Well, that faux contrition she acted out yesterday evening sure didn't last long:
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has scheduled a late-morning news conference Friday following a House vote to remove her from her two committee assignments as a rebuke for espousing extremist beliefs that she publicly renounced in part just hours before the chamber acted.
Greene showed no contrition in a Friday morning tweet.
“I woke up early this morning literally laughing thinking about what a bunch of morons the Democrats (+11) are for giving some one like me free time,” she wrote. “In this Democrat tyrannical government, Conservative Republicans have no say on committees anyway.”
That's the real, 100% pure crackpot she's shown herself to be for years, her unconvincing and weasel- worded remarks yesterday notwithstanding. She will remain a dangerous loon, fulminating inside the halls of government, minus committee assignments, but with power inside her rotted- out Trumpist conspiracist caucus.
A few takes from others, starting with the Washington Post editorial board:
Enough was known about Ms. Greene before committee assignments were handed out that Republican leaders should have prevented her from taking roles on such high-profile panels. Her posting on the education committee was particularly galling, given her previous statements questioning the reality of school shootings and accosting their victims. As revelation after revelation about her offensive past emerged, Republicans should have reconsidered. Instead, they declined on Wednesday to take a stand against kookiness, forcing Thursday’s vote. [snip]
That a corrosive influence such as Ms. Greene enjoys good standing among her House Republican colleagues offers one more sign that the House GOP is morally adrift. Thursday’s vote should never have had to happen. Republicans should have had more self-respect than to support her last year, to welcome her with full honors and to allow the situation to escalate as it did.
...[O]n the House floor on Thursday, Greene portrayed herself as “a very regular American, just like the people I represent in my district.” Which, if true, is a depressing thought.
Shedding crock-of-bile tears behind her “FREE SPEECH” mask, the freshman congresswoman even claimed she was actually a victim of the QAnon movement that she once embraced. “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true and I would ask questions about them and talk about them,” Greene said, “and that is absolutely what I regret.”
She insisted that she no longer holds these beliefs, and claimed to have renounced them in 2018, though some of her more egregious comments and social media posts were made more recently. But as recently as last week, she vowed in a fundraising solicitation that she would “never back down.” And on Thursday, Greene could not resist one more defiant jab of outrageous whataboutism: “Will we allow the media, that is just as guilty as QAnon of presenting truth and lies, to divide us?” [snip]
Whether Greene is capable of containing herself going forward is doubtful. There are countless examples of lawmakers who have not always lived up to the standards they have set for themselves — examples which Republicans cited ad nauseam — but it is hard to think of any other House member who has inhabited a dangerous alternate reality with as much fervor and as little remorse as Greene has. And in the eyes of a not-insubstantial segment of the Republican base, that makes her a hero.
... Republicans took no action at all against Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a former — so she says — devotee of the QAnon conspiracy theory and one of the few members of Congress I could imagine actually being some sort of "gravity truther." At the meeting, Greene reportedly said she was sorry for a few of the insane and offensive views she has loudly expressed, including that school shootings were really "false flag" plots to curtail Second Amendment rights. But she adamantly refused to apologize publicly for anything at all until Thursday, when it was clear that Democrats were prepared to take away her committee assignments.
We should all take the late Maya Angelou's advice: Greene has shown us again and again who she is, and we should believe her.
Greene is the proof-of-concept for a vision of politics where public servants can live in their own cartoon universe so long as enough constituents are willing to live there, too. She tweets, “I am one of you,” and her followers tweet back, “Stay strong!” as if their duty is to save their representative from being bullied about her belief that space lasers cause wildfires and not to think hard about whether they, too, believe space lasers cause wildfires.
The issue isn’t that Greene seems to believe crazy stuff. The issue is that she’s arrived in government at a time when believing crazy stuff can increase a lawmaker’s power. Because the people who support Greene genuinely believe that she is being disenfranchised. In the universe she shares with her supporters, being loathed in Washington is not an indication that she has behaved shamefully; it is an indication that she is right when she says everyone else is against her.
The more she does outlandish things, the more she will be criticized, and the more she will use the criticism as evidence of her silencing, and the more money she will raise, the more she will win.
It’s a cyclical, cynical game. She didn’t invent it, but she’s testing its limits.
Well, we've reached our limit of low-IQAnon Rep. Greene today. May she be the face of the Big Lie, insurrectionist, QAnon, violence-prone, tinfoil hat Party of Trump for now and forever.
2 comments:
"...The more she does outlandish things, the more she will be criticized, and the more she will use the criticism as evidence of her silencing, and the more money she will raise, the more she will win." So we should what, pretend Greene doesn't exist, or that she doesn't REALLY mean what she says? Of course Greene will play the victim card and will raise money but, if there's anything to be learned from this last election cycle, she'd do that REGARDLESS of the circumstances of her actual treatment. Seems to me the Democrats have to take a stand and any other approach is a recipe for increased mayhem.
Kwark -- agree completely.
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