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Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day: Ron Johnson- 2023 Update [1]
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Date: 2023-08-19
In 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, as well as 2022, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day” profiled U.S. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who in 2010, had colorful campaign discussions that included pushing back against calls to increase the statute of limitations on sexual abuse in Wisconsin, leaving victims of abuses years ago unable to seek justice, labeling Social Security "a Ponzi scheme", saying that the 97% of climate change scientists who say the phenomenon is man-made were "crazy", the real cause of climate change was sunspots, and that Greenland is covered in snow and ice because we're actually witnessing "global cooling". In 2013 that Ron Johnson answered criticism from the League of Conservation Voters that he denied climate change by accusing them of waging “environmental jihad” and has compared politicians and activists trying to prevent climate change to Joseph Stalin, Hugo Chavez, and Fidel Castro.
Johnson also was against marriage equality, and was pro-life to the extent where he considers that life begins at conception (which means he's also against most forms of birth control). Johnson also showed quite a bit of hypocrisy, railing against the economic stimulus packages passed by Congress to help the American economy, that as it turned out, his business had accepted funding from. Or perhaps he showed a great deal of personal bias for attacking the Obama administration for trying to take BP Oil to task after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill for the environmental damage he caused, by categorizing it as "launching an assault on BP" and after some digging, the media found out that Ron Johnson had hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stock in BP Oil, and he made the excuse of not selling it because he was waiting for the stock market to be better so he could get more money out of it.
And that was just what we discussed from BEFORE him reaching office in the 2010 Tea Party Wave in an upset victory over three-term Senator Russ Feingold. Since reaching office, Johnson has stayed to party lines in almost every obstructing vote in the Senate, voting against increasing the debt ceiling, the new version of the Violence Against Women Act (which he said was “unconstitutional”), and disaster relief for victims of Hurricane Sandy, just to name a few choice “blocks”.
Heck, he voted for the 2013 Government Shutdown and then voted to keep the government closed when the time came to end it. Inexplicably, he also tried fear-mongering to the fringe elements of the GOP prior to the 2014 elections during the outbreak of Ebola Virus in Africa, warning that ISIS might deliberately infect its own followers with the disease and send them to the United States to deliberately spread it (which is not a viable form of suicide attack, considering people afflicted with Ebola are far from mobile as their body starts getting wracked by the disease, and they have to get blood or feces on anyone they’re attacking without being noticed).
Sen. Johnson was one of the “47 Traitors” in the GOP who tried to meddle in the State Department’s negotiations with Iran, presented a photo of President Obama and President Rouhani shaking hands as proof they were “chummy” that was actually photo-shopped, and wasted time in a Senate hearing asking Secretary of State John Kerry and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz questions about an “EMP Bomb” that doesn’t actually exist outside of movies. And speaking of movies, Johnson even went on record to rail against, of all things, The Lego Movie, because he felt the villain, Lord Business, was a demonization of rich corporations.
He has blamed a rise in mass shootings on the media for reporting them, paid tribute to the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia after his death by stupidly posting a picture of actor Edward Gero, (who starred in a play about Scalia), and his solution to help combat the prescription opioid drug abuse epidemic… bring back those “War on Drugs” ads where your brain was compared to an egg in a frying pan that did nothing to curtail even ordinary drug abuse in the 1980s.
Johnson compared his own hard battle for re-election in 2016 to the choice of passengers on Flight 93 on 9/11 to storm the cockpit. On the week of the election, unprompted, he decided to discuss impeaching Hillary Clinton. Who wasn’t president when he was already pitching the idea. I mean, counting your impeachment chickens before they’re hatched much, Ron?
Sen. Johnson voted for every unqualified member of Donald Trump’s “Cabinet of Horrors”, as well as voting for the confirmation of all three of his Supreme Court nominees. Ron Johnson, in late July of 2017, was saying he would vote against any attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, because Sen. Mitch McConnell and leadership in the Senate were being too secretive about what was actually in the bill, and that he would vote to block it from coming to the floor. Two days later, Johnson voted to repeal. Two days. That’s all it took to contradict himself. And how upset was Sen. Johnson that he couldn’t burn down the American healthcare system and whiz on the ashes? Enough so that he responded to the dramatic “no” vote by Senator John McCain by whining about how Sen. McCain’s “brain tumor may have factored in” to his vote.
We’ve covered before that Ron Johnson is a moronic conspiracy theorist, so current events in our country mean he’s really reveling in the moment, what with a conspiracy theorist at the White House. And what with Donald Trump and a lot of conservative “media” sources rambling on with paranoid delusions about a “Deep State” within the government sabotaging the Trump administration, that Sen. Johnson would join in the chorus on Fox News:
And… that was stupid enough that fellow GOP Congressman Charlie Dent all but accused Johnson of having brain damage.
We’re honestly thinking that’s not hyperbole. In April of 2018, Johnson started whining about supposed “unprecedented obstruction” about Democrats, and then literally, a minute later, started praising Mitch McConnell for leading the Senate GOP to block the nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.
On the July 4th weekend in 2020, you may have seen a report about several Republican Senators and one member of the GOP House spending the celebration of American independence by going to Russia to meet with their foreign counterparts. Commentators and pundits thought that maybe the optics of going on a diplomatic visit to the country that meddled in the 2016 election on arguably its most patriotic holiday weren’t good. But, it was worse than that Three days later, Johnson suddenly was arguing against sanctions on Russia because “they aren’t working that well”. Three days. That’s all it took for Ron Johnson to flip on his on country.
Speaking of, Sen. Johnson gave lukewarm criticism when Donald Trump told four Democratic Congresswomen of color to “go back to where they came from”, but defended him against accusations that the attack was racist, saying that telling people to “love America or leave it” wasn’t racist in the 1960s. (Which isn’t what Trump said, mind you, and it has had racist connotations… but what do you expect from the dumbest man in the Senate?)
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/19/2188225/-Fanatical-Republican-Extremist-of-the-Day-Ron-Johnson-2023-Update
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