Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.
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Boebert Roasts Greene Over 'Nasty' Altercation In Capitol Hill Ladies Room
@next2godwin
January 20 | 2023
Reps. Lauren Boebert, center, and Marjorie Taylor Green, foreground, on Capitol steps
GOP firebrand Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) has opened up about her “nasty” altercation with fellow House Freedom Caucus member Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) in a ladies’ restroom on Capitol Hill over the former’s aversion to Kevin McCarthy’s speakership bid.
According to The Daily Beast, the pair — both loud MAGA mouths, renowned for their extremist rhetoric, often offered solely to ‘own the libs’ — got into a heated exchange on January 3, as their fellow Republicans devolved into chaos on day one of their new majority, culminating in the House failing to elect a speaker on the first ballot for the first time in a century.
According to the publication's anonymous sources, Greene confronted Boebert upon exiting a stall for “taking millions of dollars from McCarthy” but “refus[ing] to vote for him for Speaker.”
Vicereported that Boebert wasn’t among the anti-McCarthy House lawmakers who benefited from the over $1 million McCarthy-affiliated PACs spent on the GOP leaders’ colleagues, and hence, the grounds for Greene’s allegation are unclear.
The abrupt and loud accusation jolted the Coloradan into a rage, the Beast’s Ursula Perano and Zachary Petrizzo wrote, and Boebert “ran out [of the restroom] like a little schoolgirl” after lambasting Greene for “be[ing] ugly.”
Boebert confirmed the “ugly” warning part to far-right radio host Dana Loesch in an interview posted to Twitter on Wednesday.
“We were talking in the congressional ladies’ bathroom. I’m there with [Rep.] Anna Paulina Luna [R-FL], and you know… people are upset about what's going on in the speaker's race. It had been a couple of days; we were not electing Kevin McCarthy," Boebert recounted on Loesch’s radio show, The Dana Show.
"We hadn't received the concessions that we wanted, and my colleague from Georgia, the gentlewoman from Georgia, came up and started, you know, being kind of nasty about it, and no one else had been nasty about it. Everyone had been very professional," Boebert explained.
“And when she started going after me, I looked at her and said, “Don’t be ugly,” Boebert added. “I looked at her and said, “I don’t have time for this.” Shortly after, in a vicious dig at Greene, Boebert explained to Loesch that “Don’t be ugly” was “something Granny used to say to me when I was being a brat.”
\u201c"Don't be ugly..."\n\nNEW: @laurenboebert REVEALS to @DLoesch what actually went down in the Congressional women's bathroom during the Speaker vote fight. #DanaRadio\u201d— The Dana Show (@The Dana Show) 1674065907
By then Greene, a McCarthy supporter, had repeatedly criticized the ultra-conservative bloc vocally opposing his campaign for the Speaker’s gavel — a group that adopted "Never Kevin” as a slogan. Most were Greene’s hard-right Freedom Caucus cronies, including Boebert and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL).
Greene accused the hardline group of “lying to the base” and “blow[ing] things up,” and Boebert hit back by publicly disassociating herself from Greene’s infamous “Jewish space lasers” conspiracy theory, causing the Georgian to melt down and disparage Boebert publicly — an exchange several media outlets gleefully covered.
Despite heckling President Biden together in his 2022 State of the Union address and instigating culture war debates to appease the MAGA right, Greene and Boebert didn’t see eye-to-eye in private, per the Beast.
The right-wing provocateurs almost traded blows last March during a Freedom Caucus gathering, reported Politico, and were seated in different rows on the Republican side of the House chamber on the first day of the 118th Congress as McCarthy failed three times to secure the gavel.
“There was nothing against her,” Boebert told Loesch of her relationship with Greene. “We travel in the same circles [and] have the same policy views on a lot of things, [but] not everything” — the latter remark throwing shade on Greene for her support of outlandish hoaxes, including QAnon.
But true to Boebert’s concession, both agitators have thrived in the same extremist cell of the House Republican conference, which is now riddled with right-wing nihilists..
Furthermore, Greene, a conspiracy theorist, gave a speech at a conference organized by renowned antisemite and white supremacist Nick Fuentes, while Ana Paulina Luna, the Florida congresswoman who Boebert said she had talked with in the bathroom, once graced a QAnon program and has been accused, by her far-right primary opponent, of being “a witch.”
In a podcast interview last week, Greene said she and Boebert “haven’t really” addressed their feud and admitted that “it is something that we need to work out," per Newsweek.
"It's just that she attacked me personally — in a Democrat, leftist political attack, that's what she used against me. I don't appreciate that,” Greene told the host, still smarting from Boebert’s embarrassing disavowal.
Where things go from there is anyone’s guess, but on Wednesday, Boebert seemingly went on the offensive with a not-too-subtle rebuke, tweeting, “Be kind. Don’t be ugly.”
\u201cBe kind. Don\u2019t be ugly.\u201d— Lauren Boebert (@Lauren Boebert) 1674078468
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Mohammed bin Salman, left, and Donald Trump
Youtube Screenshot
It’s not often that an article in Golfweek sets the tone for the actual week, but on Saturday the premier journal of hitting small balls with sticks noted continuing problems for the nascent LIV Golf tour. The schedule of tournaments isn’t full. The roster of big name players that LIV needs to make itself seem a legit competitor to the 93-year-old PGA Tour have failed to materialize. The team-based structure of LIV has failed to create the kind of rivalries that the creators suggested would help raise interest in the new offering.
However, all those concerns could turn out to be minor. That’s because a court case in California, where LIV has filed an antitrust suit against the PGA, has gone in a direction that LIV definitely, definitely did not want. While fighting back against this suit, the PGA has sought to compel discovery about the real sources behind the fund picking up the ticket on LIV’s considerable expenses. As it happens, a slip of the tongue from a LIV attorney during the trial revealed that the fund owns 93% of LIV Golf and covers all of its expenses.
The chairman and controlling officer of that fund is Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Its bin Salman paying all the bills and taking all the risks for LIV Golf. But who is making a profit?
[LIV Golf] has paid Trump-owned golf resorts unknown millions of dollars to hold its events there, and former President Trump has publicly championed the new league, made prominent appearances at its events, and urged PGA players to sign on with LIV Golf.
Exactly how many millions is bin Salman funneling to Donald Trump through LIV? We don’t know.
That LIV Golf was at least partially owned by Saudi sources was never a secret and has been a concern since the tour began. However, as a private company, its internal ownership and funding was obscured until the unfolding court case opened up the details of just how little involvement there is from anyone else. It’s not just that bin Salman owns 93% of the tour on paper. He’s picking up 100 percent of the bill.
In response to the effort to compel discovery on LIV’s finances, the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund (PIF) insisted that it could not be forced to reveal anything. They don’t have to talk, because they are an “organ of the Saudi state” and protected by “foreign sovereign immunity.”
That doesn’t exactly make things better.
According to Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, “The revelation that a fund controlled by Crown Prince MBS actually 100 percent funds LIV Golf means that MBS has been paying Donald Trump unknown millions for the past two years, via their mutual corporate covers.” She also stresses that this has implications that go way beyond golf and beyond Trump fattening his wallet. “The national security implications of payments from a grotesquely abusive foreign dictator to a president of the United States who provided extraordinary favors to him are as dangerous as they are shocking," said Whitson.
In 2018, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner paid a visit to bin Salman at a time when he was seeking $1.8 billion to bail his company out of a devastatingly bad real estate investment. At the time, there was great suspicion that Kushner, who later received his rescue in the form of a secret bailout, may have been selling bin Salman national security secrets, including the names of U.S. sources and dissidents in Saudi Arabia.
Also in 2018, bin Salman had Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi lured into a Saudi embassy, bound, tortured, dissected, killed, and burned. In that order. Later reports showed that, while he would not admit it, Trump was aware of bin Salman’s role in the journalist’s horrific death.
In 2022, the classified documents found in Trump’s private office in Mar-a-Lago reportedly included nuclear secrets from a foreign nation. Many reports have indicated that this information related to the Iranian nuclear program — information that would certainly be of direct interest to bin Salman.
Still, Donald Trump is being paid millions by Mohammed bin Salman. How many millions? We don’t know. What did bin Salman get from Trump in return? We don’t know.
But we shouldn’t be getting revelations from Golfweek.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
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