Michael Grimm, the former Staten Island congressman who pleaded guilty to felony tax fraud and then resigned from Congress, has been trying to make a comeback with a Steve Bannon-endorsed primary challenge to incumbent Republican Dan Donovan in New York's 11th Congressional District. Grimm and Donovan had the first of two debates Monday night, and boy, was it a treat! It was two rightwing Republicans -- Donovan, the former prosecutor who failed to get a grand jury to indict any cops in the death of Eric Garner, is plain vanilla rightwing, while Grimm is drooling conspiracy theory rightwing -- going at each other hammer and tongs, each trying to find some mud that'll stick before the June 26th primary.

If you watch nothing else, you must treat yourself to this fight between Grimm and Donovan, where they discuss whether or not Donovan tried to corruptly get Donald Trump to give Grimm a pardon, or whether Grimm went to Donovan's house to talk to him about that, or whether Donovan "SAID THAT RIGHT TO ME TO MY FACE AT YOUR HOUSE" or whether Donovan sent Grimm a whole bunch of text messages wherein Donovan told Becky that Trevor and Katy were totally throwing a party but Donovan didn't tell Grimm about the party because Grimm is very stinky:

As for the rest of the debate! For those of you Catholics who, like my late, sainted mother, believe suffering here on earth will shorten your time in Purgatory, here is a video of the first third of the radio debate. You can go watch/listen to the other two here if you think you need additional self-imposed penance.

The stupid is VERY DEEP here. For starters, Grimm objected to Donovan's characterization of him as the "convict congressman," because while Grimm definitely did plead guilty to tax fraud, that was only because the corrupt Obama DOJ was out to persecute him for being conservative, just like it went after hero Dinesh D'Souza, and Donald Trump himself! Grimm stopped short of saying Obama had personally embedded a spy in his restaurant, but explained that simply because he was deliberately not paying taxes, that doesn't mean he'd committed a crime:

I think everyone knows I had three delivery boys and a dishwasher off the books. I've never hid from that. It was a civil offense that the Obama Justice Department, which is politically corrupt, used against me [...] I didn't deserve a criminal prosecution.

Also, it's totally unfair for Donovan to say Grimm admitted that he lied under oath, because he was never convicted of perjury, so there.

The two also had a big fight about immigration. Not about policy, but about how weak or tough the other was -- again, mostly talking over each other a lot, with Grimm telling Donovan to shut up because Donovan's turn was over ("No it's not!"). Grimm insisted Donovan said he never wanted to deport anyone, including criminals (which is all of them), and when Donovan said no, he wants undocumented criminals deported, Grimm shot back, "well, he wants the 11 million of them who are here illegally to have amnesty!"

Donovan, with Grimm keeping up a stream of words over him, pointed out that if you want to get all technical about it, maybe Michael Grimm is the one giving sanctuary to undocumented immigrants, seeing as how the delivery boys and dishwasher Grimm never paid taxes for were -- of course -- undocumented.

Ah, but Grimm had an unimpeachably Trumpian answer: as a restaurateur, he simply had no choice, because he'd "lived through" the harsh realities of having a gun put to his head -- no doubt by Democrats -- and being forced to hire undocumented workers for less than minimum wage:

Here's the reality any small business owner will tell you: When you have the lowest skilled jobs and you're paying minimum wage, no one else shows up [...] Go to any small restaurant throughout this city and you're gonna have undocumented workers in the kitchen. Why? Because, unfortunately, Americans don't show up for those jobs anymore.

The possibility that Americans might want benefits or a living wage, of course, was too laughably stupid for either to even mention.

To prove that he is too tough on migrants, Donovan offered his own bullshit rant about the hot immigration story of the moment -- no, not Trump's family separation policy or Jeff Sessions's declaration that we're now going to send thousands of people back to Central America so they can be murdered, as long as it's only private citizens murdering them. Heck no, the immigration story Donovan was het up about is the story of the pizza delivery guy snatched up by ICE after he took a pizza to Ftort Hamilton in Brooklyn, where an alert customer ran his ID through a government database -- as one does with all Latinos in the food delivery sector -- and called ICE on the guy.

Donovan explained he was simply astonished that anyone would think that situation is anything but just and proper:

What I found ridiculous about the whole case is that people were blaming ICE agents and our military personnel for enforcing the law [...] We're the No. 1 threatened in the entire globe in New York. Our military bases are extra sensitive locations. They have to take extra precautions to know who's going on those bases. They did exactly what they were supposed to do.

Yup, it is a matter of national security to run background checks on all Latino food deliverers, because you never know when one will turn out to be a terrorist, exactly like this guy wasn't. Oh, sure, maybe his crime was skipping out on a deportation order a few years back, but you never know: what if he'd been planning to deliver a BOMB to Fort Hamilton, huh?

You can never be too careful, is what we are saying, and also Michael Grimm has somehow come back from his sentence for tax fraud looking even more deranged than the time he threatened to throw a reporter off the balcony of the US Capitol and break him in half like a boy, the end.

Oh, the glory days. We can see why he'd try to relive them.

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[ WABC Radio / Politico]