Congressman: Measles Outbreak May Be Caused By ‘Illegal Aliens’
Congressman’s New Jobs Plan: Deny Women Access To Abortion So They Can Make More Babies
THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD
(apologies to Keith Olbermann)
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL)
An Alabama congressman with virulently anti-immigrant beliefs has a new theory on who may be causing the current measles outbreak: “illegal aliens.”…. Appearing on the Matt Murphy radio show Tuesday morning, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) was asked by the host whether he saw any correlation between immigration and the measles outbreak that has erupted in the United States. Brooks began by offering a red herring that “illegal aliens” are bringing new diseases into the country, before going on to suggest that they could be behind measles as well.
It can be difficult to know where to begin when dealing people whose devotion to the truth is tenuous at best and non-existent at worst. You can’t rely on facts…because they make up their own facts on the fly as needed to support their narrative. You can’t refute their “facts,” because they very often have little to no basis in reality, so dealing in abject reality is a recipe for frustration. No, sometimes the best, and sometimes only, tactic available to those who inhabit the realm of the empirical and demonstrable is to wait for the maroons to overstep and thus establish themselves unequivocally as fools and despots.
In this case, we have a two-fer. First up in Rep. Mo Brooks, who would have been a worthy and perennial “honoree” from my old Dumb@$$ Award days. Prone to make stuff up on the fly, particularly when it comes to tossing ridiculous accusations at Republican bogeymen (minorities, the poor, immigrants-illegal or otherwise, etc., ad nauseum, and infinitum. In this case, he’s raising the possibility that “illegal aliens” may be responsible for bringing the measles virus into the U.S. Though he claims to have sympathy for the plight of illegal aliens, he’s not above using and promoting fear of The Other in order to advance his narrative.
The truth is that all that points to measles being imported are cases of infected European travelers entering the U.S. ‘Course, it’s tougher to demonize Europeans…’cuz they kinda look like us, knowhutimean?
Oh, and if his blaming “illegal aliens” for measles wasn’t absurd enough, he also floated the idea of impeaching the President for his handling of the immigration issue. Of course; impeachment seems to be the go-to Republicans solution for virtually every intractable problem. It’s a one-size-fits-all solution to any problem, regardless of severity.
During a debate over an anti-abortion bill currently advancing in Congress, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) suggested that Republicans support restricting access to abortion because it will ultimately benefit the economy if women have more children. Goodlatte noted that carrying pregnancies to term “very much promotes job creation.”….
Explaining his support for the measure, Goodlatte made both a moral and an economic case for anti-choice laws. “I would suggest that it is very much the case that those of us in the majority support this legislation because it is the morally right thing to do but it is also very very true that having a growing population and having new children brought into the world is not harmful to job creation,” he said. “It very much promotes job creation for all the care and services and so on that need to be provided by a lot of people to raise children.”
Sadly, Rep. Goodlatte WAS a worthy and perennial “honoree” from my old Dumb@$$ Award days. A “small government” Republican who believes that government should be just small enough to be inserted into a woman’s uterus, Goodlatte comes in just behind Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) as one of the dumbest members of Congress. Unable to see the contradiction between his “small government” beliefs and his willingness to insert the power and presence of the State into a woman’s reproductive functions, Goodlatte would also happily see the U.S. turning into a theocracy…or at the very least, a remake of The Handmaid’s Tale.
That Goodlatte can in all seriousness and good conscience make a moral and economic argument for anti-choice laws is reprehensible enough. That he would stoop to using the “women are baby factories” argument is even worse. The idea that we should codify the out of date belief that the role of women is to tend to hearth and home should be abhorrent to the entire distaff half of the population. Instead, many who voted for Goodlatte are women seemingly eager to be legislated back to second-class status as the property and sexual servants of men.
This doesn’t even address the reality that anyone who believes in “small government” can’t credibly hope to advance that agenda by working to insert said government into decisions that should rightly be made by women with the legal right to control their own bodies.
The stupid, it is strong….
