Rep. Andy Barr possesses a political attribute so remarkable he hopes to parlay it into a seat in the U.S. Senate next year — an eagerness to debase himself so thoroughly that it attracts the love and endorsement of President-cum-Dictator Donald J. Trump.
It is truly astonishing. It’s like any semblance of self-pride has completely vanished.
Barr, R-Lexington, who surprised no one this week by announcing his candidacy for the seat being vacated by the retiring Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Louisville, served up a campaign video that could easily have been offered as the keynote speech at a Proud Boys convention.
It is laughable, there’s no getting around it, a parody of a serious political statement, something you might come across in a Saturday Night Live sketch ridiculing a pandering, dumb-as-a-rock politician, hitting all the lowlights from deporting undocumented residents to “firing the deep state bureaucrats who steal our freedoms.’’
“The woke left wants to neuter America – literally,” Andy declared as the camera zoomed in, without explaining a) What the hell is the woke left, and b) how the woke left intended to “literally’’ go about that grizzly and unpleasant neutering task — a pair of extra large bolt cutters perhaps?
“They hate our values, they hate our history and goodness knows they hate President Trump,” Andy belched, loudly, stacking one nonsensical notion on top of the other. “But here in Kentucky, that’s why we love him.’’
Now, to be fair, there are a lot of folks, a growing number, in fact, who don’t cotton to President-cum-Dictator Donald J. Trump, for reasons so obvious I won’t take up space laying out the indictment here. A Pew Research poll released on Wednesday revealed that Trump’s nationwide job approval has dipped to 40 percent, stunningly low for someone barely three months in office. Heck, Fox News, Donnie’s personal cheering section, has him at a meager 42 percent.
Regardless, Barr makes clear throughout the pronouncement that he intends to stick to Trump like a barnacle to a whale (I would use “literally’’ here but Andy has already abused the term) and is betting that Kentucky voters will stick with the indicted felon and sexual abuser through thick and thin, asserting that he is seeking the office “to help our president save this great country.”
Save it from who? Those woke liberals, of course.
But Andy’s sycophantic piece de resistance came in an accompanying tweet on the X social media site where he proclaimed, “I truly believe that President Trump’s life was spared in that Pennsylvania field…because God had a plan for him. And we’re watching that plan unfold every single day. President Trump needs more America First fighters helping him in the United States Senate.”
Now, it’s indisputable, as has been said for many years, that God works in mysterious ways but it’s rare for him/her to directly involve himself/herself in American politics, an area God must assuredly would wish to avoid. And, if the deity, indeed, played a part in this life-saving measure, why did he select some 21-year-old loser to fire at him during a campaign event near Butler, PA, last summer in the first place? And did God just have no plans for the poor soul who was shot and died during the attack, rendering the deity like the primary character in Steambath, who picks people off willy-nilly?
And, in saving Trump’s life, did God also plan for him to abolish the U.S. Agency for International Development, thus cutting off vital economic and humanitarian assistance to poor nations? The Boston University School of Public Health offers an online tracking tool that captures “estimated increases in mortality and disease spread for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and other diseases as a result of the near-total freeze in US foreign aid funding and programming.” As of Thursday, the tool shows 42,854 adult deaths as a result of funding discontinuation and 89,442 child deaths. The number of deaths per hour is 103.
Did God save Trump so poor Black children in Africa can’t get the food or care they need to survive? Boy, God really does act in mysterious ways.
And does cutting off federal funding in a fit of pique with outstanding universities like Harvard, where research is underway to address maladies like cancer, ALS, and a variety of others, also play a part in God’s plan?
This whole idea that Trump is on some kind of mission from God, like Jake and Elwood Blues, and that Andy is going to hop aboard as one of his disciples, maybe ranking as high as Peter, is ridiculous and offensive. The essential message, therefore, is to go against Trump is to go against God. It is about as low a blow as anyone can deliver.
It all shows just what a cheap hack Andy Barr is.
Not everyone is buying his schtick. The Club for Growth, a collection of greed heads who make Gordon Gekko look like the Dalai Lama, has assumed an anybody-but-Andy stance in the Senate race, characterizing him in one ad, of all things, as a “Trump hating, back-stabbing liberal.”
“Despite promising to bring fiscal responsibility to Washington, Andy Barr has voted to increase federal spending by trillions,” said Club for Growth President David McIntosh, a former Indiana congressman. “Andy Barr would be a disaster in the Senate, and we will oppose his candidacy.”
How they managed to draw that conclusion, since Barr served as Trump’s Kentucky campaign chairman for the 2024 presidential primary and was one of the first office holders to endorse him in that race, is open to speculation. But it’s still a potential problem. While it is unlikely that some farmer in Burkesville is going to vote against Barr because some big-city outfit called the Club for Growth considers him a louse, the group has a propensity for throwing millions of dollars to candidates it supports and against candidates it finds wanting. Barr falls in the latter category.
And a 60-second ad it produced even before Barr officially entered the race is unusually harsh, asserting that Garland Hale Barr IV was born “with a silver spoon in his mouth” which allowed him to “skip past the real world into plump government jobs” and that he “got his first big one while lying on his application. That, apparently, involved an incident in Florida in 1993 when Barr was charged with possession of a fake driver’s license. When applying for a job in the office of Kentucky Gov. Ernie Fletcher a few years later, he answered “No” on a form asking if he had ever been convicted of a crime other than “minor traffic violations.”
Small potatoes, really.
In what the ad termed “an even bigger lie,” it maintains Barr failed to fulfill campaign promises during his 12 years in the House to cut spending and reduce the nation’s $36 trillion debt. He “voted four times to raise the debt ceiling, over $8 trillion” and he’s “number one in campaign cash from woke (there’s that word again) Wall Street banks, using his position to push their agenda.”
But the trouble with the ad, if the idea is to pit Trump again Barr in voters’ minds, is that Trump was also born with a silver spoon in his mouth, lies all the time, added $7.8 trillion to the debt during his first presidential term and wants to do away with the debt ceiling.
The Club might want to try again.
Regardless, the overt animosity toward a Barr campaign may be a sign a more acceptable candidate to the Club for Growth, Lexington businessman Nate Morris, is likely hopping in.
Right now, Barr and former Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who lost the 2023 race for governor to Democratic incumbent Andy Barr, are the only well-established contenders seeking the McConnell’s seat. But Morris, a major league political fundraiser who began that hobby under former President George W. Bush, is making goo-goo eyes at the race.
Several interesting factors here: Morris raised a ton of money for Sen. Rand Paul, R-Bowling Green, and the two are said to be very close. Paul is also very tight with his sugar daddy, Jeff Yass, a Pennsylvania businessman worth in the neighborhood of $59 billion — that’s one swank neighborhood — who has thrown millions of dollars in Paul’s direction in the past.
With pocket change to spare, Yass has contributed at least $16 million to the Club for Growth. Meanwhile, last June, the Club released a Congressional Economic Scorecard. Rand Paul was one of three to receive a 100 percent rating and he has long been a hero of the organization.
So, put ‘em together and whadaya got? Yass has fully purchased Paul and the two are tight. Paul and Morris are close friends. Yass has a monetary stake in the Club for Growth. The Club issues a curious political hit job on Barr. Will anybody be shocked if Morris enters the race and gets the Club for Growth endorsement?
Rand Paul told Semafor, a news website, that he is remaining neutral in the primary race.
Rand Paul says a lot of things.
Morris should he run, intends to align himself with Trump, asserting he is the real MAGA guy in the crowd, and chides both Barr and Cameron for their ties to McConnell, who is continuously at odds with Trump and therefore remains on the outs with much of the Republican Party these days.
Two problems. Morris initially endorsed former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in the 2024 GOP presidential primary while Barr had already embraced the Trump cult, which renders Morris a latecomer to the Trump team and raises questions about his eligibility for the coveted presidential endorsement, something Andy has already officially sought.
And Morris has his own ties to McConnell. In an article that appeared in the Lexington Herald Leader on Aug. 29, 2004, the always reliable, top-drawer news reporter John Cheeves wrote that, “Morris has helped to elect Kentucky Republicans, including U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell and two McConnell proteges…”
In fact, Cheeves described McConnell as “one of Morris’ mentors.”
“Nate is the kind of kid you remember because he seems to be so sincere and so dedicated to the cause, he kind of stands out,” McConnell said. “It’s obvious that it’s an important part of his life.”
What goes around comes around. This is one train wreck that’ll be fun to watch.