The Marjorie Taylor Greene case

[southernhybrid]

I'm not so sure that the NYTimes should be giving this loon so much attention, but regardless, I'm going to gift the long article about her rise and influence that I read this morning.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/17/...Ry0NBjGWEV4ZkyN4MqigcCtXqUB_bk&smid=share-url

I'm not even going to quote fro the piece as it's very long. The author of the article had several interviews with MTG. Most of us are probably familiar with her craziness, but it appears as if she is becoming more influential, at least among the Christian nationalists etc. If anyone takes the time to read this, I'd appreciate your thoughts. My thoughts are; "OMG! How did this happen to my country!"

 

[lpetrich]

Titled link: The Problem of Marjorie Taylor Greene - The New York Times

Great article. It says a lot about the present-day Republican Party that it is willing to treat her as a respectable Republican rather than some mad dog to be primaried in the next election.

"Over the past two years, Greene has gone from the far-right fringe of the G.O.P. ever closer to its establishment center without changing any of her own beliefs; if anything, she has continued to find more extreme ways to express them." -- more like the Republican Party has moved to become more like her. Some Republicans seek her endorsement, like Kari Lake and JD Vance. She's expecting to get some nice committee seats if the Republicans get a House majority.

She blamed Antifa, then the FBI for the Jan. 6 attacks, claiming that it is not Donald Trump's fault.

Throughout this 18-month span of reporting, Greene’s messaging machine achieved a kind of wall-of-sound inescapability. Her daily litany of often-vicious taunts, factual contortions and outright falsehoods on social media and behind any available lectern depicted a great nation undone by Biden’s Democrats, with allusions to undocumented immigrants as rapists, transgender individuals as predators, Black Lives Matter protesters as terrorists, abortion providers as murderers and her political opponents as godless pedophilia-coddling Communists. The Trumpian media ecosystem where these phantasms originated saw Greene as their most able exponent, while Trump himself, in a news release earlier this year, proclaimed her “a warrior in Congress,” adding, “She doesn’t back down, she doesn’t give up, and she has ALWAYS been with ‘Trump.’”

It's telling that the Congressional Republican leadership has not done much to purge her from their party. If Kevin McCarthy wanted to, he could easily have called up Nancy Pelosi about expelling her, and the two of them could easily have whipped the necessary votes for doing so.

 

[lpetrich]

What has received far less discussion than the outrageousness of her daily utterances is what the sum total of them portends for America under a Republican majority with Greene in the vanguard. In recent months, she has continued to insist that Trump won the 2020 election. She maintains that America should have a Christian government and that open prayer should return to classrooms. She has called for the impeachment of not just Biden but also Attorney General Merrick Garland and the secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas; for the defunding of the F.B.I., after the agency searched Mar-a-Lago to retrieve secret government documents that Trump took from the White House; for the expulsion from Congress of those she claimed were Communists (and among those she has referred to as Communists are the progressive icon Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and the Jan. 6 Committee member Jamie Raskin of Maryland); and for a congressional investigation into the business activities of Biden’s son Hunter. She has introduced legislation to suspend all immigration into the United States for the next four years, as well as a bill that would impose up to 10-to-25-year prison sentences on medical specialists who provide hormone treatment or surgery to transgender youth under 18.

Greene believes that abortion should be banned and that gun-control laws should be overturned. She favors eliminating any and all regulations that were intended to address climate change because, in her view, “The climate has always changed, and no amount of taxes and no government can do anything to stop climate change.” In late September, and hardly for the first time, she excoriated a number of her Republican colleagues, suggesting they were abettors to a globalist conspiracy in tweeting “21 Republican Senators just voted with the woke climate agenda” by ratifying an international agreement to phase down the use of hydrofluorocarbon pollutants in coolant systems.

That's what we're up against with her, making the lunatic fringe of the right wing seem respectable.

About sixty years ago, respectable conservatives sidelined the John Birch Society for its kooky conspiracy-mongering. Their successors are unwilling to challenge MTG.

 

[lpetrich]

MTG would like to be in the Oversight Committee, so she can do investigations. She'd share a committee with AOC, and that will give MTG plenty of opportunity to harass AOC.

But Greene’s comments about what she deserves and how she feels she has been treated reveal a deeply personal grievance against her fellow Republicans that abides to this day, despite the party’s accommodations to her. It extends back to when she was denied an audience with Republican senators as a visitor to the Capitol in 2019; then to her being shunned by the G.O.P. establishment during her 2020 campaign; and finally to what she views as a less-than-fulsome defense of her a month into her congressional tenure, when House Democrats along with 11 Republicans voted to strip her of her committee assignments. This event, a rarity in the history of Congress, was prompted by the surfacing, late that January, of more of her previous social media posts. They included her outlandish suggestions that the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., was staged, and that a wildfire in California that same year was ignited by a laser beam shot from space by a prominent Jewish family, the Rothschilds, the subjects of many antisemitic conspiracy theories. Such delusions were commonly embraced in the community of QAnon followers.

What does she expect? She's a newcomer to politics, and I would not be surprised if many Republicans consider her positions to be just plain flaky, even if they don't say so in public very much nowadays.

Greene’s political operation is committed to the goal of reflexively demonizing nearly anyone and anything she opposes, regardless of what it costs her. Twitter has permanently suspended her personal account for repeatedly spreading untruths about Covid vaccines. Her refusal to wear a mask on the House floor during the pandemic resulted in Greene’s being fined more than $100,000. Her appearance onstage in February with the avowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes caused Bannon to cancel a public appearance with her in Georgia. (Bannon has since brought Greene back on his podcast.) Earlier this year, she traveled with a bodyguard (which, as The Times reported, Greene paid for with campaign funds) because of threats that she says have been made against her. In August, according to the local police, her house in Rome, Ga., was repeatedly “swatted” — someone claimed to a 911 operator that a violent crime was taking place in Greene’s household, compelling a SWAT team to enter her home — apparently by someone who objected to her anti-transgender rhetoric, according to a report she obtained from the police and released.

What a record of assholishness. She acts like a jerk, and when she gets some pushback for doing so, then she howls about what a victim she is.

 

[lpetrich]

Greene had previously and notoriously hired as a staff assistant the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, who had become a leper in conservative circles after remarking approvingly in 2016 of “relationships between younger boys and older men.” (Greene quietly parted ways with Yiannopoulos earlier this year.)

Why was that? I'll speculate. MY has made a career out of being a right-wing troll. But as a staffer, he would have to do real work rather than bullshitting. Stuff like research, reading through bills and assessing them, taking care of constituents. So having that sort of position didn't work out very well for him.

Yet MTG has hired former Rep Tom DeLay's chief of staff, Ed Buckham. “I hired him because I want to be a very serious legislator,” MTG said about that.

One MTG staffer asked the article's author “Who do you think are the top five Republicans in the House, other than the ones in leadership?” Then clarified with “I’m not talking about who K Street wants. I’m talking about, if you had five House Republicans on a national ballot, who would the public vote for?”

It was a revealing question. Tom DeLay had once told me that there were three career paths for any member of Congress: to be in leadership, to be a committee stalwart or to be a tireless advocate for your district. Greene had chosen a fourth path. Her ambition was to be a national figure.

She has achieved this distinction in part through an extremist posture that may well be earnestly felt but is also politically calculated. In May, I accompanied Greene on a 13-hour primary-campaign swing through her district. Two years earlier, her campaign slogan was “Save America Stop Socialism.” Now her yard signs read: “Save America Stop Communism.” Her senior adviser Isaiah Wartman said, “We’ve moved the needle.”

 

[lpetrich]

Greene once told me that when the Georgia G.O.P. establishment first encountered her in 2019, “They looked at me like I was a three-headed monster.” This was hardly the case anymore. Every Republican candidate in her state — and more across the country — seemed to be mimicking her.

Then talking about how MTG-like three Republican candidates for GA-10 were.

She didn’t look or sound especially happy to be the recipient of such flattery. I thought I understood why. “If everybody starts acting like Marjorie Taylor Greene,” I said, “then Marjorie Taylor Greene is no different from anyone else. And in the view of some people, this is Trump’s problem now.”

Then she asked rhetorically “Too much Trump?”

Then about MTG and DT. Neither of them was a long-time political insider like Kevin McCarthy or Mitch McConnell.

Both derived their outsize influence in the G.O.P. from their ability to command the airspace of the right-wing ecosystem. They achieved this not simply by being the most outrageous voices in the room but also by being more outrageous today than they were the day before. They were competing against themselves and against their adoring mimics. Their rhetorical one-upmanship was increasingly dark and violent. At a Trump rally in Michigan on Oct. 1, the former president claimed, “Despite great outside dangers, our biggest threat remains the sick, sinister and evil people from within our country.” Greene, as part of Trump’s warm-up act, was willing to get even more ominously specific: “Democrats want Republicans dead, and they have already started the killings.” The previous month, sharing an image of a darkly lit Biden speech in which the president warned that some on the right were threats to democracy, Greene tweeted, “Joe Biden is Hitler,” with the hashtag #NaziJoe.

She conceded

“Part of my problem is,” she said quietly as her S.U.V. rolled through northwest Georgia, “I’ve been too early.”

 

[ZiprHead]

They made the crank drunk at the end of the bar into a congress person.

 

[Swammerdami]

Given the huge influence this hateful imbecile has, and the likelihood that she and her supporters will be in the majority next year, it is impossible to be optimistic about the future of American democracy.

That's what we're up against with her, making the lunatic fringe of the right wing seem respectable.

About sixty years ago, respectable conservatives sidelined the John Birch Society for its kooky conspiracy-mongering. Their successors are unwilling to challenge MTG.

Barry Goldwater, one of the most crazed lunatics ever to be a major candidate for POTUS, was dependent on the JBS for support. But even Goldwater drew the line when Eisenhower was accused of treason:

I think you have clearly stated the problem which Mr. Welch’s continued leadership of the John Birch Society poses for sincere conservatives. . . . Mr. Welch is only one man, and I do not believe his views, far removed from reality and common sense as they are, represent the feelings of most members of the John Birch Society. . . . Because of this, I believe the best thing Mr. Welch could do to serve the cause of anti-Communism in the United States would be to resign. . . . We cannot allow the emblem of irresponsibility to attach to the conservative banner.

But now no lie is too farfetched for millions of Americans to swallow, nor too treasonous for a QOPster to pass up hoping for some cheap publicity.

They know the MAGA crowd is filled with drug-addled morons with no attention span, so don't even bother keeping their lies consistent.

Greene: "I support our police officers [and] their courage yesterday in keeping us safe. I know there were bad actors involved and investigations are underway — and it’s Antifa.” (In subsequent months, Greene would blame the F.B.I. for possibly instigating the violence on Jan. 6. She also voted against awarding police officers who defended the Capitol that day the congressional gold medal, its highest honor.)

If the Capitol police were fighting off the Antifa communists or the treasonous FBI, why not give them medals?

 

[southernhybrid]

Thanks for breaking down the article Loren. I didn't have the time or energy to do that yesterday. There is so much in that piece that show how extreme both Greene and most of the Republican Party have become. I guess I don't understand cult like behavior. It seems as if most of the Republican Party has become a cult. We all know how difficult it is to change the behavior and beliefs of cult members. Republicans drank the Kool Aide, which Green is handing out.

 

[Gospel]

All this because a Negro became president. It was downhill ever since.

 

[Shadowy Man]

All this because a Negro became president. It was downhill ever since.

The nerve of that guy!!

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I'm not so sure that the NYTimes should be giving this loon so much attention, but regardless, I'm going to gift the long article about her rise and influence that I read this morning.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/17/...Ry0NBjGWEV4ZkyN4MqigcCtXqUB_bk&smid=share-url

I'm not even going to quote fro the piece as it's very long. The author of the article had several interviews with MTG. Most of us are probably familiar with her craziness, but it appears as if she is becoming more influential, at least among the Christian nationalists etc. If anyone takes the time to read this, I'd appreciate your thoughts. My thoughts are; "OMG! How did this happen to my country!"

I've always had a fringe opinion of how such people come to be influential. The fact is that although we as a society are progressing with regards to general knowledge and standard of living, as individuals there are many who do not or cannot keep up. Just as there is great income disparity today there is great knowledge disparity. Someone like Greene represents that group left behind as far as knowledge and the status it brings is concerned. She and those like her benefit generally but their influence has waned within the society as a whole. The resulting insecurity brings about a defense of their ignorance.

This has always been around with regards to poverty and desperation but it did not include a defense of ignorance. Greene represents a fundamental defense of ignorance, a defense of scientific illiteracy. It began in earnest with Reagan.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

All this because a Negro became president. It was downhill ever since.

They said he would destroy America. It looks like they might be right, just not how they meant.

 

[crazyfingers]

All this because a Negro became president. It was downhill ever since.

They said he would destroy America. It looks like they might be right, just not how they meant.

Unfortunately, having black guy in the White House motivated the christian nationalists, white supremacists and the fascists to rise up to destroy America.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Sometimes I feel sorry for her because she is so stupid.

Marjorie Taylor Greene tried to honor the Confederacy but failed spectacularly

“Tonight, I stopped at the Wilder Monument in Chickamauga, GA, which honors the Confederate soldiers of the Wilder Brigade,” Greene wrote on Truth Social, the Twitter-like platform that Donald Trump owns. “I will always defend our nation’s history!”

She also posted a video where she said she climbed the 136 stairs to the top of the tower there.

The Wilder Brigade, though, was part of the Union Army and was made up of regiments from Indiana and Illinois. It fought in the Battle of Chickamauga in northwestern Georgia in 1863, and in 1890 several former officers from the brigade started discussing a monument at the Chickamauga battlefield to honor Union General John T. Wilder.

The post has been deleted from Truth Social, but not before people got screenshots and mocked her lack of knowledge about the history she claimed she will defend.

The Orange thinks she'd make a great president.

 

[Toni]

Sometimes I feel sorry for her because she is so stupid.

Marjorie Taylor Greene tried to honor the Confederacy but failed spectacularly

“Tonight, I stopped at the Wilder Monument in Chickamauga, GA, which honors the Confederate soldiers of the Wilder Brigade,” Greene wrote on Truth Social, the Twitter-like platform that Donald Trump owns. “I will always defend our nation’s history!”

She also posted a video where she said she climbed the 136 stairs to the top of the tower there.

The Wilder Brigade, though, was part of the Union Army and was made up of regiments from Indiana and Illinois. It fought in the Battle of Chickamauga in northwestern Georgia in 1863, and in 1890 several former officers from the brigade started discussing a monument at the Chickamauga battlefield to honor Union General John T. Wilder.

The post has been deleted from Truth Social, but not before people got screenshots and mocked her lack of knowledge about the history she claimed she will defend.

The Orange thinks she'd make a great president.

I don't feel sorry for her. Her stupidity is a deliberate and cultivated choice and she embraces it with all her being and chooses to believe others in her cult and outside of her cult are equally stupid and willing to believe or pretend to believe the same crap that she believes or pretends to believe. It's ALL theater. ALL of it.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I don't feel sorry for her. Her stupidity is a deliberate and cultivated choice and she embraces it with all her being and chooses to believe others in her cult and outside of her cult are equally stupid and willing to believe or pretend to believe the same crap that she believes or pretends to believe. It's ALL theater. ALL of it.

The key word there is "pretend." She pretends to be all the things she isn't, just like her orange hero.

 

[ZiprHead]

I will always defend our nation's history - by getting it wrong.

 

[ZiprHead]

 

[thebeave]

Er...no.

MTG says and does so much stupid shit, I don't understand why people feel the need to make up and spread disproven nonsense about her. Honestly, it reflects more badly on those who knowingly and/or recklessly do this, especially when they spend so much time accusing "the other side" of being a bunch of liars.