The GOP is in a civil war right now. Or maybe it’s a prison riot. Actually, a rebellion in an insane asylum captures the flavor both of the mental health of the individuals involved and their social skills. As you have been reading here for days, the GOP civil war has several fronts. Lin Wood is bashing Michael Flynn and the “leadership” of QAnon rests in the balance of that conflict. Lauren Boebert is at war with Ilhan Omar, which caused Nancy Mace to speak up in favor of Boebert’s apologizing. Apparently open bigotry is the bridge too far for Mace. All the while this is going on, people have been unified in one cry, “Where is Kevin McCarthy? Where is leadership of the GOP caucus?” And so leadership spoke out. And this is what she said.
1. There are a lot of people that need to hear this.
We Conservatives in the @HouseGOP aren’t the fringe.
We actually represent the base of Republican voters, which is approximately 70%.
And when the party learns to represent Conservative Americans, we will never lose again.
— Marjorie Taylor Greene ?? (@mtgreenee) November 30, 2021
3. Because he appeals to the common man and woman.
You can’t fool them, they see through the bull-shitters.
When Republicans learn how to truly represent the workers, traditional families, & restore rural America with #AmericaFirst policies then the party will earn their vote.
— Marjorie Taylor Greene ?? (@mtgreenee) November 30, 2021
That is the Greene manifesto, right there. And what happened yesterday, when all this crescendoed, is Greene took on everybody. She was already on the outs with Lin Wood, so that handled that. Then she jumped into the Boebert/Omar fray and told Boebert to forget about apologizing. And then, most importantly, Greene had a sit down with Kevin McCarthy who told her to stop fighting with Mace. And she walked out. So who was the boss in that scenario? Clearly Greene believes she was.
McCarthy had a meeting with Greene and Mace and told them to stop. Greene walked out of the meeting, ignored McCarthy, and started telling a reporter that she supports a primary challenge against Mace pic.twitter.com/hJ4yohW2uS
— Acyn (@Acyn) December 1, 2021
Who’s making decisions here? It’s sure not McCarthy. Charlie Sykes, the Bulwark:
So here’s a modest proposal: If the GOP does take the House next year, Republicans should just say f**k it, cut out the middleman, and name Marjorie Taylor Greene speaker.
As the Roman statesman Cicero might have said, Why the f**k not?
It’s not just that MTG represents the party’s id — in touch with both the base and the Orange-God-King-in-Exile — she runs the place anyway. Why not make it official? And anointing her has the added benefit of honesty.
Kevin McCarthy simply takes up space while she holds the real power. Amanda Carpenter called it back in May:
“Greene knows where she stands. As long as she has Trump’s support and keeps his voters in the GOP tent, she’s calling the shots. Not McCarthy.”
Since then, MTG has moved easily into the role of ideological enforcer, demanding retribution against RINOs like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and John Katko — but also keeping her fellow deplorables in line.
When Lauren Boebert offered a tentative non-apology apology for making anti-Muslim remarks about her Ilhan Omar, MTG brought her sharply back into line, reminding her that in the Era of Trump, there are no apologies.
She brought Boebert back into the fold. She straightened her out and fast. Sorry is for suckers in this brave new GOP world. Boebert sent a fundraising email out shortly thereafter. She’s a quick study when Greene is giving direction.
I wrote about this on Monday, and discussed on our “secret podcast” yesterday with Mona Charen. Like so many other GOP “leaders” McCarthy is under the impression that he can emasculate his way to power.
He imagines that he can surrender his testicles, put them in a lock box, and somehow re-attach them when he comes to power.
Who’s going to tell him?
There you have it. As to McCarthy’s “reasoning” Michael Steele, who was John Boehner’s press secretary explained it thusly.
“McCarthy’s job is getting the Republicans from minority to majority, so he’s focused on addition not subtraction,” Steel told The Daily 202. “That means keeping all the frogs in the wheelbarrow even if some of those frogs are pretty ugly.”
Again, this is conventional wisdom, utilized in normal times. We do not live in normal political times. This is terra incognita. So to use a playbook from the past might not be the way to play things now. Considering that the intraparty skirmishes have only gotten more severe as McCarthy does nothing, he might want to consider his strategy going into 2022. It might work against him.
Meanwhile, we are left with this great question which Greene addressed: Is she the base or the fringe? 2022 is going to be a year of revelation.
Apologies are gone in the “age of trump”. Apparently so is intelligence.
Apologies, intelligence, decency, the works. All gone.
Frogs in a wheelbarrow?
The most suitable metaphor for the republican party I’ve heard in quite a while.
A bunch of noisy, slimy, ugly, willfully stupid creatures being carried in a conveyance controlled by someone else to a destination they don’t know?
How accurate.
Counting her chickens before the eggs are even laid.
So, Margie says her “conservatives” represent 70% of Republican voters and then she criticizes the idea of appealing to the “swing voters.” Does she not understand that Republicans do NOT make up a majority of ALL American voters? Even when the Party was at its peak, you couldn’t find any poll that suggested even 40% of all voters identified as Republicans.
So, SIMPLE math (even Margie should be able to follow, even with a calculator) would suggest that her 70% of the 40% (not even close to that now, of course) only gives her “conservatives” a mere 28% of the total electorate.
Granted, her “conservatives” could win but only with a lot of sleazy tactics (notably by making it more difficult for those pesky brown- and black-skinned people to get out to vote) and by completely ignoring all the “voter fraud” in which her “conservatives” have been participating and, of course, by increasing the amount of voter fraud her “conservatives” do and helping them get away with it.