Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s nasty remark about a fellow congresswoman’s appearance was characteristically stupid. But the Georgia Republican is hoist on her own petard on such a regular basis, why would Democrats want to stop her?
You may have seen the video of the House Oversight Committee hearing in which MTG said to Jasmine Crockett, a Dallas area Democrat, “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”
Michelle Obama famously said, “When they go low, we go high.”
Crockett competently swatted back at MTG, going neither high nor low but around. After expressing her displeasure at committee chairman Rep. James Comer’s refusal to strike MTG’s remark from the record, she calmly said to the Kentucky Republican: “I’m just curious, just to better understand your ruling. If someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleached blond, bad-built butch body that would not be engaging in personalities. Correct?”
Nice swing. It dismissed MTG as a feral creature unworthy of direct engagement. And it left MTG as the emblem of a party whose leaders had sunk into mental chaos.
But a hysterical Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez jumped in and made the incident about her. Lacking the wit to cleanly take MTG down, the New York leftist devolved into screeching, “How dare you … !” Blah, blah, blah. Her low point was descending into street talk. “Oh, girl. Baby girl, don’t even play,” she growled in a mean girl voice right out of high school.
Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, a Democrat, denounced the whole performance as potentially uglier than “The Jerry Springer Show,” noted for its staged fights and all-around bad behavior. Of course, AOC then struck back at Fetterman, accusing him of regarding “racism and misogyny” as a “both sides” issue.
Fetterman swatted down her remark as “absurd.” And so now America is debating whether mention of fake eyelashes has racist overtones. Crockett is Black.
And so AOC took the spotlight off MTG and even Crockett.
News for hot-headed Democrats: MTG is the Republicans’ problem, not yours. MTG is also America’s problem in her demonstrated ability to paralyze the Republican House from doing its business for weeks on end. The remedy would be replacing the Republican-run House with a Democratic-run one. Would it not?
The Wall Street Journal complained last month that Greene and her whack-job allies have “no plan for anything other than to disrupt the proceedings and use social media to raise money for their personal political brands.”
GOP operative Karl Rove wrote that Greene’s efforts to remove Speaker Mike Johnson — in addition to her rantings about the Rothschilds, space lasers and such — made Republicans “look even nuttier.”
The Journal recently reported that attendees at a meeting of Republican donors are worried that Greene’s antics are “potentially disruptive to party cohesion.”
I am likening but not equating AOC with MTG. Ocasio-Cortez may be an attention-freak who lacks depth on important issues, but at least she makes legislating part of her show.
It is the Democrats’ misfortune, however, that AOC uses her media savvy to inflict political damage on the party mainstream and President Joe Biden. Moderate Democrats blamed AOC and the other squad radicals for their loss of the House majority in 2022. Apparently their defund-the-police stance didn’t go over well during a crime wave.
The sad truth for Democrats, America and even Republicans is that MTG would be nothing more than a lunatic sideshow had the left flank cared more about maintaining power. The squad may be in decline, but AOC still gets to strut around as the voice of human decency.
Once again, the screamers grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory. Smart Democrats will let MTG be MTG.
