Louisiana Voice

The vote was close, much closer than it should have been, but Marjorie Taylor Greene has been STRIPPED of her committee assignments by the US House of Representatives.

It was a vote strictly along party lines, 230 Democrats voted to remove her from the committees on Education and Labor and on the Budget and 199 Repugnantcans voted to forgive and forget that this creature stands with QAnon, one of the most bizarre conspiracy perpetuating outfits ever to come along in this country, and the anarchists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Two did not cast votes.

The 11 GOP members who voted to remove Taylor Greene included Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart (Fla.), Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.), Carlos Giménez (Fla.), Chris Jacobs (N.Y.), John Katko (N.Y.), Young Kim (Calif.), Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), Nicole Malliotakis (N.Y.), Maria Elvira Salazar (Fla.), Chris Smith (N.J.) and Fred Upton (Mich.).

The Repugnantcans who supported her appeared to forget that this mouth-breathing redneck from Georgia apparently detests everything this country stands for. Why else would she attack the very government which she now represents with a barrage of hate-infested lies? She thinks that there is a concerted effort to silence her. Perhaps she should try her hate speech in some totalitarian state like North Korea, Iran, or Turkey and see how much support she receives.

And among those Louisiana Repugnantcan representatives (and I certainly use that word loosely) who gave her a pass were Steve Scalise (who, if Taylor Greene is to be believed, was most probably never shot on June 14, 2017), Clay Higgins (who Taylor Greene probably thinks is George S. Patton reincarnate), Mike Johnson (the constitutional lawyer who apparently lost his copy of the US Constitution) and Garret Graves (who should certainly know better).

I simply refuse to believe that the typical Louisiana citizen, who these four presume to represent, agrees with the Taylor Green philosophies.

Okay, I know that just yesterday I wrote that maybe it would best for the country in general if we just ignored the certifiable nut case that she is. But now, by this forced vote by the Democrats, Louisiana’s four Repugnantcan House members have publicly cast their lot with the nuttiest of all the fruitcakes in Washington since Donald Trump and family, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell left town.

And by voting no on the resolution to remove her from her committee assignments, these four have forsaken their oaths of office, turned their backs on any shred of integrity they may have once possessed, and necessarily joined 195 other Repugnantcans in stating for the record that they believe as indisputable facts:

• A plane did not fly into the Pentagon on 9/11.
• 9/11 was a government hoax.
• Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg is a crisis actor.
• Parkland and other school shootings never happened.
• Charlottesville was an inside job.
• Democrats are satanic pedophiles.
• Nancy Pelosi should be executed for treason.
• Jewish space lasers started the California fires last year to clear land for a high-speed railroad.
• Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been replaced by a body double prior to her actual death.
• Israel was somehow connected to the JFK assassination
• JFK, Jr. is alive and well.
• Robert Mueller was appointed by Trump to investigate Hillary Clinton.
• Lizard people control the world.
• Trump won.

Moreover, they have forever identified themselves as bigoted, anti-Semitic white supremacists.

A friend sent me this tweet that pretty much says it all:

“No matter what you think of this move by the Democrats, Republicans got no one to blame but themselves. It’s THEIR fault this vote took place. THEY should have disciplined her. THEY should have cleaned up their own house. THEY should have done the right thing. But THEY wouldn’t.”

Good to know once and for all where they stand.

There was a time when I could give Graves the benefit of the doubt. He is, after all, the congressman who represents the district where I live.

No more.

By virtue that he could, by his vote today, condone the intolerable utterances of one in an otherwise responsible position as Taylor Greene, he puts himself in the same company with those in Germany who gave Hitler a pass in 1933.

And before you blow your stack at my analogy, understand I have not compared Graves and the other Repugnantcans to Hitler; I’ve compared them to the people of Germany who allowed him to come to power in the first place through their overall discontent and dissatisfaction. The only public official I would compare to Hitler would be Trump because of the manner in which he duped millions of citizens.

Why did I single out Graves? Simple. Scalise and Johnson long ago sold their souls to the radical right wing of the Repugnantcan Party and Higgins is the poster child for arrested mental development that it’s enough that we could expect him to utter a coherent sentence of no more than a half-dozen monosyllabic words.

But I somehow expected better of him because I perceived him to be one with some semblance of responsibility for doing the right thing no matter the consequences.

I was wrong.

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The Democrat-majority House will VOTE Thursday on whether Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene will be stripped of her membership on House committees, including the Committee on Education and Labor and the Committee on the Budget after Republicans PUNTED on punishing the Georgia kook for her conspiracy theories, stalking activities and Qanon affiliation.

But from my vantage point as a non-politician with no contacts inside the Beltway, no inside knowledge other than what I see and read, I believe the Democrats are making a serious mistake in going after the female version of Clay Higgins, but without the charm, the intelligence and the humility.

This woman goes way beyond weird. She makes Batman, Superman, and Spider Man seem plausible and Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny something more substantial than a myth.

And she’s the best thing that’s happened to the Democratic Party. The Democrats in Congress should be doing everything in their power to keep her on her committees – not working to kick her off. Every time she opens her mouth, the Republican hole of credibility gets a little deeper.

Damon Linker, writing for THE WEEK, said “…lavishing attention on her definitely will vastly raise her profile and increase the size of her audience beyond her George district.”

He’s correct (see coverage of four years of Trump tweets). I have a friend up in St. Francisville who consistently lamented the coverage given Trump’s outlandish proclamations (“nuke hurricanes,” “drink bleach,” “it’s just like the flu,” “it’ll be over by April,” “fake news,” “witch hunt,” “no collusion,’ ya-da, ya-da).

Now Trump is threatening to start his own political party, something called the “Patriot Party.” Again, I wholeheartedly encourage him. He will not only finish destroying the Repugnantcan Party in the process, but will add yet another to his growing list of FAILED ENTERPRISES (see Trump Airlines, Trump Beverages, Trump: The Game, Trump Magazine, Trump Mortgage, Trump University, Trump Steaks, Trump’s Travel Site, Trump’s Communications Company, Trump Tower Tampa, Trump Vodka, Trump Ice, The New Jersey Generals football team, Trump Network, Trump Plaza Hotel, and, of course, Trump Casinos).

But I digress.

We have witnessed the morphing of the Repugnantcan Party from the Party of Lincoln to the Party of Trump and now the Party of Marjorie Taylor Greene. Riding shotgun in her kookmobile is Josh Hawley, with Gym Jordan, the aforementioned Higgins, Mike Johnson and John Neely Kennedy crammed into the rumble seat as they careen the wrong direction down the Political Expressway.

Among Taylor Greene’s more outrageous claims:

• A plane did not fly into the Pentagon on 9/11.
• 9/11 was a government hoax.
• Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg is a crisis actor.
• Charlottesville was an inside job.
• Democrats are satanic pedophiles.
• Nancy Pelosi should be executed for treason.
• Jewish space lasers started the California fires last year to clear land for a high-speed railroad.
• Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been replaced by a body double prior to her actual death.
• Israel was somehow connected to the JFK assassination
• JFK, Jr. is alive and well.
• Robert Mueller was appointed by Trump to investigate Hillary Clinton.
• Lizard people control the world.
• Trump won.

This, dear readers, is the new face of the Repugnantcan Party. Abe and Teddy Roosevelt would be mortified. Even Nixon would turn away in disgust.

Even Mitch McConnell, who protected Trump for four years, ramming through Trump’s Supreme Court nominee to replace Ginsburg just weeks before the 2020 election while denying Obama’s effort to nominate a justice nearly a year before the 2016 election, calls Taylor Greene a “cancer” on the Repugnantcan Party.

When you’re too “out there” for Moscow Mitch, you know things have pretty much gone to seed in the GOP.

How did the party that espouses family values, fiscal conservatism, law-and-order, and good old capitalism slide into such a condition? The answer can be found in two memos.

The first was the Lewis Powell MEMO, written a year before Nixon appointed him to the Supreme Court as his reward. That one was a “corporate blueprint to dominate democracy.”

The second, and most important, was the so-called SOUTHERN STRATEGY, a 500-page instruction manual for the Repugnantcan Party’s 1968 plan to absorb the erstwhile Democratic South into the party in order to gain total political dominance by appealing to white prejudices while pitting racial and ethnic groups against each other and gaining political capital from the competitions and resentments that ensued.

Kevin Phillips, the 28-year-old staffer in the Nixon White House who wrote the book, told writer Garry Wills during the 1968 presidential campaign, “The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who.”

Phillips must’ve been paying attention when then-Sen. LYNDON JOHNSON said to Bill Moyers in 1960, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket.”

So, in the span of half-a-century, we’ve seen the resignation of a president, the impeachment of two others (one of those twice), the bombing of a federal courthouse in Oklahoma City, mass shootings (Taylor Greene and Alex Jones’s contentions to the contrary notwithstanding), and an unprecedent rise in right-wing extremism (that’s not to say the left has been completely dormant, the most vocal and extreme activity has come from the right).

The Southern Poverty Center has a list of EXTREMIST GROUPS that grows longer by the day. To try and understand the mindset of these people, in this case the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, click HERE.

So, don’t go after Marjorie Taylor Greene with knives flashing. That’s exactly what she wants: victimhood.

You see, Marjorie Taylor Greene isn’t the problem. Neither is Gym Jordan, Josh Hawley, Tec Cruz or Clay Higgins. They’re just symptoms of a much larger and more deadly disease that, fed the mother’s milk of publicity, can only grow stronger, more credible and more lethal.

As we should have learned from four years of Trump, the one thing these people cannot stand is to be ignored. Ignored, they will fade into oblivion.

It was difficult to ignore Trump because he was, after all, president of the US, theoretically, the most powerful man on earth. His pronouncements carried consequences, good or bad, but consequences nonetheless.

But Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of 535 members of Congress. There are 100 senators whose thoughts and actions generally carry more meaning than House members (unless it’s someone like John Kennedy). And Marjorie is but one of 435 House members – and a lowly freshman at that. Her words and actions mean little without a platform or an audience.

So, Democrats, do what’s best for your party and let her rant to her flaky bimbo heart’s content.

After all, everyone loves a clown and if she’s ignored, she’s just a harmless hick clown from Georgia.

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