Crazy Congresswomen from Georgia

One of my Senators is not too happy with one of Georgia's elected representatives. 

Sen. Thom Tillis’s (R-N.C.) comments to CNN on Tuesday were particularly biting. Amid Greene’s efforts to oust McCarthy’s successor, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), Tillis called her a “waste of time” and a “horrible leader.”

“She is dragging our brand down,” Tillis said. “She — not the Democrats — are the biggest risk to us getting back to a majority.”

Tillis added, “I’m embarrassed to have actually lived geographically in her district at one time before she was there.”

I'm not too impressed with Tillis himself, who is reliably bad on issues of liberty like unfettered domestic spying. (My other Senator is even worse; he's on that list too, and has used his office to profit wildly from insider knowledge.) He may think he's better for the brand, but that brand looks pretty tarnished to me. 

However, I would just like to point out that Greene is only the latest in a Georgia tradition -- you could even call it an Atlanta-area tradition -- of sending wild-eyed Congresswomen to Washington. Cynthia McKinney was a long-time Georgia politician, sometimes a Democrat and other times a Green Party member -- even their presidential candidate in 2008. She endorsed a metric ton of crazy ideas in her time, including a suggestion that there were widespread hidden executions following Hurricane Katrina. She claimed that 'Bush knew' about 9/11 and let it happen on purpose; separately, that "Zionists" carried out the attack. She also reliably took the side of America's enemies in her foreign policy work, and was ever-ready to support Hamas or really anyone who was against Israel. Even David Duke.

On September 11, 2023, McKinney promoted a livestream called "Can Black People and White People Work Together to Defeat Our Common Enemy" with the Star of David, indicating that the "common enemy" is Jews. The livestream was to be hosted by Ayo Kimathi, the author of Jews Are the Problem and described by the ADL as "antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ+ Black nationalist extremist" and David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and anti-semite.In the livestream, Kimathi explicitly advocated for ties with White nationalists to actively eradicate "the Jew."

That said, she was also right some of the time. She saw through NAFTA and the World Trade Organization, and she was opposed to that Gaddafi business I was just talking about in the last post. Her ideas were often way out there, but sometimes she saw things others didn't. She was an honest representative of her district, where many of those views are very popular. 

There are hundreds of people in Congress. The few crazies who get in there aren't the real problem: it's the majority that are outright crooked and power-hungry. It doesn't hurt Congress to hear some wild ideas now and then, especially since just a few of them turn out to be true. At least someone is speaking what they think is true and not just parroting the approved lines.