Support Senator Jon Tester
A smart commenter suggested I add a link for donations to Senator Tester’s reelection. Here it is, and let’s keep Jon Tester in the Senate!
The Borowitz Report: Sunday Edition
This is Sunday’s long form Borowitz Report. As I’ve posted before, Sunday’s piece is paywalled. Mr. Borowitz likes me re-posting his Substack pieces here, and thanks for everyone who has subscribed due to these, so he’s good with me giving you the full article.
The GOP’s New George Santos
My extrapolation, on this and the other voluminous recent news, is that the cult is in its mid-disintegration mode. After Donny took over the Republican Party and brought it into the murdoch-koch-leo-mercer-trump mafia, we see little but theft, racism, corruption, fascism, and destruction.
But let’s get to the laughs. We sure need, hell we deserve, the levity and schadenfreude. We earned it by unifying and beating these traitors since 2018. And we are going to win this uncivil war they’ve been waging on us, since Reagan, just five weeks from now.
Meet the New George Santos
TBR Sunday Read
Ever since the former NASA astronaut/Olympic gymnast/Beatles drummer George Santos left Congress in disgrace, one question has plagued Republicans: Could they ever find another liar prolific enough to fill his clown shoes?
Donald Trump still pumps out impressive falsehoods on an hourly basis, but he’s 78. Who are the younger, fresher fraudsters on the GOP bench who’ll step up when their death-cult’s leader can no longer spew non-stop whoppers?
Well, Republicans can relax: They appear to have found their new George Santos. And they’re betting on him to take control of the United States Senate.
Introducing Tim Sheehy
Presenting Tim Sheehy, the Republican nominee for Senate in Montana. He’s touted a business “success” that’s lost millions, incurred a mysterious gunshot wound, and crashed a plane into a house. Throw in some racist remarks caught on tape, and voila! The perfect MAGA candidate for 2024.
Sheehy’s Dubious Claims
Sheehy has bragged about two resume items throughout his campaign: His stint as a Navy SEAL and his prosperous business career. Both merit our scrutiny.
- He leaned into his warrior image in a campaign ad that blamed the supposedly woeful state of America’s armed forces on military bases’ practice of staging drag shows.
- On the campaign trail, Sheehy boasted that he has a bullet lodged in his right forearm from his time in Afghanistan. But in April, The Washington Post’s Liz Goodwin revealed that the bullet might have less exotic origins.
The Gunshot Incident
In 2015—a year after he left active duty—Sheehy turned up in a Kalispell, Montana emergency room with a wound in his, ahem, right forearm. At the hospital, he informed a park ranger that, while he was hiking in Glacier National Park, a Colt 45 handgun he kept in his truck in case of bear attacks slipped from the vehicle and discharged.
Clearly, getting wounded because you’re fighting the Taliban wins more votes than getting maimed because you’re scared of bears. But Sheehy had an explanation for the slight discrepancy between these two scenarios: He claimed he lied to the park ranger.
What actually happened, he told the Post, was that he hurt his arm hiking, and was afraid that the injury might have dislodged a bullet stuck there since his days in Afghanistan—a wound he’d never previously reported.
Confused? Well, hang on, because once Tim starts talking, it’s tough to keep up.
More Lies Unraveled
Sheehy said the reason he’d kept the war wound a secret was because he suspected it had been caused by friendly fire, and he didn’t want to get his platoonmates in trouble. Telling the park ranger the truth, he feared, could have led to a Navy investigation.
“I guess the only thing I’m guilty of is admitting to doing something I never did,” said Sheehy, unintentionally describing every lie George Santos ever told. He then cast his lying to the ranger in an absurdly heroic light: “It was a small price to pay to make sure that a whole team of really great Americans didn’t get dragged through the mud over this.”
Inconsistencies and Exaggerations
First, Sheehy’s claimed that he was the one who reported the Glacier mishap to the ranger, but the National Park Service’s official writeup of the incident indicates that a park visitor notified them of the gunshot. Second, when the ranger inspected Sheehy’s handgun, it had one bullet missing. And third, a surgeon who examined an X-ray of Sheehy’s arm at the Post’s request said that the bullet wound was consistent with an injury from a handgun.
But there’s another, super-obvious problem with Sheehy’s story: If he wanted to keep his war wound a deep dark secret, why did he brag about it on the campaign trail—and in a book?
Sheehy’s Memoir
Last December, Sheehy released a thinly disguised campaign memoir called Mudslingers (current Amazon sales ranking: #326,444) in which he described being shot in Afghanistan. Once again, he demonstrated a stunning inability to keep his stories straight. “[He] wrote in one passage that he received multiple bullet wounds in Afghanistan,” the Post’s Goodwin reported. “In another, he wrote that his body was hit by a bullet just once. In the book, he also offers varying accounts of how he was shot.”
Business Failures
When he’s not touting his naval career, Sheehy’s fond of claiming he’s a magnificent businessman. Much like his right forearm, this story’s got a hole in it.
Hyping the aerial firefighting company he founded, Bridger Aerospace, Sheehy called it a “success story” in an interview in June. According to public filings, however, the success story lost $77.4 million in 2023 and $20.1 million so far this year, raising “substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue.” On the plus side, Tim’s business career is very much on-brand for a political party whose leader has six bankruptcies.
Dangerous Pilot
Tim might suck as a CEO, but he’s less dangerous behind a desk than behind the controls of an aircraft. In February of 2019, a seaplane he was piloting nosedived into a family’s home in Winter Haven, Florida, seriously damaging the house and pinning the homeowners’ 17-year-old daughter to a wall. The family sued Sheehy for negligence in the crash, which also killed his 64-year-old flight instructor. To honor his memory, Sheehy has blamed the accident on him.
Racist Remarks
Between flying a plane into a house and running a company into the ground, it’s impressive that Sheehy somehow found the time to insult every Native American in Montana. An audio clip obtained by the Char-Koosta News, a news outlet of the Flathead Indian Reservation, reveals Sheehy mocking tribal members of the Crow Reservation. Recounting how he’s roped and branded with Crow members, he calls it “a great way to bond with all the Indians while they’re drunk at 8:00 A.M.”
Fake Campaign Photo
The Native Americans who mistakenly thought Tim was enjoying their company learned that, like George Santos, Sheehy isn’t who he says he is. There’s no better illustration of his fraudulence, perhaps, than a campaign photo published in 2023. It shows Sheehy in rancher attire leaning against a fence, the landscape of the state he loves unfurling behind him. The photo was taken in Kentucky.
