Report typos and corrections to: corrections@rawstory.com.
'Have you no shame': GOP lawmaker's family urges him to resign after 'betraying the country'
August 01, 2021
In a withering column for NBC, the siblings of Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) accused him of "betraying his country" and said the time has come for him to resign in light of his most recent antics with regard to the Jan 6th Capitol insurrection.
Dave, Jennifer and Tim Gosar have long urged Arizona voters to reject their brother over his extremist views and now they have taken their criticism of him to a new level in their op-ed.
Accusing their lawmaker brother of being "led around by the nose" by white supremacists, the three siblings said that is the least of his crimes against the country by saying his support of the Jan 6th insurrection makes him unfit to remain in office.
Echoing the famous words of attorney Joseph Welch who famously confronted Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-WI) with "Have you no shame?", Gosar's family put the same question to him while including a list of his appalling transgressions while in office.
"Although his colleagues in Congress and others in the media seem to only recently be paying attention, we have been aware of his unhinged behavior for years. We are therefore not surprised to see him heading down a very similar path to McCarthy's." they wrote before noting how he is trying to turn Ashli Babbitt -- a Capitol insurrectionist who was killed by police as she tried to access a secured area containing fellow lawmakers -- into a martyr.
"In fact, your lies helped delay the Capitol Police from clearing the chamber, and this delay led at least in part to the officer's decision to shoot Babbitt to protect you. And now you have the gall to blame those men and women who protected you for her death. Disgracefully, you even voted against awarding commendations to those who risked their lives to protect yours? You, one of the key big lie proponents and key instigators of the insurrection," they accused before saying it is time for him to step down because he is continuing to betray his country.
"Maybe it's because you're in way over your head in Congress and don't have the intellect, character or maturity to be in that leadership role. Maybe your lifelong, insecure need for the approval of others caused you to sacrifice your common decency and integrity to satisfy Trump and his followers in order to keep your seat," they wrote. "The extremism of your beliefs is finally getting the media attention it deserves. What should happen now is that you resign. Sadly, this seems unlikely. This means unless your colleagues step in, you are likely doomed to go down in history as a cautionary tale: a person who betrayed his family, his country and even himself."
You can read the whole piece here.
CONTINUE READING
Show less
In his cascade of lies about the 2020 election, Donald Trump preys on the desire of his snowflake supporters to believe that they're special. The thing is, they're not.
This article first appeared in Salon.
I live in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, a swing region in a swing state. Like the rest of the commonwealth, it backed Barack Obama twice before supporting Trump in 2016 — one of 206 counties out of America's 3,141 to make the Obama-Trump pivot — and then switched back to Joe Biden in 2020.
You might think that a county that supported Biden would never even consider electing someone who openly calls for overturning the will of its own voters. Talk to Trump supporters around here, however, and you'll hear a disturbingly blasé attitude toward that idea. Our Republican candidate for county executive, Steve Lynch, actually attended the Jan. 6 rally that preceded the Capitol assault. At one point Lynch can be seen on camera, around 1 p.m., crowing, "It's going down" as the attack began. When approached by Salon about his controversial campaign, Lynch insisted that the protest he attended had been peaceful, that Nancy Pelosi was (somehow) to blame for the violence and that antifa had caused or provoked the unrest. He complained about "the pathetic narrative put out there by this corrupt media," but offered no evidence to back up his assertions. I twice asked him a question he refused to answer:
American history is full of examples of political injustice, yet there was only one other presidential election before 2020 in which a large part of the country refused to accept the official outcome. How do people who claim this election was stolen justify the way Donald Trump and his movement have responded to their loss?
I think that oddly specific question — even if Trump supporters' claims about the 2020 election were true (which they're not), would they justify violence? — is important. Here's why: Whatever Trump fans may believe, the 2020 contest wasn't especially close or controversial in historical terms. Indeed, there have been many other elections when the loser had far more plausible grounds to claim fraud or contest the result.
We can start with Trump's supposed hero, Andrew Jackson, who won the popular vote by a substantial margin in the 1824 election but was not elected because no candidate had won enough electoral votes. Under the terms of the 12th Amendment, the election was decided in the House of Representatives, where Speaker Henry Clay threw his influence behind Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. As president, Adams in turn appointed Clay as his secretary of state, and Jackson, not without plausibility, accused the two of making a "corrupt bargain." This was never proved, and since Clay had followed the Constitution, Jackson had no legal claim that he'd been cheated. There's no doubt that the Adams-Clay deal was ethically questionable, and Jackson used his sense of outrage to help form a new political organization — the Democratic Party.
Jackson was an unappealing historical figure on many levels, but here's something he didn't do: He didn't incite an insurrection against the government over losing that heated election.
The same is true for almost every other controversial presidential election. Both Democrats and Republicans actively suppressed votes and tampered with results during the 1876 election. Arguably, Rutherford B. Hayes and the Republicans were just a little better at it than Samuel Tilden and the Democrats. A second civil war nearly broke out after that contest, averted because both parties agreed to a racist compromise that allowed Hayes to take the White House while Southern Democrats brought an end to Reconstruction and reduced Black people to second-class citizenship.
After Grover Cleveland lost the 1888 election — despite winning the popular vote, like Jackson and Tilden before him — many of his Democratic supporters accused Republicans of fraud, although Cleveland himself dismissed those claims as not legally supportable.
Much closer to our own time, Richard Nixon actually had a plausible case that John F. Kennedy and the Democrtats rigged the 1960 election through chicanery in Illinois and Texas, but concluded he could not get the election overturned in court. He later wrote, presciently, that "the mark of the good loser is that he takes his anger out on himself and not on his victorious opponents or on his teammates."
After the 2000 election, Al Gore urged his supporters to peacefully accept the results even though he had won the popular vote and only lost in the Electoral College because he trailed George W. Bush by 537 votes in Florida — and only then because a recount was halted before that margin could disappear. Unlike Cleveland or Nixon, Gore took his case all the way to the Supreme Court, but after it ruled against him in an infamous and overtly partisan decision, Gore accepted the results and urged his supporters to do likewise.
Even the legendary election of 1800, which threatened to tear the young country apart and revealed the flaws in the Constitution's original method for electing a president, did not lead to violence at the time. It's fair to say, however that its loser Aaron Burr, has been depicted as a historical villain ever since.
The 1968 election was very close and highly divisive — and may have witnessed one of the sleaziest political dirty tricks in American history. According to reliable accounts, Nixon tried to undermine the ongoing negotiations to end the Vietnam War in order to torpedo the campaign of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, his Democratic opponent. President Lyndon Johnson supposedly knew this was happening but did not go public with it. One of Nixon's advisers at the time was a young man named Roger Stone, more recently a confidant and consultant to Donald Trump. (Nixon was later forced to resign over the Watergate scandal, after trying to spy on Democratic campaign headquarters and then covering it up.)
Not surprisingly, Trump and the Republicans don't bring up 1968 or any of those other elections. For that matter, they also don't mention the one election that did result in violent public rejection — the 1860 election won by Abraham Lincoln. No one seriously suggested that Lincoln had stolen the election, but the leaders of Southern slave states found him unacceptable as president, and plunged the nation into four years of bloody carnage for what can reasonably be described as the worst possible reasons.
There are more reasons why Trumpist claims that the 2020 election was special don't hold up to historical scrutiny. For most of American history, Black people and women could not vote. The above-mentioned 1876 election, in fact, was resolved precisely by stripping away Black men's right to vote in most of the South. Throughout American history, people have been disenfranchised based on race, ethnicity, class, gender or simply the perception that they were likely to vote the "wrong" way. There have been elections decided through backroom deals, voter suppression, tampering with the results and other dubious or illegal tactics. Our democracy is almost always messy, and on many occasions deeply flawed.
If Trump were correct in his assertions about the 2020 election (which, once again, he absolutely is not), that would of course be an injustice. But it probably wouldn't make the list of the top 10 injustices in American political history. To state the obvious, Trump fans don't care about political injustice and absolutely don't care about history. Those are just excuses for a blatant attempt to overthrow democracy. If Trump's supporters want to believe they are special, in one sense they are. They remain loyal to the only president in American history to openly flout George Washington's most important precedent — the peaceful transfer of power.
CONTINUE READING
Show less
Kevin McCarthy faces furious backlash after 'disgusting' joke about assaulting Nancy Pelosi
August 01, 2021
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) came under withering criticism on Saturday night after it was reported that he joked about hitting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to a group of Republicans.
According to the Washington Post's Michael Scherer, the senior Republican was gifted with an oversized gavel with "Fire Pelsoi" embossed on it at a GOP fundraising dinner in Tennessee and then proceeded to tell the crowd that he looks forward to the day when she hands him the speaker's gavel before joking, "It will be hard not to hit her with it but I will bang it down."
With just over six months past since the Capitol riot where pro-Trump insurrectionists attempted to track down Pelosi, claiming they were going to put her on trial and then hang her, critics of McCarthy trashed him for his "disgusting" attempt at a joke.
You can read some comments below:
@michaelscherer Yes Kevin, joking about assault w a deadly weapon is HILARIOUS. Manly resonant bonus laughs for it… https://t.co/svm9cb7M32— Stephen Andrew (@Stephen Andrew) 1627779684.0
@michaelscherer @GOPLeader He has no business continuing in public office if he uttered these words & must provide… https://t.co/snJ9CQ4o49— Joseph Robertson (@Joseph Robertson) 1627787011.0
So now we’re suppose to just normalize politicians threatening physical violence on female politicians just because… https://t.co/K5Jro8gh70— TG (@TG) 1627789400.0
Kevin McCarthy joking how it would be "hard not to hit Pelosi" with the gavel is particularly unacceptable, follow… https://t.co/ATcp5SZza3— Marcia (@Marcia) 1627788963.0
@michaelscherer Hey can we not pass off violence as jokes? They came to literally kill her 6 months ago.— 🦯 🦊 Allie 💛🐝 (@🦯 🦊 Allie 💛🐝) 1627782215.0
@michaelscherer She calls him a moron. He retaliates with threats of violence.— Michele Miller (@Michele Miller) 1627782601.0
@michaelscherer Normalizing cruelty and violence is the point.— i know a predator when i see one (@i know a predator when i see one) 1627780310.0
@michaelscherer Another data point for the fact check… https://t.co/mmQiKgX4bf— Kindler (@Kindler) 1627782870.0
@michaelscherer Violence against women is still comic fodder in Tennessee.— Mark Kitterman (@Mark Kitterman) 1627778996.0
@AlyssaFafel @michaelscherer Should be grounds for dismissal— indigoiis (@indigoiis) 1627783053.0
It’s really disgusting that no Republican has the testicular fortitude to condemn Kevin McCarthy’s joke of violent… https://t.co/ynT1tNIqFY— David Weissman (@David Weissman) 1627786296.0
Kevin McCarthy should be censured for threatening violence against Speaker Pelosi. Unacceptable.— MeidasTouch.com (@MeidasTouch.com) 1627787635.0
I am fucking sick of watching the Republican leader in the House shit on cops and threaten Speaker Pelosi. This… https://t.co/BZyVkRkKzo— Adam Parkhomenko (@Adam Parkhomenko) 1627778023.0
Kevin McCarthy threatened Nancy Pelosi. He has no business being in Congress.— Iceberg Meidas Mighty! (@Iceberg Meidas Mighty!) 1627788012.0
CONTINUE READING
Show less
Copyright © 2021 Raw Story Media, Inc. PO Box 21050, Washington, D.C. 20009 | Masthead | Privacy Policy | For corrections or concerns, please email corrections@rawstory.com.
Don't Sit on the Sidelines of History. Join Raw Story Investigates and Go Ad-Free. Support Honest Journalism.
Subscribe Annually
$95 / year — Just $7.91/month
Subscribe Monthly
$1 trial
I want to Support More
$14.99 per month
{{ post.roar_specific_data.api_data.analytics }}