Wonkette would like to hereby suggest that it is no longer operable to say you have found the dumbest Republican. Somebody else will always find a dumber one. It's like that Onion video about having the biggest rock. Even if you think you have found the dumbest Republican, we will find another one, and then we will once again have the dumbest Republican. Rinse and repeat forever.

Meet Arizona state Rep. Joseph Chaplik, who introduced a bill, which passed the Arizona House, saying businesses should just have the right to decide if they don't want to abide by state, city, or county mask mandates or other public safety measures. Already, you can see that he's dumb as shit.

But get a load of his argument for why, or at least part of it:

Chaplik, however, argued that the mandates are an overreaction and that society has managed to survive other viral outbreaks without masks.

For example, he cited HIV "that was going to wipe our global destruction of human bodies with AIDS."

"We heard about that in the '80s," Chaplik said. "Yet no masks were required."

Nobody made them wear masks in the '80s, says Joseph. Because that's the same.

First of all, we'd be remiss not to mention that the AIDS epidemic was mostly hitting gay men, and people like Rep. Chaplik and Ronald Reagan and most other Republicans did not give two shits if gay men were dying in the 1980s. So there's that.

Also, we didn't exactly make it through that epidemic. There's an entire generation of gay men that is fundamentally missing from society, because they all died. Ask any straight person who was in their 20s and 30s in the '80s who was friends with gay guys how many of their friends are dead.

But ASIDE FROM ALL THAT!

Hey, quick, nobody tell Joseph that once they started to figure out how HIV was being transmitted, they recommended people wear masks, ON THEIR PEENERS.

You might know them as "condoms," but we're gonna call 'em PEENER MASKS from now on.

It's possible Chaplik isn't that stupid, but is just doing that Republican thing where they own the libs by being wrong as they possibly can while their Nanas die in service of owning said libs.

However, Chaplik's other arguments have us erring on the side of yep, really that stupid:

"Nebraska never had a mask mandate," he said. He said the same is true in places like Mississippi and Georgia.

"I would think that based on these arguments these states would have dead people piled up all over their state because no one else would be living because no one has masks on," Chaplik continued.

And for quite a while there, Nebraska and Mississippi and Georgia were major epicenters for the pandemic!

But he's correct, not everyone died of the pandemic that from the beginning we knew made certain people sick and not others, particularly the elderly and people with underlying health conditions. And we should note that Mississippi and Arizona — which are both really spread out, population-wise — have among the highest rates of coronavirus deaths per 100,000 population in the country. They're up there with South Dakota, where the cows are closer together than the people are, and the Republican governor is an absolutemoron.

Nebraska isn't that high up the list overall, but please remember the thing we said about how these are states where cows have more social events than people do.

This guy is a goddamned idiot, not worth any more of our breath, the end.

[Tucson.com]

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