When the various states send off their newest Republican elected officials to the U.S. Congress, they are not sending their best and brightest. They are sending weirdos. They are sending conspiracy cranks. They are sending ... Matt Rosendale.
I'm not sure we should be listening to any advice from someone who gets their fashion tips from Fruit Stripe Gum, but—well, no, actually I'm not sure there's any “but” to be had on this one. What's Matt on about here?
"We have drag shows taking place at Malmstrom Air Force Base. There are 150 ICBM missiles that are being controlled by that Air Force Base and by these individuals. I don't want someone who doesn’t know if they are a man or a woman with their hand on a missile button.”
All right, so our first problem is that the man cosplaying as a decaying avocado does not understand what drag shows are. You know who understands what drag shows are? Everybody except Matt Rosendale.
I'm going to guess from the gray hair on Captain Tupperware's head that Rosendale knows pretty well who Bob Hope was, and Jonathan Winters, and Dana Carvey, and Tom Hanks, and for f--k's sake drag shows have been a thing in America for at least the last 150 years. People conservative enough to consider Rosendale an ultraliberal spawned from Satan have been giddy fans of the genre for all that time, and you had to have a stick up your --- the size of a steamboat to start screeching, “Think of the children!” outside the theater doors.
Nobody ever thought Bob Hope or the Rat Pack were confused about being "a man or a woman." Nobody ever stood up at a conservative conference, teary-eyed, to explain that when they were a child, seeing Bugs Bunny in a dress turned them gay. What's most impressive about the conservative freakout over "drag shows" is that it appears to be pulled entirely out of thin air.
So what's Rosendale's exact issue here? When we get past his extremely conspiratorial notion of What Drag Shows Mean, his objection appears to be that he doesn't want drag show enthusiasts to "control" nuclear missiles, and even more than that he doesn't want "someone who doesn't know if they are a man or a woman" to be in control of missiles, and buddy? Matt, old pal?
What exactly do you imagine happens when we allow either drag show audience members or LGBTQ+ Americans to touch the missile buttons?
Do you ... do you think it turns the missiles gay?
Do you think that trans members of the military have access to different missile coordinates than everyone else and can reprogram nuclear missiles to target, uh, what exactly? What are they going to point the missiles at when you're not looking?
Does Matt here think Malmstrom Air Force Base is going to be the launch point for the Gay Apocalypse, in which The Gays rain down nuclear winter on all the straight people and fallout turns everybody fabulous? What the actual eff are you going on about, Matt?
Look, I have to be honest here: Not once in my life have I worried that somebody sitting next to one of the nation's many, many nuclear buttons might like or not like drag shows. It has come up not even once. It's not even a sentence I could imagine coming up with before 1960s Appliance Showroom Guy here put it in all our heads.
I don't even care if you put the missiles themselves in drag. You want to wrap a feather boa around that thing, you go right the hell ahead. Slap some lipstick on that intercontinental Ru Paul, give it nice rosy missile cheeks, I don't care. It's still going to blow everything to shit if anyone ever presses the doomsday button, and nobody in Moscow or Pyongyang is going to file a sternly worded protest because the missile headed towards them is more glam than the 100 or so missiles headed towards everybody else.
Screw off with this, you weirdo. I can tell you right now who shouldn't be anywhere near the nuclear buttons, and that's Republican congressmen who genuinely freak themselves out over the idea that The Gays are being granted access to our precious nuclear essence. This is a guy who seems absolutely willing to go rogue for the sake of turning his own culture war issue into a nuclear exchange. Keep him out of Malmstrom, keep him out of every other military base, and keep him out of the House liquor cabinets. Yikes.
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