GOP Senator Roy Blunt shares a notable characteristic with Missouri GOP AG Josh Hawley, incidentally also a senatorial wannabe, and it’s a characteristic which has also been attributed to Donald Trump. Apparently they don’t read.
Asked about Hawley’s belief that the so-called sexual revolution is the direct cause of proliferating prostitution and sex trafficking – one of the few social evils to excite GOP concern – Blunt answered that he wasn’t familiar with them. Bear in mind here that the offending comments are brief, can be summarized in a single sentence, and have been exciting much merriment in about every national paper.
Blunt added that Hawley’s “a very capable guy and I’m sure he’ll be able to explain his views on these issues in the right way.” This of course is meant to let us know Blunt is leaving Hawley all on his lonesome when it comes to spinning his beliefs into something widely salable. Also, there’s just maybe a hint that Blunt is aware that even degrees from Stanford and Yale can’t actually turn the proverbial sow’s ear into a silk purse – and he wants us to know that he knows that fact.
All of which leaves one wondering whether or not Blunt’s lukewarm comments lend any credence to a report by Jo Mannies on the NPR Website that Ann Wagner might be willing to duck back into the senatorial contest – in the wake of Hawley’s cluelessness, the Akin-burned Missouri GOP, might really be hoping to lure back the veteran Ann Wagner who, at least, knows how to play both ends against the middle in the standard Missouri GOP way. On KWMU’s St. Louis on the Air today, Mannies pointed out that Wagner had in the past successfully worked surburban women, the very people most likely to be put off by Hawlely’s concern about sexually liberated women.
Hawley, in his turn, however, resorted to Blunt’s “read? who me?” dodge when asked about the notorious put-up job known as the Nunes Memo:
Hawley, who is seeking the GOP nomination to challenge Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., this fall, said that he hadn’t read the widely distributed four-page memo yet but that “I’m in favor of transparency. Get the facts out there.”
Yeah, like a GOP politician, angling for the big-time, doesn’t know all the details of a political sham that most of the rest of us alert non-politicians can recite backwards and forwards.
Which is not to say I’m not sympathetic to Hawley’s dilemma. As long as he can put off responding to the contents of that nothing burger memo he doesn’t have to sully his lily-white conscience by pretending that there’s anything but inept, partisan mumbo-jumbo there. Don’t laugh – there’s bound to be a few right-wing evangelicals who still try not to bear false witness any more than they have to in pursuit of their higher goals.
In this case, of course, Blunt can’t claim ignorance – he sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, after all. So he went a step farther and gave us what is for the carefully laconic Blunt a somewhat longish sound bite that should play well with just about everybody on the right because it says nothing in a grave and measured fashion. The gist: Trump shouldn’t fire Mueller nor should Congress insure that he can’t.
In other words, Republicans will do nothing, the president can do what he damn well wants. As for the obligation of congress to provide checks on executive power and exercise oversight, one gets the impression that as far as Blunt and Hawley are concerned, oversight might be a rare medical condition to be avoided at all costs.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you our religious- and Trump-addled Missouri GOP. Poor fools don’t know what to say. So they don’t say anything as a rule, and when they do take off the masks, as Hawley seemingly did, the rest of the state’s GOP apparatchiks run for the hills.