“He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
In 2016, when he was running for his second Senate term, Ron Johnson promised the voters of Wisconsin that it would be his last. Now a Republican source has told WISN 12 News' Matt Smith that Ron Johnson will run again. The scuttlebutt is he will make a formal announcement in the next few days. [Update: Johnson has just announced he will be running for a third term]. Ron had laid the groundwork for his exercise in mendacity back in December 2021, when he said, in response to a question of the whether he was running again,
"I'm talking to all the people that I need to talk to in order to make that decision. I have been a little more forthcoming in terms of what’s going through my mind.”
For most people, the truth is simply the truth. But for people like Ron Johnson, who lives in the GOP’s parallel universe, the truth is what they say it is. Consider his claim that the same number of people thought the 2016 election was fraudulent as believe the 2020 election was. He told Larry Kudlow on Fox Business,
“This is an unstable state of affairs, Larry, where you’ve got half the country in 2016 not believing that’s a legitimate result. Four years later, the other half’s not agreeing that it is a legitimate result. We need to restore confidence in our election system.”
His claim is absurd. According to a poll taken a day after the 2016 presidential election, 84% of Americans said they regarded Trump as the legitimate president, including 76% of Democrats. In January 2021, just 58% of Americans believed that Joe Biden legitimately won — with only 21% of Republicans agreeing.
Hillary complained about Russian interference, Comey’s bombshell letter, and disinformation on social media. But she never said the vote was illegitimate. And she conceded. The day after the election, at the New Yorker hotel in Manhattan, Hillary said,
“Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and a chance to lead.”
Adding to Johnson’s duplicity is that privately Johnson admits Trump lost Wisconsin. In a secret recording made by liberal activist Lauren Windsor, posing as an election skeptic, he said,
“The only reason Trump lost Wisconsin is that 51,000 Republican voters didn’t vote for him. They voted for other Republican candidates.”
“Well look at the totals. It’s certainly plausible - there’s nothing obviously, nothing obviously skewed about the results. There isn’t.”
Johnson's cynical election-denial is an attack on America. And it’s not his first rodeo. After his 2018 jaunt to Russia to spend the Fourth of July holiday in Moscow, Red Ron denied that Russian interference in the 2016 election was a big deal. In an interview with the Washington Examiner, he said,
“I’ve been pretty upfront that the election interference — as serious as that was, and unacceptable — is not the greatest threat to our democracy. We’ve blown it way out of proportion.”
Who knew at the time that he was right — at least when he said that the Russians were not the biggest threat to our democracy — now that it has turned out the GOP is.
Johnson also thinks that reporting on thousands of insurrectionists invading the Capitol has also been blown way out of proportion, saying that the violent riot “didn't seem like an insurrection to me.”
Johnson’s lack of patriotism extends to his COVID foolishness. He has tweeted support for the notorious anti-vaxxer Alex Berenson after that charlatan was tossed off Twitter for his deadly rejection of life-saving medicines,
“Alex Berenson has been a courageous voice of reason throughout the pandemic. As a result, he has been censored. During his suspension on Twitter, you can find him on Substack … He provides a valuable counter perspective to the group-think mainstream media.”
What Johnson thinks is media groupthink is the consensus of the global mainstream medical community — statistically proven — that the COVID vaccine has kept millions alive.
It isn’t the first time he has blamed the media. In June 2021, after YouTube banned him for a week for uploading dangerous rubbish in support of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, he wrote,
“Big Tech and mainstream media believe they are smarter than medical doctors who have devoted their lives to science and use their skills to save lives. They have decided there is only one medical viewpoint allowed, and it is the viewpoint dictated by government agencies. How many lives will be lost as a result? How many lives could have been saved with a free exchange of medical ideas?”
He is delusional. The medical community has looked at alternate medicines and advised against their use. And I am sure that among epidemiologists and experts in infectious disease there has been “a free exchange of medical ideas”. And just what expertise Johnson brings to the table as the CEO of a plastics company is anyone’s guess.
There’s more. During a town hall meeting in December 2021, he extolled the benefits of mouthwash in reducing the spread of Covid. “Standard gargle, mouthwash, has been proven to kill the coronavirus.” The claim was so nuts Republican NH Governor Chris Sununu reacted by saying, “when crazy comes knocking at the door, slam it shut.
Also last December, Johnson told Fox News's Brian Kilmeade that Dr. Fauci had ‘overhyped’ COVID the same way he had overhyped AIDS. To which Fauci responded,
“Overhyping Covid? It’s already killed 780,000 Americans and over 5 million people worldwide, so I don’t have any clue what he’s talking about.”
Johnson was far from done. He asked Sean Duffy, who was guest hosting the Sean Hannity Show,
“We now know that fully vaccinated individuals can catch Covid, they can transmit Covid. So what’s the point?”
The point? Isn’t the fact that you are far less likely to be hospitalized and die enough? It’s like saying that soldiers shouldn’t bother with bulletproof vests, because people wearing them can still get shot.
CNN’s Dr. Jonathan Reiner sums it up well,
“The only people dying essentially now from this virus are the unvaccinated. And the vast majority of people being hospitalized in this country are the unvaccinated. And his [Johnson’s] propagation of this nonsense that somehow vaccines don’t work and are unsafe is the reason why so many of his constituents are becoming hospitalized and are dying. And if this is not an act, then he is just the most ignorant man in the United States Senate. And that says a lot.”
NB: The number of Wisconsinites killed by COVID stands at 11,402 and counting.
But Johnson will not shut up. On Vicki McKenna’s show, he asked the host, “Why do we think that we can create something better than God?” And in that remarkably obtuse statement, the Senate’s possibly dumbest member dismissed the entire history of medicine. So you will not be surprised to discover Senator Wrong Johnson is also a climate change denier. But I will leave that for another time
Sad, but I’d not be surprised if he won reelection, thanks Pitt