Over at the American Conservative, Matt Purple has an article, Neither Madge Nor Liz If the GOP is to be saved, it must reject both the delusions of Q and those who have wrecked our public policy, which I thought I’d skip, since I’m generally not a fan of Matt’s rap, but, for whatever reason, a sudden burst of conscientiousness swept over me and I read the damn thing, very much to my profit.
Matt has a good time trashing poor “Madge”, aka Marjorie Taylor Greene, a woman whose appetite for vicious nonsense virtually defies parody, but, well, I knew that. Where Matt really scores points is his focus on Liz’s far more “respectable” looniness, her fervent belief in her dad’s looniness, that the U.S. must own the Middle East. Matt cites a striking post by the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, back in 2014, dismantling a claim by Cheney père et fille alleging a “deep, longstanding, far-reaching relationship between al-Qaeda and Saddam” appearing in the Weekly Standard, but now, for some “mysterious” (or not) reason, no longer available, unless, I guess, you track it down on “Wayback” or whatever.
Glenn’s takedown, which shows some serious legwork, shows the utter duplicity of Dick n’ Liz, underlined by Liz’s crushing (though content-free) response: “If Glenn Kessler fails to report the multitude of evidence demonstrating the deep, longstanding and far-reaching ties between Saddam’s Iraq and al Qaeda, one can only conclude he is either biased or was absent the day they taught journalism in school.” Oh, snap, n’est-il pas? Anyway, if you forgot how dishonest neocons can be, Glenn provides an excellent refresher.
Not too surprisingly, it’s what Matt, to get back to him, doesn’t say that’s more problematic than what he does. Matt fancies himself a populist of sorts, who loved seeing Donald owning the libs, but had to gag on the Jan. 6 riot, and so avoids mentioning both Liz’s bravery in denouncing Trump in public, in terms so harsh—and so true!1—knowing that the Democrats would use it against the Republican cowards who insisted on continuing to kiss Trump’s ass, either out of love or fear, after the riot that he had conjured up out of his infantile sense of entitlement and rage. That’s giving aid and comfort to the enemy, goddamnit! And you know what that is, goddamnit! That’s treason! And you know what the penalty for that is, don’t you! It’s death!
Which, of course, is what Madge advocated for Nancy Pelosi, something else that Matt failed to mention.
Afterwords
Glenn, to get back to him, conscientiously provides a critique of his piece by Peter Huessy of the American Foreign Policy Council, which I have not read in detail but whose bullet-pointed summary, which precedes the article, strikes me as predictable neocon boilerplate, as well as a subsequent article, not responding to his piece, Saddam and the Islamists: The Ba‘thist Regime’s Instrumentalization of Religion in Foreign Affairs, uncovering more communications, but no actual cooperation, between Saddam and Islamist groups. There remains no evidence that Saddam had the slightest involvement in 9/11, despite whatever deep, longstanding, far-reaching, and utterly dishonest innuendoes Liz and her daddy want to craft.
1. And, goddamnit!, the truth hurts! Especially if you’re Donald Trump!
