This is an opinion column.
Monday morning, I got a tip. Over the weekend, Sen. Tommy Tuberville had said some stupid things.
At the Southern Legislative Conference in Charleston, S.C., Alabama’s senior senator turned into a fire hydrant of crazy talk — about climate change, foreign produce and pesticides causing autism. I spent the day hunting for a video, because Tuberville’s stupidity is the sort of thing you have to see to believe.
By Monday night, however, my search was moot.
Tuberville gave a live performance on national TV.
In an interview with Alabama native Kaitlan Collins, Tuberville fumbled with the definition of “white nationalists” who Tuberville calls “Americans.”
“A white nationalist is someone who believes that the white race is superior to other races,” Collins said.
“Well, that’s some people’s opinion,” Tuberville said.
In this instance, “some people” includes the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
Of course, we didn’t need more proof that Tuberville says and does stupid stuff. He’s left a trail behind him the way pulpwood trucks belch smoke along back country roads.
There was that time he couldn’t name the three branches of the federal government, despite having been elected to one of them.
There was the time in 2013 — under oath in a sworn deposition — when he said he didn’t remember saying he’d leave Ole Miss’s football program in a pine box, two days before he left for a better coaching contract at Auburn.
There was that time in an interview six years later, when he had no trouble at all remembering the pine box comment.
There’s that time after he left Auburn when he got caught up in a ponzi scheme.
There’s that other time he got caught up in another ponzi scheme.
There was that time he said he would use his Senate office for fundraising — a felony under federal law.
There was that time, just this month, he cheered $1.4 billion of federal money going to rural broadband in Alabama — something he had voted against.
And all that is before we get to the racist stuff.
Last year, Tuberville said Democrats want to give reparations to people who “do crime.”
“They want crime. They want crime, because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have,” Tuberville said at a Trump rally in Nevada. “They want reparation because they think the people that do the crime are owed that. Bullshit.”
And then there was the infamous interview with a Birmingham public radio station, WBHM, in which he was asked whether white nationalists should be allowed to serve in the military.
“Well, they call them that,” Tuberville said. “I call them Americans.”
We could stop there, only there’s no way Tuberville will ever stop there.
The dumb stuff Tuberville does hurts himself and hurts Alabama, but now it’s beginning to hurt America.
As of next week, the United States Marine Corp. won’t have a commandant for the first time in over 100 years — because of Tuberville.
Using a sleight of Senate procedure — apparently suggested by a former food writer he hired as a senior aide — Tuberville has slowed the promotion of more than 200 top military officers to a crawl, a tactic that could soon create vacancies on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Tuberville says this is to protest Defense Department policies regarding abortion, but increasingly, it seems more like a cry for attention.
TeleTubby isn’t getting what TeleTubby wants, so TeleTubby is going to make life hard.
There are consequences to electing folks like Tuberville to office, but probably not what most folks imagine. Many people have pointed to Tuberville as the reason Alabama could lose Space Command.
But the real drawback of such folks rising to higher office is that they don’t rise. Rather, they pull everyone else closer to their level. Public bodies are supposed to serve as an aggregate of American intelligence. When we elect dumb people to public office, we make the aggregate dumber.
Tuberville actually gives us an opportunity to see this in action. Seemingly all Democrats and many Republicans in the Senate agree that one person obstructing military promotions is, at least, disrespectful to the armed services and potentially harmful to national security.
However, none of them have done anything to stop him. Not the Democrats. Not the Republicans. Not the junior Senator from Alabama who benefits by comparison to her senior colleague.
Every time they shrug their shoulders, they’re saying in the meekest, weak-willed way: “I stand with Tommy.”
If the House Freedom Caucus can kick out Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Senate leadership should be able to put this baby in a corner, too. They just don’t want to, because they’re scared.
And their complicity has made them as guilty as he is.
Until his colleagues put a stop to this, Tommy Tuberville is everybody’s senator.
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