Are GOP Snowflakes Starting to Melt?

The GOP war on journalism is nothing new. Spiro Agnew launch a tirade against the nattering nabobs in 1971 in Des Moines, Iowa. Still, the party of Lincoln, in the age of Trump, is increasingly using journalists as a punching bag for political gain.

From Wikimedia Commons, official image.

We’ve seen lots of examples in recent days. There is the war between Mike Pompeo, the volatile and sensitive Secretary of State, who apparently can’t abide an uppity NPR reporter asking pretty tame and obvious questions.

He says that he has done that’s right He has defended everybody. But he won’t name a time when he actually defended former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.

Over the weekend, after a testy interview with NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly, she says Pompeo called her into an unrecorded meeting to berate her. He doesn’t deny it, but claims it was an off-the-record conversation.

I honestly don’t believe Mike Pompeo. The NPR line and statements seem calmer and seem to express a willingness to verify—whereas Pompeo is part of an administration that has no credulity, where lies and a lack of accountability are the status quo. And Kelly seems to be clear in her description of the events—listen to the full interview (link at the top of this post) that preceded Pompeo’s outburst, followed by Kelly describing the second conversation.

An off-the-record interview requires a clear agreement between the journalist and the source—and given the context and timing of what happened, again, the NPR reporter appears to be the truth teller in this case. It is shameful that the State Department has followed up Pompeo’s toddlerish behavior by banning NPR from an official trip—banning a whole organization because you don’t like one interview is not OK.

From Marylouisekellybooks.com, image by Katarina Price.

And Pompeo going ballistic on Kelly is part of a common GOP strategy. Consider how Sen. Martha McSally, running in a tough election campaign, attacked a CNN reporter who was asking a reasonable question about whether the Senate should hear new evidence from

“You’re a liberal hack,” she said in passing, in an exchange videotaped and shared by one of her aides. I think she protests too much—and won’t answer the question. Anderson Cooper commentary on the event is shown below.

One of the many tragedies of the era of Trump is how far the Dear Leader has gone in trashing all norms of discourse. It’s not just that he speaks in expletive-laced tirades, or tweets from his dark, evil heart and not from his increasingly publicly dysfunctional brain—but he is also tapping in to a deep and long history of the Republican Party turning its back on the marketplace of ideas.

See the screenshot of a recent tweet from Todd Dorman, opinion page editor of The Gazette. The chair of the Iowa GOP is in the attack-the-hack pack. Increasingly, in recent election cycles, the Iowa GOP has followed it’s national Dear Leader in making the press the enemy for political convenience.

Well, I don’t think it’s any wonder why. If you can’t argue the facts, pound the table and shout loudly is a common and old debate tactic. Or claim bias and excuse yourself from the discourse.

Republicans, you’re embarrassing yourselves. Calling out bias if you think it’s there and have a basis for it? OK, that’s fair. Refusing to answer questions, or refusing meetings with editorial boards or throwing immature temper tantrums? Not OK and not fair. It's poorly done political theater at its worst.

Welcome to the new reality of the conservative snowflake, melting in the heat of rather lukewarm questions.

Well you know that they say about heat that you can’t stand. I hope voters help these Republican snowflakes get out of the kitchen of government.