2022 Midterm Elections

[Cartmann99]

 

[Cartmann99]

Meanwhile in the North Carolina governor's race...

 

[Cartmann99]

Meanwhile, in Arizona...

 

[fraurosena]

When one's sedition comes to bite you in the ass...

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Another GQPer who admires Hitler:

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[Cartmann99]

I really hope Georgia doesn't elect him.

 

 

[Cartmann99]

GOP commission refuses to certify New Mexico primary vote

Quote

SANTA FE, N.M. — New Mexico’s secretary of state on Tuesday asked the state Supreme Court to order the Republican-led commission of rural Otero County to certify primary election results after it refused to do so over distrust of Dominion vote-tallying machines.

Democratic Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Olive’s request came a day after the three-member Otero County commission, in its role as a county canvassing board, voted unanimously against certifying the results of the June 7 primary without raising specific concerns about discrepancies.

The commission’s members include Cowboys for Trump co-founder Couy Griffin, who ascribes to unsubstantiated claims that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Griffin was convicted of illegally entering restricted U.S. Capitol grounds — though not the building — amid the riots on Jan. 6, 2021, and is scheduled for sentencing later this month. He acknowledged that the standoff over this primary could delay the outcome of local election races.

“I have huge concerns with these voting machines,” Otero County Commissioner Vickie Marquardt said Monday. “When I certify stuff that I don’t know is right, I feel like I’m being dishonest because in my heart I don’t know if it is right.”

The commission’s vote is the latest example of how conspiracy theories and misinformation are affecting the integrity of local elections across the U.S. Trump has continued to describe the 2020 election as “rigged” or “stolen,” despite a coalition of top government and industry officials calling it the “most secure in American history.”

Dominion’s systems also have been unjustifiably attacked since the 2020 election by people who embraced the false belief that the election was stolen from Trump. The company has filed defamation lawsuits in response to incorrect and outrageous claims made by high-profile Trump allies.

New Mexico’s Dominion machines have been disparaged repeatedly by David and Erin Clements of Las Cruces in their review of the 2020 election in Otero County and voter registration rolls at the request of the commission. The Clements are traveling advocates for “forensic” reviews of the 2020 election and offer their services as election experts and auditors to local governments. Election officials including County Clerk Robyn Holmes say the Clements are not certified auditors nor experts in election protocols.

The couple has highlighted problems during sporadic, hours long presentations to the commission this year. Local election officials dispute many of the findings as mistaken or unfounded.

County canvassing boards have until June 17 to certify election results, prior to state certification and preparation of general election ballots.

Under state law, county canvass boards can call on a voting precinct board to address specific discrepancies, but no discrepancies were identified on Monday by the Otero commission.

“The post-election canvassing process is a key component of how we maintain our high levels of election integrity in New Mexico and the Otero County Commission is flaunting that process by appeasing unfounded conspiracy theories and potentially nullifying the votes of every Otero County voter who participated in the primary,” Toulouse Oliver said in a statement. She accused the commission of willful violations of the state election code.

New Mexico uses paper ballots that can be double-checked later in all elections, and also relies on tabulation machines to rapidly tally votes while minimizing human error. Election results also are audited by random samplings to verify levels of accuracy in the vote count.

The Otero County commission voted last week to recount ballots from the statewide primary election by hand, remove state-mandated ballot drop boxes that facilitate absentee voting and discontinue the use of Dominion vote tabulation machines in the general election.

On Monday, Holmes said those instructions from the county commissions conflict with state and federal election law, and that she would only recount the election by hand under a court order.

“The election law does not allow me to hand tally these ballots or to even form a board to do it. I just can’t,” said Holmes, a Republican. “And I’m going to follow the law.”

Holmes noted that the state-owned vote tabulation machines from Dominion are tested by Otero County officials in public view and that the machines also are independently certified in advance. Griffin said he and fellow commissioners don’t see the process as trustworthy.

“That’s a source that we don’t have any control or influence over,” he said.

Mario Jimenez of the progressive watchdog group Common Cause New Mexico said the public can view testing of vote-tallying machines prior to elections in every county, and that certification notices are posted on every machine where voters can see them.

“They have no basis — other than ‘we just don’t trust the machine’ — for not certifying the election,” Jimenez said of the Otero County commissioners.

Though Trump won nearly 62% of the vote in Otero County in 2020, county commissioners have said they are not satisfied with results of the state’s audit of the vote count nor assurances by their Republican county clerk that elections this year will be accurate.

County commissioners could not immediately be reached for comment Tuesday.

Marquardt, the commissioner, laughed Monday at the suggestion that a court might intervene in the election dispute.

“And so then what? They’re going to send us to the pokey?” she said.

 

[Xan]

The New Mexico Supreme Court has issued a decree that the county commissioners have to follow the law and certify the vote.

Yeah.  There's a chance that they get sent to the pokey.

[Cartmann99]

 

[Xan]

Yep.  Walker has a grown daughter and grown son and two younger sons.  The man lies like he thinks he's Trump.  And they're lies that are easy to uncover.  You can't just tell people that you were part of the FBI or on a police force because that's easy to check.   He's just so dumb.

[Howl]

Hershel Walker's whole shtick is being an African America Christian family man, criticizing men who are not actively present in raising their children. 

MSNBC: "Walker’s disclosure is the second time this week that the candidate, who has been repeatedly publicly critical of African American absentee fathers, has been forced to admit he had children out of wedlock after media reports of their existence...

 

...On Tuesday, The Daily Beast revealed Walker had a “secret” 10-year-old son he hasn’t played an active role in raising.

On Thursday morning, The Daily Beast revealed he had a third son, who is 13 years old now, out of wedlock." 

[Cartmann99]

4 hours ago, Howl said:

Hershel Walker's whole shtick is being an African America Christian family man, criticizing men who are not actively present in raising their children. 

MSNBC: "Walker’s disclosure is the second time this week that the candidate, who has been repeatedly publicly critical of African American absentee fathers, has been forced to admit he had children out of wedlock after media reports of their existence...

 

...On Tuesday, The Daily Beast revealed Walker had a “secret” 10-year-old son he hasn’t played an active role in raising.

On Thursday morning, The Daily Beast revealed he had a third son, who is 13 years old now, out of wedlock." 

Spoiler

 

[CTRLZero]

23 hours ago, Xan said:

The New Mexico Supreme Court has issued a decree that the county commissioners have to follow the law and certify the vote.

Yeah.  There's a chance that they get sent to the pokey.

The county commissioner(s) are refusing to comply.  One commissioner is awaiting sentencing for his actions on January 6.  Link to CNN article below.  I was thinking about how this would bolster Dominion Voting’s case, and sure enough, here is a quote from the article:

In a statement this week, a Dominion spokesperson called the controversy in Otero "yet another example of how lies about Dominion have damaged our company and diminished the public's faith in elections."

Cowboy for Trump refuses to certify election results

[GreyhoundFan]

[Cartmann99]

Kari Lake is running for governor in Arizona as hard-right Trump supporter. She forgot about the internet being forever.

Spoiler

The backstory:

GOP Candidate Says Drag Queens a Danger to Kids. But This Drag Queen Says She ‘Had Her Kid in Front’ of One

Quote

Trump-endorsed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake is the latest in a long line of GOP politicians to claim drag shows are a danger for children. But one of Phoenix’s most famous drag queens just publicly called her out for taking part in the drag scene herself—and allegedly letting her own daughter join in the fun.

Rick Stevens, better known to Phoenix’s queer scene as established drag queen Barbra Seville, brought all the receipts in posts on Twitter and Facebook on Friday night, sharing photos of himself and Lake together, apparently at drag events, before he says Lake “turned to the right.”

Lake, who former President Donald Trump praised as someone who will fight to end “woke” curriculum in schools, recently took to social media to weigh in on the conservative fight to prevent children from attending drag shows.

“They kicked God out of schools and welcomed the Drag Queens,” Lake wrote on Friday, on Instagram and Twitter. “They took down our Flag and replaced it with a rainbow. They seek to disarm Americans and militarize our Enemies. Let’s bring back the basics: God, Guns & Glory.”

But Stevens said this stance is a far cry from the Lake he’s known since her ‘90s Fox10 news days, when he said she frequented a club he performed at.

Stevens wrote that he’s performed for Lake's birthday, in her home (with young children in attendance), and at “some of the seediest bars in Phoenix.”

In an interview with Arizona Central, Stevens said Lake’s comments were shocking. He also recalled a time when he said she allowed her young daughter to watch Seville perform.

“She’s friends with drag queens,” he said. “She’s had her kid in front of a drag queen. I’ve done drag in her home for her friends and family. She’s not threatened by them. She would come to shows constantly. To make me be the bogeyman for political gain, it was just too much.”

“Kari was a friend of mine, and I stood by her when she turned to the right,” Stevens wrote.

Lake seemed to be a supporter of the LGBTQ+ community in screenshots of private messages Stevens posted that date back to 2012.

The Republican candidate’s campaign was quick to hit back on Stevens’ claims, however.

“Richard’s accusations were full of lies,” Lake’s campaign wrote in a statement. “The event in question was at a party at someone else’s house, and the performer was there as a Marilyn Monroe impersonator. It wasn’t a drag show, and the issue we’re talking about isn’t adults attending drag shows, either. The issue is activists sexualizing young children, and that’s got to stop.”

Above all, Stevens told Arizona Central he feels betrayed by Lake, who he considers to be a hypocrite.

“If I can do anything to expose the hypocrisy, and if I can do anything to keep someone like that, a few votes away, from power, I’m happy to do that,” Stevens said.

 

Edited June 19, 2022 by Cartmann99

[Cartmann99]

GOP Candidate Fantasizes About Murdering Political Opponents in New Ad

Quote

The Jan. 6 committee has, for the past few weeks, been reminding Americans about the horrifying “war scene” that unfolded during the attack on the Capitol. Some conservatives are ignoring the panel’s findings and dismissing the hearings as a distraction. Others are doubling down on political violence. Eric Greitens, a scandal-ridden Republican running for Senate in Missouri, released an ad on Monday advocating for “hunting” RINOs, or Republicans In Name Only, a term for conservatives who haven’t veered far enough to the right.

The ad is not subtle. It isn’t even metaphorical. It features Greitens and an armed military team breaking into a house to execute Republicans who don’t sufficiently support former President Trump. “Join the MAGA crew,” Greitens says. “Get a RINO-hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”

Facebook removed the video shortly after Greitens posted it Monday morning. “We removed this video for violating our policies prohibiting violence and incitement,” a spokesperson said. Twitter did not remove the video, but did put a public interest notice on it for violating its rules against hateful content. Twitter also prohibited people from liking, comments, or retweeting the video, although it is allowing quote tweets.

Greitens is no stranger to gun-laden campaign ads. He was joined by Donald Trump Jr. earlier this year for a video in which the two shot guns at targets for a few seconds. “Striking fear into the hearts of liberals everywhere, folks,” Trump Jr. said. During his 2016 campaign for governor, Greitens released a spot of himself unleashing hell with an automatic Gatling gun. He won that election but resigned two years later amid scandals ranging from allegations of sexual misconduct to felony charges for using a veterans charity list to raise campaign cash. Greitens thinks he’s still fit for federal office, however, running this year to replace retiring Sen. Roy Blunt. He’s still mired in scandal, too. His ex-wife in March accused him of physically abusing their children, taking away her belongings, threatening her on multiple occasions, and threatening to kill himself if she didn’t stand by him as he was trying to weather his past scandals.

Greitens introduces himself in the video released Monday as a Navy SEAL. He’s tried to leverage his once-held military position for political gain on multiple occasions, something that hasn’t sit well with his former colleagues on the elite unit — especially in 2018 as his misconduct was spilling into public view, The New Yorker reported at the time.

Guns have been a fixture of Republican campaign ads ahead of the midterm elections, with several candidates implying they should be used to kill people. Blake Masters, the venture capitalist who recently landed former President Trump’s endorsement for Senate in Arizona, said in an ad that the “Second Amendment isn’t about duck hunting.” Janice McGeachin, who lost the Republican primary for governor in Idaho despite Trump’s endorsement, similarly said in an ad that the Second Amendment “isn’t about bird hunting.” But Greitens isn’t leaving the actual purpose of the Second Amendment to the imagination. He made abundantly clear in his campaign ad on Monday that it’s about executing those with opposing political views.

Trump is still mulling whom to endorse in the Republican primary for Senate in Missouri. The former president’s blessing could swing the race, and it wouldn’t at all be surprising if he lined up behind the gun-loving alleged sexual abuser who’s been charged with ripping off money from a veterans charity.

 

[Cartmann99]

Spoiler

 

[thoughtful]

Insecure men of Arizona with "growing issues," save your money. Don't bother going to Kari's party, just jerk off to the poster.

Edited June 20, 2022 by thoughtful
missed an obvious joke - losing my touch!

[Howl]

On 6/20/2022 at 2:59 PM, Cartmann99 said:

GOP Candidate Fantasizes About Murdering Political Opponents in New Ad

I just listened to a Sarah Kendzior podcast discussing Eric Greitens.  Sarah lives in St. Louis and her interviewee is also from Missouri so they are more than familiar with Greitens. 

From the Rolling Stone article linked by @Cartmann99: "Eric Greitens, a scandal-ridden Republican running for Senate in Missouri..."   

Greitens is so much worse than you can imagine.  Let's start with his military career.  Yes, he is a Navy SEAL, but according to his fellow SEALs, he was a SEAL who avoided actual combat assignments and was never in combat.

According to his ex, he abused her and their children,  AND don't forget this he abused his mistress;  he's a chronic liar and blatant liar about multiple things, served less than half his term as governor. And yet, and yet, voters of a certain stripe love him.  Incomprehensible. 

ETA: Just came across this tweet: 

 

Edited June 22, 2022 by Howl

[Howl]

So...Herschel Walker, running against Rev. Raphael Warnock as Republican candidate for Senate in Georgia.  Mr. Walker has dissociative identity disorder (multiple personalities).  

Lots of to-ing and fro-ing in the subsequent tweets in this thread about whether Herschel's mental health issues are "disqualifying" or "let the voters decide" or people wishing for competency tests for candidates, yada yada. 

[Alisamer]

I personaly DO think there needs to be some sort of basic competency test required to run for a major political office. Herschel Walker is like a walking demonstration of CTE and Trump is clearly demented, yet because of money here they are. 

I feel like while the "anybody can be anything" concept is good in theory, in practice we end up with people getting elected who are dumber than rocks just because they have money or name recognition. 

And I still do not understand what sort of delusion allows people who proclaim Christianity to vote for "good Christian men" who have clearly broken every commandment short of murder and have never lived on the same planet as honesty. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"How 2022 Became the Year of Over-the-Top Masculinity in Politics"

Quote

If you look at the campaign ads for this year’s Senate races, the message is clear: Real men live in Missouri. In the heart of America. On the ruby red plains, where the pickups are large and the flags fly high.

In late April, Republican Senate candidate and former Missouri governor Eric Greitens posted on Twitter a rather unsubtle video that captured him visiting a shooting range with Donald Trump Jr. As the clip opens, Greitens and the former first son are already hunched over their semiautomatic rifles. One second in, we watch as the shooters fire a hail of bullets — two hails, actually — until they pulverize and then fell a body-shaped metal target. “Liberals, beware!” Greitens soon intones with a grim “Terminator”-like finality.

Greitens is, of course, taking cues from the elder Donald Trump, who gave us all a master class in unbridled machismo. Trump said of the Islamic State, “I’m gonna bomb the s--- out of them,” and when football player Colin Kaepernick took a knee, Trump pronounced, “Wouldn’t you like to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a b---- off the field right now, out? He’s fired.’ ”

American politicians have almost always been obliged to display manliness to win elections, but our 45th president heightened masculinity to absurd, comic-book levels. Many have posited that Trump was old-school, taking us back to the days of John Wayne and guys-only steak dinners, but cultural critic Susan Faludi — author of “Stiffed,” “Backlash” and other books on gender — argued persuasively in a 2020 New York Times opinion piece that, no, Trump introduced us to a new, Internet-age masculinity, a “Potemkin patriarchy” specially tailored for “an image-based, sensation-saturated and very modern entertainment economy. … Contemporary manliness is increasingly defined by display — in Mr. Trump’s case, a pantomime of aggrieved aggression: the curled lip, the exaggerated snarl.”

In political races nationwide this year, Republicans are clamoring to get the snarl and the swagger just right as they seek to out-Trump one another. During the Super Bowl, Senate candidate Jim Lamon of Arizona ran an ad that was styled to look like an old western movie and starred himself as a gun-twirling sheriff firing at a sheepish actor dressed to resemble Joe Biden. In Georgia, Mike Collins, a Republican in a U.S. House race, trundled a wheelbarrow full of paper into the forest, then shot at it as viewers realized he was turning “Nancy Pelosi’s Plan for America” into a cloud of confetti and smoke.

The Senate race in Missouri has arguably emerged as ground zero for the manliness question — and Greitens isn’t the only candidate shilling his virility. Do you remember Mark McCloskey, that vigilante in St. Louis who brandished an AR-15 military-style rifle at Black Lives Matter protesters? He’s now seeking the GOP nomination for Senate, too — touring Missouri in a custom campaign vehicle, an SUV appointed with a giant photo that captures his gun-toting moment of fame. “Never back down!” reads the adjacent text.

Nationwide, all of this GOP chest-beating appears to be working, as Democrats seem poised for a thrashing in the midterms. In Missouri, though, one Democrat volleyed back early, serving up his own brand of manhood. Last June, Lucas Kunce released a Senate campaign video that showed him locking and loading an AR-15. In the ad, Kunce bends over the gun’s sight. He squints. Will he shoot?

No. Instead, Kunce smirks and says, “Forget it. ... Stunts like that? Those are for those clowns on the other side. Like that mansion man Mark McCloskey.” There’s a bounce in his voice; Kunce, who’s 39, is enjoying this caper. And he speaks with a certain authority: The guy is shredded. His pecs bulge beneath his blue T-shirt, and his implicit message — that he’s a real man and McCloskey’s a dingleberry — gains steam when we learn that Kunce is a 13-year Marine veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Kunce’s campaign isn’t about masculinity, but it certainly invokes the theme. “All they care about,” he told me, referring to Greitens and McCloskey, “is looking tough, looking strong. For me, masculinity is taking care of people — your family, your community — and making sure that you actually stand for something.”

What Kunce stands for is radical economic change. He’s a self-described populist, and for him, re-creating America is a military mission. “I’m a grenade,” he told an audience not long ago. “Pull the pin on me and throw me into the U.S. Senate so I can change things.”

There are other Democratic Senate candidates who exude some of Kunce’s brawn: for instance, John Fetterman, the 6-foot-8, heavily tattooed Pennsylvania lieutenant governor who favors hoodies over business suits. But Jackson Katz, creator of the 2020 documentary “The Man Card: White Male Identity Politics From Nixon to Trump,” is particularly excited about Kunce. “For decades,” says Katz, “the Democrats have been seen as the non-masculine party, and they’ve done nothing about it. They’ve been clueless. And now here’s a guy who can’t be written off physically or personally as soft.”

Can Kunce actually win? Can a political novice sell a revised, anti-Trump version of manhood in a once-centrist state that, in the past six presidential elections, has consistently voted Republican? Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, for one, is worried that the race “could end up being competitive,” as he told CNN in April, before advising Missouri Republicans: “You better nominate a fully capable, credible nominee or you’re in trouble.”

But perhaps the bigger question about the rise of an ultra-macho style in Missouri’s — and America’s — politics isn’t whether it’s effective; it’s what it all means. If this new exaggerated masculinity proves consistently appealing to voters on both the right and the left, then what does that suggest about the kinds of candidates who can, and cannot, realistically seek office in the future? About what types of issues we can debate and on what terms? About what kind of people we want to lead us — and what kind of country we want to be?

Lucas Kunce is 6-foot-2, and he wears his clothes tight, so that even in repose, he seems athletic, his muscles hardened by a regimen that involves running, swimming and weightlifting. His automobile is less impressive. It is a well-loved 2013 Ford Focus. The paint is chipped; the passenger-side front door sticks a little and sometimes needs a special shove.

For three days this May, I plied the campaign trail with Kunce. We moved — the candidate, his press officer and I — west to east across Missouri, from Kansas City to St. Louis, the three of us passing innumerable highway signs for adult bookstores and fundamentalist churches, on a trip that seemed loose-limbed, unofficial. There’s a boyish abandon about Kunce. The onetime Marine major is half-inclined to address every audience he encounters as though it were made up of leathernecks convoying with him through Fallujah. “Lucas has no filter,” his press officer, Connor Lounsbury, will tell me. “None. I can’t tell him how to act. He’s just Lucas.”

Sometimes the no-filter approach works its intended magic. Like when we travel to a school for apprentice ironworkers in North Kansas City. When Kunce enters the classroom, he finds 30 apprentices, all male, in grimy orange and yellow T-shirts. They are sinewy and bearded, and they slump in their chairs, their arms crossed as their helmets, plastered with stickers, sit before them on tables, bearing slogans such as “Rat Poison Ironworkers. Local Union #10.”

For most politicians, it’d be a hard room, but Kunce begins with, “We got any veterans in here?” Soon, he’s talking about how, when he was growing up in Jefferson City, in the ’90s, his family was so broke that his mom “begged the grocery store manager not to cash the check until the end of the month.” The manager complied. “People cared for each other,” Kunce says, “but today that grocery store is owned by some private equity a--hole, and if you don’t have money, you’ve got to go down to payday loans. That’s f---ed up, right?”

The ironworkers nod. They snicker knowingly. They’re listening, and Kunce continues, now talking about how the United States has spent $6.4 trillion on wars since 2001. “The thing that p---es me off,” he says, “is how they spent almost nothing for the communities of the people who served in those wars. The first house I ever lived in was bulldozed. The house I joined the Marine Corps from is boarded up.” The problem, Kunce says, is “politicians who make decisions based on their stock portfolios. I want to take power back in this country. I want every damned one of you to have power.”

Eventually, the apprentices begin moving toward a practice construction site. In the corridor, Kunce’s aides hand them a new helmet sticker, a piece of campaign propaganda that reads, “Make S--- in America Again!” Thirty-year-old Matthew Luckey tells me, “I’m going to clean my helmet off so this sticker will stay on there.” A father of four who voted for Trump in 2020, Luckey says of Kunce, “He seems like a pretty down-to-earth guy.”

Outside, the apprentices are building the iron bones of a three-story building. The instructor takes Kunce aside to teach him how to tie rebar with wire — a step in the manufacture of concrete — and as Kunce bends over the rebar, he is intently focused.

But then there’s a distraction. Off in the corner of the job site, one by one, apprentices are roping into harnesses to pull their way up a 35-foot-high iron beam. It’s a challenge that involves hugging the beam close and angling your feet just so into a 12-inch-wide gap. One guy struggles his way to the top and triumphantly rings the bell there. Another makes it only 10 feet up, then falls. I hear the grisly sound of the man’s feet slapping the pavement. There’s a collective sigh of relief (he’s all right), and then there’s a hush. And I realize that the plan, all along, has been to give Major Kunce a crack at the beam.

Kunce climbs into the harness. Then everyone waits for a boom lift to maneuver into place, to save the candidate if he gets stuck. No one else got such backup, and the machine ups the ante: Either Kunce will prove himself a hero here, or he’ll leave known as the weenie who needed the boom. No one is working now. The apprentices are all gathered at the base of the beam, making sardonic jokes and spitting chewing tobacco.

When Kunce starts out, his grip is firm, but his hips are canted back, too far from the beam, and his feet slip in the slot. About a dozen feet up, though, he finds his groove, and then he’s just flying, hand over hand, toward the top. He’s moving more quickly than anyone else will all day, and the assembled ironworkers are loving it.

“Hell, yeah!” someone yells.

“Don’t look down. Keep going up!” shouts another apprentice.

Kunce reaches the top; he smacks the bell.

“Yes,” one ironworker cries from below. “That’s my senator!”

This nation was founded on great acts of brawn. George Washington stood in a boat, crossing the Delaware, towering and mighty in his rough-hewn breeches, his broad chest to the wind. He was strong enough to hurl a silver coin across the Potomac, and he once broke up a brawl between soldiers by seizing both combatants by the throat.

Or so the story goes. In his forthcoming book, “First Among Men: George Washington and the Myth of American Masculinity,” Maurizio Valsania, a history professor at the University of Turin in Italy, writes that our first president was in fact not a hulk, but rather a “coifed” upper-class gentleman who wore a corset to ensure that his back was, per the fashion of the day, ramrod straight, like a ballet dancer’s.

Valsania doesn’t gloss over the ruggedness of Washington’s life — he did cut down trees; he did fight in wars — but the professor stresses that Washington, who was potbellied, with a concave chest, only became a he-man in the American imagination decades after his death, when Andrew Jackson made pushing west and fighting Native Americans the national mission. “As the symbolic father of a nation prizing strength and territorial expansion,” Valsania writes, “Washington must by necessity remain the tallest, strongest, most athletic, and most virile of men.” For the actual Washington, however, the highest values were “self-effacement and making sacrifices for the common good,” Valsania told me. “He was a communitarian.” Valsania says all of our early leaders were.

Jackson was a radical departure. A loudmouth who liked to brag about his brawls and his duels, he brought to the White House a bumptiousness that spoke to an ambitious, rising middle class. He was an individualist and, ever since his early-19th-century presidency, Valsania says, “there’s been a tension between two American masculinities, between the individualist and the communitarian.”

America’s consummate communitarian, probably, was Franklin Roosevelt, who in one 1932 speech tried to convince his audience that the time for burly Jacksonian individualism had passed. “The man of ruthless force had his place in developing a pioneer country,” Roosevelt said, but his modern equivalent — “the lone wolf, the unethical competitor, the reckless promoter” — threatened to drag our nation “back to a state of anarchy.”

As a refined aristocrat, Roosevelt wasn’t inclined to drive his point home with muscular heft, but there have been communitarians who’ve done so, the prime example being President Lyndon Baines Johnson. LBJ pushed through his Great Society agenda partly via the “Johnson Treatment,” which saw the beefy 6-foot-4 Texan lobbying congressmen by jabbing his finger at them, grabbing at their lapels and leaning threateningly into their personal space.

Since Johnson, though, Republicans have largely been able to castigate Democrats as weak. In his film “The Man Card,” Jackson Katz argues that this winning strategy took root in the 1968 presidential election when Richard Nixon media adviser Roger Ailes, who would go on to found Fox News, first tapped the “fear, anxiety and anger of the White middle class.” Ailes helped land Nixon the “hard-hat vote” — the support of the White working class — and thereby aligned Republicans inextricably with White male virility.

In the years since, Democratic candidates have tried to project strength, but the efforts have largely fallen flat. Think of 1988 presidential candidate Michael Dukakis riding around in a military tank, looking like a little boy in an oversized soldier’s costume, or of Barack Obama deciding, in 2013, that it was a good idea to release photos of himself shooting skeets.

Even when Democrats seem poised to win the manliness game, they lose. In the 2004 presidential election, their candidate, John F. Kerry, was a decorated Vietnam War veteran, his military credentials far stronger than those of incumbent George W. Bush, who’d dodged the draft and instead joined Texas’s Air National Guard. Still, some 200 former naval men emerged to form Swift Vets and POWs for Truth, which sought to poke holes in Kerry’s naval résumé. We winced at footage of Kerry windsurfing while Bush repeatedly got himself photographed cutting brush at his Texas ranch; it was Bush who managed to establish himself as the “real man” in the race.

Joe Biden has tried to be manly, certainly. In the run-up to the 2020 election, he released a video called “That’s a President,” which starts by telling us that being commander in chief is “about protecting Americans.” A medley of tough guy pics ensue — Biden convening with camo-clad soldiers, Biden playing Joe Cool in dark sunglasses — as a deep male voice extols the Democrat’s virtues: “Strength. Courage. Compassion. Resilience.”

But none of that has stopped Republicans from trying to portray him as unmanly. In March, after Biden decided not to risk establishing a no-fly zone over Ukraine, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) went on Fox News and told Sean Hannity that the president’s Ukraine policy constituted a “wimp fest.” Hannity heartily agreed. “We saw Donald Trump using modern warfare,” he said, now focused on Afghanistan, “to kick the living Adam Schiff out of that caliphate and [fiefdom] that was grown under Obama and Biden.” No shortage of testosterone in that sentence!

It would be impossible to call Lucas Kunce a wimp, or to tar him with the label “elitist” — another, related slur beloved by Republicans. As the candidate tells us in “Home,” a two-minute campaign ad thick with tear-jerking violins, he grew up on “an old cracked street in Jeff City, Missouri.” His father was an IT specialist for the Missouri Department of Conservation. His mother was a teacher. Or, rather, she was until Kunce, the oldest of four children, was 8. Kunce’s sister was born then, with cardiac issues that required three open-heart surgeries. His mother had to stop working to care for the girl. Medical bills piled up, and in 1990 his parents filed for bankruptcy.

But the family patched through. “Our neighbors and friends lifted us up,” Kunce says in the ad. “They gave me the chance to make something of myself.” Slowly, lovingly the camera zeroes in on Kunce, standing in profile on a gritty street. “So I did,” Kunce continues. “I went to Yale and became a U.S. Marine to honor those who had given me so much.” Kunce goes on to lament that, once he came home from Iraq and Afghanistan, he found “the community I had loved had been hollowed out … the wealth of our state sucked dry.”

For anyone who missed the video’s masculine motifs, “Home” soon delivers a hopeful medley of macho visuals as Kunce promises to “Marshall Plan the Midwest.” We see an auto garage where wrenches hang gleaming on a pegboard. We visit a boxing gym and hang out for a second or two of sparring, and we follow a young bro shouldering a load of lumber out to his pickup while Kunce enthuses about investing “in the heartland, where we’ve been making things for generations.”

As Kunce and I cross Missouri, I ask him how he took the unusual path from Yale to the Marines. He tells me that after finishing college and attending law school at the University of Missouri, he returned to Jeff City and found a mentor in Al Mueller, a Marine and Vietnam vet who ran the soup kitchen that Kunce’s parents launched in the late 1980s, in the basement of their Catholic church. “Al,” he says, “always put others before himself. He thought the Vietnam War was a mess, but he enlisted. He decided, ‘If it’s not me, it’s going to be somebody else.’ ”

In 2007, when Kunce was 24, Mueller took him several times to the Marine Corps League, a sort of VFW hall, in the community of Apache Flats, just outside Jeff City. A singer-songwriter named Ron Saucier was often on hand, warbling patriotic songs playing tribute to soldiers. “There were World War II veterans there, and Korean War vets,” Kunce remembers, “and they told me their stories.” Like Mueller, these older men seemed noble to Kunce. “I already knew that I wanted to do public service,” Kunce says, “but that’s when I decided how I would serve.” Here was a communitarian alpha male in the LBJ tradition — and he was jumping into the fray.

Kunce has been on Fox News numerous times, and also on MSNBC and Bloomberg Television. He’s out-fundraising all other candidates for the Senate seat, including Republicans, bringing in $3.3 million as of March 31, the last time such figures were available. Most of his donations have come from outside the state — from Democrats hoping for a ray of sunshine in the midterms. Ninety-eight percent of the gifts have been for less than $200 — a stat that puts him in the same league as John Fetterman, widely regarded as a grass-roots folk icon. Still, it’s not a sure bet that Kunce will win the primary. His opponent, beer heiress and nurse Trudy Busch Valentine, 65, has made very few political appearances, but in recent polls she was just behind Kunce in a race that still isn’t on many Missourians’ radar screen.

What’s clear is that if Kunce does face Greitens in November, he’ll be up against someone who trumpets his own intense machismo. Before he was governor, Greitens, now 48, was an intelligence officer in the Navy SEALs. He has published four books about his SEAL experience, among them “Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life.” In appearing on TV to promote these brisk sellers, he has reflected on questions such as, “How do people deal with hardship and become heroic?” In his winning 2016 gubernatorial campaign, he worked the SEAL motif relentlessly, even going so far as to sell bumper stickers that read, “ISIS Hunting Permit.” Not everyone appreciated his virile strutting: That same year, 16 of his fellow SEALs joined forces to produce a sharply critical video that accused Greitens of “stealing the valor and sacrifice of our brothers who actually fought, died, and dedicated their lives to taking the fight to our nation’s enemies.”

Greitens is, like Kunce, a toned physical specimen. He has run a marathon in under three hours and has an impressive boxing résumé. But he has faced a welter of ethical issues. In 2018, he stepped down as governor, accused of violating campaign finance laws — a charge that was deemed unfounded in a 2022 Missouri Ethics Commission ruling. In 2018 he was also accused of terrorizing his hairdresser. He allegedly tied her up, blindfolded her, stripped her, forced her to have oral sex, took photographs and then threatened to distribute them if she ever spoke publicly of the episode. More recently, his ex-wife has accused him of knocking her down and smacking the couple’s young son so hard the boy’s tooth jiggled loose.

In 2018, Greitens was indicted on one felony count for invading the privacy of the hairdresser. The charge was later dropped, though, and the Missouri Supreme Court is now looking at claims that the prosecutor in the case, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, withheld evidence. In a March statement, Greitens called his ex-wife’s allegations “completely fabricated” and “baseless.”

I sought an in-person interview with Greitens; for weeks, he did not reply to my emails. Eventually, though, his campaign sent me a written statement attributed to the former governor. “I fight for what I believe in and I stand on principles,” the statement read. “Far too often, especially in politics, we see weak-kneed politicians who are afraid to stand up and do the most difficult things. When I am U.S. Senator, my sole purpose will be to defend this country from all threats, domestic and abroad, just like the oath I took when I first enlisted with the Navy.”

The rhetoric was manly, no doubt, but I’d eventually discover that, in the Senate race in Missouri, you don’t have to be a man to talk like a honcho. One evening, while visiting the St. Joseph Country Club for a Republican fundraiser, I speak to U.S. Rep. Vicky Hartzler, who was polling in third place in her party’s crowded primary, behind Greitens and Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt. She offers me a solution to the use of drones for carrying drugs across the U.S.-Mexico border. “In Missouri,” she tells me, “there’s a lot of gun owners. We do a lot of target practice. I know we could shoot them down.”

Nearby, hunkered over a white tablecloth, is the figure who first got me thinking about Missouri and manhood: Mark McCloskey. McCloskey is, okay, polling in fifth place among Missouri’s 21 Republican Senate candidates, but there’s something archetypal about this personal injury lawyer who, in 2020, patrolled his lawn with an AR-15 as his wife, Patricia, stood beside him waggling a smaller, more ladylike Bryco .380-caliber pistol at Black Lives Matter protesters.

McCloskey is the aggrieved White male, so one afternoon I meet up with him and Patricia at a bar in St. Joseph to ask what compelled him to brandish his gun. Like many conservatives, McCloskey sees our nation as an impending catastrophe in need of hard male energy. He tells me that the Black Lives Matter protesters were “screaming death threats and arson threats.” Audio recordings of the incident don’t support this claim — their wording is hard to decipher — but McCloskey says that the activists pointed and told him, “That’s where I’m going to have my breakfast after we kill you and take the house.”

What McCloskey perceived as a Black Lives Matter siege on his home was just another chapter in a long-running siege on American liberty that “goes back to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1905. The forces that created the Soviet Union and Red China,” he tells me, “have a program of trying to undermine free society.” Today, he says, “the CDC is using our phones to track us. There are people sitting in holes in D.C. with no hope of a trial” — Jan. 6 protesters, he means. “This country has the smallest remnants of freedom left,” he continues, “and my campaign is a movement to restore freedom, to restore individuals as the masters of their own lives.”

McCloskey tells me that the impulse to “stand up for God and country” resides in his DNA — and for a moment he transports me to long-ago Fort Dodge, Iowa, where, one day, his elderly great-grandfather was crossing a “bridge over a creek. Some young punks were coming the other direction saying, ‘Out of my way, old man,’ ” McCloskey recounts, “and he just knocked them off the bridge, into the water.”

As I sit there listening, I marvel at how different the raw streets of Fort Dodge were from McCloskey’s manicured lawn — and how the myth of frontier masculinity keeps enduring in America, no matter the context. But we’re an hour into the interview now, and I’m cognizant of Patricia, who’s been sitting silently by her husband’s side the entire time. I look over to her, finally, and note that she’s a lawyer too; she also patrolled the lawn that day in 2020. Why isn’t she the one running for Senate? “I wouldn’t think about running,” she says. “He’s the dude.”

A couple of hours after scaling the iron beam, Kunce is slated to meet the photographer for this story. The plan is to take pictures of the candidate in Independence, where he lives within sight of the house that Harry Truman called home for over 50 years. Lounsbury, the press officer, thought Kunce was going to shower and change for the shoot. But when we meet him, Kunce has done neither.

We shoot the photos. We get on Interstate 70 and press east. Just outside of St. Louis, in well-heeled Chesterfield, Kunce meets 60 or so local Democrats gathered in a large gazebo set in a sumptuous grassy park.

When Kunce speaks, his arm gestures are coiled, taut, emphatic. He talks about onerous student loans, which, he says, obliged his law school classmates to abandon their save-the-world ideals and work instead for those “white-shoe law firms that help payday loans squeeze more money out of us.” Then he skewers the politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, who perpetrated the war in Afghanistan. “They lied to our faces,” he says. “They told us, ‘Give us your sons and daughters. Give us your trillions of dollars. We’re building something real and lasting in Afghanistan.’ And it all fell apart in 11 days.”

Afterward, Kathy Coe, an IT specialist, stands up to tell Kunce, “I love that you have fight in you. My huge frustration with the Democrats is that we’ve been too polite. Right now, we’re bringing a knife to a gunfight.”

Eventually, I’ll speak to Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a history and gender studies professor at Calvin University in Michigan, and learn that she too appreciates Kunce’s force. “He’s exactly the sort of candidate the Democrats should be running right now,” says Du Mez, author of “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.” “He’s a strong, ripped White male who knows how to use a gun. Who better to reveal how much of the right wing’s masculinity is performative?”

Du Mez adds, “There can be other real-deal candidates capable of subversion: strong women of color, for example. But right now, when masculinity is the motif of the season, Kunce seems right. It’s going to be hard for the Republicans to say he’s not a real man.” Still, she continues, “Kunce is a test case. Republican masculinity is about defending White Christian nationalism. Think of Mark McCloskey on his lawn. Kunce is doing the muscle thing, but he’s extricating the Christian nationalism. We’ll have to see if it works.”

It’s likely to be an uphill battle. The Cook Political Report has rated the Missouri Senate race as “solid Republican,” and Terry Smith, a political scientist at Missouri’s Columbia College, isn’t inclined to doubt that prediction. Smith sees Greitens as the man to beat in Missouri. “In 2016, I learned my lesson on writing certain kinds of candidates off,” Smith says, alluding to Trump’s shocker victory. “I would never count Eric Greitens out. He’s a bad boy, and that resonates with voters. And he has access to a lot of money.” Billionaire shipping magnate Richard Uihlein last year gave $2.5 million to a super PAC supporting Greitens. “Kunce has a long way to go,” Smith tells me.

Kunce doesn’t deny that opposing Greitens would be tough, but he’d relish the challenge. “If it’s me against Greitens, it’s going to be bloody,” Kunce says. “It’s going to be a very bloody, nasty fight.”

Politics as slugfest is exciting, and it makes for killer tweets. But what if we lived in a world where bravado and masculinity weren’t the prime criteria for political success? Kelly Dittmar, a political science professor and the director of research for the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, argues that we should strive for such a world by reimagining political campaigns. “We should expand the credentials we seek, value, and reward among candidates and officeholders,” Dittmar wrote in 2020 on the center’s blog. “Disrupting the gender power imbalance in U.S. politics requires not only shifting power away from men but also from masculinity.”

Dittmar doesn’t just disdain macho saber rattlers like Greitens and McCloskey. She gives low marks to all politicians, male and female, who drench their rhetoric in machismo, for this, she argues, “only maintains power in those credentials.” She laments how, in 2016, presidential candidate Carly Fiorina told Trump to “man up,” and she even takes a swipe at Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who decried Trump’s boorish treatment of Fiorina by calling him “a pathetic coward who can’t handle the fact that he’s losing to a girl.”

Is Kunce just another politician misguidedly using tough-guy rhetoric to take down Trump and his heirs? The answer is complicated. Kunce is a lot more than a gunslinger. When I think of him now, I place him back at Apache Flats, at the Marine Corps League, mixing with the sort of World War II vets that ’40s-era correspondent Ernie Pyle valorized when he savored the communitarian spirit those soldiers shared in combat. “We are all men of new professions,” Pyle wrote, “out in some strange night caring for each other.”

But then there’s Kunce’s tight T-shirts, the easy and knowing way that he handles a gun for the camera, his happy embrace of the f-bomb as a go-to campaign trail adjective. With his arrival — and with the rise of other ultramasculine candidates in this election cycle — the tone of menace underlying American politics is getting more pronounced.

I could feel this as we crossed Missouri on I-70. One afternoon, as we were driving east in the Focus, Kunce told me about his last military posting, in which he was on staff at the Pentagon, leading arms negotiations between NATO and Russia — and growing increasingly tired of how the Russians violated treaties. He said, “Power and coercion is the only language they understand. If you talk about hugs and kisses, you’re just going to get abused.”

Then, abruptly, he shifted topics, now zeroing on his Senate race. “Eric Greitens, Mark McCloskey,” he said, “all these fake populists on the right, these guys who oppose unions and higher wages, who don’t actually want to end corporate control in our country? They are the Russians, and you’ve got to fight them with firepower.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Spanberger’s rival questions on tape whether pregnancy less likely after rape"

Quote

Yesli Vega — the GOP nominee in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District vying to unseat Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) — drew outrage Monday after audio published by Axios Richmond appeared to capture her postulating inaccurately about why rape might not lead to pregnancy in a conversation about abortion and exceptions to abortion bans.

Vega’s comments perhaps mark the opening salvo in the role abortion policy will play in the 7th District race following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade — a development that political analysts have anticipated could energize Democratic voters in a midterm election year in which Republicans have claimed much of the momentum.

And Vega’s remarks, political scientist Stephen Farnsworth said, immediately “add fuel to that fire.” Her comments elicited swift condemnation from Virginia Democrats and drew comparisons to other Republican politicians who infamously tanked their campaigns after making controversial comments about abortion and rape.

Axios published the audio Monday and said it came from a campaign event in Stafford County last month. The outlet said the tape captured an exchange between Vega, who is a Prince William County supervisor, and an unknown person who suggested to Vega, “I’ve actually heard it’s harder for a woman to get pregnant if she’s been raped. Have you heard that?”

Vega responded: “Well, maybe because there’s so much going on in the body, I don’t know. I haven’t seen any studies. But if I’m processing what you’re saying, it wouldn’t surprise me, because it’s not something that’s happening organically. Right? You’re forcing it.”

The recording released by Axios begins with Vega, an auxiliary Prince William County sheriff’s deputy and former Alexandria police officer, drawing on her own anecdotal experience as a law enforcement officer with rape and pregnancy.

“The left will say, ‘Well, what about in cases of rape or incest?’ ” Vega said, apparently referring to exceptions to abortion bans in those cases. “I’m a law enforcement officer. I became a police officer in 2011. I worked one case where, as result of a rape, the young woman became pregnant.”

Then the unidentified person asked Vega if she had heard it’s harder for rape victims to get pregnant. As Vega explained why she thought that could be true, the woman added in agreement: “Exactly. Like, the body shuts down in some way.”

“Yeah, yeah. And the individual, the male is doing it as quickly — it’s not like, you know — so I can see why maybe there’s truth to that,” Vega responded.

Rape can and does lead to pregnancy. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that nearly 3 million American women have experienced rape-related pregnancy, citing a 2018 paper that conducted the first review and survey of rape-related pregnancy in two decades. Abortions stemming from rape are uncommon, according to recent studies, with the Guttmacher Institute estimating that just 1 percent of abortions follow a rape and a 2015 Chicago survey of more than 19,000 women at two health-care clinics offering abortion finding just 1.9 percent got an abortion because of rape.

The CDC also notes that only between 5.2 percent and 26 percent of rape victims report their rape, depending on the identity of the perpetrator.

The Washington Post requested an interview with Vega, including to ask questions about her positions on abortion policy in post-Roe America. She did not agree to an interview, instead sending a statement through a campaign spokesman that did not touch on her positions on abortion or her comments.

“Liberals are desperate to distract from their failed agenda of record high gas and grocery prices, and skyrocketing crime,” she wrote. “For all the left-wing bloggers and media, as a mother of two children, yes I’m fully aware of how women get pregnant.”

She then accused Spanberger of lying, although Vega did not say what about, and called her position on abortion “extreme.” A campaign spokesman did not immediately respond to questions about what Vega was referring to or to answer specific questions about Vega’s positions on a national abortion ban or about exceptions in cases of rape, incest and when a mother’s life is at risk, among other questions.

In a statement to The Post, Spanberger said Vega’s comments in the audio published by Axios were “devoid of truth, shamefully disrespectful toward victims of rape, and clearly indicate that she is not qualified to be making serious policy decisions on behalf of our fellow Virginians.”

“I will continue to work tirelessly to ensure a woman’s right to choose and the fundamental right to privacy,” Spanberger said.

State Sen. L. Louise Lucas (D), the president pro tempore of the Senate, in a tweet called Vega “a complete disgrace to everyone else wearing that uniform.” Susan Swecker, the chairwoman of the Virginia Democratic Party, called Vega’s comments “deeply hateful, offensive and an insult to all rape victims.”

“Vega’s indefensible comments have no place in Congress,” Swecker said in a statement. “The contrast could not be more clear between Yesli Vega and Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, who is a staunch defender of a woman’s right to choose and the fundamental right to privacy.”

Farnsworth, a political science professor at the University of Mary Washington, anticipated Democrats would make these comments a central rallying cry against Vega for the remainder of the campaign, especially given how last week’s overturn of Roe is “going to turbocharge Democratic voters.” He called her comments “very damaging” to her prospects in the swing district, which is anchored in Prince William County and the Fredericksburg area and is a district that both President Biden and Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) won.

Farnsworth and others noted the 2012 Senate campaign of Missouri’s Todd Akin tanked after Akin claimed inaccurately that it was “really rare” for pregnancy to occur after rape and that “the female body” would be able to “shut down” a “legitimate rape.”

“If the Democrats drop this issue between now and November they’d be guilty of malpractice,” Farnsworth said. “Even in a red state like Missouri, a place far more conservative than the 7th District of Virginia, a comparable comment was poisonous to the Akin campaign.”

Vega’s position on Roe has been unambiguous. She cheered the leaked draft Supreme Court ruling in May and celebrated Friday when the ruling overturning the constitutional right to abortion officially came down, saying she was glad the power to decide abortion policy “was returning to the state where we have a pro-life Governor at the helm.”

But she has not been as clear about specific abortion policies she would support. According to Axios, she expressed support for a 15-week ban like the one Youngkin is pushing for but did not answer directly when asked if she would support a nationwide ban.

At an event in May observed by a Post reporter, Vega and several other candidates were asked what they would do about abortion in Congress.

Vega started by saying she agreed with everything two candidates before her had said. One, David Ross, a Spotsylvania County board supervisor, said he would support a bill declaring life begins at conception. Crystal Vanuch, the chair of the Stafford County board of supervisors, said she believed abortion policy should be left up to states.

Vega then said that “when you talk to people on the other side of the aisle about abortion, you have to know what you’re talking about,” before expressing apparent support for the Texas abortion law that banned abortion after six weeks; the state is now slated to ban all abortion.

“When we talk about the Texas bill, what does that bill say and mean, that if a heartbeat is detected, you can’t what? You can’t kill that baby. You can’t,” Vega said. “And most people don’t know this. All they know is general talking points — I don’t want old White men controlling my body. My body my choice. Where was that same rhetoric when they were trying to mandate vaccines on we the people?”

 

[AnywhereButHere]

Lee Zeldin seems to have won the republican primary in the governor’s race in NY. So, that means Giuliani is out which is awesome, but Zeldin is just as crazy pants, so that sucks. They’re all fairly rabid Fucknut humpers, so yeah. Not exactly spoiled for choice there. 
 

Hochul better win the general. 🤞🤞🤞☘️☘️☘️🧲🧲🧲🐇🐇🐇(never mind the lucky rabbit’s foot - I’m going with the whole damn rabbit).