Peter Skurkiss on Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (RINO-Ohio) (with UPDATE)

 

Peter Skurkiss at American Thinker asks whether “anti-Trump RINO Rep. Anthony Gonzalez [can] survive a primary challenge?”  Gonzalez represents Ohio's 16th congressional district, which includes part of Northeast Ohio including Wayne County and parts of Cuyahoga, Medina, Summit, Portage and Stark Counties.  Mr. Skurkiss begins:

You may recall that Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (RINO-Ohio) is one of ten Republican House members who voted to impeach President Trump after he left office on the bogus charge that he had incited the riot in the nation's capital on January 6.  For this, Gonzalez was formally censured in early May by the Ohio Republican Party and asked to resign.

Far from being chastised, Gonzalez continued his vendetta against Trump and by extension MAGA supporters.  He next voted for the Democrat resolution to establish a commission to investigate the January 6 fracas.  Nancy Pelosi, chief proponent of the commission, says the commission will be "independent and bipartisan."  Who in his right mind could believe Pelosi on this?  Was there anything remotely fair or honest in the way Pelosi's House of Representatives held its two Trump impeachment trials? 

In reality, the January 6 commission will function as a red herring designed to advance the Democrat agenda going into the 2022 election.  The commission will be to focus media attention on the false Democrat argument that the events on January 6 constituted an insurrection.  By any objective standard, it did not.  All the ensuing kabuki theatrics will be a replay of the Russian collusion hoax, with the corporate media aggressively pushing the Democrat agenda.  This will be done with the intent to take the spotlight off the mounting failures of the Harris/Biden administration.  And for this, Gonzalez voted "yes."

It is interesting to hear Gonzalez's spurious argument as to why he shouldn't be purged from the Republican Party or primaried.  It's the usual trite blather: we need to be a big tent party; we can't chase voters away; dissent is healthy.  There is some truth in all those sayings, but they miss the point.  Gonzalez conflates his treason to the GOP with legitimate dissent.  Nobody would have thought ill of Benedict Arnold if he had merely disagreed with George Washington on tactics or strategy.  But Arnold went beyond the pale.  He gave aid and comfort to the enemy, just as Anthony Gonzalez has done.  Gonzalez seemingly lacks the wisdom to heed the words of Abraham Lincoln ("a house divide cannot stand") or Jesus (Mark 3:25: "and if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand").

Gonzalez is in survival mode.  He's throwing self-serving excuses around in the hope that some might stick.  Just as likely, he's also auditioning for a lucrative post-political career in the arms of those who first recruited him to come back to Ohio from California to run for office.  Gonzalez is angling to be the poster body purged by the narrow, mean-spirited Republican Party.  His big-money backers will lap that up. 

Skurkiss closes with a comparison to Jane Timken’s candidacy for Portman’s Senate seat in the 2022 election:

As to Gonzalez's vote to impeach President Trump, Timken was initially soft on Gonzalez.  . . .  But now that [Josh] Mandel, a MAGA man, has sharply criticized Timken for supporting Gonzalez, she has abruptly changed her tune.  She now is reported to favor Gonzalez out of office.  Some profile in courage that Timken is.  . . .

Anthony Gonzalez and Jane Timken typify all that is wrong with the established Republican Party.  The sooner they and their ilk are driven from power, the stronger and better the party will be.  To be a big tent party does not require that back-stabbers be tolerated.

That’s most of Mr. Skurkiss’s article, but click here for the entire article.

Update from David M. Drucker at the Washington Examiner:

Republican Max Miller is poised to ride an endorsement from Donald Trump to victory over Rep. Anthony Gonzalez in a GOP primary in Ohio, a contest unfolding as a clear test of the former president’s influence with grassroots conservatives.

Miller, a 32-year-old former Trump White House aide, was endorsed by the former president soon after announcing for the Cleveland-area 16th Congressional District. Trump was intent on getting revenge on Gonzalez, a second-term congressman among the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach him in the waning days of his administration for allegedly inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Trump’s swift endorsement of Miller has, so far, kept other Republicans who might want to challenge Gonzalez, 36, out of the race. Party insiders are skeptical that will change, setting up a one-on-one contest between pro-Trump and anti-Trump candidates on track to reveal how much punch the former president has in GOP primaries post-White House.

More here.

# # #

 

Delingpole: A Few Things We Could Happily Live Without in 2020…

Who better than James Delingpole at Breitbart to ring in the New Year with a different twist and a healthy dose of political incorrectness:

Happy New Year! Here’s a few things the public sphere could probably survive without by this time in 2020…

Greta Thunberg.  Every time you thought that the cult of St Greta could not get any more insane, reality said: “Hold my beer.” After being feted across the world by everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger to the Pope, hailed by Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood as the new Joan of Arc, St Greta achieved full apotheosis at year-end when a Swedish pastor described her as the successor of ‘Jesus of Nazareth’.

How sad it will be in 2020 when the world wakes up to the fact that this teenage school drop-out is nothing but a puppet for green crony capitalists in her native Sweden, who have choreographed every stage of her progression from ‘lonely schoolgirl protesting against climate inaction’ to Nobel-Prize-nominated superstar. No one likes being taken for a fool – and Greta the Puppet has fooled almost everyone.

Mr. Delingpole’s other please-go-away nominees:

• Princess Meghan  (I’m sorry America, but you’re going to have to take Meghan Markle back.) . . . 
• Never Trumpers
• . . .
• Bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes
• . . .
• Excuses for Muslim terrorism
• Sir Elton John
• George Soros
• Care Bear Commies  (Expensively educated kids from the most prosperous generation in history confidently assuring us that ‘the only problem with communism is that it has never been tried properly yet.’) . . .

. . . and more. . .

Read his New Year’s article here.

And Happy New Year!

# # #

"a frenzy of primal extremism"

Conrad Black’s take on President Trump and the potential historical impact of his policies is encouraging. Black concludes:  

Donald Trump’s greatest achievement may be the total annihilation of the Democratic Party in its present mutated and degraded form. The Democrats have been allowed to slither to their present state of moral degradation with the witless and spineless collaboration of look-alike Republicans who are easy to defeat, like McCain and Romney, or can be survived, like Reagan and the Bushes, or destroyed, like Nixon.

Faced with a Trump they could not defeat and cannot destroy, Democrats appear to be entering a frenzy of primal extremism. If the Democrats go to the voters next year as the party of infanticide, open borders, a 70 percent top personal income tax rate, and the practical abolition of private health care, they will vanish more quickly, and with less distinction, than the Whigs, who at least had serious leaders like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln before their party imploded. This thronging riff-raff of Democratic presidential aspirants couldn’t lead the country across Washington’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, and won’t get an invitation to try.

The full article at American Greatness is here.

# # #

That’s our Governor

A.F. Branco cartoons at Legal Insurrection

The blog Freedom’s Lighthouse posted a video on ABC News of our Governor earlier this week, along with these comments:

Oh my goodness. Here is John Kasich over the weekend saying he is “very seriously” considering running for President in 2020.

Kasich only won one state – his home state of Ohio – during the 2016 GOP Presidential Primaries against Donald Trump.

He then refused to support Trump in the General Election against Hillary Clinton and would not even attend the Republican National Convention held in his own state of Ohio. Totally despicable. But Trump won Ohio anyway!

Kasich here floats the possibility of running as a Third Party Candidate – essentially to be a spoiler, just to keep Trump from winning. He is a NeverTrumper and he would clearly rather see a radical Leftist Democrat win that see Trump get re-elected. What a buffoon.

Yup.

# # #

Priorities in the Age of Trump

one version of Donald Derangement Syndrome

James Delingpole at Breitbart published an article, “Trump Derangement Syndrome Is Making Conservatives Lazy, Cowardly and Stupid”. He’s sorting through Never Trumpers, conservatives, and semi-conservatives. He concludes:

Let’s get this straight. We – at least the vast majority of us – on the side of the argument that Donald Trump is currently representing believe in stuff like: national borders, free speech, protecting citizens’ interests, equality of opportunity, lower taxes, smaller government, democratic accountability, the family, personal responsibility, rising standards of living, property rights, the rule of law, checks and balances, the Constitution, liberty. There is nothing in any of this we should feel awkward or guilty about. It does not make us Nazis. Or even semi-Nazis. Or alt-right. Or any of the other pejorative terms which – according to our opponents – make it wholly acceptable to punch the teeth out of anyone in a MAGA baseball cap.

Trump Derangement Syndrome has caused some conservatives – not all of us, thankfully – to lose sight of why it is that we fight.

We fight because we’re right. And yes – as Trump is one of the few conservative presidents to get – it really is that simple.

I am posting and linking since I expect it will resonate with most Cleveland Tea Party members. Full article is here.

# # #

Dreamers Amnesty

image credit: zazzle

Old news: Speaker Paul Ryan is pro-Amnesty. Yesterday, he had this to say:

House Speaker Paul Ryan said Wednesday that it was “not in our nation’s interest” to expel the roughly 800,000 young people protected from deportation by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

William A. Jacobson has more on DACA / Dreamer amnesty at Legal Insurrection:

Trump is on the verge of turning a temporary Obama policy deferring enforcement against people here illegally into a full-blown amnesty, which may even go beyond people brought here as children.

Amnesty is the issue on which to oppose Trump, particularly if you support Trump generally. It will kill his presidency, something Schumer and Pelosi correctly diagnosed. Democrats want amnesty for all illegal immigrants and open borders, they’ll take 800,000 as the way to open the door. And they’ll use even the slightest sellout to seek to separate Trump from the people who elected him so as to defeat him on other issues.

Amnesty is the gateway drug to a failed Trump presidency.

NeverTrump Republican are particularly ecstatic on social media today. They want nothing more than for Trump to fail so they can proclaim “I told you so.” They thrive on being out of power. Schumer and Pelosi are NeverTrump Republicans’ best friends right now.

When Trump was elected, my reaction was that there was great opportunity, and I’d support him when his policies were good, and oppose bad policies. Amnesty is a bad policy. It goes to something more than the rule of law, it goes to whether we have a country.

Particularly if you support Trump and want his positive policies to succeed, you need to oppose an amnesty sellout.

NumbersUSA has posted several Action Alerts over the past few days. One recommended action is to let Speaker Paul Ryan know where you stand on DACA (Dreamers) amnesty:

We're hearing from a number of NumbersUSA activists that Speaker Ryan's voicemail is full. You can also contact his office by filling out the contact form on his website:

http://www.speaker.gov/contact

An accessible background essay on the case against Dreamer amnesty is on the American Thinker blog here. 

# # #

Conrad Black: Choose Sides in This Civil War

image credit: tothedeathmedia

Conrad Black has a sobering if scary take on the minefields and treachery that President Trump has to deal with every day. Here are a couple of paragraphs (and considering the “Never Trump” bias of National Review, I am somewhat surprised that NR published the piece in the first place):

Trump opponents need to understand what the alternative is. The battle lines have been so sharply drawn, in what is now a bloodless civil war for direction of U.S. public policy, that the two sides cannot really communicate with each other. There is a commendable candor in Kellyanne Conway’s statement: “They hate us and we hate them.” . . .

. . .  There is now unfolding what must be the last civilized debate about the trajectory of events in Washington before the civil war moves from the heavy and frequent skirmishing that has intensified since the election to the fight to the death that seems inevitably to impend. The president said in a powerful address to a very enthusiastic audience in West Virginia last week, where he received the grace of conversion to the Republican party of the formerly Democratic governor, Jim Justice, that the entire special-counsel investigation into relations between the Russian government and the Trump campaign is “a total fabrication” and “an attempt to [reverse] one of the greatest political defeats in American history.” So it is.

. . .

Whether [Robert] Mueller conducts himself professionally or not, there is no excuse for a special counsel to have been appointed, and the president was (as he need not have mentioned publicly) badly let down by Sessions. The scramble of nominal Republicans such as Lindsey Graham, and drooling partisan Democrats such as Chris Coons, to pass redundant, grandstanding legislation to protect Sessions and Mueller is nauseating. Trump ran against and defeated both parties, the Clintons, the Bushes, and Obama, and most of their close collaborators in the Congress. The war continues and until the president has enough economic progress, or enough time without gaffes that the hostile media can amplify into a wall of noise, or a sudden foreign-policy success such as with North Korea or even Venezuela, if he wants to start moving the needle of the polls upwards, he will face the problem of cowardice and lethargy in his own party. Senator McConnell’s statement in Kentucky this week that Trump was responsible for the almost total failure of the Republican Congress to achieve anything in the past six months was just more self-serving claptrap from a familiar and very tiresome source. . . .

. . .

This is a civil war and the apostate conservatives should realize that, if Trump loses, they don’t get a new Reaganism in the Republican party and renewed importance and self-importance for themselves; they get the semi-permanent return of those responsible for the decline of America, the sleazy transformation of America into an ineffectual force in the world and into an inert, economically stagnant welfare state. The choice, for sane conservatives, is Trump or national disaster. . ..

Read the whole thing here.

# # #

The election and Conservative values

image credit: moviehole

...and Tea Party values

A blogger called The Z Man offers some thoughts about what’s going on with this election (h/t Bookworm):

A theme here over the years has been the fact that the Conservative Movement has managed to conserve nothing. The reason they are in a crisis is the same reason a losing ball coach finds himself in jeopardy. People will tolerate only so much losing. A salesman, who cannot close deals, gets fired, even if he is the nicest guy in the world. What’s happening today is Official Conservatism™ is being fired.

. . .

Official Conservatism™ hates Donald Trump and they hate the people voting for him. That’s been a bit of an eye-opener for people. When [Fox News’ Brit] Hume detailed Trump’s deviationism, he was dismissive and condescending. He then had that gold plated phony George Will come in and dismiss Trump and the people supporting him as knaves and fools. The segment was ostensibly about Official Conservatism™, but it was really just an excuse for the two of them to bash Trump. 

. . .

there’s the creeping realization that their brand of conservatism is all hat and no cattle. Their moral preening and appeals to as yet undefined principles are just postures. 

Read the rest here. And VOTE.