Major update to the main post below - this just in from
TIME here with their headline:
“Why the RNC's Embrace of Trump
and the January Sixers Will Backfire”
Introductory part:
It was entirely natural for Washingtonians to have spent a good bit of their
weekend gas lighting themselves, questioning whether the RNC had actually passed a resolution on Friday to censure two
House members for participating in the congressional investigation of a failed
insurrection plot on January 6 of last year.
And did we get it right that the RNC — with no debate or
recorded vote — also said in the resolution that Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam
Kinzinger engaged in the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in
legitimate political discourse” simply by looking into the details of
the deadly attempt to keep Donald Trump in power? But yes,
all of that happened.
The RNC voted on Friday to censure Cheney and Kinzinger for
accepting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s invitation to join a House panel looking
into the events that led to and took place during the siege of
the Capitol for the first time since the Brits set fire to it in 1814.
In the aftermath of the attacks, Senate Republicans effectively killed any hopes of a bicameral probe and shut-down talk of work on a Senate query.
House GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who is working aggressively to keep Trump on his side and perhaps deliver him the Speakership next year, sought to gum up a House probe by naming two hostile members to the panel.
Speaker Pelosi nixed his choices, prompting a GOP boycott of the
House investigation, but Cheney and Kinzinger ignored McCarthy and accepted
Pelosi’s invitation.
The RNC also branded those being investigated, tried and sentenced for their roles in the January 6 attack on the Capitol as victims — despite their roles in scaling the marble walls, smashing windows, occupying members’ workplaces and sending Capitol Hill into hiding.
Trump dangled, if he wins the White House in 2024, pardons to the more than 700 people arrested so far for their roles.
The RNC seems, at least in their resolution, to have sided
with Trump that those facing consequences remain in a crouch of victimhood.
RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel tried to clean up the mess after
the RNC vote, arguing the resolution was not about the violence at all, adding:
“Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger crossed a line. They chose to join Nancy Pelosi
in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate
political discourse that had nothing to do with violence at the Capitol.”
That, to be clear, was not the resolution that passed with very few audible nays.
The RNC’s actions once again left GOP lawmakers in a frenzied sidestep to avoid siding with anything that could leave them cross with Trump.
Original post follows from here:
Rather long but a super opinion article here in SALON from a very talented
writer, usually known simply as “Digby” – Heather Digby Parton – she is spot with
her assessment and this catchy headline (edited to fit the blog):
“Mike
Pence finally speaks up — too late! Trump's takeover of GOP is virtually
complete”
Last Friday (February 4), while appearing before the
Federalist Society in FL, former Vice President Mike Pence said
the words that
dare not be uttered in the Republican Party: “President Trump was wrong.”
He was referring to Trump's recent assertion that Pence had
the right to “overturn the election.” While Trump's original statement and
Pence's mild rebuke both sent shock waves through the media, they really
shouldn't have. Of course Trump thinks Pence had the right to
overturn the election. He couldn't have been any clearer in the 5,789 times
he's mentioned it.
No one should be surprised that Pence came out and said
Trump was wrong, either. He has stayed pretty quiet about the whole thing, but
the fact that Pence didn't actually try to throw out electoral votes, under
tremendous pressure, proved long ago that he thought it was impossible and
unjustified. He just didn't have the guts to come out and say it directly until
now, which is typical.
I doubt Pence's comments would have caused the stir they did if it weren't for the fact that earlier in the day the RNC had voted to censure Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) at the RNC's winter meeting in Utah. The committee statement said, among other things, that the party would “immediately cease any and all support of them as members of the Republican Party for their behavior which has been destructive to the institution of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Republican Party and our republic, and is inconsistent with the position of the Conference.”
It described Cheney and Kinzinger's roles
on the House Jan. 6 committee as helping the “Democrat-led persecution of
ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”
Once it was pointed out
that the Republican Party's governing body appeared to be saying were saying that the
Capitol rioters were “engaged in legitimate political discourse” the
statement was rapidly amended to
read “legitimate
political discourse that had nothing to do with violence at the Capitol.”
RNC leaders claimed they meant to refer to people like “those fraudulent electors from various states, whom they characterized as being just regular folks.”
(One of them has close ties to RNC chair Ronna McDaniel.)
According to the New York Times,
however, the language of the resolution had been carefully negotiated over
several days, and was voted on first by the executive committee and later by
the full conference. So unless the Republican leadership has reading
comprehension problems (which they might!) if they hadn't mean to embrace the
insurrectionists surely someone would have raised an objection before the whole
thing went public.
According to reports from the conference, there was quite a
bit of back-and-forth among members, some of whom thought it wasn't a good look
for the party to cater to Trump's revenge fantasies. But the true believers won
out, led by one of Trump's top henchmen, David Bossie.
I have written about Bossie before.
He's a notorious right-wing operative, going all the way back to the 1990s when
he made his bones as an anti-Clinton character assassin working with the
notorious Floyd Brown, who was famous for producing the racist “Willie Horton” Ad in the 1988
presidential campaign.
Brown's group was called Citizens United, which Bossie later
took over, and which brought the infamous lawsuit to the
Supreme Court that
opened up unlimited big money in politics. (The suit was over Bossie's film: “Hillary: The Movie,” one of his
patented hit jobs.)
Bossie quickly became a media go-to source for dirt on the Clintons and his career was off and running.
He soon became a congressional Whitewater “investigator” (and was later fired by Newt Gingrich for doctoring tapes and releasing them to the public.)
He produced films with Steve Bannon long before Bannon was a household
name or had hooked up with Trump, and wrote several crude smear jobs on
Democratic politicians.
Naturally enough, Bossie jumped on the Trump train back in 2016 and soon teamed up with Trump's first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. The two of them made quite a pair.
At one point during Trump's term he even
discussed bringing them into the White House as a “crisis team,” although no
one was quite sure whether they'd be tasked with creating crises or fixing
them. The dynamic duo wrote a book together called “Let Trump Be Trump” a memoir of the
glory days of the 2016 campaign.
In 2019, Bossie was exiled from Trump World over accusations that his misleadingly-named fundraising outfit, the Presidential Coalition, had bilked Republican donors out of millions of dollars that was supposed to go to support conservative candidates and somehow never got there.
Trump does not like it when someone uses his name to run a grift without giving him a taste, and was reportedly “apoplectic.”
But Bossie has been slowly but surely worming his back into the fold ever since. Trump assigned him to challenge ballot-counting in swing states after the 2020 election and Bossie recently took on the important task of destroying the presidential debates for 2024, so Trump can skip them if he wants to.
(Debates don't tend to work to his advantage).
As the Washington Post's Philip Bump pointed out, this appears to be yet another piece of the plan Trump is setting in motion for 2024. Aside from all the legal shenanigans going on with election officials in battleground states, Trump will almost certainly try to clear the primary field, as he did in 2020, when he strong-armed states into canceling their Republican primaries altogether.
But Bossie's latest task, shepherding the
censure of Cheney and Kinzinger, has to have him fully back in Trump's good
graces. Nothing is more important to the ex-president than that and Bossie
handled it smoothly, including the inflammatory language that McDaniel was
forced to amend, but no doubt had delighted Trump, now fully supportive of
the January 6 insurrectionists. He probably wasn't too happy with McDaniel's
forced “clarification.”
Considering Bossie's very special set of skills, it's not unrealistic to suspect he may be setting up McDaniel for a fall.
According to Vanity Fair,
he wants the RNC chair for himself. That would be the zenith of his career as a
right wing operative and would signal the final and total takeover of the party
by Donald Trump (as if that hasn't happened already). When you think about it,
in Trump's Republican Party, David Bossie is the only man for the job.
RELATED: At last the Republican Party comes
clean: It stands for terrorism and Trump, against democracy.
More on Trump, the GOP,
and the insurrection:
· Trump is done pretending. He is now
openly celebrating the Capitol riot.
· Trump takes control of the January
6 story — while the media and Congress sleep on it.
· Who were the January 6 attackers?
Isolated white folks, searching for meaning — and enemies.
My 2 Cents: Nothing to add
to this fine detailed article by Digby – in her usual humorous yet clearly
honest and factual writing style – she is always worth reading.
There is nothing in this article that I disagree with – hope you feel the same – the B/L is always the same: The truth and facts must always prevail as they do about Donald J. Trump: He is a clear and present danger.
As usual, thanks from stopping
by.
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