GOP Nutcase Amanda Chase Announces Bid for Virginia Governor

Like the far left of the Democrat Party, the far right of the Virginia GOP cares more about right wing ideological purity than it does about actually winning election.  A case in point is the announcement by GOP Sen. Amanda F. Chase, a Trump-style Republican nutcase in my opinion, that she will run for governor next year as a Republican.  Better yet, if she doesn't get the GOP nomination, Chase says she will run as an independent and virtually guarantee another Democrat governor commencing in January, 2022.  One would think that the GOP rout in the Virginia 2019 elections, not to mention the GOP losses in Virginia in 2018 would be a blaring clarion that what Chase stands for is not wanted by the vast majority of Virginians.  Whether she gets the GOP nomination or not, Chase represents all that is insane and reactionary in today's Virginia GOP.  The Washington Post looks at Chase's announcement which must have been met with glee by Democrats in Richmond.  Here are article excerpts:

State Sen. Amanda F. Chase, a Trump-style Republican at odds with both parties in Richmond, announced on Monday that she will run for governor next year as a Republican — and failing that, as an independent.

“I can’t take it anymore,” Chase (Chesterfield), said, referring to “the liberal, socialistic agenda that has taken control of the Capitol.”

She said she would seek the GOP nomination but would pursue an independent bid if the party denies her the nod.

Chase, 50, made the announcement on the sunny South Portico of the state Capitol before a cheering crowd of more than 100 supporters, many wearing orange “Guns Save Lives” stickers.

Chase first won attention last year for wearing a holstered .38 special on her hip on the Senate floor. Then came a string of controversies, including cursing at a Capitol Police officer over a parking spot, calling the Senate clerk “Miss Piggy,” and declaring rape victims to be “naive and unprepared.

The episodes led to her ouster from her local GOP committee and alienated Chase from Senate GOP leadership, which called her a threat to its efforts to hang onto its razor-thin majority in the chamber in the November elections.

But Chase — who embraced the criticism as a proof of fearless, politically incorrect straight talk — easily won a second term.

In the Senate this year, Chase has continued to infuriate Republicans and Democrats alike. She quit the GOP caucus. She’s been stripped of all but one committee assignment — the lowly Local Government panel. Every one of the bills she sponsored solo this year was killed.

Chase, who has a background in finance, vowed to snap the GOP’s decade-long slide by “doubling down” on conservative issues such as gun rights.

“People are tired of weak-kneed Republicans,” she said. “They get in there and moderate to the middle. And so we have a brand and identity problem now. People don’t know if you’re a real Republican or a fake Republican. Well baby, I’m a real Republican.”

Chase is the first Republican to formally enter the race to succeed Gov. Ralph Northam (D), who by law cannot seek back-to-back terms. Pete Snyder, a Northern Virginia technology entrepreneur, has been publicly mulling a bid. Republicans have not won a statewide race since 2009. Chase has been one of the most vocal advocates for gun rights in the Virginia Senate. . . . . As other suburban Republicans stuck to “kitchen table” issues during pivotal legislative races last year, Chase played up her staunch support for President Trump and gun rights and her fierce opposition to abortion. Her clash with the Capitol Police officer and other controversies drew public rebukes from leaders of her own caucus. But that only bolstered her standing with some GOP activists, who rallied around her Trumpian bravado. Some GOP Senate colleagues reacted skeptically. “Amanda just doesn’t have a level of substance, maturity or seriousness that Virginians expect in a gubernatorial candidate,” said state Sen. Mark D. Obenshain (R-Rockingham).

I welcome Chase's candidacy since it will splinter the GOP vote and meanwhile remind the rest of Virginian why they do NOT want a Republican in the Executive Mansion. 

The Donald Trump - RNC War Escalates

The RNC and the so-called GOP establishment continue to try to close their eyes to their own responsibility for setting the stage for the destruction of the Republican Party which they now want to lay at the feet of Donald Trump.  Without the RNC's and the GOP establishment's welcoming of Christofacists, white supremacists and know nothings into the GOP, there would be no Donald Trump candidacy.  Nor would Trump be attacking the party's inner workings and delegate selection process and  saying that the “system is being rigged by party operatives with ‘double-agent’ delegates who reject the decisions of voters.”  Personally, I love that karma is finally coming back to bite the RNC and so-called establishment in the ass big time.  For far to long the courted factions that decent people should have shunned and encouraged all kinds of misogyny.  Now, the are paying the piper.  Here are highlights from the Washington Post on the escalating warfare:

Tensions between the Republican Party and its own front-runner erupted into a full-blown public battle as top party officials rebuked Donald Trump on Friday for alleging that the GOP primary system was “rigged” against him.

The dispute, which has been simmering for days, centers on Trump’s failure to win any delegates last weekend in Colorado, which selected its 34 delegates at a party convention rather than a primary attended by voters. All went to Trump’s chief rival, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.

The outcome prompted a daily stream of complaints and allegations this week from Trump, who wrote in an op-ed published in Friday’s Wall Street Journal that the “system is being rigged by party operatives with ‘double-agent’ delegates who reject the decisions of voters.”

A senior Republican National Committee official fired back with a thinly veiled response, writing in a Friday memo to reporters that “each process is easy to understand for those willing to learn it.”

The fight again pits Trump against a Republican establishment that is still broadly opposed to his candidacy and struggling to reconcile with the possibility that he could be the GOP presidential nominee in November. Veterans of past presidential campaigns warned that the feuding could have an adverse effect on down-ballot races and on the ability to defeat Hillary Clinton, seen as the likely Democratic nominee, in the fall.

“Traditionally, this is the time that the party and front-runner come together and make the plans necessary to defeat the Democratic candidate in the fall,” said Michael Steel, who was an aide for Jeb Bush’s campaign and previously worked on the Mitt Romney campaign in 2012 and as spokesman for John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) when he was House speaker. “That’s clearly not happening, and it’s going to make it tougher to beat Secretary Clinton.”

Ron Bonjean, a former top adviser to Republican congressional leaders, called the Trump-RNC showdown “unprecedented” and warned that “taking a flamethrower to the Republican Party machine” could backfire on Trump.

“This is like a general severely criticizing his own special forces before ordering them to go into battle,” he said in an email. “Trump runs the risk of demoralizing grass-roots party organizers when he is going to need every asset to help him beat the Democratic nominee.”

One of the keys to Trump’s success until now has been his willingness to harshly criticize the party establishment, but he will need the support of the RNC in fundraising and get-out-the-vote efforts if he wins the nomination. 

The fresh tension comes just as the party heads into another busy period of delegate allocation and selection. This weekend, seven states will hold meetings to select at least some of their delegates.

Republicans will gather in Georgia, Kansas, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Virginia for meetings in congressional districts to award their delegates. And in Wyoming, Republicans are hosting a convention similar to the one held in Colorado, and Trump’s team concedes that they are again poised to lose to Cruz.

The Southernization and Dumbing Down of the Republican Party

Having lived in the South now for well over 40 years, I know first hand that at times the region is like one huge insane asylum, or perhaps more specifically, it is inhabited by those who suffer from wholesale bi-polar disorder.  On the one hand, many people can be charming and hospitable yet in the next moment show themselves to be racists and/or ignorance embracing evangelical Christians consumed by hatred of gays, liberals, non-whites, and anyone they deem "other."  Once the South came into the GOP tent, that inherent insanity slowly and steadily took control of the party, driving sane and rational people out as they could no longer stand the hypocrisy and ugliness that the "godly folk" personify.  Making matters worse, the primary calendar increasingly has allowed the ugliest elements in the South to have a disproportionate role in shaping the type of GOP candidate that can obtain an early lead in the nomination process.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at this growing problem.  Here are excerpts:

Southernization is a special problem for Republicans because their Southern supporters tend to be far more socially conservative than the rest of the party or the country. Southern politics is also more deeply polarized around race, giving backlash candidates a leg up. The GOP’s slide rightward creates electoral difficulties for it in presidential elections and is the central factor in Washington’s inability to find consensus on much of anything.

True, the whole carnival starts in Iowa, which is as Midwestern as you can get. But the caucus system gives more conservative Iowa Republicans an outsize influence because white evangelicals play a disproportionate role in what is a relatively low-turnout contest.

It is to the evangelicals’ credit as democratic citizens that they organize, mobilize and participate. But their civic virtuousness only makes the final result less reflective of opinion in the party, in Iowa itself and elsewhere.

New Hampshire comes next, and its voters frequently reach verdicts at odds with those Iowa renders. This means that South Carolina often plays a tie-breaking role on the GOP side. Talk about shifting the dialogue right: The site of the opening skirmish of the Civil War is not only one of the most conservative states in the nation; it is also one of our most racially divided polities. 

All of 1 percent of this year’s Palmetto State Republican primary voters were African American, according to a network exit poll — yes, 1 percent. Some 96 percent were white.

[N]ow we confront Super Tuesday. It includes primaries in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia. Yes, this Southern-fried, hickory-smoked mix is leavened by primaries in Massachusetts and Vermont, caucuses in Colorado and Minnesota, and, on the Republican side, a “preference poll” in Alaska. But there’s a reason the day is often called the “SEC primary,” after the Southeastern college sports conference.

The Dixiefied calendar is now an issue in Republican presidential maneuvering, with the possibility that the Midwest would be further disenfranchised. Republican honchos may have presided over a party that “brought to life” and “fed” the “Frankenstein monster” they see in Donald Trump, as Robert Kagan wrote in The Post recently. Never mind. The feckless establishmentarians now have the temerity to tell Ohio Gov. John Kasich that he should do his part in their belated anti-Trump operation by dropping out in support of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio — even though Rubio has yet to win a single primary.

High-minded thinkers regularly bemoan the sharp polarization of American politics and wring hands earnestly over why this has come to pass. One of the principal causes is the Southernization of Abraham Lincoln’s party, and our primary process makes it only harder for those who would reverse the trend.

Donald Trump and the Death of the GOP

The face of today's GOP

In a piece in the Washington Post, conservative columnist Michel Gerson bemoans what would happen to the Republican Party if Donald Trump were to secure the party's presidential nomination.  Among other things, he laments that Trump would make the "GOP the party of racial and religious exclusion."  News bulletin to Gerson: that has already happened to the GOP.  Trump merely would be the culmination of the process that started when the so-called GOP establishment first welcomed in Christofascists and then white supremacists into the party.  These cancers have metastasized and Trump id the result of this sickness.   I - and all of my family - were once Republicans, but we were driven out of the GOP once it became something ugly motivated primarily by religious extremism and the hatred of others that goes hand in hand with it, and by increasingly open racism.  Gerson should have begun his lament 20 years ago.  Here are highlights from his column which is incorrect in someways, but misses the point on when the death of the GOP began:

Every Republican of the type concerned with winning in November has been asking the question (at least internally): “What if the worst happens?” 

The worst does not mean the nomination of Ted Cruz, in spite of justified fears of political disaster. Cruz is an ideologue with a message perfectly tuned for a relatively small minority of the electorate. Uniquely in American politics, the senator from Texas has made his reputation by being roundly hated by his colleagues — apparently a prerequisite for a certain kind of anti-establishment conservative, but unpromising for an image makeover at his convention.

Cruz’s nomination would represent the victory of the hard right — religious right and tea party factions — within the Republican coalition. After he loses, the ideological struggles within the GOP would go on.

No, the worst outcome for the party would be the nomination of Donald Trump. It is impossible to predict where the political contest between Trump and Hillary Clinton would end up. Clinton has manifestly poor political skills, and Trump possesses a serious talent for the low blow. But Trump’s nomination would not be the temporary victory of one of the GOP’s ideological factions. It would involve the replacement of the humane ideal at the center of the party and its history. If Trump were the nominee, the GOP would cease to be.

[T]he aspiration, the self-conception, of the party was set by Abraham Lincoln: human dignity, honored by human freedom and undergirded by certain moral commitments, including compassion and tolerance. 

It is this universality that Trump attacks. All of his angry resentment against invading Hispanics and Muslims adds up to a kind of ethno-nationalism — an assertion that the United States is being weakened and adulterated by the other. This is consistent with European, right-wing, anti-immigrant populism. It is not consistent with conservatism . . .

Liberals who claim that Trumpism is the natural outgrowth, or logical conclusion, of conservatism or Republicanism are simply wrong. . . . . Lincoln is not even the distant relative of Trump.

[A]s a demagogue, he has followed some of America’s worst instincts wherever they have led, and fed ethnic and religious prejudice in the process. All presidential nominees, to some extent, shape their parties into their own image. Trump would deface the GOP beyond recognition.

Trump is disqualified for the presidency by his erratic temperament, his ignorance about public affairs and his scary sympathy for authoritarianism. But for me, and I suspect for many, the largest problem is that Trump would make the GOP the party of racial and religious exclusion.

The nomination of Trump would reduce Republican politics — at the presidential level — to an enterprise of squalid prejudice. And many Republicans could not follow, precisely because they are Republicans. By seizing the GOP, Trump would break it to pieces. 

Personally, at this point I do not believe the GOP can be saved from the ugly elements that have taken over the party base.  The sooner the party dies, the better.