Republicans ‘deserve the blame’: Columnist roasts the GOP — and demands accountability

The Republican Party is "a clear and present danger" to America and receives all of the hatred it is receiving, Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. argued on Friday.

Pitts was responding to criticism that he "exclusively" and "only" blame Republicans.

"Well, there’s a reason the Republicans get the blame for destroying any sense of common American narrative. It’s because — pay close attention here — they deserve the blame for destroying any sense of common American narrative," he wrote. "The Republican Party did it by a campaign of demonizing dissent, shredding norms and boundaries, embracing a politics of white resentment and fear and, perhaps most corrosively, delegitimizing the very idea of knowable fact, so that an ordinary birth certificate becomes an object of suspicion, an ordinary election a seedbed of distrust and the sacking of the U.S. Capitol an innocent visit by tourists."

Pitts noted estrangement from the party from conservative voices including former standard bearer Mitt Romney (R-UT), Reps. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) and Liz Cheney (R-WY), along with columnists George Will, Kathleen Parker, and Jonah Goldberg.

"You cannot fix what you will not face. And what America needs to face is the simple, chilling fact that the Republican Party is a clear and present danger. Confronting that does not make you a partisan. It makes you a patriot," he argued.

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