One of my specialties as a bloggers is mocking Republican hypocrisy, which has exploded since the Trumpist takeover of the GOP. There are few subjects on which there’s more hypocrisy than religion. MAGA style religion, like their patriotism, is performative.
As expected, the Gret Stet of Louisiana’s bid to post Ten Commandments posters in classrooms has been approved by the Fifth Circuit. The ACLU has appealed the case to SCOTUS but I’d be shocked if they find the law unconstitutional. The Roberts-Alito court isn’t big on the separation of church and state. They killed the Lemon excessive entanglement test in 2022, so the chances of rejecting the Ten Commandments law are slim and none, and slim has moved to Bunkie, LA.
In a 2024 post, The Clownfish Commandments, I mocked Gov Landry and his mini-me, AG Liz Murrill for using an image from Cecil B DeMille’s The Ten Commandments in support of the law. Gret Stet MAGA maggots have difficulty distinguishing movies from real life, so I wasn’t surprised. I am, however, surprised by some of the unintentionally funny posters approved for classrooms across the state.
I call him Speaker Yellowbelly, but Charlie Pierce calls Mike Johnson Speaker Moses. While I doubt that Landry and Murrill read Charlie’s piercing insights on politics, they’ve glommed on to his pairing of Johnson and Moses:
Mike Johnson is a lawgiver? I thought he was America’s leading bootlicker. At a glance, Trump has violated at least half of the commandments. For all I know, he’s coveted his neighbor’s cattle. Congressional Republicans act like recalcitrant cattle being herded but it’s not glorious like this scene from Howard Hawks’ Red River:
If The Clownfish can cite DeMille, I can name check a superior director. Hawks, however, would do a better job of wrangling the MAGA cattle herd than Speaker Yellowbelly. He’d throw in some slapstick comedy as well.
That collapsing dinosaur skeleton looks like Trump’s free fall in the polls, which makes the image uplifting as well as funny.
Back to the Landry-Murrill propaganda posterpalooza. This one purports to be about legal history:
William is NOT my favorite Blackstone, Harry is:
Was the world’s master magician in league with Satan instead of Moses? Beats the hell outta me. I bet Jeff and Liz don’t know either, not that either would ever admit to a mistake. It’s hard being perfect. #sarcasm.
Our next approved poster features dictionary guy Noah Webster and William McGuffey whose readers educated American kids from the 1830’s to 1920’s. The McGuffey Readers are long outmoded except in the eyes of Landry and Murrill:
It may be hypocritical, but I have to give Landry and Murrill’s people grudging credit for appropriating a liberal hero for their propaganda posterpalooza.
Justice Ginsburg may have dug the Ten Commandments, but she would have never supported posting them in classrooms. She would have considered that excessive entanglement of church and state. I miss the Lemon Test prongs and all.
Team MAGA is so far out of the mainstream that the left should appropriate genuine conservative icons to strike back. For example, we could appropriate Ronald Reagan’s views on tariffs, immigration, and Russian aggression. He was a free trader who was moderate on immigration and anti-Russian. Reagan was wrong on most issues but his record begs for the use of political jiu jitsu against the party he once led.
Repeat after me: Turnabout is fair play.
The Gret Stet considered appropriating Martin Luther King for their poster propaganda campaign but passed:
That was too hypocritical even for The Clownfish and his mini-me. They’re suppressors of black voters, not civil rights supporters. Some in the Gret Stet call him Klandry and Murrill is notorious for opposing wrongful conviction compensation. She seems to believe prosecutors never make any mistakes and that defendants most of whom are Black had it coming. According to a ProPublica investigation, Murrill is even worse on this issue than Landry:
Since taking office two years ago, Murrill has opposed all but one of 23 compensation claims brought by people whose convictions have been vacated by the courts. These include cases in which the men were exonerated through DNA or blood evidence and others in which police are accused of fabricating evidence.”
<SNIP>
Verite News and ProPublica interviewed the attorneys of 17 of the people whose compensation claims Murrill opposed. The majority expressed shock at her tactics. When Landry was attorney general, his office regularly spoke with defense attorneys and assured them that the attorney general would not stand in the way of compensation in the rare times the office agreed that a former prisoner was innocent, according to two of the attorneys.”
Who wants to be known as worse than Jeff Landry? Liz Murrill, that’s who. I thought the defunct criminal indictment of her was preposterous. I feel the same way about the exuberant religiosity of the Ten Commandments posters. It feels more like religious coercion than the free exercise of religion envisioned by the founders. They, too, knew from hypocrisy: of the 55 delegates who attended the constitutional convention, at least half were slave owners.
Repeat after me: Hypocrisy is as American as apple pie, just not as tasty.
The last word goes to Jimmy Cliff: