Let's get something straight. Marjorie Taylor Greene was not booted from the Education and Budget Committees because she had a bad hair day. She was stripped of those assignments because she posed a threat to her fellow colleagues. It matters not whether the threats came before or after she was sworn in as a member of the House of Representatives.
For Republicans to suggest there is a moral equivalence with respect to Ilhan Omar's admittedly anti-Semitic comments is absurd. In the first place, Omar apologized for her words; Greene not only spent twenty minutes on the House floor rationalizing and deflecting from her conduct, she used the opportunity to fundraise on Twitter off of it. Secondly, and more importantly, what Omar did pales in comparison to what Greene did.
Seriously, show me the Democrat who called for a bullet to be put in the head of Nancy Pelosi; show me the Democrat who said the Parkland school shooting was a false flag; show me the Democrat who claimed there was no evidence that a plane struck the Pentagon on 9/11; show me the Democrat who believes Jewish space lasers are to blame for the wildfires in California; show me the Democrat whose insistence that the election was stolen encouraged the kind of assault we saw take place at the Capitol on January 6. Go ahead, show me. I'll wait.
Found any yet? Didn't think so. Know what? There aren't any. And Kevin McCarthy knows it. He and his band of spineless jellyfish know all too well who and what Greene is but they didn't have the courage to stand up to her. So it was left to the Democrats, along with eleven brave Republicans, to do it for them.
But, alas, they were able to find the courage to finally stand up to someone. Liz Cheney, one of the most prominently conservative members of the Republican conference, was forced to endure a procedural vote to determine whether she could retain her leadership position over her decision to impeach Donald Trump. FYI, she survived, though likely only because it was a secret ballot. Had the vote been public, Cheney might very well have been stripped of her leadership post.
Let that sink in for a moment: A conspiracy theorist gets a standing ovation - yep, you heard right, a standing ovation - while a genuine conservative with enough integrity to vote her conscience is humiliated in private. If that's what McCarthy calls a big tent, I shutter to think what's underneath it.
Behold, the GOP, formerly the party of Lincoln and now the party of QAnon; where facts are optional and insanity is a prerequisite; where morals and decency are checked at the door and political survival is the end all be all; where conservatives are an endangered species and wackadoodles run riot.
This is what happens when you don't lock up at night; the wrong people come in and make themselves at home. This wasn't a hostile takeover, it was a lay down, complete with a cookie, a glass of milk and a binky. There isn't a single Republican who can say with a straight face that they didn't see this coming; not one.
It's nice that Mitch McConnell called Greene a "cancer for the Republican Party" and that he was joined by many Senate Republicans. Too little too late, I say. You don't wait until the unwelcome guest parks his butt on your sofa to ask what the hell he's doing there. The Republican Party made its bed and now it has to lie in it.
And while the Ben Sasses and the Mitt Romneys and the Lisa Murkowskis and the Susan Collins all scratch their heads in bewilderment over the state of their beloved party, the rest of us have to deal with the ramifications of the squatters who are defecating all over the joint. If these absentee landlords had said no to Trump half as many times as they said no to Obama, they and the country wouldn't be in this jam right now.
This is their mess. They need to clean it up. Now!
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