It has long been the philosophy here in the shebeen that the only proper answer to the question, “Is nothing sacred?” is usually, “No.” However, the activities of Rep. Mike Collins of the 10th Congressional District of Georgia have sorely tested that axiom. Last week, he posted his support for the racist rabble at the University of Mississippi that gathered to heckle student demonstrators in a fashion so cruel and stupid that you half expected Ross Barnett and General Edwin Walker to rise from the dead and join in. “Ole Miss,” Collins Xweeted,“taking care of business.”
Collins made his mark as a conspicuous POS in Congress shortly after taking office in 2023. One of his first actions was to hire as his chief of staff one Brandon Phillips, a GOP apparatchik most notable for having been accused of animal cruelty. Phillips allegedly kicked a woman’s dog. (What is it with conservative Republicans and dogs?) Phillips was a true piece of work. From Politico:
Phillips resigned from the Trump campaign in September 2016 after local TV station WSB-TV revealed his previous criminal history. A separate story by WXIA in Atlanta reported that in 2008, he “attacked” a man and slashed his tires, and threw a woman’s laptop. During the incident, Phillips caused “visible bodily harm” and “cuts and bruises to the head and torso” of the male victim, according to the Macon Telegraph, citing a Superior Court indictment. Phillips was arrested on charges of battery and felony criminal damage. But before the case went to trial, he pleaded guilty to lesser charges of criminal trespassing and battery. Phillips was sentenced to three years of probation, 50 hours of community service and a $1,567 fine, although a year later his probation ended after he was granted early release.
Since then, Collins has burnished his reputation as one of the least excusable legislators in modern American history, a founding member of the Angry Children’s Caucus, largely through his poisonous history on social media. On Wednesday, however, he went deeper into the gutter than he ever has before. Reacting to revelations in The New York Times that Robert Kennedy Jr. had claimed to have been the victim of a brain worm, Collins Xweeted the following:
“You either die a Kennedy with a hole in the brain or live long enough to become a Kennedy with a hole in the brain.”
Collins was born almost four years after President John F. Kennedy was shot in the head in Dallas. He was less than a year old when Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot in the head in Los Angeles. He apparently has spent the ensuing years in pursuit of pig-ignorance on a number of topics, most notably basic humanity. Two of the most traumatic events of the past century, within the living memory of millions of Americans, are merely grist for his sub-moronic quest to be the cleverest dick on drive-time radio.
In normal times, of course, Collins would be taken to the woodshed by the Republican congressional leadership. One might even think that Speaker Moses, currently being touted as a newly minted colossus by our most prominent political fanzines, might take public action to demonstrate that he doesn’t preside over a roadside reptile farm and begin the process of hauling American conservatism out of the sewer where it has come to thrive. But Speaker Moses was too busy lying, “intuitively,” about voter fraud and insinuating that the president is senile to serve the general national interest. The next time the Almighty comes to call at the Johnson home, Speaker Moses might ask Him to clarify that business about bearing false witness. The Republican party now is so lost in the depths of the prion disease that an attack of brain worms would be terribly redundant at this point. Rep. Mike Collins is a walking symptomology of it.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
