Eric Schmitt was born in suburban St. Louis. After high school he attended Truman State University (Home of the Bulldogs). He then got his law degree from St. Louis University (Go Billikens). And yes, team nicknames are important here, trust me.
In 2005 Eric Schmiitt began his political career as a city alderman in Glendale, Missouri. Schmitt rose quickly through the GOP ranks, entering the Missouri state senate in 2009. By 2017 he was the state Treasurer, then in 2019 he became the Missouri state Attorney General. That's when he started to make a name for himself in MAGA world.
As Attorney General he filed a lawsuit attempting to invalidate the Affordable Care Act. According to Wikipedia, after voters approved an amendment to the state constitution expanding Medicaid coverage, Schmitt argued in front of the Missouri Supreme Court that the republican controlled legislature and GOP Governor could legally refuse go along with expansion. You can't get any more Trumpian than that. In fact, it might have been the exact moment that Eric Schmitt became a genuine made MAGA guy.
To cement his image, during the Covid-19 pandemic Schmitt filed lawsuits against St. Louis County who was trying to implement restrictions on indoor dining and crowd sizes. One of the suits challenged a county wide mask mandate. When the pandemic really began to spin out of control Schmit's office filed a suit against the Chinese government and the Chinese communist party for, among other things, lying about how deadly the disease actually was. After using up $12,000 of the state's money to translate the paperwork into Chinese the federal court dismissed the case. Around the same time, he was going after the reds in Beijing, his office was also suing local school districts and Jefferson County, MO over mask requirements.
In November 2022, the people of Missouri elected Eric Schmitt to the U.S. Senate by a little over 13 points. To paraphrase a lyric, his future was so bright he had to were shades. (Reports say the optimism in his camp was so prevalent he had even begun jockeying for the second spot on a J.D. Vance Presidential ticket)
Then, early this week, things went, let's say, a tad awry.
During the Senate Judiciary Committee meeting the Senator from Missouri appeared to be attempting to establish some sort of conspiracy between Special Persecutor, Jack Smith and Fulton County DA Fani Willis. Smith had been investigating Donald Trump and the entire January 6th coup attempt while at the same time Willis was investigating Trump's not so subtle effort to alter the 2020 election outcome in Georgia. No one is sure how serious Schmitt was about some nefarious collusion between the two--although we know MAGA loves conspiracies, well, except when they implicate Trump. The real reason for the line of questioning seemed to be to catch Jack Smith in a lie. In some quarters this is known as suborning perjury, a felony that will get you five years in the joint.
Schmitt asked Smith if he had been in Atlanta during the investigations. Smith told the Committee he might have gone through Atlanta's airport while flying back and forth from Wahington to Florida. Schmitt, who had already called the Special Prosecutor a dirtbag, smiled slightly. Then he asked something along the lines of, "Would it surprise you, if we have proof, you were in Atlanta at an Atlanta Hawks game? " Smith was bewildered. One of Schmitt's aides rose with a large poster board showing Smith's texts about having tickets to a Hawks game. There was a problem though. Schmitt and his band of merry pranksters either didn't notice, or didn't care that while the texts mentioned Hawks, none specifically said the Atlanta Hawks, or referred to the city of Atlanta.
During the ensuing uproar Smith said he did remember going to an Iowa-Maryland woman's basketball game, "around that time." That game was played in College Park, MD and featured then collegiate women's basketball superstar, Catlin Clark. Minnesota democratic Senator Amy Klobachar immediately jumped in to remind everyone Clark's Iowa team was known as the Hawkeyes. What she didn't mention, probably because she didn't have to, is that many times people shorten Hawkeyes into just Hawks. A little later observers noted the seat and row numbers Smith talked about don't exist in Atlanta's State Farm Arena, home of the NBA Hawks. In addition, Smith was accompanied by a couple of U.S. marshals to the game, and the Marshal service had a record of their whereabouts.
It was a fuck up worthy of a Saturday Night Live bit. Everybody scrambled to cover their asses. When initially confronted about the mistake, Schmitt told TMZ only, "It's my job to ask the question." The implication being it was his staff who screwed the pooch and his only mistake was to believe them. Later he tried to laugh it off by saying, "Who knew Jack Smith was a Caitlin Clark fan?" He also tried to excuse the mistake by insisting the Hawks-Warriors game was the only NBA game being played that night. Actually, there were six NBA games played on the date in question, but by then a lie that lame was minor enough to be shrugged off. Judiciary Committee staffers began claiming they had warned Schmitt's staff the texts were, "unvetted." Others said the White House had provided the flawed information to Schmitt's people.
Despite the epic goof the right-wing media and online hacks proclaimed the day was a resounding indictment of Jack Smith. Sean Hannity congratulated Schmitt on social media, but then quickly deleted it. Later on his FOX show he praised republican committee members by name, without mentioning Schmitt, for exposing Smith's abuse of power. Others in the online MAGA media simply ignored El Gaffe Grande and told their followers, numbering far too many, Jack Smith had perjured himself.
Not everyone was trying to sweep the disaster under the rug though. An editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch read in part, "Wrong teams, wrong league, wrong state." It went on to say the whole episode was, "a loony right-wing conspiracy based on some misunderstood text messages. Falsely accuse a prosecutor of perjury; call him a villain and total dirtbag--and then stand by that playground pejorative even after the whole thing turned out to be a lazy mistake made by Schmitt and his staff..."
All that, of course, is the nature of the MAGA beast. Never say you're sorry or admit a mistake. Plow on to the next set of outrageous lies as fast as you can with the firm belief the truth can't catch up and, most importantly, the rubes will buy it all.
I tell you, Herr Goebbels would be proud.
10-2-26
No comments:
Post a Comment