In a column for the Bulwark, conservative Mona Charen criticized an attempt by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) to clean up her image and lay blame for her conspiracy-laden rantings on being fooled by what she read on "the internet."
In the piece where the longtime columnist not too subtly suggested the controversial lawmaker has a "roiling stew of garbage between her ears," Charen said mainstream Republicans shouldn't buy her sudden conversion on the road to power at the side of newly-elected Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).
As the columnist pointed out, Taylor Greene has parted ways with her former comrades-in-arms against the GOP establishment, Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL) in the battle for the House speakership that spread out over 4 days and fifteen ballots.
Fresh off McCarthy's victory she appeared on Fox News with host Howard Kurtz on Sunday where he gave her an opportunity to explain her history of inflammatory comments, to which she replied, "Like a lot of people today, I had easily gotten sucked into some things I had seen on the internet. But that was dealt with quickly early on. I never campaigned on those things. That was not something I believed in. That’s not what I ran for Congress on. So those are so far in the past."
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Charen isn't buying it and sarcastically wrote, "The bad internet sucked her in and forced her to believe that Obama was a secret Muslim; that the Parkland shooting and the Sandy Hook murders and the Las Vegas massacre were all false flag operations; that Bill and Hillary Clinton had a hand in killing John F. Kennedy, Jr; that 9/11 was an inside job; that a California wildfire was caused by lasers “beamed from space and controlled by a prominent Jewish banking family with connections to powerful Democrats;” and that Hillary Clinton had murdered a child in order to use her blood for a satanic ritual."
As the columnist noted some of those claims that were "so far in the past" were in 2018.
Dismissing Taylor Greene's portrayal of herself a "model citizen" since then, the columnist noted the Georgia Republican's dalliance with white nationalist Nick Fuentes when she spoke at one of his conferences and her continuing defense of the rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6.
Add to that, she pointed out, it was just December 22 of last year when the lawmaker told a crowd the Jan. 6 insurrection would have had a different ending when she boasted: "We would have won. Not to mention, it would have been armed.”
"Greene’s makeover didn’t start this week. She’s made stabs at resets before, even traveling to the Holocaust museum to introduce a few facts into the roiling stew of garbage between her ears. She denounced Nick Fuentes after Trump dined with him (but not Trump), and acknowledged that a plane really did hit the Pentagon on 9/11. She has sparred with Lauren Boebert, the pillow guy, and Alex Jones’s fans. But this is not a case of a politician who misspeaks or commits a gaffe and must make amends," the columnist wrote.
She added, "She has a disordered personality. As a grown adult, she chased a teenager who had survived the Parkland school shooting down the street, harassing and berating him. She is drawn to hatred as a moth to a flame. She is the poison that courses through the veins of parts of the right—the vicious, reality-challenged right," before warning, "If she is to be normalized by the GOP, it is the party, not she, that is changed."
You can read her whole piece here.
