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Over the course of the year, Sen. Tommy Tuberville has periodically tried to defend his blockade on military promotions. The Alabama Republican’s talking points have all collapsed quickly, but he’s tried peddling weak pitches anyway.
Tuberville has said the Pentagon’s travel-reimbursement policy is illegal. (It’s not.) He’s argued that the military is paying for abortions. (It’s not.) The GOP lawmaker has said his unprecedented blockade "only" affects several hundred high-ranking military officers, which is obviously not worth taking seriously.
Tuberville has been especially invested in the idea that his radical tactics aren’t undermining his own country’s military, which is wholly at odds with everything actual U.S. military leaders keep trying to explain to him.
This week, however, the semi-successful-coach-turned-right-wing-politician rolled out a new line: The blockade is justifiable, Tuberville said, because of poetry. AL.com reported:
Tommy Tuberville cited “people doing poems on aircraft carriers” as a reason the U.S. Navy is “so woke,” Alabama’s senior senator said Wednesday during an appearance on Fox News.
He did not appear to be kidding.
In context, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro joined the ranks of U.S. military leaders condemning Tuberville this week, suggesting to a national television audience that that the Republican senator is “aiding and abetting communists” by adopting tactics that assist America’s foes.
It was against this backdrop that the Alabaman said Del Toro “needs to get wokeness out of our Navy.” Tuberville — who never served in the military, who’s failed to follow through on his commitments to veterans’ charities, and who failed to tell the truth about his father’s military service — added, “We got people doing poems on aircraft carriers over a loudspeaker.”
He didn’t elaborate, but HuffPost noted that there was a spoken-word event on the USS Gerald Ford that apparently generated some attention.
I won’t pretend to know why Tuberville thinks poetry in the Navy is problematic, though it’s worth noting that there’s a rich history of troops writing important and poignant poems, and the United States’ national anthem is itself based on a poem written by an American on a ship during a war.
Nevertheless, Tuberville seems convinced of his own righteousness, suggesting his blockade will continue indefinitely. Roll Call reported this week that the Alabaman’s posture is renewing conversations among Democratic senators “about ways to get around the blockade.”
For its part, the Pentagon also added this week that if Tuberville doesn’t back down by the end of the year, “nearly 650 of the more than 850 general and flag officer nominations will be affected."