Dana Milbank’s column in WaPo today is absolutely chilling and brilliant. It is titled “199 House Republicans have embraced anti-Semitism and violence”. I knew about the Jewish lasers in space garbage, but the extent of Republican Representative Taylor Greene’s hatred of Jews still came as a shock:
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), who is quickly becoming the de facto face of the Republican Party, has suggested that the deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, where white supremacists chanted “Jews will not replace us,” was actually an “inside job” to “further the agenda of the elites.”
She shared a video in which a Holocaust denier claimed that an “unholy alliance of leftists, capitalists and Zionist supremacists have schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation” with the purpose of “breeding us out of existence in our own homelands.”
She posed for campaign photos with a white-supremacist leader and then refused to renounce the man.
She approved of a claim that the Israeli intelligence service assassinated John F. Kennedy, and she speculated that wealthy Jewish interests — the Rothschilds, a target of anti-Semites since the 19th century — set forest fires in California using lasers from space.
This isn’t idle bigotry, for she “liked” a social media suggestion that “a bullet to the head would be quicker” to remove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), who has committed “a crime punishable by death.” She posted on social media about hanging Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, approved of a suggestion that FBI agents be executed, and posted a photo of herself with an automatic weapon next to three Democratic members of Congress, calling herself their “worst nightmare.”
On the House floor this week, she offered no apology and no direct mention of her anti-Semitic and violent statements. Using Christ-on-the-cross imagery, she condemned those who would “crucify me in the public square for words that I said, and I regret, a few years ago.”
But she didn’t regret them. She had tweeted the night before: “We owe them no apologies. We will never back down.” She retweeted an article featuring another QAnon adherent attacking the Republican Jewish Coalition. And several Republican colleagues gave her a standing ovation Wednesday night when she delivered a private speech that Republicans said was similar to the unrepentant one she gave in public on Thursday.
House Republicans refused to sanction her for her outrages, and on Thursday, all but 11 House Republicans voted against a successful Democratic measure to remove her from House committees.
Like Hitler, Greene’s bigotry and hatred isn’t confined to Jews. But like Hitler, Jews seem to be an especially large obsession for her bizarre and profoundly sick mind.
If there was even a semblance of sanity left among the Republican leadership, they would be moving heaven and earth not only to expel her but every member of their party that stood to applaud her speech. She is extremely dangerous.
But the GOPQ abandoned sanity years and years ago.
UPDATE: The author of this great column is Dana Milbank. This post originally credited a different great WaPo writer. My apologies to both of them for the switch and thanks to RP for catching it.