This is an important point. All it would take is for four GOP Senators to defect from the party for Mitch to be unseated as Leader and for the Senate to provide oversight. How about it, sad face caucus? Mitt? Susan? Lisa M? Marco? Cory G.? Ben S.? Lamar A.? Anyone? Anyone?
But let's not mince words here. These people won't do it, in part, because they know they would have to have a huge, 24/7 security detail to protect them from harm at the hands of some particularly unhinged Trump supporter. Trump also knows this, and probably loves it.
They know that they would get the Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib treatment from Trump. And that this would put their lives in jeopardy. But rather than siding with their colleagues Trump has imperiled, they choose not to imperil themselves. Profiles in courage, all.
How can it be that the so-called admirers of Western Civilization in the GOP don't understand that they're living inside the plot of Frankenstein, a book they all (except for Trump) undoubtedly read in high school?
Just gonna leave this here.
Reading @TimAlberta's book enabled me to better understand the role Mitt played in feeding the MAGA Frankenstein in whose shadow he is now cowering.
In 1978 the chair of the Oregon Republican Party was a conspiracy-obsessed, Holocaust denying white Christian supremacist with longstanding ties to neo-Nazis and right wing domestic terrorists.
I'll admit, he was a bit of an outlier. But he campaigned hard for Goldwater in '64, was a Reagan delegate in '76, '80, and '84, and was a huge fan of Dan Quayle and Pat Buchanan in the 90s.
More importantly, he spent the years 1960-2000 driving hundreds of thousands of miles across the state of Oregon--forging connections with local activists in churches and American Legion lodges, taking far right speakers on tours through every major town in the state, etc.
I think I may have found the most perfect illustration of that common variety of American centrist journalism that attributes agency and responsibility only to the left and never the right. It's from the Atlanta Constitution, 12 August 1970. For context....
The columnist notes that there is a far right, grassroots movement that was working to take over the historically moderate Oregon Republican Party. I've been researching that illiberal and anti-democratic insurgency for a couple years now.
The leader of that movement was Walter Huss, a conspiracy-obsessed white Christian nationalist and virulent antisemite who worked his tail off for decades to drive the OR GOP to the right. But according to that columnist, Huss bears no responsibility.
I've become a bit of a collector of these obits of wealthy "conservatives" like Robert Olney. Unmentioned is the fact that by 1966 Olney thought the Jews had turned the US into a Communist country that could only be saved by a violent coup led by Christian Patriots like himself.
In the mid-1960s Olney was corresponding with Pedro del Valle about the Continental Congress they were setting up with white nationalists & antisemites like John Crommelin, Richard Cotten, & William Potter Gale. The idea was that the US Gov't was illegitimate & it was 1776 again.
Here's a letter retired Lt. General Pedro del Valle wrote to an Alabama chiropractor in 1967 explaining how the UN rendered the US Constitution null and void, and how Dr. Olney was organizing a new government to return the country to its origins as a "White Christian Republic."
Few things more convincing than “rules and standards matter” bloviating about how wearing shorts in the Senate will be the downfall of Western Civilization from the party of President “grab em by the p*ssy.”
Real clear eyed sense of proportion from the party who nominated the guy who opened his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists.
Highly recommend this discussion of Bill Buckley's very bad book, God and Man at Yale. I have one friendly amendment to add that makes Buckley look even worse!
The hosts talk about how Buckley was reading the batshit conspiratorial rantings of Lucille Cardin Crain as they appeared in a short-lived periodical called Educational Reviewer. You'll never guess who was the main funder for it. William F. Buckley, **Sr.**
As Buckley, Jr. is feverishly reading and annotating copies of Lucille Cardin Crain's Educational Reviewer in the Yale library ca. 1950, what he's doing is ingesting wingnut propaganda that has been bankrolled by his father. I'd be interested to know if Jr. was aware of this.
When did the "MAGA doom loop" cycle inside the GOP begin? There's no single "right answer" but in this thread I will propose in June 1962, inside the Multnomah County (OR) GOP. I'm only slightly kidding...bear with me as I try to explain.
In June 1962 a grassroots far right insurgency tried to take over the Multnomah Co GOP. These two fairly pablum stories from The Oregonian at the time are just a barrage of names, all of which I'll bet you've never heard of. But let me introduce you to some of them.
The organizer of the insurgency was Syl Ehr, a sign painter by trade and a fascist Silver Shirt from the 1930s who was active in the America First movement and would become a leader of the right wing domestic terrorist/anti-tax Posse Comitatus movement in the 1970s.