America's Dumbest Senator takes on the war in Ukraine

Tommy Tuberville has the IQ of a dumpster fire and the lack of self-awareness you'd expect from a MAGA stalwart

When we last checked in with America’s Dumbest Senator ©, he was in the process of decimating the senior command of this country’s military to prove to his constituents how anti-abortion he was. For nearly a year, he placed a hold on all promotions the Senate would typically rubber stamp.

Yes, individual Senators have the power to do this, but if a Senator exercises this power, it’s generally done for a short period to make a point. Sen. Tuberville took a massive shit on the entire system and then walked away with a self-satisfied grin on his face.

No amount of persuasion from either side of the aisle could make him understand the degree of damage he was doing, not only to our military’s senior leadership but also to individual senior leaders, whose careers he was fucking with as if they were playthings. One senior officer suffered a heart attack from the stress of trying to do two jobs.

Not that that Sen. Tuberville cared. He had a point to make, and NO ONE would stop him from his righteous quest. This crusade was from a man with the functional IQ of a dumpster fire and the moral standing of a house plant.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama continues to amaze. Nor for anything senatorial, mind you. Not because he’s a policy nerd like Elizabeth Warren or a canny political strategist like Mitch McConnell or a passionate ideologue like Bernie Sanders.

No, Tuberville continues to amaze because he has no higher brain functions. He is basically just a walking autonomic nervous system, a series of physiological processes (heartbeat, breathing) that keep him technically, biologically alive. He is incapable of deep or even shallow thought, which he proves on the rare occasions he tries to use the pile of rusty bike chains that is his brain to form an idea, or to speak coherently about any imaginable topic — the alphabet, how to use soap, his favorite color. If you saw him engaged in a battle of wits with a doorknob, you would bet your life savings on the doorknob. He is literally a carrot.

I would’ve said a tub of cottage cheese well past its “sell by” date, but referring to Sen. Tuberville as “literally a carrot” works equally well.

How the man managed as a major college football coach for as long as he did boggles the mind. Someone so thoroughly incapable of higher mental function would seem limited to drawing plays in the dirt. Still, maybe the schools who employed him hired intelligent people and thus limited his ability to fuck things up.

Remember when Strom Thurmond was so old and decrepit that his aides had to wheel him onto the Senate floor and tell him which button to push so he voted the way he would have voted before his brain turned into melted butter? Strom Thurmond was an intellectual giant at that point compared to Tommy Tuberville.

This week Tuberville tried to talk about Russia’s war in Ukraine on Steve Bannon’s War Room, in what might well be his final appearance for a while, since the podcast is about to take a four-month hiatus. Bannon asked him about whether Russia would agree to a peace deal if it got to keep the parts of Ukraine it already annexed. Asking Tuberville this question is like asking a folding chair to solve the Hodge conjecture. Nevertheless:

Tuberville tried to make the case that there is a lull in armed conflict in Ukraine because Putin has no interest in fighting there. […]

“He doesn’t want Ukraine. He doesn’t want Europe. Hell, he’s got enough land of his own,” Tuberville insisted.

I have to wonder if the Senator from the Yellowhammer State is watching the same war as the rest of us. Vladimir Putin has spent the course of the war demonizing Ukrainians as Nazis and fascists to the point where most of Russia believes him. And there seems little doubt that, given the opportunity, Putin would attempt to reconstitute, if not the USSR, then at least something along the lines of Greater Russia.

After all, “megalomania” is a word that appears on many psychological profiles of the Russian President.

It’s harder to gauge Putin’s intentions for the rest of Europe. Still, assuming that he wouldn’t advance into Western Europe would be naïve in the extreme. There are resources and ports that would greatly benefit Russia, so it makes sense that Putin would want to seize the parts of Western Europe that would be useful to him.

Now, Russia’s invasion was almost two and a half years ago. The causes for it are long established. There have been intensive debates about the level of support the United States should offer Ukraine, and why, in committee rooms and on the floor of the Senate. Presumably there have been briefings and white papers and documents from policy experts presented to senators describing Vladimir Putin’s belief that Ukraine is a phony nation and its entire culture is made up, but really the country has been part of Russia for centuries, and now, sadly, it has been overrun by Nazis and therefore must be subdued by force and ushered back into peaceful harmony with the Russian motherland.

In short, there is zero reason for a sitting senator to say what Tuberville said. Putin doesn’t want Ukraine? Does a fish not want water? Of course he wants Ukraine. All you have to do to know this is read anything he has said since early 2022.

Just to cap that off, Steve Benen at MaddowBlog points out that Tuberville said the exact opposite two years ago:

Two years ago, the Alabaman insisted that Putin launched an invasion of Ukraine in order to acquire “more farmland” because “he can’t feed his people.” 

Of course, Ukraine has a distinctive culture and history. Ignoring that is to ignore historical reality and the rich tapestry of Ukrainian history.

In 1996, Russia, along with the US, signed a security treaty with Ukraine, pledging to defend Ukraine’s security in exchange for the former Soviet republic giving up its share of the former USSR’s nuclear arsenal. As the world has learned far too often, Russia’s commitment to a treaty lasts only as long as it remains in its interests. When that ceases to be the case, Russia may find a pretext to walk away from the treaty.

Ukraine has established a functional, if somewhat troubled, democracy, which left Vladimir Putin feeling threatened. The idea of a democracy existing on Russia’s southern border doesn’t sit well with the Russian autocrat, who would’ve rightly seen a Ukrainian democracy as a challenge to his rule.

Sen. Tuberville has chosen to cast his lot with Putin for reasons known only to himself. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to question what benefit(s) may accrue to the Senator due to this support, but there’s no evidence of direct Russian support.

Still, one has to wonder why the Senator is so pro-Putin.

And, insofar as I’ve been able to find, Putin has never proffered Ukraine once being the Soviet Union’s breadbasket as justification for the Russian invasion. However, you can bet he’d love to have Ukraine’s grain production back under Russian control.

Back to the War Room, where Tubby was nowhere near done. Instead, he pulled out the old shibboleth that it was the West that forced Putin into the invasion:

“He just wants to make sure that he does not have United States weapons in Ukraine pointing at Moscow.”

Christ, has he been talking to Max Blumenthal? The US was not flooding Ukraine with weapons and making Putin nervous. And if the US had had troops and equipment stationed in Ukraine, Putin never would have invaded in the first place. Crazy, not stupid.

Maybe we’re being unfair to Tubs. We can’t expect a senator who sits on the — let’s see here, committee assignments, committee assignments — the friggin’ Senate Armed Services Committee to have a working knowledge of foreign conflicts.

The US didn’t have troops and equipment pre-placed in Ukraine. NATO didn’t either. Why? Because Ukraine isn’t a NATO country. That may change over the next few years, but in February 2022, Ukraine wasn’t a NATO member. It hadn’t even received an invitation to apply for membership.

Of course, since the invasion, Ukraine has received hundreds of billions of dollars in weaponry from Western countries. NATO fears that introducing NATO troops will escalate the war into a possible WWIII. NATO is also afraid that Vladimir Putin’s threats about Russia’s potential use of its nuclear weapons aren’t empty saber rattling.

It’s more likely than not that Putin’s nuclear arsenal is every bit as decrepit and worn out as his army, but no one in NATO or the US government is willing to call his bluff. The cost of being wrong is too terrible to contemplate.

Meanwhile, Sen. Tuberville believes he’s tuned in to what Vladimir Putin wants and needs. The truth is that if we rely on ANYTHING the Senator from Alabama has to say about anything, America will be thoroughly and utterly fucked. For America’s sake, we can’t rely on the analysis of an elected official who’d lose a battle of wits with a greased doorknob.

Sen. Tuberville should avoid sharp instruments and challenging issues. Either could leave him mortally wounded, which might not seem so bad, but I fear that anyone who might replace him could be even worse.

Remember, this is Alabama we’re talking about—not exactly the birthplace of Nobel laureates.

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