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28 January 21
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FOCUS: Bess Levin | Is Marjorie Taylor Greene the Worst Person in Congress? An Investigation
Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
Levin writes: "The United States House of Representatives has always counted its share of horrible people, but the era of Donald Trump obviously upped the 'truly awful with a side of crazier than a sh#thouse mouse' quotient."
There’s stiff competition, but the lawmaker who harassed a school shooting survivor is clearly the one to beat.
Whereas past and present members like New York’s Michael “I’ll throw you off this fucking balcony” Grimm and Wisconsin’s Glenn Grothman, who once put out a press release declaring that “almost no Black people today care about Kwanzaa—just white left-wingers who try to shove this down Black people’s throats in an effort to divide Americans,” used to handily top the charts, today’s competition requires elected officials to wake up a lot earlier in the morning to be crowned the House’s biggest asshole. That competition grew even more fierce on Wednesday, when a video surfaced of newly elected representative Marjorie Taylor Greene harassing a teenage survivor of a school shooting, in which she called him a “coward,” among other insults.
The video, posted by Fred Guttenberg, the father of a slain Parkland student, shows Greene following Parkland survivor David Hogg while he is apparently in D.C. to discuss gun control with lawmakers. In it, Greene suggests that Hogg is using dead children—like the 14 who were killed at his high school—to elicit sympathy. “Why are you using kids as a barrier? Do you not know how to defend your stance?” Greene yells at Hogg, who ignores her. “Look, I’m an American citizen. I’m a gun owner. I have a concealed carry permit. I carry a gun for protection for myself. And you are using your lobby and the money behind it and the kids to try to take away my Second Amendment rights. You don’t have anything to say for yourself? You can’t defend your stance? ... How did you get kids? Why do you use kids? Why kids?” Naturally, she then launches into a monologue about how if there’d been more guns at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, fewer people would have died. “You know, if school zones were protected with security guards with guns, there would be no mass shootings at schools. Do you know that? The best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun,” she says. “But yet you’re attacking our Second Amendment. And you have nothing to say. No words.”
When it becomes clear Hogg isn’t going to dignify her questions with responses, Greene turns toward the camera to conspiratorially wonder how Hogg was able to get meetings with lawmakers when she wasn’t, a truly incredible self-own. “Guess what?” she says. “I’m a gun owner. I’m an American citizen. And I have nothing. But this guy with his George Soros funding and his major liberal funding has got everything.” Then she calls Hogg a “coward” because he won’t respond to the crazy lady who thinks school shootings are inside jobs by Democrats so they can take away her guns. “He’s a coward,” she says. “He can’t say one word because he can’t defend his stance. Because there is no defense for taking away guns. There is no defense for gun confiscation. Zero.”
That wasn’t the only video—originally posted on Greene’s own YouTube page—to resurface on Wednesday. In another, Greene suggests that the 2017 Las Vegas shooting was planned by anti-gun activists who specifically targeted the people at the country music festival because “performing a mass shooting into a crowd that is very likely to be conservative, very likely to vote Republican, very likely to be Trump supporters, very likely to be pro-Second Amendment, and very likely to own guns” helps the anti-gun liberals pass anti-gun legislation by making people scared of mass shootings.
The videos followed a Tuesday report by CNN’s KFile that Greene had liked comments supporting the executions of prominent Democrats and federal agents before she was elected. The congresswoman responded with a statement on Twitter claiming that it must have been someone else using her account who seemingly endorsed executing, among others, Nancy Pelosi, despite the fact that she also gave a speech saying Pelosi was “guilty of treason” and treason was “a crime punishable by death.”
Asked if the White House had any comment about Greene on Wednesday, press secretary Jen Psaki refused to dignify the congresswoman’s insane behavior with a response.
And yet!
Greene’s colleagues are loathe to come down on her too hard, apparently reserving such judgement for…well, actually, it’s not clear what she would have to do at this point to be universally condemned by the GOP, per CNN:
Most House Republicans were silent on Wednesday after CNN’s KFile reported that Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene repeatedly indicated support for executing prominent Democratic politicians in 2018 and 2019 before being elected to Congress.
Greene has a track record of incendiary rhetoric, including past comments using Islamophobic and anti-Semitic tropes. She also has ties to the baseless and thoroughly debunked QAnon conspiracy theory. The CNN KFile report once again puts Republican leaders in a position of deciding how to respond—and so far most are declining to weigh in.
A rare Republican to speak out was Representative Adam Kinzinger, who tweeted, “She is not a Republican. There are many who claim the title of Republican and have nothing in common with our core values. They are RINOS. She is a RINO.” That might be giving Republicans a little too much credit but hey, it’s something!
Trump supporters think impeachment proves Democrats were always out to get him
Rather than that he committed a (second) impeachable offense. Per The New York Times:
For much of the American public and for the historical record, the second impeachment of former president Donald J. Trump represented a blistering censure from a coequal branch of government whose members’ lives had been imperiled days earlier by a mob of his supporters attacking the Capitol. But many of his defenders saw the second impeachment, a first for an American president, as something else: the culmination of years of unfair treatment by a Washington establishment that was always hostile to Mr. Trump and is now trying to end his political career once and for all.
Now, supporters of Mr. Trump whose blood boiled at the first impeachment are galvanized anew by the second, rising to his defense with the familiar refrains they have soaked up for years from conservative talking heads, from social media or from the president himself. Cries of a witch hunt and commands to “stop the steal.” Calling opponents “radical left Democrats” and the media “fake news.” Repeating the campaign slogan of “Keep America Great” as hundreds of thousands died of the coronavirus and the economy tanked.
“If he had done something bad in his presidency that was absolutely horrible, I could see it,” Trump supporter Ashley Klein told The New York Times. “But he was treated very unfairly for a guy who would have made way more money not being president.”
Meanwhile, at Trump’s D.C. hotel…
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