God bless Tommy Tuberville, the junior senator from the great state of Alabama and a man so bereft of smarts that he makes us long for the intellectual candlepower of that block of moldy Parmigiano Reggiano we found at the back of the fridge a few weeks ago.
Not that the great state of Alabama sent Tuberville to the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body for his nuance and his ability to grasp complicated issues. But guys! Come on! He makes his Senate GOP colleagues look good, and his Senate GOP colleagues are the likes of Ron Johnson and Marsha Blackburn! Work with us here!
Anyway, here is Your Week in Tuberville.
The action all took place at the latest Nazi reichsparteitag – excuse us, this year’s CPAC – where Tuberville gave an interview to Newsmax. (Motto: The channel you watch when all the others have been consumed in a nuclear holocaust!) There he gave a couple of quotes about President Biden. First up, on the drama of a possibly brokered Democratic convention that the political press is obsessed with because it’s fucking February and they have lots of airtime and column inches to fill:
“I think they’ll change probably around the convention time, move somebody in to try to give President Trump a run for his money. But Joe Biden, he can’t win, he’s tryin’ to stay in there just so he’ll stay out of jail, to be honest with you.”
Obviously Tuberville is hoping his audience is too dumb to remember that there is one major party candidate facing multiple criminal felony counts for which he could be tried before November, and it sure isn’t Joe Biden. And being a Newsmax audience, they probably are that dumb. They should read Wonkette more!
Then he went back to everyone’s favorite shibboleth these days, which is that Joe Biden is so old and decrepit that Democrats could sub in the Crypt Keeper and it would be an improvement:
“To see his decline over the last few months, I don’t think he’ll make it. Just watchin’ him walkin’ on a tarmac yesterday in L.A. with Nancy Pelosi, he’s shuffling his feet, lookin’ at the ground. We gotta have some leadership in this country. I don’t know what they’re gonna do, but President Trump’s gonna win anyway.”
We are very glad that Tuberville brought up Biden’s alleged frailty. For one, it reminds us that Tuberville has been on this kick about Biden barely being able to totter across his bedroom, much less in public, for a long time. And yet somehow Biden has yet to fall and shatter his hip or his skull or his handsome face.
The other reason we’re glad Tuberville brought this subject up is that it gives us an excuse to post this video of the senator from last October falling down a flight of airplane steps like Redneck Inspector Clouseau:
Ha ha, look at that old man slip and fall! He must be even older than old Joe Biden! Oh, 12 years younger, you say? Well.
We’re glad Tuberville was unhurt by the fall. (We took a similar spill last year on some steps and broke a toe, and we’re more than 20 years younger than the senator from Alabama.) We are not, however, above once again reminding Tuberville that karma is not the first name of the Vice President.
Next up, some actual reporters caught up to Tuberville at CPAC and asked him about the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that granted personhood to embryos, a ruling that could end in-vitro fertilization treatments in the state. (Already, three of the seven clinics that perform IVF in Alabama have temporarily halted treatments while they sort out the legal implications of their good and decent work suddenly being declared possible homicide.)
From NBC News:
“Yeah, I was all for it,” Tuberville told reporters. […] “We need to have more kids. We need to have an opportunity to do that, and I thought this was the right thing to do,” Tuberville said.
Tommy Tuberville clearly has no idea what IVF is or does. Frankly, we’d be surprised if he can even spell IVF.
Pressed by NBC News about whether he was concerned about how the ruling could impact people who are trying to have kids through IVF, Tuberville sidestepped the question.
“Well, that’s, that’s for another conversation. I think the big thing is right now, you protect — you go back to the situation and try to work it out to where it’s best for everybody. I mean, that’s what — that’s what the whole abortion issue is about,” he said.
Words! Those are definitely words, and they are definitely tangentially related to the issue, all right!
The Alabama lawmaker, who noted that he had not seen the ruling, appeared to struggle to explain how the decision, which threatens to limit access to IVF treatment, would help more people have children.
“It’s about the same direction, but I agree, but people need to have access. People need to have — we need more kids, we need the people to have the opportunity to have kids,” he said.
Sure, go back and repeat what you said a minute ago, maybe those 60 seconds will be long enough for it to now make sense.
Christ. Maybe Democrats could distract him with the “look over there” trick every time he’s about to vote for something, giving themselves a bit more of a Senate margin.
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