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A failed GOP 'victory party' in Arizona reveals another reason why there was no 'red wave' [1]
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Date: 2022-11-11
As reported by Dana Milbank in his column for the Washington Post, as the “wave” failed to materialize, the event’s planners soon turned off Fox News’ election coverage (which is, of course, the only coverage that the guests would watch) and substituted music. Whatever that music was, however, was soon drowned out by those who, one by one, took their turn at the stage microphone.
As Milbank reports, the tone was set from the beginning:
They eschewed basic decency. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is “losing the gavel but finding the hammer,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) told the crowd, joking about the attack on Pelosi’s husband that left him with a fractured skull — just as GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake did a week earlier. The crowd laughed. [***] They hurled insults every which way. “Merrick Garland needs some new pantyhose.” “Beto [O’Rourke] is a furry.” Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) is a “little man” whose “ears don’t match.” President Biden is a “lost child” with a “very dirty diaper.” Democrats are “lunatics.” [***] At a time that typically calls for magnanimity and reconciliation, they instead cried out for vengeance. When Anthony Fauci’s name was invoked, they chanted “Lock him up!” They vowed to be a “nightmare to Joe Biden” and to impeach his aides. “Sorry libs,” sneered the emcee. “Sucks to suck.”
As Milbank reports, state party Chair Kelli Ward declared, without a trace of irony, that her fellow Republicans had “remade the party in our image.” Even as beleaguered election workers in Maricopa county performed the tedious task of counting all the votes, they were slammed with insults accusing them of fraud and criminality.
Then Kari Lake, the former anchorwoman and newly rising Republican star, chimed in with her own nasty invective:
A few minutes after 10 p.m. local time, Kari Lake took the stage with a fresh stream of invective: “Corruption.” “Cheaters and crooks.” “BS and garbage.” “Incompetent people running the show in Arizona.” “Propagandists.” “Fake media.” “Incompetency.”
As Milbank observes, “It was an appropriately ugly end to this grotesque campaign, just one last attempt to generate disgust — not just toward Democrats but toward the democratic process.”
This kind of rhetoric from Republicans has been the salient feature of the entire 2022 election. Inspired by Trump’s lies about nonexistent election fraud, and by Fox News’ continuous demonization of all things Democratic, it’s understandable why Republicans would think it might be effective, no matter how ugly or dangerous it became. But as it turned out, the voters did not direct their disgust at Democrats. Rather, they directed their disgust towards the GOP, in the clearest way imaginable. And although Milbank doesn’t mention this, the most pathetic aspect of this display was the fact that every single one of those speakers would doubtlessly call him/herself a “Christian.”
It may be the case that the Republicans who spoke at that Resort were simply reflecting the values of their constituents. If so, that suggests some truly awful things about the average Republican voter. But most people still expect at least a modicum of decency in their political leaders. They expect them to model their behavior in such a fashion that reflects their own values. That was why the majority of American voters threw out Donald Trump in 2020, four years after those same voters failed, only because of the Electoral College, to prevent him from becoming president in the first place.
The resistance to Trump was not only a reaction to his policies, but to the nastiness and repulsiveness of his entire persona, his complete lack of empathy, his racism, and his performative cruelty. That same reaction resulted in the election of a Democratic House in 2018 and a Democratic President in 2020. Now it’s resulted in what we’re seeing unfold in the 2022 results, with Republicans outdoing each other in their efforts to be as nasty as possible, and the Democrats winning yet again.
So, if Republicans want to know why they failed so spectacularly, they might first try listening to what comes out of their mouths.
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