Friday, January 05, 2024

THERE ARE NO MAINSTREAM REPUBLICANS


The Nikki Haley campaign just snagged a major endorsement:


You rember Don Bolduc:
Donald C. Bolduc ... is a retired brigadier general of the United States Army. The Republican nominee in the 2022 U.S. Senate election in New Hampshire, he lost to incumbent Democrat Maggie Hassan....

Bolduc has called for the repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ending direct popular election of U.S. senators.... He opposed the provision in the Democrats' Inflation Reduction Act allowing Medicare to negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs, saying, "Anything the government’s involved in, it's not good, it doesn't work." ...

In May 2021, Bolduc was one of 124 retired generals and admirals who signed an open letter promoting the lie that the presidential election was "rigged" in Biden's favor.... Throughout his campaign for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, Bolduc continued to promote the false claim that the election was stolen and that Trump actually won; in an August 2022 primary debate, he said of his signing the May 2021 letter: "damn it, I stand by [it]"....

Bolduc ... has falsely claimed that COVID-19 vaccines are really "Bill Gates saying we should put [micro]chips inside people" and asserted that the use of face masks to control the spread of the virus "cause[s] more problems than they solve"....
And here's my favorite Bolduc fun fact:
Speaking to an audience in North Hampton, New Hampshire, on October 27, 2022, Bolduc repeated the debunked hoax ... that children are being told they can identify as cats and use litter boxes in schools.
Until Haley finally drops out of the race and endorses Donald Trump, we'll be told that she's a "mainstream" Republican, not like those icky MAGA Republicans. (We'll probably be told that even after her inevitable Trump endorsement, and possibly after she joins the Trump ticket as his running mate.) But there simply are no mainstream Republicans now. Every Republican is either a conspiratorial extremist or willing to join hands with conspiratorial extremists for the greater glory of the GOP. (You might argue that northeastern Republicans like New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu have genuinely separated themselves from the party's extremism, but Sununu endorsed Bolduc in the 2022 general election.)

Democrats need to say that the GOP is beyond the pale. Even its anti-extremists are extremist.

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