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.

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When cultures collapse

 

image credit: saturdayeveningpost.com

Walter E. Williams sums it up:

A society's first line of defense is not the law or the criminal justice system but customs, traditions and moral values. These behavioral norms, mostly imparted by example, word-of-mouth and religious teachings, represent a body of wisdom distilled over the ages through experience and trial and error. Police and laws can never replace these restraints on personal conduct. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. Today's true tragedy is that most people think what we see today has always been so. As such, today's Americans accept behavior that our parents and grandparents never would have accepted.

Williams considers gun violence, popular music, unwed mothers, manners, and more. His article “Things Haven’t Always Been This Way” is at Townhall here. RELATED: Peter Skurkiss at American Thinker is unhappy about the degradation of public school dress codes in Texas. Not encouraging.

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Voter fraud update

image credit:thedailysheeple.com

It's better than stuffing the ballot box. Investors Business Daily picked up the report:

Voter Fraud: When President Donald Trump brought up the idea that non-citizens were casting ballots in elections, the reaction was fast and furious. Such a thing, if it exists at all, is exceedingly rare, we were told. But when one state decided to take a close look, it found something quite different.

After a yearlong voter-fraud probe, Texas discovered that, lo and behold, 95,000 people identified as non-citizens had voter registrations. What's more, 58,000 of them voted in one or more Texas elections.

When Attorney General Ken Paxton led the state's investigation, he noted that Texas had already found 165 non-citizens in four counties who had cast 100 illegal votes in two years.

But wait. Isn't all this stuff about non-citizens voting a load of bull? When Trump appointed a voter-fraud commission in 2017, Democrats and the press howled in protest.

Sure, Trump almost certainly exaggerated the number of non-citizen voters. But in response, Time magazine declared that we "know that ineligible non-citizens do not vote in American elections." Vox.com, the "explanatory" news site, derided Trump as "indulging the long-standing myth of the non-citizen voter." Harvard researchers said that there is "no evidence" that non-citizens vote.

Less than a year after he put it together, Trump disbanded his commission, not because it didn't find anything, but because it faced a fusillade of lawsuits and stonewalling from state election officials.

More here. What about Ohio? Eric Eggers at Breitbart reported on the most recent election cycles:

Republican Troy Balderson clings to a narrow margin in last night’s special election for Ohio’s 12th Congressional district, underscoring the impact voter fraud can have in key elections around the country.

The separation of 1700 votes, or less than one percent, highlights the recent attempt by Democratic activists to fight efforts to prevent voter fraud from occurring.

For the past four years, George Soros has spent millions of dollars trying to weaken Ohio’s election security by funding efforts to both block its implementation of Voter ID and prevent the state from removing inaccurate registrations.

Soros pledged $5 million to fund Clinton campaign attorney Marc Elias’s efforts to fight voter ID laws in Ohio and two other states ahead of the 2016 election. 

. . .

Consider that 170 registered voters listed as being over 116 years old still existed on the rolls of Ohio’s 12th Congressional when GAI accessed the data last August. That’s 10 percent of Balderson’s current margin of victory, pending provisional ballots. And 72 voters over the age of 116 who “live” in Balderson’s district cast ballots in the 2016 election.

But the Left hasn’t given up trying to create conditions favorable for voter fraud in Ohio. As former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell has pointed out, “hyper-partisan liberals…have their eyes on Ohio.” Electing a Democrat as the state’s top elections official would undoubtedly roll back the hard-won safeguards Ohio has implemented. And as Blackwell points out, as goes Ohio, so goes the Presidency.

And it does not look good. Just two days ago, Peter Skurkiss at American Thinker reported:

Ben Stein, a once on-again, off-again conservative, now associates himself with a left-wing advocacy group called Policy Matters Ohio as a "staff associate."  Stein's affiliation with this non-profit came to light when he recently authored an opinion piece in the Akron Beacon Journal titled "Make it automatic for the people." 

Make what automatic?

Why, make voter registration automatic.  As if voting laws and policies haven't been weakened enough, there is now a drive across the country to make voter registration automatic.  It goes under the name Automatic Voter Registration (AVR), and 15 states have already enacted it in one form or another.

AVR works basically like this.  When a person has an interaction with a state government agency (say, Department of Motor Vehicle or a welfare agency), the data he gives will automatically be transferred to the Election Board.  And – presto – that person is registered to vote, unless choosing to opt out.  

Stein is disingenuous when he says AVR would screen out those ineligible to vote, such as non-citizens.  The fact is, there's no reliable way to ensure that all registrants are citizens.  

Read the rest here.

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