Rotten to the core
A new American center-right party has its risks, but the GOP is so far gone it's worth a try.
On Wednesday, JVL listed the insane antics of some state Republican parties.
In Texas, the state GOP adopted a QAnon slogan and the party chairman is actively talking about secession.
The chair of the Wyoming GOP is talking about seceding from the Union, too. Also: The state party censured Liz Cheney for voting for the article of impeachment.
The Arizona state GOP voted to censure Republican governor Doug Ducey, Cindy McCain, and former senator Jeff Flake for general enemy-of-the-people stuff.
The Nebraska state Republicans are pursuing censure against Ben Sasse for the specific charge of having voted that it was constitutional to conduct an impeachment trial.
The Hawaiian Republican party is openly sympathetic to QAnon.
The Oregon Republican party published a resolution claiming that the January 6 Capitol attack was a “false flag” operation designed to hurt Donald Trump.
Michigan state Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey suggested the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was a “hoax” perpetuated by opponents of former President Donald Trump.
The state Senate’s top Republican made the bizarre and unfounded claim in a video-recorded meeting at a diner last week with leaders of the Hillsdale County Republican Party, who were discussing censuring him for not taking a bold enough stand against Democrats.“That wasn’t Trump’s people. That’s been a hoax from day one. That was all prearranged,” Shirkey, a Clarklake Republican, said of the riot. “It was arranged by somebody who was funding it. … It was all staged.”
[…]
Shirkey insinuated that even Sen. Mitch McConnell “was part of” a staged insurrection.
“I think they wanted to have a mess,” Shirkey said. “They would have had to recruit this other group of people.”
Shirkey also suggested a darker conspiracy but offered no evidence.
“I think there are people above elected officials,” Shirkey said. “There are puppeteers.”
Nothing ominous about an elected official musing about “puppeteers.” Nothing at all.
Noah Rothman notes that state-level Republican parties seem determined to go the way of Virgina’s once-dominant GOP, which has become even more cultish and radical as that state turns bluer:
Virginia Republicans had every reason to believe that Barack Obama’s 2008 victory in this historically red state was a fluke. It was the closest presidential contest in the state since 1976 and the first time a Democratic candidate had won in Old Dominion since LBJ’s landslide win in 1964. The following year, amid the rise of the Tea Party, Republicans retook the governor’s mansion and maintained a prohibitive block of reliable districts at the state legislative level. But in the decade that followed, Republicans became less and less appealing to the state’s voters. And as the GOP declined in relevance, its members became increasingly unhinged.
As National Review’s Alexandra DeSanctis ably chronicled, devolution culminated in the 2018 resignation of GOP chairman John Whitbeck, after three years of service to the party, following insurgent politician Corey Stewart’s GOP nomination for U.S. Senate. Stewart’s agenda involved municipal police forcing individuals to prove their citizenship at routine traffic stops, and he presented himself as the candidate for “forgotten white voters.” He called Paul Nehlen, an anti-Semitic fringe figure who lost a primary campaign against Paul Ryan, one of his “personal heroes.” Stewart also called his conventionally Republican critics “cuckservatives” and maintained close ties with one of the organizers of the infamous “Unite the Right” rally that descended on Charlottesville in 2017.
For every Trumpy Virginian voter energized by Stewart, two more voters were repulsed. In the end, he lost by a resounding 16 points. But the Virginia GOP has not learned its lesson. In the interim, Rep. Denver Riggleman was ousted at a party convention—not a primary election—because he officiated a gay wedding ceremony. And the party’s leading frontrunner for the gubernatorial nomination this year, a woman who describes herself as “Trump in heels,” has drawn rebukes from the state’s minority Republican senate conference for defending the “white history” represented by Confederate statuary and attacking the “spineless eunuchs” within the GOP’s so-called establishment.
Republican voters with an interest in winning elections might look at this example and recoil in horror. That’s not what happened.
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Political parties are vehicles for the acquisition of political power at the ballot box. That is what they are built for. The GOP’s electoral failures should produce some soul searching. At the very least, we should see the voters who support Republican policies demand better representation from their respective parties. But we haven’t seen that. Maybe Republican voters aren’t all that interested in winning elections anymore. If so, state parties are delivering.
Hey, who cares about governing, when you can own teh libs?
There are still some sensible Republicans left, like Pete Meijer and Mitt Romney, but they’re a dying breed. For every Romney there are several dozen like ̶L̶a̶d̶y̶ ̶G̶ Lindsey Graham and Rand Paul, who have bent the knee to their conspiracist masters.
The master isn’t Donald Trump. Their new master is Donald Trump’s supporters. As the late John Crosbie was fond of sarcastically saying, “there go the people, and I must follow them, for I am their leader.”
Starting a new political party in Canada is hard enough, as Maxime Bernier could tell you. Starting a viable new party in the United States is almost impossible. But God Bless some ex-Republicans for trying:
Dozens of former Republican officials, who view the party as unwilling to stand up to former U.S. President Donald Trump and his attempts to undermine U.S. democracy, are in talks to form a center-right breakaway party, four people involved in the discussions told Reuters.
The early stage discussions include former elected Republicans, former officials in the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Trump, ex-Republican ambassadors and Republican strategists, the people involved say.
More than 120 of them held a Zoom call last Friday to discuss the breakaway group, which would run on a platform of “principled conservatism,” including adherence to the Constitution and the rule of law — ideas those involved say have been trashed by Trump.
The plan would be to run candidates in some races but also to endorse center-right candidates in others, be they Republicans, independents or Democrats, the people say.
Can a new “Integrity Party” or “Center Right Party” - some of the names being bounced around, which leads me to hope they get some decent marketers on board - actually get anyone elected? Probably not.
Can it siphon off enough Republican votes to damage the GOP? Probably yes, though there’s also the risk that disgruntled conservatives who reluctantly voted for Biden will break with the Dems. (Ideally, both American parties should split. There’s not much holding together “The Squad” and Joe Manchin.)
If the alternative is sticking with the increasingly unhinged Republican Party and inadvertently providing respectable cover for its unhinged majority, however, I’d say starting a new party is worth the risk.
My home province is Canada’s newest COVID-19 hot spot, and I feel like it’s my fault. For months I’ve been saying things like, “Newfoundland is in a total mess, with the offshore oil and tourism industries ravaged by the pandemic, but at least it hasn’t been hit hard by the virus itself.”
So, yeah, I jinxed it. My bad.
According to the province’s chief medical officer, complacency about COVID-19 led to this new outbreak:
Newfoundland and Labrador reported 53 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday, and 32 presumptive cases. The vast majority of the people who tested positive were under age 20, health officials said.
It was by far the largest single-day increase since the first case in the province was identified in March. Before Wednesday, the highest single-day total was 32, on March 25.
"We've had our few practice runs in Deer Lake, and Harbour Breton and Grand Bank. And now here we are with the with the big one. So we really need to start taking this seriously," said Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Janice Fitzgerald during an afternoon update.
"I believe that going so long with low case counts of COVID led to complacency and we are now seeing the repercussions."
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With so many young people involved in the latest outbreak, Fitzgerald said she's worried about the long-lasting damage that can be caused by nasty social media posts, and advised people to think critically about what they are posting.
She said this spike is expected to have "significantly more cases" than the Caul's Funeral Home cluster last year in the early days of the pandemic.
Between March 15 and 17, more than 100 people contracted the virus either directly or indirectly from the St. John's funeral home.
About 1,000 people have been, or will be, tested in connection to Mount Pearl Senior High School, just outside of St. John's, said Fitzgerald, and there are hundreds more actively being identified by public health as close contacts.
"If there's any good news in all of this is that people are now listening to public health advice and getting tested. That is critical to containing the outbreak," she said.
"We are conducting widespread testing and all contacts of high school students are being tested and self-isolating."
The epicenter of the outbreak? My old high school. Go Huskies!
Cases have been climbing consecutively higher over the past few days in the province, seemingly due to an outbreak at a high school in the Eastern Health Region.
“The positive cases we are seeing now are primarily the result of exposures in the last two to three weeks,” Fitzgerald said. “We have over 1,000 people that have been or will be tested that are associated with Mount Pearl Senior High School.”
Hundreds more are being identified as close contacts to those individuals, she added.
“All contacts of high school students are being tested and self-isolating. For students and staff of Mount Pearl Senior High, you must self-isolate for fourteen days from the last day you attended school, or were in contact with a positive case, whichever is more recent.”
Yeah, this is something the kids at O’Donel High School will never let MPSH students live down.
Last week, Newfoundland and Labrador appeared almost COVID-free, with at most one or two new cases reported per day. The numbers exploded in the blink of an eye, and they will probably get much worse over the next few weeks.
One of the scariest things about this virus is that it takes a week or two to show up in testing. By the time you find out you have it, you may have already infected everyone you’ve come into contact with. And then they may infect everyone they’ve met, and so on. Once community spread has been detected, there’s not much you can do except impose a “circuit breaker” lockdown.
Here in Nova Scotia, our COVID-19 infection numbers remain remarkably low. We should be proud of how well we’ve done. But that’s only as far as we know.
This pretty much sums up my position on the Gina Carano cancellation:
Agreed. There is one last exit ramp for the GOP to begin to limit the damage and possibly restore some semblance of sanity to the party, and that is the conviction of Donald J. Trump for high crimes. If they do what I suspect they will do, they will be branded as the party of kooks, cranks, crack-pots, and insurrectionist conspiracy theorists for the foreseeable future. No one in their right mind would vote for these people, however the fact that 74 million people in this country aren't in their right mind speaks volumes about how unhinged we are as a country.
Love the John Crosbie quote :) (Hey, doesn't that sound a lot like parenting? ;)
The kids at O'Donel should get busy with the hand sanitizer and masks, because at this rate, they're lucky if they haven't already got it............