32.2 - Clown Award: Nigel and Sally Rowe

Clown Award: Nigel and Sally Rowe

So it seems appropriate that this brings us to our next item, the Clown Award, given as always for meritorious stupidity.

Appropriate because one of our nominees this week is right-wing talk radio host Mark Levin, who recently came out with what may be the stupidest denial argument ever.

On his August 30 show, he listed several scientists: Aristotle, Archimedes, Galileo, Tesla, Faraday, Newton, Pasteur, Einstein, and Edison, mispronouncing Archimedes as "Archie-medes," then asked "What do they all have in common?"

His answer was that none of them ever wrote about human-caused climate change, which, he said, proves that climate change is not about science but about importing "a foreign ideology."

Then we have Kimberley Paige Barnette, a candidate for mayor in Charlotte, NC, who had a big "Vote for Me!" post on her Facebook page which listed among her qualifications "Republican," "smart," "traditional," and "white."

She was running far behind the other candidates. Happily, she stayed there, finishing last.

Next, we have Rand Paul, auditioning for the next remake of Stephen King's "It," proposing that we pay for relief for victims of Harvey and Irma by making equivalent cuts in foreign aid, because after all why shouldn't we let those damn foreigners suffer.

Notably, we have Hillary Clinton, proving yet again that she still doesn't get it. In her new book, she again blames pretty much everybody except herself for losing to the most unpopular presidential candidate ever. Not only the expected targets like sexism and Bernie Sanders - I mean, apparently just that he ran in primaries against her was in and of itself just such a mean, horrible, destructive thing to do - but pretty much everyone and everything within reach.

In fact, she even blames what she calls her biggest gaffe - the bit about "putting coal mines out of business" - on Barack Obama, who she also blames for getting her to "go easy" on Sanders - as if the accusations and innuendos of racism and sexism were "going easy."

She even blamed the energized anti-Trump women-lead marches and demonstrations, asking why weren't they there for her, sniffle.

Nigel Rowe

The only reason she isn't the Clown - well, two reasons, because yes there was someone worse, but this is one - is that the institutional Democratic Party seems at long last to have had enough of her, with even people like Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, and Joe Biden criticizing her and there appears to be a general feeling, including among donors, that she should just go away. Here's hoping she will take the hint.

Which leaves this week's winners of the Big Red Nose and they are Nigel and Sally Rowe (I only have a picture of Nigel), the Bible-thumping Christian parents of a six-year-old boy attending an unnamed Church of England primary school near Portsmouth, England who are threatening to sue the school because it allowed a boy in their son's class to wear a dress.

They intend to argue that the school has acted without due regard to pupils and not respected their rights to bring up their children according to their biblical beliefs.

In other words, they are saying the school was obligated to insure that every other parent made sure that their own children acted in that school according to the Rowes' beliefs, and those parents' own religious (or lack of religious) beliefs be damned. Only the Rowes' beliefs mattered. And it's hard to imagine anything more transparently clownish than that.

And yet there is more. To top it off, they said it was "simply not the case" that they were demonstrating prejudice against transgender people - even as Nigel Rowe went on BBC to insist that boys are boys and girls are girls and the "way we are" is "within our DNA" and all this transgender nonsense is "a political agenda."

Nigel and Sally Rowe. Yeah. Clowns.