Josh Hawley Is Madison Cawthorn Is Marjorie Taylor Greene
There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the “crazies” and the Very Serious People in the GOP.
Suppose you banged your head really hard, got knocked out, and went to the emergency room to assess the damage. In that case, you might expect a doctor to ask very easy questions to test whether or not you’re able to perceive reality accurately. Questions such as “Who is the president of the United States?” Or, “Who won the 2020 presidential election?” Well, a good number of Republicans can’t come up with the right answers and they don’t have any injuries to blame.
The dumb ones say that voting machines possessed by the ghost of Hugo Chavez flipped the election for Joe Biden. The ones with Ivy League degrees—but who are absolutely not elites—simply oppose any voter expansion rules made prior to the election and want to cancel votes in the swing states won by Joe Biden—but, funnily enough, only in the swing states won by Joe Biden. Not that there’s any difference to this distinction: Both contentions are nonsense that has been debunked or overruled in courts dozens of times.
Many of these people are scammers, attention-hungry bottom feeders, and other assorted carnival barkers. But some of them want to be taken Very Seriously.
Some of them aspire to do more than just make it to the main stage at TPUSA. Some of them want to be Thought Leaders. Some of them even want to be . . . president of these United States.
But, why, when it’s been proven repeatedly that Biden is president and it has been established, as a factual matter, that there was no widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, should anyone listen to the people who are peddling this lie? Because if they are willing to lie about something as objectively simple as the results of a presidential election—about 2+2 equaling 4—what else will they lie about?
Missouri Senator Josh Hawley is trying to get to the pole position for 2024 on the off chance that Donald Trump decides to self-exile in Mar-a-Lago and Donald Jr. then takes a pass on the race. And he wants to take the “smart, but populist” lane.
He has degrees from Yale and Stanford. Yet on Wednesday, he linked arms with the crazies by announcing that he will object to the counting of Biden’s Electoral College victory, thus forcing a roll-call vote in an attempt to push the determination of the election to Congress.
He’s avoiding all of that ghost-of-Chavez talk and instead couching his attempt to overturn the election as being deeply-held conviction about “voter integrity” and the “unprecedented effort of mega-corporations, including Facebook and Twitter, to interfere in this election, in support of Joe Biden.”
He absolutely is not pandering to the MAGA fundraising file who want the election overthrown. No sir. He just wants to highlight the problems with ballot integrity and social media. He’s not just some crank trying to impress Parler. He’s a Very Serious Person who the crazies just so happen to like. He can unite the party! That’s his lane.
So, even if you think MTG or Mad-Caw are a little on the nutty side, Hawley wants you to trust him when he runs for the Big Job in 2024.
Will he get away with it?
What about all the Very Serious People who supported Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s lawsuit to throw out Biden’s votes in the swing states he won?
Or how about all of the people who, in late December, were still insisting publicly that could pull out a win? Do we have to take them seriously, ever again?
Are we supposed to treat the people who gave credence to Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn as though they are normal, responsible adults who should be entrusted with making decisions about anything to do with our government, whatsoever?
Even the Trump-aligned New York Post is now begging Trump and his enablers to “Give it up!” “Sidney Powell is a crazy person,” the Post says. “Michael Flynn suggesting martial law is tantamount to treason. It is shameful.”
Indeed.
But we all knew—or readers should have known that this was coming.
We should never forget exactly who and what these people did in this moment. There is no difference—none, at all—between the Josh Hawleys of the world and the Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Madison Cawthorns.
Don’t ever let them pretend otherwise.