The only thing more shocking than this would have been rotten eggs and tomatoes flying through the air towards the stage. If Mitt Romney is getting booed in the middle of Mormon Country, make no mistake, the GOP is horrifically divided. Listen to the first minute and a half or so, until outgoing party chair Derek Brown gets up and asks people to calm down. This was something that, if you predicted it would happen back in 2012, you would have been laughed at.
A few minutes later in the tape Romney describes himself as an “old fashioned Republican’ and the booing starts up again. “You can boo all you like. I’ve been a Republican all of my life. My dad was the governor of Michigan and in case you don’t remember, I was the Republican nominee for president in 2012,” he said.
A lot has changed since 2012 is all I can say. Salt Lake Tribune:
Romney wasn’t the only recipient of boos from the crowd. Gov. Spencer Cox also caught a measure of disapproval.
“I know some of you hate me for some of the decisions I had to make,” said Cox as he took the stage to a smattering of boos from delegates upset with COVID-19 restrictions. “But I want to point out that some of you haven’t been paying attention.”
Cox touted the state’s rapidly improving economy following the COVID-related downturn, noting Utah was one of two states to see net job growth during the pandemic. He also said the state did not go as far as some other states with virus-related restrictions.
“We banned government vaccine passports,” said Cox to cheers, referencing a bill passed during the 2021 Utah Legislature. But that bill only blocked the state government from requiring vaccines. Private businesses can still require vaccinations for customers.
They loved Mike Lee, though. Lee got a standing ovation when he took to the podium and he’s a Trumper. This does not bode well for the GOP returning to some kind of post-Trump sanity. This is worrisome.
This is worrisome for the Republican Party, which means it’s good news for everyone else. If they want to be the party of fantasy grievances and irrelevance, let them be with their dwindling, diminishing support. Meanwhile, the party of reality, policies, and getting things done, goes from strength to strength. Doesn’t current polling show (R) at 29% and falling and (D) at 49% and rising? Let them paint themselves into their little corner of moaning whineyness while we take the rest of the floor and cover it properly.
I’ll tell you what worries me. I’m afraid that if the GOP can’t or won’t go back to some kind of sanity and remains the party of Trump, that eventually a fascist will be elected. We were in a bad way for four years. If the wrong Republican president gets in — think a Josh Hawley type — we could be in a very bad way. I’m worried about what’s going on in this country.
People do 4get that Germany was a predominantly Christian & a democratic republic prior to Hitler seizing power through propaganda & violence. Although we are much more diverse & much larger, anyone can be duped. Faux & 2facebook reach more people than Goebbels could ever dream of. No time for pretending it’s not a danger.
I wish I could attribute, but I read this person who advanced the idea that this country needs an effective center-right party to block / co-op the the far-right. I would agree in that the Democratic party appears to have been effectively doing the same thing on the left…for some time.
You’ll call me a pessimist but the nonsense we’re seeing in AZ is just practice. I believe we can just about guarantee a Hawley type will get in that is unless Congress and Biden can get some serious voting legislation passed. With Manchin and some of the others, it doesn’t look very hopeful what with those folks supposedly being on “our” side.
You’ll excuse me if I refuse to shed tears over the Six Billion Dollar Man and the predicament his faulty programming landed him in. Because make no mistake, he was FINE with this crowd when they weren’t coming for him. Now that they are…well, my sympathy for anyone who still call themselves “Republican” ran out a looooong time ago.
That’s the trauma of the last four years talking, Ursula, not the good sense I know you have. “Eventually” is going to have to wait until they have a far better strategy, command structure and agenda than this every-grifter-for-himself BS. As long as Trump is alive and/or out of prison, none of that is happening. I look for them to waste the next five to ten years with the infighting and wind up with nothing to show for it. All the people who WOULD have helped them otherwise are now their mortal enemies. They will pay for that mistake…dearly.
Mitt lost me with the golden plates thing long ago. Just a member of a different cult.
I’m not a x-tian so looking at all of them from where I’m standing-they all pretty much look the same. It is therefore not much of a surprise evangs and other conservative x-tians allying themselves with someone like Trump. I guess I was more surprised Trump wanting his name connected in any way with them.
I seem to get the idea that the GQP considers anyone not more right wing than Attila the Hun is a ‘communist’. I wonder if any of them have even read Karl Marx?
I honestly believe that if there was a Second Coming the even jellies on the fight would chase Jesus out of town for being a ‘stinking pinko liberal’
The decidedly unholy alliance between “Christian” conservatives and the GOP that was cemented during the Reagan years has for several decades caused to both think and say that if Jesus came back and preached the same message he wouldn’t get any better treatment than he did the first time.
I agree. They are just pure evil and idiots. It’s sad that these types of people, makes the average cat and dogs look like a genius.
I remember a time when saying anything positive about Russia/U.S.S.R. would have earned one the moniker of “commie” and “pinko” from the republican party. It was not all that long ago.
When it comes to Weimar Republic era Germany, my fellow travelers on the left forget a lot of things that continue to make it an extremely bad analogy for our current situation (does anyone even remember the Kaiser’s government that got toppled in the First World War, for instance, or mass political disunity of what became “Germany” that goes back at least a thousand years?). After twenty years of seeing it applied to two objectively evil but just as objectively incompetent Republican maladministrations, I am frankly sick of it. I find more similarities to the ham-fisted, short-sighted of Mao-era Chinese Communist Party that led to the Sino-Soviet Split than any of the shibboleths of the World War 2 horror stories that keep getting peddled.
Hitler became powerful because he was the German savior, Germany had hit a bad economic time for the people, he rescued them.
What President Biden is trying to do is strengthen the US so no one has the desire to be rescued by a fascist.
The more he fights for the people with good supporting Bills the stronger the nation become, might make republican see what is best for them.
My word this political playing field gets more interesting all the time. As in the old Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times”. I would not have predicted this not only in 2012, but quite frankly in 2016. Not that this wasn’t the crazy-pants party for years but this is just insane.
Let’s hope it’s not catching is all I can say.
A truly sad day for Utah. Mitt is not the reasonable kind of republican that his father was, but he deserves a chance . . . if only he and all his cohorts would only listen to the great advice from leaders of the church they profess to believe in. It has not been a month since one of the prominent leaders, a former professor of constitutional law and a justice on the Utah supreme court, Dallin H. Oaks, gave a most enlightening discourse at a world conference of the church, in which he did all possible, with the topic of the constitution.
To those paying attention, they soul have gotten the following message: the founders did not form a single party system, all people should have the right to vote, parties are far less important than voting responsibly after having weighed the issues and the candidates, and never condemning those of a different political persuasion.
The church maintains a strict neutrality over candidate and policy choices, though it will weigh in on issues it considers of a general decision with adverse moral consequences. It campaigned against gambling and for prohibition of advertising for alcohol and tobacco, having relied on its own law of health, held since 1835. It campaigned against same-gender marriage, and yet advocated for protections of civil rights to housing, work, health benefits, etc for committed couples, married of not, without regard to gender of the partners. It holds the concept of procreation sacred and for this reason does not approve doctrinally of same gender unions because it is physically impossible to produce offspring of such a union. But it honors the law and accepts it. Gay marriage is legal in Utah with no subsequent protest after the supreme court decision. Abortion is permitted under specific circumstances, but not selective, as for birth control. Tobacco and alcohol are available for sale, and though there is no gambling, residents are not punished for buying lottery tickets from neighboring states. Rather than prohibiting participation in acts contrary to doctrine, it encourages its members to adhere to them in their own lives and teach their children the same. No threats of hell fire or excommunication if they are gay or smoke or drink, etc. They even have waded into the medical marijuana issue, trying to help craft a law that would permit this use but protect the young from the temptation to use it recreationally. It counseled members not to break the law and use it medically but voiced no objection to their going to states where it was legal for medical puropses and use it there.
Now, after that talk made by Oaks, how quickly it has been ignored by the obvious Mormon core of the Utah republican party. when they booed Romney and cheered Mike Lee. Since Ezra Taft Benson flirted with the John Birch crowd in the 50s and 60s, a whole lot of members bought into the extremism and decided that the GOP did, indeed, stand for God’s Owen Party. Couple that with the politically expedient in the 19th century of excluding blacks from the hierarchy to try for statehood in the midst of the runup to the Civil War and its aftermath, and we have a cocktail for ultra conservatism in the 21st century.
Church leaders for some decades now have been trying to reverse that trend through counsel in kind voices. This latest effort is the strongest to the present day, and I think we will see more in coming years. But the voices will likely have to become stronger to get inside the hardest of heads. These right win Mormons have proven quite adept at compartmentalizing their religion and their politics to allow them to accept opposite philosophies without batting an eye. These days, that group would even object to Mitt’s father, who was a far more realistic conservative. Mitt is not quite as crazy as his party, but he, too has drunk the beverage of choice that makes one compromise moral principles in favor of political expediency. Funny how even the most middle class liberal tightens up when he becomes a billionaire, much after having participated directly in the destruction of the American industrial base for a huge bank account.
In theological terms, both Romney and Lee, and some of the other yahoos Utah has sent to Washington, need to repent. Let’s see if this extremism embodied in the booing will be a wake up call for Mitt. I think Lee is already a lost cause.