A bus carries students down Jayhawk Boulevard at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. (Tim Carpenter/Kansas Reflector)
I just need one moment for everyone to not act certifiably insane, OK?
And I don’t refer to those who are coping with mental health issues when I write that. I mean insane as shown in old cartoons, with Bugs Bunny in a straitjacket and a couple of men chasing him with butterfly nets. As in bonkers, nuts and bananas.
The latest eruption erupted Wednesday with politicos voicing their disgust over comments made by University of Kansas lecturer Phillip Lowcock.
The lecturer made the following noxious remarks about the presidential election: “There are going to be some males in our society that will refuse to vote for a potential female president because they don’t think females are smart enough to be president. We could line all those guys up and shoot ’em. They clearly don’t understand the way the world works.”
Sigh. Really?
In an election season that already has seen two attempts on the life of Republican candidate Donald Trump, you could make that point in a million different and better ways.
That was nuts enough. But the revelation of Lowcock’s comments Wednesday was accompanied by the kind of predictable outrage and disinformation that showed no one else was thinking with their entire brain for more than a split second. Much like a man confronted by an all-you-can-eat taco bar after a night of heavy drinking, many of us make regrettable decisions under the influence of partisan politics.
Both U.S. senators from Kansas criticized the comments, as though Jerry Moran and Roger Marshall had nothing better to do with their afternoons than judge other people’s speech. Marshall called for the instructor’s resignation. Again, we’re talking about a statement almost immediately retracted by the speaker.
“Did I say that? Scratch that from the recording. I don’t want the deans hearing that I said that,” Lowcock said in the same recording.
As my buddy and pal Joel Mathis pointed out over at the Kansas City Star , the Republicans braying for the lecturer’s head on a stick are the same who had no response to Trump’s recent call for a “Purge”-like hour of violence to rid the nation of crime.
“One rough hour — and I mean real rough — the word will get out and it will end immediately, you know?” Trump proclaimed in Pennsylvania. “It will end immediately.”
That seems bad! So did Jan. 6, 2021, when a bunch of that guy’s superfans attempted a coup at the Capitol building. Yet both Moran and Marshall voted against an independent inquiry into the insurrection. Just four months after, Marshall told everyone “ it’s time to move on .”
In other words, a random comment from a KU lecturer should cost him a job. But Trump’s actual violent attempt to retain power should be airily dismissed. Maybe we should give him the job again!
This is the dark side of the last month before a presidential election, in which everyone and his or her mother takes leave of their senses and unleashes a bitter torrent of rhetoric at the slightest provocation. Nothing demands this. Nothing requires this. We live in a state where Trump, regardless of his crimes against our country, will almost certainly capture our measly six electoral votes . Any rhetoric serves as so much extra ice dispensed from a gas station soda machine — stray cubes shot onto the floor to eventually melt into nothingness.
But there was Attorney General Kris Kobach, for some reason jabbing at the Kansas Board of Regents while commenting on Lowcock.
Hey, attorney general, you could also note that the president of a Regents school didn’t properly credit more than 20 authors in his doctoral dissertation. I mean, it doesn’t involve simultaneously standing up for Trump, but at least it has roots in reality.
Finally, however, we must chat about the Kansas Republican Party and its erstwhile chairman, Mike Brown. Brown has turned the state’s once-Grand Old Party into a conspiracy-addled looney bin, weaponizing the party’s weekly newsletter to launch diatribes against the nonexistent “deep state” and repeat Trumpian talking points ad nauseum.
In this case, however, Brown went above and beyond.
He issued a statement condemning Lowcock’s words — but misidentified the speaker as David Guth, a retired KU journalism professor who criticized the National Rifle Association back in 2013 . You know, a year when everyone still seemed sane?
If you want to argue that words matter, and that you shouldn’t use heightened rhetoric against those who don’t deserve it, then what the heck was Brown thinking? To spotlight and shame an innocent man? That mistake could lead to real-life consequences for Guth. I doubt the state GOP wants to bear those costs. To its credit, the party issued a corrected press release, but not without claiming that “both of these individuals have worked for the University of Kansas, and both their comments are vile.”
What a black mark on the honorable history of a once-honorable party.
The nonsense had a bipartisan flavor, though. Even Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly joined the chorus denouncing the remarks. She might be politically smarter than me and most Kansans, but that can lead to some pretty unpleasant places for someone claiming to be a Democrat.
If you want to score political points one way or the other in this conflict, feel free. But I’ve had enough of all of it. You’re all crazy, and this election is making you that way.
We still have more than three weeks to go.
Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here .
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