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Our most disgraceful political leaderMichael GersonWASHINGTON n the morning of Feb.3, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., sat in the Capitol Rotunda for a service honoring fallen U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who died during the Jan. 6 attack by domestic terrorists. On the evening of Feb. 3, McCarthy asserted that the big tent of the Republican Party should include those who have advocated political violence.All in a day's work for the United States' most disgraceful political leader.The Republican legislator whom McCarthy has tried to shield from the consequences of sedition, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., said in 2019 that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is guilty of treason... a crime punishable by death. She endorsed the view that Pelosi might be quickly removed by a bullet to the head. She approved of the suggestion that federal law enforcement agents hostile to then-President Donald Trump should be executed. Responding to a proposal that former president Barack Obama and former sec -retary of state Hillary Clinton be murdered, Greene wrote: Stage is being set. Players are being put in place. We must be patient.McCarthy claims he has received private assurances from Greene that she no longer wishes death on Pelosi. Greene made a weak, private apology to the House Republican caucus, mainly for causing them inconvenience. She also made a de minimis mea culpa on the House floor, saying she regrets some words of the past without directly apologizing for her overt racism and embrace of politicalassassination. This might best be called a false-flag apology -conceding just enough reality to sound sane, while leaving plenty of wiggle room for conspiratorial insanity. Greene's admission that the 9/11 attacks happened, for example, did not include conceding a plane crashed into the Pentagon (which Greene has denied).As apologies go, this has been thin gruel. But it has been enough for McCarthy to declare a united Repub -lican front, reaching all the way from Rep. Liz Cheney,R-Wyo., who voted for Trump's impeachment, to Greene, who supported the execution of Trump's enemies. The McCarthy coalition is so diverse and exciting. Republicans must be proud.McCarthy wants us to know that he is not personally supportive of the wing of the GOP that approves of political murder, accuses Clinton of skinning babies and blames a Jewish conspiracy for setting forest fires. I condemn those comments unequivocally, he has said. But for McCarthy, equivocation is always a tool near at hand. I think it would be helpful if you could hear exactly what she told all of us, he explained Wednesday, denouncing Q-on, I don't know if I say it right, I don't even know what it is. McCarthy was referring, of course, to QAnon, which he was perfectly aware of last August when he denounced it. Feigned ignorance is the purest form of equivocation.Seldom has a political figure misunderstood his country and its challenges more comprehensively than McCarthy. This is not a time for balancing; it is a time for choosing. The main threat posed by Greene is not to the unity of the Republican Party; it is to the political culture of the country. A forced apology to her GOP colleagues, and a reprehensible non-apology to the nation, mean nothing. The outcome that would actually strengthen our constitutional system is for Greene to publicly, specifically and sincerely renounce her poisonous political views andurge her followers to do the same. Which she has not done, and clearly has no intention of doing.A big political tent will always shelter a number of clowns. But that is different from welcoming violent thugs who gain strength from the appearance of legitimacy. To force another metaphor, the rise of radicalism confronts the GOP with a choice between drinking hemlock and not drinking hemlock. McCarthy's brilliant compromise is to take a slightly smaller dose.In the end, McCarthy described the House action to remove Greene from her committees as a partisan power grab. It is, in fact, a relatively mild display of moral sanity. The Republican sickness is a broad inability to make such rudimentary moral distinctions.Apart from the ethics of the matter, there is a political case to be made for the firm repudiation of dangerous crackpots. As a rule, such people are easy to motivate and organize because they are, well, dangerous crackpots. But American political movements - conservatives in the 1950s and '60s, liberals in the '60s and '70s - suffered from public identification of their cause with radicalism. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton succeeded, in part, by getting beyond scary ideological caricatures of their parties. Does McCarthy really want to fight his campaign for the suburbs with Greene as the face of the GOP?It was beyond good luck that Republicans, after the Capitol assault, were given some dramatic ways to break with violent, anti-democratic radicalism. They had the opportunity to strongly repudiate Greene. And they could convict Trump of inciting an uprising. Now it seems likely that Republicans will throw these chances away. The clowns, it appears,, are firmly in charge.Michael Gerson's email address is michaelger-son@washpost.com.
Newspaper Details
Sun Journal
New Bern, North Carolina, US
Sat, Feb 06, 2021
Page 11
Full Page
Clipped by
Bobbie J.
USA 12 Sep 2024
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