Republicans know how to pick ’em
We have some winners among Republican candidates this year. Wyoming Rep. LIz Cheney was not one on Tuesday, as expected. Too sane for her Trumpformed party. If you have not read Robert Draper’s unsettling profile of the Joe McCarthy-adjacent lunatics who have taken over in what was once John McCain’s Arizona, do.
I’ve long joked that centuries after the Reformation, any yahoo with a slick suit, an expensive coif, a sonorous voice, and a morocco bound, gilt-edged, King James red-letter edition gets to define Christianity any damned way he pleases, and there’s no authority to say otherwise. After the Trumpformation of the Republican Party, barriers to entry there are even lower.
Election denial and Trump fealty are enough.
Dana Milbank offers an example from the Tar Heel State:
Trump-endorsed congressional candidate Bo Hines, the Republican nominee from North Carolina’s 13th District, weighed in recently on all the talk about the United States becoming a banana republic, one of those nominal democracies where the rule of law is shaky. But Hines, a former college football player, spoke as if everybody was referring to Banana Republic, the clothing retailer.
“A lot of people have likened the situation going on right now, is, you know, they say we’re in a Banana Republic,” he told radio host John Fredericks. “I think that’s an insult to Banana Republics across the country. I mean, at least the manager of Banana Republic, unlike our president, knows where he is and why he’s there and what he’s doing.”
Hines’s campaign retroactively labeled this “a joke.” Ha! I nearly split my pleated chinos.
It’s not as if candidates through the years have not made gaffes on a bipartisan basis, Milbank observes, but this year’s crop of Republicans’ amplifiers go to 11.
After Bo Hines, need Milbank say more?
He does: Herschel Walker and Mehmet Oz.
Crudité, anyone?
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