These Fucking Guys: A two-fer, David French and Sen. Jim Banks

Thy cup runneth over with fuckery and assholery. David French finally realizes his complicity in Trump's arise (sorta) and Indiana Republican Senator Jim Banks shows his true colors

I have sorta lapsed in my diligent hunt for douchebaggery and fuckwads. Post election in November, it felt like exposing the fuckery was like pistol-whipping a blind child.

In other words it was too easy. To say it was a target rich environment would be a MASSIVE understatement.

But this week, two things happened that I just can’t let slide. Senator Jim Banks R-Twatwaffle had the audacity to tell a fired HHS worker that he probably deserved it. Add to that David French finally realizing that his fundamentalist Christian tribe of evangelicals is responsible for Trump’s ascendance and return to power.

Starting with the oxygen thief in the Senate:

This Fucking Guy - Jim Banks

Indiana has graced us with some dumb fuckers for a long time. Dan Quayle, Bush I’s veep, Michael “help me mother” Pence was a force from there, and served in the house as well as as governor of Indiana before becoming Trump’s beard (oops, I mean veep).

But, not to be outdone, there is shit-stained boxers Senator Jim Banks, who represents the “great” state of Indiana in the top chamber in the legislature.

Wikipedia tells me that he was born in 1979, so this wad of fuck is at the trailing edge of my generation, Gen X. Great.

But what got him into the crosshairs is that he was confronted in the halls of Congress by a former employee at the department of Health and Human Services. In case you missed it (and if you did, what rock are you living under, and do you have room for me to join you?) on Tuesday, April 1, the wholesale gutting of the workforce that the twat RFKjr was unleashing from top to bottom at the HHS, and that affected about TEN THOUSAND PEOPLE, from people who administer, and including leaders and groups that track infectious diseases, and a lot of other really important things.

So, this newly unemployed person had some free time. They chose to ask Senator Banks to his face about it.

From a news posting by AOL¹:

Sen. Jim Banks said Wednesday he's not apologizing after a video spread online showing the Indiana Republican calling a fired federal worker who confronted him on camera over sweeping government cuts "a clown" who “probably deserved” to lose his job.

Uh, wow. The tone-deafness of this is stunning, but it really isn’t surprising, as this is like candy to the uber-MAGA trolls that now dominate over at Twitter²:

"The Democrats and the left-wing media have lost their minds because I told a left-wing activist in the halls of the Senate office buildings yesterday what I really thought," said Banks in the post. "A clown is a clown, who’s chasing senators through the halls with a cellphone, complaining about losing a left-wing 'woke' job in the federal government that should have never been a federal job to begin with."

So, the new get out of jail free card is to whinge about “woke”, and tar everyone who works in the government as “left-wing” activists.

God, the depths to which these fuckers dip to.

Read the article, watch the Senator and his entourage’s expressions, and remind yourself that the Senate is the thinking, deliberative body. People like Banks, Tuberville, and Blackburn (and Cruz, and …) are supposed to be the adults in government. And this fucker gets rewarded with a $174K salary of our money. Time to fire his ass me thinks.

This Fucking Guy indeed.

David French gets closer…

Numero dos this fine Friday is David French, a former JAG, a lawyer who spent much of his career jamming religion into the public, and lately he’s an OpEd columnist at the Grey Lady, The New York Times.

His latest columnist newsletter, he writes:

At this point, it’s safe to say that evangelicals are more responsible than any other American group for Trump’s political power. It is my community that has made him president — twice. If you removed white evangelicals in particular from his coalition, he would have lost all three of his presidential races by a landslide.

In 2016, Trump won 80 percent of the white evangelical vote. The rest of America voted for Hillary Clinton, by a 26-percentage-point margin, 60 to 34. In 2024, Trump won 82 percent of white evangelicals, and 40 percent of everyone else.

Gee Mr. French, you are finally realizing that your “tribe,” AKA White Evangelical Christians, were pretty much the force that carried Trump to the White house.

Twice.

Yeah, I know you have tipped your hat about this in the past, but this is the clearest I have seen your acknowledgement of this stone-cold fact.

After almost 10 long years during which Trump has captured evangelical hearts more than any other president of my lifetime, I am forced to admit that Trump may have been better attuned to conservative evangelical culture than any other Republican president in the modern era. (emphasis mine)

Took ya long enough. But the genesis of this awakening seems to be the final straw that broke the camel’s back, the crass commercial offers of blessings and personal angels by the Trump Administration’s Spiritual Advisor, Paula White.

A longer than usual pull quote is justified here:

Last month, Paula White, one of President Trump’s most faithful and powerful evangelical supporters and a senior adviser to his new White House Faith Office, began offering “seven supernatural blessings” for the Easter season.

If you “honor God” during the period of Passover and Easter, “God will assign an angel to you, he’ll be an enemy to your enemies, he’ll give you prosperity, he’ll take sickness away from you, he will give you long life, he’ll bring increase in inheritance, and he’ll bring a special year of blessing.”

The suggested price for these extraordinary gifts is an offering to Paula White Ministries of $1,000 or more, and if health, wealth and an angel weren’t enough, White’s ministry will also give you a gorgeous Waterford crystal cross.

If you think White is alone in her cynical, heretical grift, then let me introduce you to Lorenzo Sewell, another of Trump’s Christian favorites. He’s a Detroit-area pastor who delivered a benediction at Trump’s second inauguration in January.

Yes, the Evangelicals have long been sliding into the prosperity gospel shit, but true faith leaders like French and Russell Moore have been dancing around this slide into cheese, claiming that the crassness is a perversion, and a minor part of their “faith”, but as long as Trump was delivering solid policy to allow the dominant religion in America to force-feed their ideology to the rest of the country, they could turn a blind eye.

But no, American evangelicalism has always been a cancer on society, bringing the symptoms of judgement, intolerance and suffering to those they deem unworthy or unwashed.

The fact that they do these things in the name of Jesus Christ is a double farce. The evangelicals of today do not even pretend to fig leaf with the teachings of their Lord and Savior. Reject asylum seekers, immigrants, the poor, the hungry, it is all about gaining, retaining and wielding political power. Principles be damned, as long as they get to worship their bronzed idol.

I am not a religious person, but I know the ten commandments, and I am pretty sure that idolatry is not allowed in their supposed worldview, but here we are.

These Fucking Guys

For the tone-deafness of Jim Banks, and the final realization that yes, David French, you bear a lot of blame for inflicting Trump on the nation, and no, your cushy job at the top of the legacy media world doesn’t clean the stench that oozes from every orifice in your shitty body.

These two twat-waffles win today.

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1. Count me as surprised that AOL has a news service… Or that it still exists at all.

2. I will deadname this until I die.