After weeks of stumbles,self-inflicted own goals and growing momentum against them, some of the Republican Party’s weakest politicians were on this weekend’s Sunday shows.
How did their appearances go? Well, let’s take a look.
Marco Rubio on CNN’s ‘State Of The Union’
Rubio probably assumed he would be in for post-huricane softball questions, but hat didn’t quite go according to plan.
Host Dana Bash asked Rubio how he can square his hypocrisy at requesting disaster relief now with his previous objections to other states’ disaster relief requests. Rubio tried to bullshit an answer that would sound good to conservatives, but Bash corrected him as he went along.
Rubio tried to scapegoat Alaskan fisheries as an excuse for voting against Hurricane Sandy relief, as if they were somehow pork in the bill, but they were also damaged by other natural disaster events. So no. We’re sure Alaska Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan told him this then.
But much like how they refuse to tackle climate change, which makes these natural disasters worsen, Republicans make short-sighted decisions only to be shocked when it affects them.
Rick Scott on CNN’s ‘State Of The Union’ and NBC’s ‘Meet The Press’
On CNN, Dana Bash asked Scott, who is also the chair of the National Republican Senate Committee, to comment on Donald Trump’s thinly veiled death threat at Mitch McConnell and racist remarks towards McConnell’s wife. Scott, like the coward he is, refused to condemn it and minimized it as just Trump “giving nicknames.”
Bash pushed back against Scott’s characterization of “Coco Chow” as a simple “nickname” for McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, who was also Trump’s secretary Of Transportation.
BASH: Nicknames are one thing, but this — this is — this appears racist. Is that OK?
SCOTT: It’s never, ever OK to be a racist. It’s — look, I think you always have to be careful if you’re in the public eye how you — how you say things. You want to make sure you’re inclusive. […] So I hope no one is racist. I hope no one says anything that’s inappropriate.
That’s a lot of words to just say nothing specifically and not actually condemn Trump’s racist bullhorns.
Over on NBC, Chuck Todd asked Scott if Florida should step in to regulate mobile manufactured homes since most places in Florida can’t get property insurance for them, due to their vulnerability to more frequent storms.
After Scott failed to answer, Todd asks again more pointedly. Scott made this statement with a straight face:
SCOTT: I think it’s sort of, you have to have stricter building codes. […] But then on top of that, you’ve got to make sure there’s no fraud. We’ve got to, we’ve got to really crack down on fraud. […] So what you’ve got to do is every year, what we had to do is we had to look at what’s going on in the insurance market, where there’s fraud, and how do we eliminate it? And that’s something the state’s going to have to do very aggressively.
Who’s going to stop the fraud? Rick Scott will stop the fraud!
Brian Kemp on ‘Fox News Sunday’
Georgia GOP Governor Brian Kemp appeared in the safe space that is Fox News to do a political ad against Stacey Abrams an interview with host Shannon Bream. He seemed to stumble or outright lie a few times.
Bream asked about Georgia’s draconian anti-abortion “Heartbeat Bill.” Bream said Stacey Abrams is correct in pointing out that at six weeks a fetus has no heart, and the sound of the “heartbeat” is the ultrasound machine translating electrical activity into audio/visual representation. Kemp responded:
KEMP: You can take the volume off the machine or whatever, but you can see the heartbeat. I know that, I’ve seen it myself and I think medical science is very clear on that.
Yes, it is clear that Kemp is wrong.
Bream asked about rising crime in Georgia, despite Kemp touting copaganda in his election ads.
BREAM: Why should voters choose you if crime is up under your watch?
KEMP: Well, for one, unlike Stacey Abrams, I’m not gonna defund the police […] We passed legislation to keep rogue local governments from doing that.
The police have not been “defunded” anywhere. Again, crime has gone up under Brian Kemp, not Stacey Abrams. They have kept their full budgets. It’s almost as if they’re bad at “serving and protecting,” but really good at demonizing accountability for their gang-like actions. Kemp, in his effort to use rising crime as a dogwhistle to campaign against a Black woman, kinda accidentally admitted that.
Republicans’ sales pitch is always to make the government as ineffective as they possibly can when they have power, so they can point at how ineffective it is.
Have a week.
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