Politics-What's on your mind?

[Orema]

In Capital, a G.O.P. Crisis. At the R.N.C. Meeting, a Trump Celebration.
Party members at a gathering of the Republican National Committee endorsed President Trump as the man to lead the party forward, ignoring the turmoil in Washington.

By Jonathan Martin
Jan. 8, 2021


Ronna McDaniel was re-elected as chair of the Republican National Committee despite the party’s loss of the presidency and the Senate. Credit...Pete Marovich for The New York Times

AMELIA ISLAND, Fla. — In Washington, Republicans were dealing with a burgeoning crisis in their ranks, with high-profile resignations and bitter infighting over how to deal with an erratic and isolated president. But at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting on Friday, most party members were operating in a parallel universe.

In a chandelier-adorned ballroom at the seaside Ritz-Carlton here, there was no mention of President Trump’s disruption of the coronavirus relief package or his phone call to the Georgia secretary of state demanding that he help steal the election, both of which contributed to Republicans’ losing control of the Senate.

And while the R.N.C. chair, Ronna McDaniel, condemned the attack on the Capitol, neither she nor any other speaker so much as publicly hinted at Mr. Trump’s role in inciting a mob assault on America’s seat of government.

Even as the president faces a possible second impeachment proceeding, this collective exercise in gaze aversion was not the most striking part of the meeting. More revealing was the reason for the silence from the stage: Party members, one after another, said in interviews that the president did not bear any blame for the violence at the Capitol and indicated that they wanted him to continue to play a leading role in the party.

“I surely embrace President Trump,” said Michele Fiore, the committeewoman from Nevada, where Republicans have lost two Senate races and the governorship since 2016. Ms. Fiore, who was sporting a Trump-emblazoned vest, said the president was “absolutely” a positive force in the party.

The fealty to Mr. Trump was made plain on Friday when the state chairs and the committeemen and women who make up the R.N.C.’s governing board unanimously re-elected Ms. McDaniel, Mr. Trump’s handpicked chair. They also reappointed her co-chair, Tommy Hicks, who was first appointed to his post because of his friendship with the president’s eldest son.

Mr. Trump is the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over the loss of the White House, the House and the Senate in a single term and will be the first since Andrew Johnson to boycott his successor’s inauguration. That hasn’t yet fazed the Republican rank and file.

“This room, they’re in denial, and that’s on the record,” Bill Palatucci, a committeeman from New Jersey, said during a break in the Friday session, acknowledging the “damage done to the country” and the Republican “brand” this week.

But Mr. Palatucci was a lonely voice of dissent, at least in public.

Privately, a group of Republican officials, mostly those from the pre-Trump establishment wing of the party, said that they were appalled by the president’s conduct and that Ms. McDaniel had been candid about the party’s difficulties behind closed doors.

These Republicans predicted with more hope than confidence that once Mr. Trump was out of office, the ardor for him in the conservative base would cool.

Yet for now, the flames still burn.

“I would love to see him go into states that have some House seats we can flip in ’22,” said Terry Lathan, the Alabama G.OP. chair, who said “absolutely not” when she was asked if Mr. Trump bore any blame for the attack on the Capitol.

When a committee member took an informal survey on whose closed-door speech on Thursday members had liked better, that of Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota or of Nikki R. Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, the response was clear. The party officials preferred Ms. Noem’s, because she had not criticized Mr. Trump as Ms. Haley did in her remarks, a Republican familiar with the sampling said.

Earlier in the day on Thursday, when the president briefly called into a breakfast meeting, he was greeted by applause. And when the Missouri national committeeman, Gordon Kinne, said at the breakfast that he was a supporter of the president but had been upset by his comments about the violence at the Capitol, he was met with a generally frosty response, according to another committee member in the room.

The loyalty to Mr. Trump results in part from the turnover on the committee during his term. The president’s top political lieutenants intervened to install loyalists in state and local G.O.P. conventions ahead of 2020. The goal was to prevent any party rule changes that could have made it easier to mount a primary challenge against Mr. Trump, but the end result was to leave the committee heavy with Trump devotees.

The changes also accelerated a trend that pre-dated Mr. Trump’s rise: the evolution of the committee from a body filled with canny political professionals and power brokers in their states to one dominated by dogmatic partisans well-marinated in Fox News and Facebook memes.

Perhaps more significant, the president has fostered a new wave of activism on the right — and many longstanding G.O.P. leaders fear alienating these newcomers to party politics.

“We can’t exist without the people he brought to the party — he’s changed the direction of the party,” said Paul Reynolds, the Republican committeeman from Alabama. “We’re a different party because of the people that came with him, and they make us a better party.”

Reta Hamilton, a committeewoman from Arkansas, said Mr. Trump should play “a leading part” in the G.O.P. in the future for just that reason — “to bring his voters,” she said.

Ms. Hamilton and other R.N.C. members also sought to rationalize questions about the damage to the Capitol and the images of Trump banners and Confederate flags littering the building.

“What was your reaction to Black Lives Matter looting and robbing and killing people?” she shot back brazenly before walking away.

Steve Scheffler, a committeeman from Iowa, was equally quick to invoke last summer’s at times destructive protests over racial justice and the news media’s coverage of them.

“Why doesn’t the press condemn the violence that happened in Portland and Seattle?” said Mr. Scheffler. “It’s a double standard.”

Asked if he felt there was an equivalence between the left-wing protests of 2020 and the violent attempt to subvert the election this week, he said: “Two wrongs don’t make a right. It’s all bad.”

In her remarks to the committee, Ms. McDaniel, the niece of Senator Mitt Romney, thanked Mr. Trump for his faith in her and never directly acknowledged that Mr. Trump had been defeated, only referring to her frustration at “losing critical elections.”

As for the president’s own denial about his loss, she did not rebut the conspiracy theories he has pushed, and that the party’s base has echoed.

Addressing the Republican “grass roots,” she vowed to work with state legislatures to “make sure what we saw in this election never happens again.”

Ms. McDaniel went on to criticize the effort by House Democrats to withdraw gender-specific words like “wife” and “husband” from the rule book governing the chamber.

The standing ovation she received was a reminder that disdain for the left’s perceived excesses is the most animating, and unifying, force on the right. This brand of oppositional politics could help paper over Republicans’ challenges when they run as the out-of-power party next year.

Indeed, much of Ms. McDaniel’s speech was Republican red meat. There were warnings against socialism, attacks on the four liberal congresswomen known as “the squad” and boasting about the diverse class of lawmakers who helped the party gain House seats in November despite Mr. Trump’s broad unpopularity. “Candidates matter,” she said, alluding to new lawmakers.

David Bossie, one of Mr. Trump’s advisers and the Maryland committeeman, insisted that the party’s losses had been on the margins.

“You don’t have to throw out everybody when there’s nothing fundamentally wrong,” Mr. Bossie said.

A handful of committee members, however, believe more reflection is desperately needed, particularly after this week. “We’re whistling past the graveyard,” said Henry Barbour, the Mississippi committeeman, who called Mr. Trump’s conduct before the riot “totally unacceptable.”

Few of his counterparts, though, would criticize the president.

Asked if Mr. Trump was still the effective leader of the G.O.P., the Wyoming Republican chair, Frank Eathorne, said, “The way Wyoming sees it, yes.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/u...gtype=Homepage

[homoe]

~~
Voss, Chao, Mulvaney, the list goes on and on...

Really, now after 3 years and 50 weeks, you've finally saw what an idiot you've been ass kissing and brown nosing?! OR perhaps just now you're realizing soon you'll be out of a job and are trying to cover your ass!

[GeorgiaMa'am]

Originally Posted by homoe

~~
Voss, Chao, Mulvaney, the list goes on and on...

Really, now after 3 years and 50 weeks, you've finally saw what an idiot you've been ass kissing and brown nosing?! OR perhaps just now you're realizing soon you'll be out of a job and are trying to cover your ass!

Thank goodness some die-hard Republicans are starting to turn their backs on T***p and his legacy, for whatever reason. The RNC is delusional, claiming they want Trump to continue to lead the party, even after everything that culminated in this past week's sh*t storm. I welcome any of them who want to adopt a more centrist, if not Democratic, position. And if any of them truly see the light, well Hallelujah!

[homoe]

WASHINGTON — One of his most important early backers now says supporting him "was the worst mistake I ever made in my life" and a top donor called for him to be censured by the Senate. The largest newspapers in his home state called on him to resign. His publisher canceled its contract with him for an upcoming book. He's been pilloried by both Democrats and Republicans for leading the futile objection effort.

That's just some of the condemnation that's come Sen. Josh Hawley's way since the Missouri Republican became the first senator to announce he would object to the counting of Electoral College votes and then moved forward with his plan even after a pro-President Donald Trump mob had stormed the Capitol on Wednesday.

And a viral photo of Hawley entering the Capitol before the riot, showing the senator in a slim-fitting suit, hair perfectly coiffed and raising his fist toward the gathered crowd, has already become a lasting image of a day that won't soon be forgotten.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/sen-josh-...203731306.html

[homoe]

Freshman lawmaker hit with colleagues’ fury after Hitler comments.

CHICAGO — Rep. Mary Miller served less than a week in Congress before moving Illinois Democrats to call for her resignation after she referenced Adolf Hitler in a speech not long before Donald Trump supporters laid siege to the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.

“She’s been on this earth long enough to know that invoking the beliefs of Hitler as being right in any respect is inappropriate and wrong. It’s wrong enough that she should not be in Congress,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said in an interview.

During a rally for the conservative Moms for America, Miller, an Illinois Republican said conservatives would lose unless "we win the hearts and minds of our children. This is the battle. Hitler was right on one thing. He said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’”

Miller, the wife of Illinois GOP state Rep. Chris Miller, issued a statement Friday saying "I sincerely apologize for any harm my words caused" and she "[regrets] using a reference to one of the most evil dictators in history." But she blasted critics for “intentionally trying to twist my words.” Miller spokesperson Erin O’Malley considered an interview request with the congresswoman Friday but didn’t respond further.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), an Iraq War veteran, said Miller should resign and be replaced with “someone who better understands the sacrifices our brave service members made during World War II.” Illinois' Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who also is Jewish, called Miller’s comment at the rally “disgusting.” And Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, one of the first Republicans to press for Trump's removal from office after Wednesday's riots, called the Hitler comments “garbage.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/0...omments-456596

[homoe]

Originally Posted by homoe

Freshman lawmaker hit with colleagues’ fury after Hitler comments.

CHICAGO — Rep. Mary Miller served less than a week in Congress before moving Illinois Democrats to call for her resignation after she referenced Adolf Hitler in a speech not long before Donald Trump supporters laid siege to the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.

“She’s been on this earth long enough to know that invoking the beliefs of Hitler as being right in any respect is inappropriate and wrong. It’s wrong enough that she should not be in Congress,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said in an interview.

During a rally for the conservative Moms for America, Miller, an Illinois Republican said conservatives would lose unless "we win the hearts and minds of our children. This is the battle. Hitler was right on one thing. He said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’”

Miller, the wife of Illinois GOP state Rep. Chris Miller, issued a statement Friday saying "I sincerely apologize for any harm my words caused" and she "[regrets] using a reference to one of the most evil dictators in history." But she blasted critics for “intentionally trying to twist my words.” Miller spokesperson Erin O’Malley considered an interview request with the congresswoman Friday but didn’t respond further.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), an Iraq War veteran, said Miller should resign and be replaced with “someone who better understands the sacrifices our brave service members made during World War II.” Illinois' Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who also is Jewish, called Miller’s comment at the rally “disgusting.” And Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, one of the first Republicans to press for Trump's removal from office after Wednesday's riots, called the Hitler comments “garbage.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/0...omments-456596

Even if Miller doesn't resign, she may be forced out of Congress anyway after the redistricting process fires up later this year.

Illinois is expected to lose one of its 18 congressional seats in the upcoming redistricting process as the state’s population has fallen relative to others. And there's a good chance the remap doesn't bode well for Miller: She lacks seniority against GOP Reps. Rodney Davis and Mike Bost for conservative seats. Now her words have further alienated the state's power structure, where Democrats control both houses of the Illinois Legislature and the governor's office.

[~ocean]

" Donny Dolly Hands " has blood on his hands ~ he is now the new 2020 "Chucky Dolly Hands "

[Cin]

Originally Posted by Orema

In Capital, a G.O.P. Crisis. At the R.N.C. Meeting, a Trump Celebration.
Party members at a gathering of the Republican National Committee endorsed President Trump as the man to lead the party forward, ignoring the turmoil in Washington.

By Jonathan Martin
Jan. 8, 2021


Ronna McDaniel was re-elected as chair of the Republican National Committee despite the party’s loss of the presidency and the Senate. Credit...Pete Marovich for The New York Times

AMELIA ISLAND, Fla. — In Washington, Republicans were dealing with a burgeoning crisis in their ranks, with high-profile resignations and bitter infighting over how to deal with an erratic and isolated president. But at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting on Friday, most party members were operating in a parallel universe.

In a chandelier-adorned ballroom at the seaside Ritz-Carlton here, there was no mention of President Trump’s disruption of the coronavirus relief package or his phone call to the Georgia secretary of state demanding that he help steal the election, both of which contributed to Republicans’ losing control of the Senate.

And while the R.N.C. chair, Ronna McDaniel, condemned the attack on the Capitol, neither she nor any other speaker so much as publicly hinted at Mr. Trump’s role in inciting a mob assault on America’s seat of government.

Even as the president faces a possible second impeachment proceeding, this collective exercise in gaze aversion was not the most striking part of the meeting. More revealing was the reason for the silence from the stage: Party members, one after another, said in interviews that the president did not bear any blame for the violence at the Capitol and indicated that they wanted him to continue to play a leading role in the party.

“I surely embrace President Trump,” said Michele Fiore, the committeewoman from Nevada, where Republicans have lost two Senate races and the governorship since 2016. Ms. Fiore, who was sporting a Trump-emblazoned vest, said the president was “absolutely” a positive force in the party.

The fealty to Mr. Trump was made plain on Friday when the state chairs and the committeemen and women who make up the R.N.C.’s governing board unanimously re-elected Ms. McDaniel, Mr. Trump’s handpicked chair. They also reappointed her co-chair, Tommy Hicks, who was first appointed to his post because of his friendship with the president’s eldest son.

Mr. Trump is the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over the loss of the White House, the House and the Senate in a single term and will be the first since Andrew Johnson to boycott his successor’s inauguration. That hasn’t yet fazed the Republican rank and file.

“This room, they’re in denial, and that’s on the record,” Bill Palatucci, a committeeman from New Jersey, said during a break in the Friday session, acknowledging the “damage done to the country” and the Republican “brand” this week.

But Mr. Palatucci was a lonely voice of dissent, at least in public.

Privately, a group of Republican officials, mostly those from the pre-Trump establishment wing of the party, said that they were appalled by the president’s conduct and that Ms. McDaniel had been candid about the party’s difficulties behind closed doors.

These Republicans predicted with more hope than confidence that once Mr. Trump was out of office, the ardor for him in the conservative base would cool.

Yet for now, the flames still burn.

“I would love to see him go into states that have some House seats we can flip in ’22,” said Terry Lathan, the Alabama G.OP. chair, who said “absolutely not” when she was asked if Mr. Trump bore any blame for the attack on the Capitol.

When a committee member took an informal survey on whose closed-door speech on Thursday members had liked better, that of Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota or of Nikki R. Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, the response was clear. The party officials preferred Ms. Noem’s, because she had not criticized Mr. Trump as Ms. Haley did in her remarks, a Republican familiar with the sampling said.

Earlier in the day on Thursday, when the president briefly called into a breakfast meeting, he was greeted by applause. And when the Missouri national committeeman, Gordon Kinne, said at the breakfast that he was a supporter of the president but had been upset by his comments about the violence at the Capitol, he was met with a generally frosty response, according to another committee member in the room.

The loyalty to Mr. Trump results in part from the turnover on the committee during his term. The president’s top political lieutenants intervened to install loyalists in state and local G.O.P. conventions ahead of 2020. The goal was to prevent any party rule changes that could have made it easier to mount a primary challenge against Mr. Trump, but the end result was to leave the committee heavy with Trump devotees.

The changes also accelerated a trend that pre-dated Mr. Trump’s rise: the evolution of the committee from a body filled with canny political professionals and power brokers in their states to one dominated by dogmatic partisans well-marinated in Fox News and Facebook memes.

Perhaps more significant, the president has fostered a new wave of activism on the right — and many longstanding G.O.P. leaders fear alienating these newcomers to party politics.

“We can’t exist without the people he brought to the party — he’s changed the direction of the party,” said Paul Reynolds, the Republican committeeman from Alabama. “We’re a different party because of the people that came with him, and they make us a better party.”

Reta Hamilton, a committeewoman from Arkansas, said Mr. Trump should play “a leading part” in the G.O.P. in the future for just that reason — “to bring his voters,” she said.

Ms. Hamilton and other R.N.C. members also sought to rationalize questions about the damage to the Capitol and the images of Trump banners and Confederate flags littering the building.

“What was your reaction to Black Lives Matter looting and robbing and killing people?” she shot back brazenly before walking away.

Steve Scheffler, a committeeman from Iowa, was equally quick to invoke last summer’s at times destructive protests over racial justice and the news media’s coverage of them.

“Why doesn’t the press condemn the violence that happened in Portland and Seattle?” said Mr. Scheffler. “It’s a double standard.”

Asked if he felt there was an equivalence between the left-wing protests of 2020 and the violent attempt to subvert the election this week, he said: “Two wrongs don’t make a right. It’s all bad.”

In her remarks to the committee, Ms. McDaniel, the niece of Senator Mitt Romney, thanked Mr. Trump for his faith in her and never directly acknowledged that Mr. Trump had been defeated, only referring to her frustration at “losing critical elections.”

As for the president’s own denial about his loss, she did not rebut the conspiracy theories he has pushed, and that the party’s base has echoed.

Addressing the Republican “grass roots,” she vowed to work with state legislatures to “make sure what we saw in this election never happens again.”

Ms. McDaniel went on to criticize the effort by House Democrats to withdraw gender-specific words like “wife” and “husband” from the rule book governing the chamber.

The standing ovation she received was a reminder that disdain for the left’s perceived excesses is the most animating, and unifying, force on the right. This brand of oppositional politics could help paper over Republicans’ challenges when they run as the out-of-power party next year.

Indeed, much of Ms. McDaniel’s speech was Republican red meat. There were warnings against socialism, attacks on the four liberal congresswomen known as “the squad” and boasting about the diverse class of lawmakers who helped the party gain House seats in November despite Mr. Trump’s broad unpopularity. “Candidates matter,” she said, alluding to new lawmakers.

David Bossie, one of Mr. Trump’s advisers and the Maryland committeeman, insisted that the party’s losses had been on the margins.

“You don’t have to throw out everybody when there’s nothing fundamentally wrong,” Mr. Bossie said.

A handful of committee members, however, believe more reflection is desperately needed, particularly after this week. “We’re whistling past the graveyard,” said Henry Barbour, the Mississippi committeeman, who called Mr. Trump’s conduct before the riot “totally unacceptable.”

Few of his counterparts, though, would criticize the president.

Asked if Mr. Trump was still the effective leader of the G.O.P., the Wyoming Republican chair, Frank Eathorne, said, “The way Wyoming sees it, yes.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/u...gtype=Homepage

This is quite disturbing. Although I don't know why I'm surprised. This is the Republican Party. This is who they are.

Apparently they are not at all concerned that Trump will be impeached.

All the clutching of pearls by members of the GOP, it's all for show. I guess there will be no price to pay for all the elected officials of the Republican party who participated in this attack on the Capitol or publically supported the riot.

This is all too disheartening. People don't change their minds. People believe what they believe at their core. We all think the other would change their minds if they just understood the truth. The line between fact and fiction has been so blurred that truth is considered a matter of opinion.

[Orema]

Originally Posted by Cin

This is quite disturbing. Although I don't know why I'm surprised. This is the Republican Party. This is who they are.

Apparently they are not at all concerned that Trump will be impeached.

All the clutching of pearls by members of the GOP, it's all for show. I guess there will be no price to pay for all the elected officials of the Republican party who participated in this attack on the Capitol or publically supported the riot.

This is all too disheartening. People don't change their minds. People believe what they believe at their core. We all think the other would change their minds if they just understood the truth. The line between fact and fiction has been so blurred that truth is considered a matter of opinion.

Exactly............

[Cin]

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”
― Winston S. Churchill
That was then and this is now.
Now they change lies for truth and truth for lies and they don't hurry off, they stand there smug and content with what they have accomplished. No need to fear the truth today. One can wiggle out of any inconvenient truth.

Apparently the formula for turning lies into truth is to simply share the lie with like minded folk and repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat.

Before this over it will be Antifa who stormed the Capitol to make these poor, good hearted, special, god fearing patriots look bad.

https://www.politifact.com/article/2...l-rumor-sprea/