Republican Lawmakers Claim To Launch Investigation Of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show

On Sunday night, Bad Bunny gave his much-anticipated Super Bowl Halftime Show performance, staging an intricate, joyous spectacle almost entirely in Spanish. It was awesome. Now, a couple of bad, bummy Republican Senators claim that they're launching an investigation of that halftime show for, among other alleged crimes, "pelvic thrusts."

Republicans have been attempting to use Bad Bunny's Halftime Show as a culture-war issue since it was first announced, with Trump officials promising to send ICE agents to the performance. Turning Point USA staged its own widely derided halftime show with Kid Rock and some country singers, but a reported 128 million people still watched Bad Bunny. As Entertainment Weekly reports, Tennessee representative Mark Ogles — funny name — requested an Energy And Commerce Committee investigation of the performance.

Ogles tweeted that the performance was "pure smut," and he went on to describe it in pearl-clutching detail: "Children were forced to endure explicit displays of gay sexual acts, women gyrating provocatively, and Bad Bunny shamelessly grabbing his crotch while dry-humping the air. And if that weren't outrageous enough, the performance's lyrics openly glorified sodomy and countless other unspeakable depravities." In an attached letter to Committee chair Brett Guthrie, Ogles complained of "widespread twerking, grinding, pelvic thrusts, and other sexually suggestive conduct." I didn't want to steal Entertainment Weekly's headline, but it's pretty great.

On Tuesday, Missouri rep Mark Alford went on the streaming network Real America's Voice and suggested that some kind of investigation is already underway, or that they were "still investigating" it. Alford claimed he was "switching back and forth" between Bad Bunny's performance and the Turning Point show, and he said that he and other reps would talk to the FCC about it: "There's a lot of information that has come out about the lyrics... This could be much worse than the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction."

This looks like pure posturing right now, but we'll see how this attempt at manufactured outrage works out.