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Tag: embarrassment
Trump Doubles Down On Ousting Liz Cheney After Primary Defeats

Trump Doubles Down On Ousting Liz Cheney After Primary Defeats

On Tuesday, May 24, former President Donald Trump suffered humiliating defeats when two Republicans he was backing in Georgia lost GOP primary races by double digits. After that embarrassment, journalists David Weigel and Josh Dawsey emphasize in an article published by the Washington Post, Trump is focusing on his campaign to oust Rep. Liz Cheney via a GOP congressional primary in Wyoming.

Former Sen. David Perdue, campaigning on the Big Lie and falsely claiming that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump, lost to conservative incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp by a brutal 52 percent. Rep. Jody Hice’s loss to incumbent Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger wasn’t that harsh, but it was bad enough: Hice lost by 19 percent.

On Memorial Day Weekend, Trump headed to Wyoming to campaign for attorney Harriet Hageman — one of Cheney’s primary challengers. That election will be held on August 16.

“His crusade was dealt a major blow last week in Georgia, where Republican primary voters overwhelmingly renominated Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger over candidates the former president vigorously supported,” Weigel and Josh Dawsey explain. “Those losses followed a spotty record in earlier races that included high-profile defeats of his preferred candidates in Idaho, Nebraska and North Carolina. In Pennsylvania, the candidate Trump endorsed for U.S. Senate is in a recount. Taken together, the results have raised questions in the party about his influence.”

The Trump-backed Pennsylvania candidate that Weigel and Dawsey are referring to is Dr. Mehmet Oz, who appears to have defeated hedge fund executive Dave McCormick in the Keystone State’s 2022 U.S. Senate primary — but just barely. After all of the state’s counties reported their unofficial results, Oz led McCormick by only 902 votes, according to CNN. And Pennsylvania Secretary of State Leigh Chapman has ordered a recount.

Weigel and Dawsey describe a Saturday, May 28 rally in Caspar, Wyoming as “a moment the former president and his movement used to regroup.” Trump angrily railed against Cheney at that event, associating the arch-conservative congresswoman and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney with the “failed foreign policy of the Clintons, Bushes, the Obamas and the Bidens” and telling the crowd, “Liz Cheney is about America last.”

The Post reporters observe, “The August 16 primary in Wyoming is shaping up as the next big test of Trump’s effort to unseat Republican elected officials who have been critical of him and who fought his falsehood-ridden attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election…. After failing to oust Republicans in Georgia who had rebuffed his attempts to subvert the election, Trump was pivoting to a campaign with better odds of success, due to a strong anti-Cheney sentiment in the Republican ranks in Wyoming.”

Cheney, as Weigel and Dawsey point out, has been campaigning on “the rule of law.”

“Unlike in Georgia, where Kemp and Raffensperger ran more nuanced campaigns when it came to addressing Trump, Cheney — a three-term congresswoman who has raised more than $10 million for her reelection campaign — has been unapologetic about opposing the 45th president, even as local Republicans have condemned her,” the reporters note.

Conservative pundit Rich Lowry, in an op-ed published by the New York Post on May 27, stresses that there is no getting around just how embarrassing Kemp and Raffensperger’s victories in Georgia are for Trump. Lowry’s op-ed is headlined “Trump’s Humiliation in Georgia Was Even Worse Than You Know.”

“If Trump had been rationally calculating his interests,” Lowry argues, “he would have thought twice about making his signature project in the 2022 primary season a challenge to an entrenched, politically shrewd governor. Instead, he pulled the strings to create a statewide vengeance slate challenging everyone from Kemp on down…. Republican primary voters in Georgia clearly favored moving beyond an all-consuming focus on 2020 and opposed Trump continuing to make the state his political plaything.”

Lowry uses a Wyatt Earp analogy to mock Trump in his op-ed.

“Like Wyatt Earp after the gunfight at the OK Corral,” Lowry writes, “Donald Trump and his allies mounted up for a vendetta ride in Georgia. Unlike Earp and his posse, though, Trump didn’t get his man or any of his confederates, and Gov. Brian Kemp and Co. didn’t even have to leave the territory.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Rick Perry’s Hunting Camp Embarrasssment

Rick Perry is attracting heated criticism over the controversial former name of his family’s hunting camp. The West Texas retreat, which the Perry family began leasing in 1983, was long known by the controversial name “Niggerhead.” The pejorative name is painted on a rock standing at the entrance of the property; although it has since been painted over, the name is still visible under the thin coat of paint.

Perry claims that the rock has been painted over since he and a friend complained about the offensive name to Perry’s father in 1983 or 1984; he’s also argued that the “offensive name that has no place in the modern world.”

Perry’s account has been disputed, however; seven people told the Washington Post that they recalled seeing the rock with the name unobscured during the years that Perry has been associated with the ranch. One retired game warden claims that the name was visible through at least 1990, and one former ranch worker believes that the name was displayed as recently as 2008.

Perry’s rivals have been quick to jump on this embarrassing revelation. Herman Cain, the only black candidate vying for the Republican Presidential nomination, has accused Perry of racial insensitivity.

“Since Gov. Perry has been going there for years to hunt, I think that it shows a lack of sensitivity for a long time of not taking that word off of that rock and renaming the place,” [Cain] told ABC’s “This Week.

“Yes, it was painted over,” he said. “But how long ago was it painted over? So I’m still saying that it is a sign of insensitivity.”

At the end of the day, no matter how eager some critics are to paint Perry as a bigot, this embarrassing incident does not prove that Rick Perry is a racist. The simple fact of the matter is that Texas has a checkered past with regard to racism. It’s not necessarily Perry’s fault that his family’s hunting camp was a part of that troubled history.

What it does prove is that Perry’s political handlers made a huge error in allowing the sign to remain at the ranch, only partially covered by a thin layer of paint. Given that every miniscule detail of a presidential candidate’s private life is examined under a magnifying glass during a campaign, someone should have seen this coming.

It also suggests — perhaps unsurprisingly — that Governor Perry doesn’t have a lot of diversity in his inner circle. Something tells me that, if Perry had ever brought a black friend hunting with him in the past two decades, a sign emblazoned “Niggerhead” wouldn’t still be standing by the entrance of the family ranch.

Burning Ambition: How Texas Wildfires Embarrass Rick Perry

Nothing has revealed the shortcomings of Rick Perry, as a governor and a thinker, as the terrible wildfires ravaging central Texas over the past several months. Having skipped out of a visit to burning Bastrop County over the weekend, he seems to realize that his handling of this disaster is a severe embarrassment both to him personally and to the state. That weekend no-show wasn’t the first time Perry appeared to shirk his duty; last week, he skipped a presidential campaign event in South Carolina, supposedly due to urgent responsibilities back home — and then turned up at a California fundraiser.

Around the same time, a Perry aide remarked that their campaign fundraising was “going like wildfire.”

But the ideological rot goes far deeper than goofs and gaffes. With his Tea Party disdain for the federal government and his record of slashing essential state services, Perry is ill-suited to cope with the realities of modern government — including droughts and fires that may well result from the climate change whose real origins he refuses to acknowledge. He now finds himself seeking additional disaster assistance from the federal government — and criticizing that same government for failing to do more when his general argument is that it must do far less.

Consider his own state budget, whose deep cuts meant depriving local volunteer firefighters of bulldozers and other essential equipment for stopping the spread of rural fires. Yet since last April, when the unprecedented wave of fires grew worse, Perry has been seeking federal aid to make up that shortfall — an ironic stance from a right-wing radical who threatened to secede from the United States not so long ago. Far from seceding, Perry is sulking because Washington hasn’t sent federal bulldozers to fight those fires in Bastrop County.

This disaster was not unforeseen. Over the past year, heat and drought not seen in the Lone Star State since the Dust Bowl era have led to a record-breaking conflagration: thousands of fires since December, more than a hundred active fires now and scores more reported every week. The state’s firefighters are exhausted; the trucks and planes used to combat the blazes can no longer be properly maintained. So the neglected and underfunded system is reaching its limit, which is why the state has turned in desperation to Washington eight times for aid. Fire commanders told the Christian Science Monitor last week that calls for help are going unmet because there is simply not enough manpower and equipment to serve the current need.

“Because so many fires are burning across the state, our resources are spread pretty thin,” said Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst. “That’s why we need the federal government to step up to the plate immediately.”

Yes, they need the federal government to step up with hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, right away — even though the state reduced funding for its fire departments by nearly 75 percent last year and cut the budget for the Texas Forest Service by more than a third.

Perry suggests that fighting the wildfires will be financed eventually from the state’s “rainy day fund,” although many Texas legislators of both parties warn that fund has already been depleted. What he probably expects is that the costs of firefighting will be recovered somehow from the federal government — and he isn’t waiting to see how those expenditures are offset in the rest of the federal budget. As the lieutenant governor said, they want help “immediately.”

Of course the good people of Bastrop County and across beleaguered Texas deserve the nation’s assistance. They pay federal taxes and, despite their governor’s stupid remarks, they’re loyal and patriotic too. But they ought to reconsider the kind of irresponsible leadership that responds to environmental change with right-wing mythology and slashed budgets — and then must plead for salvation by that awful bureaucracy back east. And the rest of us ought to consider what would happen if he were in charge of the federal government. Where would everyone turn after he dismantles Washington, as he vows so eagerly to do?