Arizona's GOP dealing with defeat by attacking Cindy McCain
If you were holding out hope that Trumpism might end with Trump
(oh, my sweet summer child), please allow me to present Exhibit A: the Republican Party of Arizona.
You might think the state party would be chastened. Republicans in the state just lost a second Senate seat, leaving them without a Republican senator for the first time since 1952. (In a dubious first, the party’s nominee, Trump-tongued Martha McSally, managed to lose both seats in back-to-back elections.) The state also went for Joe Biden, backing a Democrat for only the second time in 72 years.
Next, two prominent officials in the Arizona GOP, Reps. Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar, became ringleaders of a plot to overturn the election results. They have been identified as architects of last week’s protest that turned into a deadly invasion of the U.S. Capitol.
So what is the Arizona Republican Party doing to recover? Why, it’s attacking John McCain’s widow.
The party just rolled out a “censure resolution” against Cindy McCain. Childish and bizarre, it attacks the wife of Arizona’s beloved late (Republican) senator for having “a past riddled with drug abuse.” (She admitted three decades ago to a previous painmedication addiction.)
It admonishes her for supporting “leftist causes such as gay marriage.” It scolds her for endorsing Biden, “in direct opposition to . . . the Constitution.” It upbraids her for objecting to Trump’s “criticism of her husband” — and then it repeats such slander, saying the late senator, a war hero and POW, committed “serious wrongdoing during his military service.”
The text then says Republicans will “officially censure her” at their “Jan. 23, 2020 Mandatory Meeting.” (I’m still writing 2020 on my censure resolutions, too.)
What next? A resolution denouncing Barry Goldwater as a socialist? Labeling Sandra Day O’Connor as antifa?
The self-destructive madness can be traced to the 2019 election of Kelli Ward, R-Wackadoodle, as state GOP chairwoman. Under the leadership of Ward — a two-time loser of Republican Senate primaries, one against McCain — the party embraced election conspiracy theories: It called for the state legislature to “DE-CERTIFY the false results,” and when the state’s Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, an erstwhile Trump ally, defended the count, Ward tweeted that Ducey should “#sthu” — shut the hell up.
Cindy McCain reacted mildly to the party’s attack, saying she’s “a proud lifelong Republican” who supports “candidates who put country over party.”
There had been a strain of McCain antipathy within the Arizona party well before Trump, who served in the First Bone Spurs Division during Vietnam and attacked McCain’s heroism for years, even posthumously. Meanwhile, a younger, multiracial electorate has been gradually turning against Republicans in the state, as in Texas, Georgia and North Carolina.
But ruin accelerated with the takeover of the party by proTrump extremists. (Ward famously suggested in 2018 that the McCain family disclosed his imminent death because the “narrative” would be “negative to me.”)
The Arizona GOP debacle, and the obsession with demonizing a revered, deceased leader, show the lasting damage Trump has done to the party. In place of McCain, the faces of the state party are now Gosar and Biggs, who along with Alabama’s Rep. Mo Brooks allegedly organized last week’s protest-turned-riot.
“I was the person who came up with the Jan. 6 idea with Congressman Gosar, Congressman Mo Brooks and then Congressman Andy Biggs,” said “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander in a pre-event video. “We four schemed up of putting max pressure on Congress while they were voting so that
. . . we could change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body hearing our loud roar from outside.”
Instead, they sacked the Capitol, and five died — the latest and surest sign that the party ennobled by John McCain’s patriotism has become the refuge of scoundrels.