Given the state of our politics some days – most days – it’s difficult to figure out where to start.
So, I’ll begin with the famous question posed by lawyer Jospeh Welch to Wisconsin’s demagogic Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954 during the hearings that helped bring about McCarthy’s downfall: “Have you no decency, sir?”
Since Monday I have been going back and forth on whether to write something about Mike Lee, the senior senator from Utah, a Temple going Mormon Republican who seems to think his main job as a United States senator is to post rafts of batshit crazy stuff on Elon Musk’s social media platform.
[In fairness to Lee he also is the chief Senate proponent of selling off public land in the American West, an idea as stupid and ill-considered as the senator’s social media profile.]
I hesitated to write about Mike Lee’s gutter garbage because it was so obviously gutter garbage that I (naively) thought Lee might try to make it right if people just gave him a few hours … or days.
Silly me. So, here’s one more recounting of this sordid, awful moment in our Trump Era, an era of blatant, uncompromising lying and character-free crap spreading that pretends to be politics in a democracy.
If you haven’t discovered it earlier Lee’s recent behavior should confirm that much of social media is a stewing cesspool of toxic human-generated waste largely because of guys like Mike Lee.
Joe Perticone at The Bulwark conducted a deep dive into Senator Lee’s social media habits. It ain’t pretty.
The Bulwark conducted a review of Mike Lee’s Twitter feed, @BasedMikeLee, over the past month. During that time period (30 days), the senator posted nearly 1,400 times, or about 46 posts a day. Of those posts, about half (697) were original tweets. The rest where retweets of other accounts or his own posts. The posts came mostly during normal business hours. But not exclusively. Of the nearly 700 posts Lee authored on Twitter, 47 of them came between the hours of 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. eastern daylight time. ¹
Perticone concludes, and its hard not to agree, that Lee needs an intervention – fast. Another appropriate step would be to show him an exit to his political career.
It was heartening – briefly, at least – to see Lee’s colleague from Minnesota, Tina Smith, confront him over his disgustingly shameful mocking of the state legislator in Minnesota, Melissa Hortman, who was assassinated last weekend.
“I wanted him to know how much pain that caused me and the other people in my state, and I think around the country, who think that this was a brutal attack,” Smith told reporters. “I don’t know whether Senator Lee thought fully through what it was — you have to ask him — but I needed him to hear from me directly what impact I think his cruel statement had on me, his colleague.”
I’ll assume you’ve read about Lee’s comments and Smith’s response to them, but you may not have read about the strong Republican pushback against Mike Lee’s lunacy.
You haven’t read about pushback because it hasn’t happened.
As far as I can tell only one Senate Republican, Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, said much of anything about Mike Lee’s disgraceful social media quips. “Seems insensitive, to say the least, inappropriate, for sure” and “not even true,” Cramer said.
And not even true.
Lee took the slimiest of his social media posts down, but did nothing more because being a shitposting conservative now means never having to say you’re sorry or wrong – about anything.
The Deseret News, the Salt Lake City newspaper owned by the LDS Church, editorialized about the senior senator from Utah, quaintly suggesting he might do something to make all this nonsense a little less nonsensical.
The tweets were unacceptable for anyone, let alone from a member of the Senate. It revealed a lack of compassion for both victims and their loved ones and cast a poor light on Utah, the state Sen. Lee represents. Removing the tweets was a start. An apology and recognition of the mistake should follow.
Lee didn’t just cast a poor light on Utah, but the human race. ²
So, instead of party pushback on the troll from Utah you might have seen the troll who is president of the United States trash talking the governor of Minnesota. Tim Walz broke the news to the world that his friend, the former speaker of the Minnesota House, and her husband had been killed in their own home apparently by a crazed, anti-abortion Trump supporter.
The president attacked Walz.
Well, of course, he did.
Leave it to Jon Stewart to pick through this pile of crap.
On his Monday show Stewart called Lee “the avatar for the insanity of this moment.”
After excoriating Lee for his callous, depraved treatment of victims of assassination, Stewart recounted a meeting he had with Lee back when Stewart was trying to get Congress to act on assistance for first responders injured in the terror attack on the World Trade Center in 2001.
As the Salt Lake Tribune reported:
Stewart said he and a group of first responders met with Lee, who responded to one police officer recounting how he survived being in one of the towers when they collapsed. “Sen. Lee smiled and said, ‘I bet you’ve got a lot of stories,’” Stewart recalled.
“We met a lot of people in Washington,” Stewart said. “That was the only meeting where we all walked out and looked at each other and went, ‘What the f— is wrong with that guy?’”
What, indeed.
And what is wrong with 600,000 people who follow his social media nonsense or the 571,974 Utah voters who supported him in his last re-election or the millions of Americans willing to shrug off such a repulsive lack of character? ³
At long last, have you left no sense of decency?
Answer: No. But we certainly have a lot of stories, don’t we?
This column first appeared on the Marc C. Johnson Substack.
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