'What the hell is wrong with these people?': Conservative batters the GOP response to Pelosi beating

In a blunt column for the Bulwark, longtime conservative writer Mona Charen dropped the hammer on Republicans for their tone-deaf response to the ugly assault inflicted on Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and claimed that even moderate GOPer's failed miserably when addressing it.

While high-profile conservatives like Don Trump Jr., Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Arizona governor candidate Kari Lake have garnered the most attention for their jokes and comments about the savage hammer beating of the 82-year-old Pelosi, other Republicans have stepped in it with their "what about" approach to the attack.

In her column, Charen focused on Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin for his joke about the hammer attack and New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu -- both of whom have gone to great pains to portray themselves as moderates not in the Donald Trump mold as they jockey for a run at the 2024 GOP presidential nominations.

On the matter of Youngkin, who joked about sending Nancy Pelosi back to San Francisco to be with her hospitalized husband, Charen called his comments "crass and cruel," and wrote that "Youngkin was widely viewed as the ticket out of Trumpism for many 'regular' Republicans. He was not a human blow torch like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Doug Mastriano. He was the sort you could bring home to your mother."

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Charen then alleged that: "even the 'normal' Republicans are, if not trolls themselves, troll adjacent."

She then turned to Sununu who said on Meet the Press, "Well, look, you can go back to the beginning. This started back in the summer of 2020, right, when you saw cities burning, you saw not a whole lot of accountability there," and later added, "What has happened to Steve Scalise, that was years before 2020, the threats on Justice Kavanaugh—so—Gabby Giffords. I mean, there doesn’t seem to be an end to this. It’s on both sides of the aisle."

According to Charen, "Democrats have not fetishized guns and violence as the GOP has. They have not elevated to hero status a young man, Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot his way into a protest, killing a man; nor featured gun brandishing suburbanites at their national convention; nor filled their commercials and even their Christmas cards with images of themselves bedecked with weaponry."

She then added, "So Sununu’s bothsidesism breaks down."

"What the hell is wrong with these people? Where has their sense of ordinary decency gone?" she wrote. "All of this is a garden party compared with the bilge (thank you Charlie Sykes) released into the atmosphere by Donald Trump Jr. Repeating a rumor from the fever swamps (which rumor was later retweeted by the new chief Twit), he displayed a picture of men’s underwear and a hammer, saying 'Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.'"

Charen then concluded, "It’s beginning to look like Republicans go along with Trumpism not because they feel they must, but because they’ve really come to embody it."

You can read more here.