Wednesday’s Full Frontal With Samantha Bee saw America’s favorite Canadian late-night host wading back into the fetid seepage emanating from the Trump White House with her customary, dagger-eyed aplomb. Like her fellow Wednesday late-night Trump-bashers, Bee pointed out that the Trump’s recently convened “voter fraud” commission is itself more fraudulent than a Trump University degree, groaning as it is with smug-faced gerrymanderers, vote-suppressors, and transparently hypocritical right-wing ideologues like totally-not-racist Kansas Secretary of State, Kris Kobach. (Despite his Harvard thesis arguing against divestment from Apartheid-era South Africa and his long history of, as Bee puts it, “chipping away at the Voting Rights Act.” You know, the one that sought to redress Jim Crow era disenfranchisement of black voters who, by an overwhelming margin, did not vote for Donald Trump.)
But Bee took a little detour for the last half of her monologue into the completely empty House chamber where, last week, three of the dumbest Republican congressmen in all the land gathered to slur their new standup material and some good old fashioned GOP bigotry about the recent House vote that narrowly failed to strip medical coverage from transgender service members and their families. That’s “slur” with added emphasis because, before congressmen Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and noted white nationalist enthusiast Steve King (R-IA) got to asking, “What’s the deal with soldiers’ genitals?,” their colleague and opening act Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) warmed up the complete lack of crowd by stumbling his way through a confused-sounding set about that whole Trump-Russia collusion thing as if he had steadied his nerves for his big C-SPAN performance with some adult courage-juice. (Even mush-mouthing his way through the name of one of the congressional committees he serves on.)
But when Rohrabacher handed the mic over to Gohmert and King, Bee asserted that their tag-team dumbassery is the stuff Full Frontal staff viewing parties are made of, as the two bigoted besties trotted out their best material about why trans people shouldn’t get health benefits. (They could sign up just to get sex changes and then quit, laughing all the way to the dress and/or suit store once, as Gohmert stammers, “they cut ‘em off, or add some.”) Or, indeed, serve in the military at all. It’s this last point where the pair, whose long-standing obsession with transgender people in no way suggests that they think about what glorious secrets are hidden in the underpants of everyone they meet, gave what Bee termed their “Western Civ oral presentation.” The pair brought in historical figures such as 17th-century Polish King John Sobieski and the eunuch soldiers of the Ottoman empire to prove conclusively that those people—with the unconventionally alluring sex organs King and Gohmert in no way think about while poring over obscure historical texts hoping for illustrations—aren’t fit to serve their country. (Gohmert has also taken a courageous stand against “gay space colonies” in the past.) Bee points out that Steve and Louie took time out of their busy day not only to come up with tortuously convoluted historical precedents for those sexy transgender people not being good soldiers, but also to stand, covered in flop sweat, in an empty room and riff to each other, in great detail, how those transgender people, with their parts that are so enticingly unusual, are not worthy of even one more second of anyone’s attention.