Tommy Tuberville and Forrest Gump: Alabama Boys Explain the World
When it comes to serious national security issues and the Republicans' congressional antics, as the saying goes, “you just can’t make this up.”
“Stupid is as stupid does.” The line from Forrest Gump, Tom Hanks’ guileless, Zelig-like character in the eponymous movie 30 years ago, explains more about politics these days than all the commentariat’s barrels of spilt ink. Astonishingly dumb statements are never in short supply in Washington. Lately, however, their leading sources appear to be working overtime to ensure the national conversation remains overstocked.
Senator Tommy Tuberville currently heads up the queue. For a good ole boy who has called Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, and Florida as well as Alabama home, the 68-year-old should be familiar enough with race-related extremists, including white nationalists. Tuberville said he believes they aren’t racists despite the fact they say they are. Add to that his approval of believers in the white race’s supremacy serving in the military. To be sure, it’s not just an American view. Back in the day, the Third Reich’s Waffen SS commanders didn’t mind either.
To be fair, Tommy is new in Washington and maybe he’s still sorting out national versus home state’s realities. In 2020, the year voters elected Tuberville to the Senate, Alabama ranked number six in the top ten states with the most hate groups per capita, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The state slipped in 2021 but still hung onto a place in the top 20. Among Alabama’s hate groups, besides its neo-confederates and antisemites, Tuberville may have simply taken for granted the white nationalists on his home turf.
That Tuberville took weeks to reverse field and finally disavow his remarks shouldn’t be a surprise. Auburn’s former football coach has been stuck at “fourth down and long,” intellectually speaking, for quite a while. In a press conference after his 2020 election victory, Tuberville’s comments hinted at forthcoming problems, variously confusing the three branches of government and asserting socialists not fascists were the Allies’ enemies in World War Two. Tuberville also apparently hadn’t heard about the fall of the Soviet Union. Last year he explained that “communist Russia” invaded Ukraine because it needed more land.
It's not all the senator’s fault. Football is a religion across the South where fans genuflect before their state’s gridiron giants. Their worship may just be sports mania, but it also seems to reflect a faith that win-loss records guarantee greatness on any playing field. In 2022, for example, Georgia Republicans did their best to offer up a candidate who could compete with Tuberville for the Senate’s dunce cap distinction when they ran Herschel Walker, the Bulldog’s famed backfield menace. Walker’s dopey mendacity tanked his campaign even among his “Go Dawgs” Peach State rooters.
Tuberville’s nonsense unfortunately isn’t confined to coining oxymorons or ignorance of history. He’s holding up Senate confirmation for 260 senior military officers to force an end to the services’ medical coverage of abortion care. Putting the generals and admirals who are on the way to lead US forces in limbo affects multiple major commands. With zero military experience, Tuberville says it doesn’t matter, military readiness isn’t at risk, and besides there are too many generals anyway. Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem, The Hunting of the Snark, defines the senator’s reasoning, or lack thereof, best. “What I tell you three times is true.”
When it comes to ridiculousness among Republicans, Tuberville has competitors. Several seem to be angling to replace the Hollywood comedy writers now out on strike. Take Georgia’s Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. This week Greene offered amendments to the defense authorization bill that directed the President to withdraw from NATO and prohibited the transfer of F-16s and long-range missiles to Ukraine. NATO was unreliable, she said, and giving away airplanes would leave US fighter pilots plane-less rather than up in the wild-blue-yonder.
An outspoken opponent of US support for Kyiv, Greene seems oblivious to the fact her defense appropriation bill amendments, including a proposal to cut $300 million from funding for Ukraine that was voted down this week by her GOP colleagues, sound like Pravda’s rip-and-read. So does her call to negotiate with Moscow, although in the GOP where Vladimir Putin remains a popular figure, she’s not alone. Florida Representative Matt Gaetz this week called for Russia’s membership in NATO. Gaetz also proposed an amendment to end all aid to Ukraine.
Apparently unaware of Xi Jinping’s “no limits” partnership with Putin, the 20th Century history of Europe, or the geography NATO is committed to defend, Gaetz asserted that a NATO transformed with Moscow’s membership could confront the Chinese threat. While Kremlin officials doubtless aren’t waiting by their phones for an invitation, the profound ignorance, not to mention irresponsibility underlying his proposals didn’t seem to bother a third of his fellow GOP House members; 70 voted with Gaetz for his amendment to end all support for Ukraine.
The conventional Washington wisdom has sophisticated explanations for the antics of the Tubervilles, Taylor Greenes, and Gaetzs now populating the Republicans’ congressional ranks. From the GOP’s razor-thin House majority, its pathetically pliant Speaker, and the party’s radical right-wing caucus to a strategy for the 2024 election based on all-out culture war, the inside-the-beltway analysts say, national security is no less in political play, nor vulnerable than any other program this year and next.
Maybe so, but Occam’s Razor also applies. The simplest explanations with the fewest moving parts are often right. Forest Gump suggested as much on screen in 1996. Speaking in New York last June, so did Liz Cheney. Wyoming’s former Republican Representative, who co-chaired the House committee that investigated January 6th, put it this way. “The country…faces hugely challenging and fundamentally important issues. And what we’ve done in our politics is create a situation where we’re electing idiots.”