Marjorie Taylor Greene is normally as far down our relevance list as we would want to go, but this time she tried to interfere with the aid bill to Ukraine, so let’s focus for a few minutes on the character of the kind of person who would do that.
Her actions have made her the new darling of Russian state television, which used to mock her idiocy. Kremlin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov said “Thank goodness she exists.”
If this is your saviour, of course, then your cause is truly desperate and you are delusional, and if you weren’t killing thousands of innocent Ukrainians I wouldn’t care, but here we are.
She tried holding up the aid bill by threatening to toss out Speaker Johnson, and when that crumbled, she tried inserting amendments into the bill (zero success). But many of her amendments reflect real Russian talking points.
Do you think that a person who believes we are threatened by Jewish Space Lasers could dream this up on her own?:
My favorite is number 58: “Prohibits funding for the Azov battalion.”
Azov is a far-right all-volunteer infantry military unit; it is the Ukrainian equivalent perhaps of Putin’s Wagner Corp, which turned against Putin and attacked him. Do you think MTG would know that? Or even if she did, that she would be concerned about it?
Her other amendments include demands that Ukraine close all its bio-laboratories, prove that “Christian churches in Ukraine are able to operate free from government interference” and bar funding until “restrictions on Hungarians in Transcarpathia” and other minorities are lifted.
I would love it if someone could challenge her to find Transcarpathia on a map.
These are Russian demands.
Come to think about it, how stupid are her Russian handlers for thinking they could get her to insert these amendments without being revealed as the source?
Democrat Jared Moskowitz mocked MTG, suggesting his own amendment to make her "Putin's Special Envoy" to Congress.
Moskowitz also introduced a second amendment trolling Greene, seeking to rename her office in the Cannon House Office Building to the "Neville Chamberlain Room" — a reference to the former British prime minister famed for his failed attempts at appeasement toward Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.
In response to Greene’s amendment calling on people who vote for Ukraine to join its military, Rebekha Maciorowski, a US citizen who has been serving as a combat nurse on the front lines in Ukraine, replied to Greene's call, saying: "I did."
What kind of brain does it take to think that she can just echo a right-wing enemy of the US?
It pays to heed that question, because – distressingly – she is not alone in her threat to the US system.
She got elected in a far-right district in Georgia that happened to come open just after she had been shut down in a vote for mayor in a more balanced region. She had money and she was controversial. She entered the race for Georgia’s 14th District as soon as the incumbent made a surprise announcement that he was stepping down. The 14th is in Appalachia, home to uneducated very Evangelical white folks. She poured money into advertising - about $1-million of her own money - and by the time other competitors showed up, she had nailed the nomination. Some two-thirds of the winning nominees in primaries go to the person with the most financial support, and this proved the case for Greene. She campaigned in a bus with Trump’s picture on the sides, and had a cardboard cut-out of Trump for her campaign stops. Her big slogan was “Stop Socialism! Save America!”.
In a district where 75% of the voters sided with Trump in 2016, the 2020 election was a formality. She went to Congress.
The warning light is flashing for ridings like this in the coming election. Any District that has high percentages of Evangelicals and whites is going to go Republican. There are 17 Districts with that profile, three in Alabama, two in Georgia, seven in Tennessee, one in Missouri, three in Arizona, and one in South Carolina.
And each of those will go to the candidates that are the most confrontational.
In other words, they are prime for ‘Christian’ hate candidates who foster the most rage.
Greene can do that, because her world view isn’t a view, it’s a series of uninformed mistakes – and she ahs no shame in shouting them out.
Her factual world-view is limited…She does not want American funds sent to foreign countries like Guam. Guam is an American territory.
She called Africa a country.
When she visited the Wilder Monument in Georgia she said it “honors the Confederate soldiers of the Wilder Brigade”. The Wilder Brigade was in the Union Army. But hey: blue and grey…so easy to mix up.
She says things like “People are dying who have never died before.”
Marjorie loves Trump, and she got irate with Stormy Daniels regarding the hush money scheme, tweeting that she “is too old and disgusting to make money as a porn star now, so she’s grifting off her lies about Trump." Stormy Daniels saw it days later and came back: "Oh, Majorie! Bless your heart. In case you haven't noticed, tiny has a horse fetish. He's not going to fuck you. Actually..... He might. Carry on. Get it, girl!"
She knows, she says, that there are stupid people in Washington: “I know; I work with some of them.”
Adding to a social media offer to pay good money to see her IQ results, someone else suggested that she would not even finish the test; “Oh look, a squirrel!” Then pull out her AR-15 and shred it.
She once said that an Illinois elementary school received $5.1 billion for “equity and diversity.” That would have been half the state budget for pre-college education. But some people take her seriously.
She defended George Santos.
Hearing that she wanted to write a book, Jimmy Kimmel suggested getting her some crayons and a Denny’s placemat so she could get it out of her system.
After she actually wrote a book (called “MTG”) Kimmel said it was the first book she had ever written…or read.
She stated: “Joe Biden is rewarding human traffickers and coyotes who smuggle illegal aliens across the border.” Don’t know where to start on this one…
She said that people with Downs Syndrome were retards and “so stupid”.
She decried the idea of dumping Johnson and then proceeded to try to do it.
USA Today calls her “the most ludicrous lawmaker in an age of pervasive ludicrousness.”
She warned that God is sending strong signs to America to repent, in earthquakes and eclipses and comets. Someone unkindly pointed out that there are 1700 earthquakes in the US every year, about 4 a day.
She accused Nancy Pelosi of spying on her with the “Gazpacho Police”. Conjures up a Muppets-style scene of mashed tomatoes peering around a corner at her house.
She complained that her taxpayer-funded salary ($174,000) was too low, and was making her miserable, adding that she “lost money”.
She loves Putin but made no attempt to rationalize the image of the citizens of Rostov cheering on the Wagner fighters as they moved on Moscow. She did however suggest that the US was behind the group’s uprising.
She thinks her TV is spying on her: “Last night in my DC residence, the television turned on by itself and the screen showed someone’s laptop trying to connect to the TV.”
She mocked Florida school shooting survivor David Hogg as an "idiot" who "only talks when he is scripted". She suggested that the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida (17 people died), and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut (26 died), were hoaxes. "I confronted David Hogg twice, and he ran away from me," she gleefully recounted. She had a video taken which shows her striding behind him harassing him.
She claims that Bill Gates wants us to eat fake meat that is grown on a “peach tree dish”. Possibly “petri dish”, but who really knows…
In short, Marjorie Taylor Greene is perfectly suited as a model Republican politician.
And while a few dozen American states in the South might vote for her type, an increasing number of states have higher education and a richer world view.
But if this is the drain Republicanism is going down, I’m OK with that.
I do miss the Party of Lincoln and Eisenhower, when racial and economic fair play were top of the agenda, but I’m sure another party will eventually supersede the current Republican dross.
And MTG can inherit the old title of the “Know Nothing” Party, of civil war fame.
Maybe she can erect the next Wilder monument to the Confederacy, in fact.
It must be nice not knowing anything…it gives you so much freedom!
So as Stormy Daniels would say: “You get it girl!”
“When you’re dead, you won’t even know you’re dead. It’s a pain only others feel. — Same thing when you’re stupid.” - Andrea Junker