On this date in 2015, 2016, 2017, as well as 2018, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day posted profiles of Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin, who while a challenger to Mitch McConnell’s U.S. Senate seat back in 2014, came out in support of Personhood legislation to give zygotes the same rights as fully born adult citizens, and who attended a rally in support of cockfighting (and then unsuccessfully tried lying about it when the media reported on it). Matt Bevin then won the 2015 GOP Primary in the governor’s race in Kentucky by a whopping 83 votes, and went on to top the Democrat in the field even though he had spoken about the Medicaid Expansion in Kentucky, and expressed his desire to reverse the decision, which would take away healthcare from hundreds of thousands of people in Kentucky. Much like his previous gaffe with going to a dogfighting rally, Bevin tried denying he ever made remarks about stripping healthcare from so many… even though he was caught on tape doing so. Bevin was elected even though he professed in October that he wanted to execute the failed policy several states implemented of drug testing welfare recipients. Since taking office, Bevin immediately started using the power of his office to reverse any progress done by outgoing Governor Steve Beshear over the past couple years, including the reversal an executive order made by reshear to restore the voting rights of some who had them taken away permanently for felony convictions, or doing whatever he could to help out bigoted county clerks like Kim Davis who were losing their minds about having to do their jobs and sign off on same sex marriages by changing the way marriage licenses are written so that the clerk’s name not only doesn’t need to be signed, but doesn’t appear at all on the document.
In September of 2016 at the Voter Values Summit, Matt Bevin lost his goddamned mind when he was asked if the country could “survive a Clinton presidency”, and began rambling about revolution, saying, “The roots of the tree of liberty are watered by what?. The blood, of who? The tyrants to be sure, but who else? The patriots. Whose blood will be shed? It may be that of those in this room. It might be that of our children and grandchildren.” When asked for clarification about his remarks, he became even more paranoid, adding, “Today we have thousands of men and women in uniform fighting for us overseas and they need our full backing. We cannot be complacent about the determination of radical Islamic extremists to destroy our freedoms.” But a month later, Matt Bevin was urging preachers and clergy to ignore whatever warnings they might have received about politicking (which can jeopardize their tax-exempt status), and help the GOP campaign to win offices, and calling the existing law a “paper tiger”. Outside of rhetoric, we’re not fans of Gov. Bevin on policy, either, as he has spent the early part of 2017 trying to get “right to work” legislation passed in Kentucky, and do whatever he can within his power to harm workers’ unions in his state.
2017 was a particularly insane year for Matt Bevin, starting in January of that year when he released a Facebook live video where he trashed the name of his state Attorney General, Andy Beshear, because Beshear revealed that he wouldn’t challenge a lawsuit against HB 2, an anti-abortion law Bevin signed even though it was patently unconstitutional based on all precedent. This would, of course, save the state from not just the cost of losing that lawsuit, but the time and effort involved. During his rant, Bevin called Beshear “dishonorable” and called out a newspaper from the Courier Journal of Louisville and calling her reporting “lies”. In March 2017, Gov. Bevin signed SB 17 into law, a “religious freedom” law that allows public school students to express religious and political views in homework and class projects “free from discrimination or penalty,” distribute political and religious literature, and wear religious items and symbols. Where it completely goes off the rails, is the law would allow for student organizations to openly discriminate against LGBTQ students based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. In other words, it’s a violation of the separation of church and state, and just flat out discrimination, with lawsuits immediately getting filed that the state will inevitably lose. By the end of that month, Bevin’s administration began filing lawsuits against every abortion clinic in Kentucky, and nearly did so to the extent that they nearly closed the last one in the state. The move was blocked, however, by a judge’s ruling.
In May of 2017: Bevin refers to the local press as “cicadas” in a Facebook Live broadcast in an attack on his local press, and within a week, this led an apparent Bevin supporter to shoot out the windows of the Lexington Herald-Leader. In August of 2017, after a Neo-Nazi drove his vehicle into counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, injuring a score of people and killing Heather Heyer, Matt Bevin echoed the remarks of Donald Trump, claiming that “both sides” were to blame. (It’s hard to get any lower than that…)
By October of 2017 Bevin stated his desire to never legalize marijuana usage in Kentucky because of “people overdosing based on ingestion of products that are edibles and things,” adding “law enforcement people in emergency rooms being overrun by problems.” (HINT: There are not marijuana overdoses happening, from edibles or otherwise.)
Which brings us to 2018…
- January 16th, 2018: Matt Bevin threatens to take away Medicaid funding from half a million people in Kentucky “if they don’t work for it”. A reminder, though… most people on Medicaid are the elderly or the disabled, who can’t necessarily perform physical work.
- February 26th, 2018: Bevin, in an interview with NPR, muses his opinion that an uptick in gun violence over the past several years, particularly in school shootings, has nothing to do with the easy availability of firearms, but it’s actually due to “violent video games”.
- March 6th, 2018: Gov. Bevin appears in a documentary by the right-wing group the Liberty Counsel about noted homophobic bigot Kim Davis, where he declares her an “inspiration to the children of America”:
“Against all the scorn, all the enmity, all the vitriol, all the nastiness, she stood firm. I think Kim Davis is without question an inspiration, not only to leaders like myself—people in the public arena and those outside the public arena—but to my children, the children of America. People, even if they disagree with her, have got to respect the fact that here is a woman who was willing to put it all on the line out of conviction for what she believed and knew to be her right as an American citizen. And her faith and her conviction in the fact that that faith was protected by the First Amendment in our Constitution—in our Bill of Rights, specifically—is something that she was willing to put front and center, and if that’s not admirable, if that’s not something we would want all Americans to emulate, I don’t know what is.”
- April 15th, 2018: Enraged and impotent to stop a teacher’s strike without actually, y’know, PAYING the teachers, Matt Bevin decides to make the ridiculous accusation that teachers not being in school to teach children has led to a mass outbreak of child molestations in Kentucky. No, really.
- July 2nd, 2018: A judge rules against Gov. Bevin’s attempts to place work requirements on Medicaid recipients (which, good, a large proportion of Medicaid recipients are disabled and can’t work) prompting Bevin to just try and ignore the court ruling and strip half a million people of their dental and vision coverage.
- July 10th, 2018: Bevin goes to Louisville’s Phoenix Hill school district that is demographically 86% black and 13% Hispanic, and makes the very tone deaf and insensitive statement, “I’m going to go in and meet the members of the West Louisville Chess Club – not something you necessarily would have thought of when you think of this section of town”.
- December 12th, 2018: After the Lexington Courier-Journal and Pro-Publica begin investigations into his administration, Gov. Bevin goes on a paranoid, conspiracy-theory-laden rant about how they are “biased” and claimed that they were funded by George Soros. Only days later, a Neo-Nazi mass shooter in Pittsburgh gunned down a synagogue, while ranting about George Soros. So way to take part in a stochastic terror campaign, Matty.
Matt Bevin is up for re-election in November of 2019, and early polling shows that he’s now got the lowest approval rating of any sitting governor in the country, and that he would lose to state Attorney General Andy Beshear handily, by almost double digits. In Kentucky, which isn’t exactly a blue state. His chances at re-election are so dismal, there are rumors that he won’t even file to run for re-election (as of this post, he has yet to file). Frankly, we’re looking forward to raising a glass of bourbon to celebrate his crazy ass getting the boot about nine months from now.