I got bored with writing the "look how stupid Republicans are" posts long ago. Years ago, I wondered why seemingly non-stupid Republicans seemed to be posturing to make their party the party of the stupid. But the stupid stuff they did in those days was amateur hour by today's standards. Since then, the GOP charged head-first into a campaign strategy that is utterly devoid of any policy proposals and instead embraced moronic grievances that are almost always premised on some stupid misunderstanding of how things are. The post-Trump era, I would argue, is even dumber than when Trump was in office. Having jettisoned any coherent ideology beyond outright racism and owning the libs (with only the vaguest sense of what libs actually believe), listening to Republican politicians talk these days makes me feel like my thinking brain is oozing out my ears. Stupidity is the air they breathe. It is so ubiquitous it has become unremarkable.
And then I see something like this. One of the Republican party's rising stars is claiming that a medicine to treat parasites in livestock "won the Nobel Peace Prize" and bashed the Biden Administration for not getting doctors to prescribe it for COVID. Two doctors did win the Nobel Prize in Medicine (not the Peace Prize) for their work showing that ivermectin was effective at treating roundworm parasites (not COVID). Really dumb right? Except that it's also dangerous because people who see Greene's remarks will take ivermectin instead of getting vaccinated or (if they are infected) getting actual treatment for COVID. Greene's remarks aren't just hilariously funny, they could plausibly lead to people's deaths. Not too long ago, if a politician made a dumb and potentially dangerous statement like that reporters would track her down and ask follow-up questions. But none of that is going to happen now because Marjorie Taylor Greene regularly makes mind-numbingly dumb statements. It's not newsworthy, it's expected. So she goes unchallenged. They all do.
