Two J-6 Insurrectionists Doesn't Even Begin To Tell The Story Of Insanity
Debbie Lasko announced she’s had enough of Congress and is retiring. Her district, AZ-08, is made up primarily of suburbs north and west of Phoenix, including Peoria, Sun City West and a little northern Glendale.The PVI is R+10 and the partisan lean is R+22. Trump won the district in 2020 with 57% and last year Lesko was reelected with no opposition, neither in the primary nor the general. She was elected in 2017 when Trent Franks, a far right fringe maniac and closet case, was involved in a series of bizarre sex scandals. Well… he wants his old seat back. Yep, he’s running and he’s not even the craziest among the 15 Republicans who have either declared or are talking about declaring. The Libertarian Party candidate is QAnon Shaman, Jacob Chansley; yep, the J-6 rioter who was sentenced to 41 months in after pleading guilty. He served less than 2 years and now lives in a half-way house. His lawyer told the judge he had disavowed QAnon and Trump.
Aside from Franks and the QAnon Shaman, there are other very well known candidates running— and another J-6 insurrectionist, state Senator Anthony Kern of Glendale. But even better known are the Arizona House Speaker Ben Toma, who was endorsed by Lesko, 2022 Senate candidate Blake Masters, and 2022 Attorney General candidate Abe Hamadeh. They’re all officially in, as are 5 vanity candidates but there are some relatively credible other Republicans talking about jumping in as well— Peoria Mayor Jason Beck, state Rep. Janae Shamp, state Rep Steve Montenegro (a wild MAGAt and full-on conspiracy theorist who was involved with trying to steal the election for Trump and got caught up in a sex scandal when he ran for the seat in 2018; he’s also an Associate Pastor at the Surprise Apostolic Assembly) and former state Rep Phil Lovas, who was Trump’s state chair in 2016.
Just in time to answer questions about Trump’s embrace of full-fledged Nazi rhetoric. That is from yesterday. On MSNBC with Jen Psaki after Trump posted it, Jamie Raskin said that “the role of the government in [Trump’s] view is to advance his political fortunes and destroy his political enemies. So what would a second term look like? It would look a lot like Vladimir Putin in Russia. It would look a lot like [Viktor Orban] in Hungary— illiberal democracy, meaning democracy without rights, or liberties, or respect for the due process, the system, the rule of law. They don’t accept elections that don’t go their way,” Raskin said. “They refuse to disavow political violence. They embrace political violence as an instrument for obtaining power, and then everything flows from the will of a charismatic politician. And that is Donald Trump in their book. So we are clearly headed into a completely different form of government than any of us would recognize, as continuous with the past— right-wing, authoritarian government in league with Putin, Xi Jinping, Orban, Jair Bolsonaro… you name it.”
There are also half a dozen random Democrats who have jumped into a race who, I'm afraid to say, have no chance to win even if there’s a blue wave.