37.7 - Clown Award: Mike Shoesmith

Clown Award: Mike Shoesmith

Now for one of our popular features, this is the Clown Award, given as always for meritorious stupidity.

Our first candidate and winner of the Least Self-Aware Person in the World Award is Swiss investor and frequent business media commentator Marc Faber. In an investment newsletter he writes, he said:

"Thank God white people populated America, and not the blacks. Otherwise, the US would look like Zimbabwe, which it might look like one day anyway, but at least America enjoyed 200 years in the economic and political sun under a white majority."

He then immediately said, and you know this is coming, "I am not a racist."

Um, yeah, you are.

Next is Gary Cohn and he is Tweetie-pie's chief economic adviser and a former president of Goldman Sachs.

Pitching Tweetie-pie's tax plan at a White House press briefing recently, he referred to what he described as a typical family that has two children and earns $100,000 per year, saying they can expect annual tax savings of approximately $1,000 under the plan.

Some people have jumped on his idiotic claim that with that $1000 that family could "renovate their kitchen" or "buy a new car" - but what sealed it for me was "a typical family" making 100Gs a year - close to twice the median income and more than over 70% of US households make.

Gary Cohn: a man who would have to travel thousands of miles in order to be close enough to be out of touch.

Now we head into the space of just weird and I do mean space.

Bettina Rodriguez Aguilera is a GOPper running for Congress from Florida's 27th Congressional district to replace the retiring Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.

In 2009, Rodriguez Aguilera described how at the age of seven she was taken aboard a spaceship by three blond, big-bodied aliens who have communicated telepathically with her several times since.

She should fit right in with the other space cadets in the House chamber.

Mike Shoesmith

But our winner, oh, our winner, returns us to the glory days of the Clown Award when genuine stupidity was the ruling force.

So the winner of the Big Red Nose this week is Mike Shoesmith, self-styled executive editor of something called PNN News & Ministry Network although I can't for the life of me find out what the PNN is supposed to (or ever did) stand for.

Anyway, writing on his "news and ministry network" which is actually a blog on October 19, he argued - and I do mean he argued, he went on at some length, this was no tweet, it was a column - he argued that if a woman wears "suggestive clothing" around a man she is committing criminal sexual assault. Seriously.

Because, y'see, quoting him, "when a man sees a naked or partially dressed woman a chemical reaction happens in his brain ... giving him an involuntary surge of pleasure," which he apparently regards as a bad thing. But this means that, he turns to the criminal code now, "without his consent" she has "applied or attempted to apply" a force against him.

Thus, "Men are in a state of constant sexual assault by women who either don't understand the severity of what they are doing because it's cute and they like the attention, or worse - they do know the feelings it stirs and like the control they have over men."

I would like to have pity on, feel sorry for, Mike Shoesmith in his obvious fear of women and of his own feelings and his pathetic pleas for women to protect him from his own feelings by "putting some clothes on" and "stopping the sexual assault against men," but I can't.

Because while he may be pathetic, he is still a clown.