Tommy Tuberville never had any qualifications to be a senator. Alabama’s voters elected him anyway.
His college degree is in physical education, and after graduating, he coached football players; first in high school, then worked his way up the college football ranks (see his profile here).
Tuberville is now a U.S. Senator for exactly two reasons: He has high name recognition because of his sports career, and he ran as a Republican in a deep-red state against a single-term Democratic incumbent who barely got elected and only because his GOP opponent messed around with teenage girls (see details here).
Every time I read another news story about Tuberville, my conviction deepens that he’s the dumbest fencepost in the U.S. Senate. He may know football, but he doesn’t know squat about anything else.
Until today, his most recent notoriety flowed from the senatorial hold he imposed on 184 general-officer military promotions in order to force the Pentagon to change its abortion policies (see story here). That’s still a big problem, because the hold is still in place, and is compromising our nation’s military readiness (see story here).
So what did Tuberville do today to make new headlines, and take stupidity to a new level? He opened his mouth. Twice.
First, he said the jury verdict against Trump in a New York civil lawsuit brought by a woman who accused him of raping her made him — Tuberville — want to vote for Trump “twice” (see story here). Voting twice in an election is illegal, although some Republicans don’t have a problem with it (see, e.g., my postings here, here, and here).
Then, he “suggested he doesn’t have a problem with white nationalists serving in the military,” adding he considers racists in uniform “patriots” (see story here).
Tuberville, who has made racist remarks in the past (see story here), and criticized the Pentagon’s diversity training (see story here), can’t be ignorant of the U.S. military’s history of racial discrimination, although he’s certainly willfully oblivious to it.
But never having served in the military, he probably is ignorant of the crucial importance of teamwork in military missions. The only scenario in which having white nationalists, white supremacists, or racists in military units is one in which the military is either all-white or segregated, which was the situation up through World War 2. But today, while U.S. military forces remain majority-white, over 40% of active-duty personnel are either black or Hispanic (see chart here).
Thus, to say that having racists in the ranks is disruptive, and interferes with the military’s mission of defending our country, is an understatement. Keeping them out of the military is vital to our self-preservation in a dangerous world.
But what do you expect from an amateur politician with scant knowledge of national defense, and no experience at governing, who thinks preventing service members from getting abortions in states where it’s legal is more important than staffing the military with admirals and generals?
Tuberville is an incompetent politician. I really wish he’d stuck to what he knows how to do.