On Thursday’s edition of The Maria Bartiromo’s Brain May Be Pudding, but You’d Never Need Three Fingers to Eat It All Comedy Hour, the host asked Johnson—after spending roughly eight minutes lobbing Hunter Biden softballs—what his top Senate priority is.
Is it making groceries and gas more affordable for people who didn’t happen to marry a billionaire’s daughter? Ha ha ha ha! You naif!
Watch:
BARTIROMO: “Quick, Senator, what’s your priority in the Senate right now?”
JOHNSON: “Well, from my standpoint—unfortunately I’m not chairman of a committee where I have subpoena power, so it’s more difficult for me to compel testimony, but one of the main reasons I ran again, Maria, is nobody else is advocating for the vaccine injured. These vaccine injuries are real, they’re serious, they’re not all that rare, but that’s what I’m going to be focusing on, because I think I can get a fair amount of information, uncover and expose the truth, at least as it [relates] to vaccine injuries.”
Is it just me, or was Bartiromo kind of bored by Johnson’s top Senate priority? It’s almost like Fox’s bigwigs don’t actually believe the absurdities that regularly seep from their technicolor lie-holes. Weird, huh?
Of course, vaccine injuries are no doubt real—but they also appear to be exceedingly rare. And the vaccines are certainly much less of a health concern than COVID-19 itself. But Johnson, et al., have been dishonestly using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database to claim vaccine injuries are a huge and widespread problem. (Spoiler alert: They’re not.)
Johnson also had very little concern for the health of his constituents when COVID was raging, at one point callously stating, “I’m sure the deaths are horrific, but the flip side of this is the vast majority of people who get coronavirus do survive.”
The bigger outrage here is that Republicans up and down the ballot claimed they were going to work on issues important to the American people, not just to a handful of barmy conspiracy theorists. Weirdly enough, they’re not.
Go ahead and do a Google search on “Republicans” and “inflation.” Most of what you’ll find was posted pre-election. There are really good reasons for this. For one thing, inflation has begun to moderate all on its own as pandemic pressures have begun to ease (though it’s still too high). For another, Republicans never had any serious solutions for bringing down inflation. They just wanted to bamboozle Americans into thinking they did—and thinking they cared. (Psst: They don’t.)
As The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin noted in a January column, after Republicans officially assumed control of the House, they offered little with respect to inflation or crime—other than the usual dishonest bleating, of course.
[N]ow, with the election in the rearview mirror, Republicans aren’t talking much about either issue. They prefer to spend time trying to defund the Internal Revenue Service, criminalize abortion providers, threaten economic meltdown and beat the drum on “scandal” investigations. Instead of working to clamp down on crime, House Republicans want to investigate those prosecuting the Jan. 6, 2021, armed insurrectionists and ride to the rescue of the former president, the target of multiple criminal investigations.
As previously noted, the big problem Republicans focused on during the midterms—inflation—has been resolving without their help. All they’ve offered are solutions to make it worse.
Inflation declined for the last six months of 2022 as gas prices returned to pre-Ukraine war levels. (Wages went up in December as prices and consumer spending went down.) Indeed, Republicans care so little about inflation, they passed a bill to roll back funding for the IRS, which would increase the deficit, and another to prevent Biden from taking steps to reduce gas prices (as he did last year).
Of course, while Democrats did historically well in a midterm where their party held the White House—which is usually a death knell for either side—Republicans did manage to take the House in a squeaker, largely on the strength of their inflation “solutions.” But two actual solutions for addressing inflation—allowing more willing workers into the country via immigration reform and, ahem, raising taxes on rich people—are nonstarters with the GOP. So all they can do is throw more ketchup against the wall and see if it sticks, while shrieking about the perils of “wokeness.”
RELATED STORY: Polling shows GOP war on ‘woke’ isn’t exactly a winner
They have few other options for winning the hearts and minds of the American people, especially since their big congressional “investigations” are flopping like Rupert Murdoch’s dinglies in a Brisbane sauna.
The big reason these investigations don’t seem to be breaking through is pretty simple: They just aren’t that popular, and never really were. And it’s not just Navigator’s polling that shows Americans aren’t very receptive to whatever comes out of these hearings. Since January, a series of Pew, NBC, and Public Policy Polling surveys have shown that most Americans don’t see these investigations as priorities for Congress, or would rather Republicans spend less time pursuing these lines of inquiry in favor of addressing more tangible, everyday issues (first among them being inflation and the cost of household goods).
For example, when Pew Research asked Americans in mid-January how they felt about the GOP’s new focus on investigating the Biden administration, the answers were pretty definitive — 65 percent worried Republicans would focus “too much,” while 32 percent thought they wouldn’t pay enough attention. Even Republicans were split closely; 42 percent of Republican adults said they thought Republicans would focus on oversight too much, compared to the 56 percent who feared lawmakers wouldn’t go far enough.
Well, you can fool some of the people some of the time, eh?
RELATED STORY: House Republicans bet everything on loud investigations. It’s not going so well for them
But hey, maybe Ron Johnson’s new laser focus on the vanishingly minuscule problem of COVID vaccine-related injuries will galvanize the public. Or maybe he can beat the drum on abortion for another six years. That’s still a winning issue for the GOP, right?
Okay, maybe not.
RELATED STORY: Tuesday’s election showed just how dangerous suburban trends are getting for Republicans
Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.
