OMG, it’s Senator Ron Johnson (R)(Wisconsin), romping home with an unprecedented third Gohmert Award in a single calendar year, for this astonishingly stupid and dangerous Tweet:
The metronomic regularity with which Johnson, a true idiot’s idiot and deeply immoral racist, keeps winning these things has so impressed the Rules Committee that it’s been decided that our Ron should be the first recipient of a new and higher category of gong, just now invented: the Standing Gomey. With this award, Johnson is now deemed to be the constant, automatic winner of a conceptually unlimited series of Gomeys, with a new one springing metaphysically into being out of the ether, quantum-style, whenever he so much as parts his lips or hovers his fingers over a keyboard. This means that within the pantheon, Johnson can now be considered co-equal with the great Louie Gohmert himself, and let me tell you, folks, there were those riding desks here at the Home Office who thought such a thing impossible. Yet Ron made it look easy, and raced to the front of the pack despite stiff competition from the likes of Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, from whom, no doubt, much more will be heard in due course. We’ll be sure to keep track for you.
But what’s so vile about recommending the work of this fellow Alex Berenson to The Base? Probably you’ve never heard of the guy. Well, Berenson, once a semi-respectable journalist, has become one of America’s most vocal and insistent anti-vaxx COVID deniers, and has built up a vast following by repeatedly warping the truth to deny both the severity of the pandemic and the efficacy of the vaccines which, but for the efforts of him and others like him, could give us our only way out from under it. He’s more persuasive than the usual lunatics because he gloms on to real epidemiological research papers, which he then cites while deliberately – one can’t help but conclude maliciously – misrepresenting their findings. Employing a mixture of selective quotations, pseudo-scientific bafflegab, and outright lies, he’ll argue that this or that paper out of this or that European or Israeli research institute proves that the vaccines don’t work, that instead they suppress the immune system, making people susceptible to other diseases, that indeed they sicken and kill people all on their own, and anyway, COVID is no problem for anybody younger than 50 or so, all the while portraying himself as a brave purveyor of suppressed truths, a “courageous voice of reason” as Johnson puts it. Or, as The Atlantic concluded:
He is, in short, a toxic troll with blood on his hands, working as hard as he can to make sure more people die.
It gets even better. Like a lot of right-wingers, Berenson equates public health efforts to get shots into arms, and talk of things like “vaccine passports”, not just as attacks upon his Hard Earned and God-Given Murrican Freedom – USA!! USA!! – but tantamount, in fact, to sewing gold Stars of David on to the vests of all conscientiously objecting anti-vaxxers, and thus morally equivalent to the methodology of the Holocaust. In a truly horrendous Tweet last week, Berenson, doubtless having used Google Translate to look up the German word for “vaccination”, coined a snappy new catchphrase for his followers:
…in response to which the Auschwitz Memorial sent out a wounded, yet to my mind remarkably restrained, plea for sanity:
“Painful to the memory of Auschwitz”. “A sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline”. Yeah, I’d say so. I’ll second that. You might also add that appropriating the cruelly ironic slogan with which the perpetrators of history’s most sordid, sickening crimes against humanity taunted their millions of helpless, terrified victims, just to sound clever while owning the despised libs whose sole objective is to put a stop to so much unnecessary death, pain, and suffering, is so hideously despicable that it goes far, far beyond the realm of anything we might merely call ignorant and repugnant; it is, purely and simply, evil.
So here you go, Senator Johnson. This is for fawning all over one of America’s nastiest, most antisocial, most pernicious assholes, and for everything else you’ve always done and ever will do to poison all public discourse, and eradicate the nobler aspirations that once raised your fractious nation above the level of cruel farce.
Feel free to sit on it, and rotate.
the needlefish 