Why Does No One Ever Say “Republicans Have to Stop Acting Crazy or Voters Will Punish Them”?
One-way voter accountability.
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1. Only the Best People
First up is Karen Mueller, a Republican candidate for Wisconsin attorney general. Why would anyone care about the race for Wisconsin attorney general? Well, meet Karen . . .
A Chippewa Falls attorney who is a key player in a movement to take the impossible step of decertifying the 2020 election is running for Attorney General on a platform of using the office to prosecute doctors who did not administer the anti-parasite drug ivermectin to dying COVID-19 patients and instead gave them other treatments.
Karen Mueller is joining the race's Republican primary after unsuccessfully suing in November 2020 to overturn the presidential election result, and writing a memo in January supporting state Rep. Tim Ramthun's call to decertify the election, an analysis that has been widely circulated among decertification supporters. Other attorneys and legal experts have concluded the idea is impossible and illegal.
Mueller said in an interview she is launching a campaign in order to investigate six Wisconsin hospitals for their doctors' decisions to not administer ivermectin to COVID-19 patients. She would not disclose the names of the hospitals or reveal details of her allegations.
Perfectly normal.
Now meet Nebraska state senator Bruce Bostelman. He is a Republican who already holds elected office and who during a legislative debate . . . well, I’m just going to let you watch the video:
Yes.
Schoolchildren dress up as animals — cats or dogs — during the school day; they meow, and they bark. And now schools are wanting to put litter boxes in the schools for these children to use. How is this sanitary?
The best part of this is when Bostelman vouches for the authenticity of his claim:
This is very disruptive within the school system. It’s very disruptive within the classes. I even heard from one person here recently who said that a student identified as a cat and wanted a litter box and the school didn’t provide the litter box and the student went ahead and defecated on the floor. Really. Really.
Not really. The entire thing was made up. Bostelman retracted his statement.
Hours after his remarks, Bostelman backtracked and acknowledged that the story wasn’t true. He said he checked into the claims with state senator Lynne Walz, a Democrat who leads the legislature’s education committee, and confirmed there were no such incidents.
“It was just something I felt that if this really was happening, we needed to address it and address it quickly,” Bostelman said.
What strikes me about this though is Bostelman’s formulation about having “heard from one person” the story and then his “Really. Really.”
He wasn’t mistaken. He was lying. Who is the “one person” he spoke to who reported having seen the litter box / defecation incident? Such a person does not exist. He saw a meme on the internet—not an infographic, a meme—and then presented it as a true thing which had been told to him by an actual person who claimed to have been a first-hand witness. But there was no such person.
And yet, it’s somehow it’s the Democrats who have to “run to the center”? I don’t quite understand that.
Here we have Republicans pushing the most batshit crazy stuff you can imagine at the same time that the Biden administration is proposing a $32 billion increase in funding for the police. And somehow the problem is Democrats being out of step?
This isn’t to say that the argument that Dems need to be centrist is wrong. I suspect it’s right.
Rather, what I’m suggesting is this: