Dana Milbank is impressed by Alabama’s Senator-Elect Tommy Tuberville. Not in a positive way. Milbank thinks he may be the dimmest member of the Senate.
President-unelect Trump has studied every play in the Coups-for-Dummies playbook: court challenges, pressure on Republican officials to overturn the election, even a half-baked plan for martial law from pardoned convict Michael Flynn. But no luck.
Now, Trump’s final hope rests with Tommy Tuberville. This is like finding out your death-row appeal will be argued by Sidney Powell.
Tuberville — or “Tubs,” from his college football coaching days — is the Republican senator-elect from Alabama, and he’s proposing to object to the election results in the Senate on Jan. 6. Trump exulted: “Great senator.”
Problem is, Tubs, if he were a Democrat, is what Trump might call a “low-IQ individual.” In their wisdom, the voters of Alabama chose to replace Democrat Doug Jones, who prosecuted the Birmingham church bombing, with a man who recently announced his discovery that there are “three branches of government,” namely, “the House, the Senate and the executive.”
In an interview with the Alabama Daily News, he also offered the insight that World War II was not, as many suppose, a conflict against Nazism. “My dad fought 76 years ago in Europe to free Europe of socialism,” he said. He further informed the newspaper that “in 2000 Al Gore was president, United States, president-elect, for 30 days.” (Actual number of days Gore spent as president-elect: zero.)
For obvious reasons, Tubs avoided debates and interviews during the campaign. Even so, he imparted some extraordinary wisdom.
On climate change: “There’s one person that changes the climate in this country and that’s God,” he told Alabama’s Daily Mountain Eagle.
On the opioid epidemic: “It’s not just opioids now, it’s heroin …”
On health care: “We don’t have the answer until we go back to open up being a capitalistic health-care system where we have more than one insurance company.” (There are 952 health insurers in the United States.)
On education: “We’ve taken God out of the schools and we’ve replaced the schools with metal detectors.” Tubs has declared his desire to serve on the Senate “banking finance” committee, apparently unaware that banking and finance are separate committees — and that he is ineligible to serve on banking because Alabama’s senior Republican senator already does.
Tuberville’s Senate campaign (in which he also defeated former attorney general Jeff Sessions) was a magical voyage of discovery, as he learned about such things as advice and consent. Senators “confirm judges all across the country, federal judges, and get them in place,” he marveled.
He also seemed to have no clue what the landmark Voting Rights Act was, telling Rotarians: “It’s, you know ― there’s a lot of different things you can look at it as, you know, who’s it going to help? What direction do we need to go with it? I think it’s important that everything we do we keep secure. We keep an eye on it. It’s run by our government. And it’s run to the, to the point that we, it’s got structure to it. It’s like education.”
Now this genius wants to make his first act as senator a doomed, symbolic challenge to the election that forces Republican colleagues into an embarrassing vote. Trump will soon be gone. But as long as there are mental giants such as Tubs, Trumpism will remain.
Tuberville had a mixed record as a football coach at Auburn, Cincinnati and Texas Tech. He had a brief broadcasting career with ESPN, once confusing Iowa and Iowa State, and, when asked for a game analysis, replying on hot mic, “Y’all make me do this s—.”
He also established his financial naivete: His business partner in a hedge fund pleaded guilty to fraud; Tuberville claimed he knew nothing. Tubs also was lured to invest in an alleged Ponzi scheme. He set up a foundation to help veterans, but veterans got only a third of the money raised.
As a candidate, Tubs offered exotic views on why rural hospitals closed (“because we don’t have Internet”), on impeachment (“I’ve been trying to keep up with it but it’s so hard”) and on constitutional democracy (“We’d probably get more done with just the president running this country. So let the Democrats go home”).
Tuberville was baffled by the vote counting after Election Day (“The referees are suddenly adding touchdowns to the other team’s side of the scoreboard”), and last week said he plans a Senate challenge to the electoral college tally.
Would you expect otherwise from this champion of civics education? “We’ve gotten away from teaching … history, civics, government,” he observed. And another time, “We’ve got to get our education back on the right track … we’re going to educate several generations in this country that really don’t understand this country.”
Eventually, people might not even know the three branches of government.
Too many helmet to helmet tackles, .. wait until he finds out the Senate meets in DC, not Montgomery…
Tuberville is a horrible person in addition to being dim bulb. He has been described as Roy Moore without the sex scandal. Tuberville had been living in Florida, but he moved to Alabama to displace Doug Jones from the Senate. As a retired football coach, he knew that the football fans of Alabama would vote for him Tuberville’s past shady business dealings didn’t hurt him, and neither did his vituperative temper and outbursts. During the election he portrayed Doug Jones as a communist with ties to Venezuela. Since so many dim bulbs live in Alabama, Jones is their newly minted senator. That is how the deep South likes their politicians. They invoke God all the time, yet their actions are morally bankrupt. https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-senate-elections-golf-lawsuits-football-9ca5887bba8ec5778f07694a6dc25bc4
Just like Trump voters. What does it say about his voters
Looks like presidential material to me, given that the bar for stupid has been lowered with 4 years of Trump and his gang of incompetents. They just blather about God, guns, the flag, abortion and commies and they get elected. This is so sad for our country that these despicable far right nincompoops get any traction in the minds of the electorate.
The American people voted in a lying, right wing bigot to lead our nation. A graduate of fancy private schools, Trump wasn’t even sure where Alabama was on the map. Remember the sharpie drawing. https://www.salon.com/2020/12/26/remember-that-stupid-thing-donald-trump-did-hard-as-it-is-to-pick-here-are-the-top-10/
It is no surprise that a football coach who has served three universities would see nothing wrong with moving to Alabama to run for Senate. It is no surprise that the voters selected a person whose ignorance of the governmental system rivals any known political leader in history. Nor is there any surprise in the fact that a divisive message got someone elected in 2020.
But I sense a fraud. I have heard hat there were thousands of ballots for Doug Jones that were found in a uhaul truck in Dellrose, TN, along with voting machines filled with votes for Doug Jones. We need to send the military to Alabama to fore a redo.
What should we expect? He’s an ex football coach and he’s going for the “Hail Mary”. I don’t know the statistical odds on a Hail Mary play in football, but my guess is that they are slim to none? It doesn’t surprise me that Alabamans voted this guy into office….. the ONLY thing worthwhile in the state is their college football teams.
I must defend my Alabama friends. Their folklife efforts have elevated understanding of places like Gees Bend. The good people I know from the great state are simply outnumbered by the voters sucked into the maelstrom of post Nixon southern Stragety politics.
Remember that the most under-represented people in the nation are southern leftists. This group might comprise 20% of the Alabama electorate, perhaps more. Division politics has stripped them of their right to representation.
The good folk of Alabama had a courageous, intelligent, and honorable Senator. They chose to replace him with Tommy Tuberville. No excuse for that. I have family in Alabama. Some, I’m sorry to say, are outright racists.
My folklore friends are anything but rascist. It’s hard for good people to live in a place where there are people who are not what they would have them be.
There are many good and lovely people in Alabama. Huntsville is a mecca for science and engineering connected to the space program. I wish more black voters had shown up for Doug Jones who was working for equity, but the dim bulbs showed up in greater numbers.
Here’s an article from just prior to the election that features interviews with some of his former Auburn players:
https://slate.com/culture/2020/10/tommy-tuberville-senate-auburn-players.html
Thanks for the link to the article. And this from that article: “He has also promoted birtherism, complained bitterly about environmentalists, said immigrants were bringing “drugs” and “diseases,” and stoked fear about the socialist and communist “indoctrination” of the education system.” end quote
All of this disgusting quotation is knuckle headed, awful, stupid, racist, total baloney and off-the-charts offensive but the part that really infuriates me is, “….communist “indoctrination” of the education system.”
This vile moron will have 6 years in the Senate!! He almost makes Ron Johnson look palatable. Not really, they are both senators from hell.
I wonder, does the dimmest senator to be have a dimmer switch we can turn off?
Ron Johnson, Tom Cotton and Tommy Tuberville’s elections rest on anti-abortion and anti-immigration rhetoric. Protection of historic demographic entitlement, race, gender and class, drives them and their voters. The anti-government and anti-socialism pieces of the right wing platform are based on the same objective. The government and the economic system have the power to safeguard fairness which is disadvantageous to the entitled.
McConnell wrote that what he liked about Biden is that Joe doesn’t lecture him about why the right wing is morally wrong. Biden focuses instead on negotiation. McConnell, Cotton, Tuberville and Johnson know that fairness is the opposite of their goals. Preaching ethics to them has the lone effect of annoying them.
Ron Johnson spoke at Lifest, Pastor Bob Lenz’ event. Huffpo in an article updated 12-6-2017, “Controversy in Wisconsin”, by Jim Wallis, describes conservative religion’s rejection of justice. That repositioning enables the protected religion’s embrace of social
Darwinist, Charles Koch.
Both this article and the comments are right on target. I have the great misfortune of being represented, or should I say misrepresented, by both Tuberville and Mo Brooks who is a prime example of a Republican blowhard. Please know that not all Alabamians are proponents of this ineptness. There are some that work hard against it, but it’s an uphill battle when dealing with ignorance and the idea that party comes before country.