The Old Game Continues Among the Worst GOP Senators
We’re going to get character assassinations and sex scandals concerning Donald Trump’s presidential appointees, and sanctimonious chin-wagging from “thoughtful” and “prudent” members of the Senate GOP caucus as they simp for the discredited Propaganda Press and their pals at the Democrat National Committee.
What we’re really getting is the Old Game for Christmas. And the American people have had it with the Old Game.
It started with Matt Gaetz, the original nominee for attorney general in the new Trump administration. Gaetz didn’t last long when it became very obvious that he wasn’t going to be able to gather up a requisite consensus among the Republicans in the Senate to get to the 50 votes that would allow incoming Vice President JD Vance to push his confirmation over the top, so he ejected.
When Gaetz did, the president-elect replaced him with former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, whose stature and background are unimpeachable enough to take her confirmation out of the realm of controversy. Bondi’s main negative was, as Jack Cashill noted here at The American Spectator a few days back, her mishandling of the Trayvon Martin–George Zimmerman case a dozen years ago. But naturally, none of the establishment Washington Generals in the Senate GOP caucus will ding her for that.
Instead, it’s going to be others who are bearing the brunt of the current Old Game media assault. And these utterly talentless cloakroom lounge lizards Republican voters have saddled ourselves with, who still don’t know what time it is in America, have so far made it pretty clear that they aren’t on our side.
They’re still on the side of the Old Game.
Pete Hegseth and Joni Ernst
You’re aware that Ernst, Iowa’s junior senator, has very little room to talk about the personal behavior of anyone else, correct? From 2019…
U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst, who said Wednesday she was forced into talking about her private pain once her divorce documents were made public, adamantly denied her ex-husband’s accusation that she had an affair.
“That is not accurate and I was a company commander overseas and took that job very, very seriously,” Ernst said of allegations by her ex-husband that she had an affair with a subordinate while serving in the military.
The senator on Wednesday answered a range of personal questions from reporters about her recent divorce. In the divorce documents, she said that her ex-husband physically assaulted her.
She called herself “a survivor” and said that while it is difficult for her to talk about her own experience, she will continue supporting survivors of abuse.
“What I want people to understand is that I am the same person as I was last week. You just know more about what’s inside of me now,” she said, getting choked up.
Joni Ernst denies her ex-husband’s allegations that she cheated on him with a soldier under her command. And maybe she’s telling the truth.
Similarly, Pete Hegseth denies the allegations that are now coming out of the woodwork about him — and that have been put on display by the disgusting sludge-blob that is the legacy corporate media.
The most emblematic of those comes from NBC News, which presented a story earlier this week claiming that some 10 current and former Fox News employees have come forth to describe Pete Hegseth as a drunkard on set during the network’s morning show that he’s hosted for the last several years. Not a single one of those accusers, seven of whom apparently no longer work at Fox News, have the courage of their convictions enough to go on the record with their allegations. Meanwhile, multiple Fox News personalities who have worked directly with Hegseth have denounced the allegations as trash, or something else. (READ MORE: Hegseth’s On-Record Defenders Crush Baseless Drinking Claims by Nameless Sources)
This was in the wake of a media firestorm about a supposed sexual assault Hegseth committed against a woman who it turned out had sex with him in a Monterrey, California hotel room while her husband and children slept in another room at the same hotel. He was between wives at the time; she was obviously attempting to escape the consequences of her adultery. The police didn’t believe her and no charges were brought.
The point is that Ernst probably ought to be sympathetic to Hegseth’s plight of having to fend off a blizzard of allegations about his personal life which are awfully tired and not particularly relevant to the job he’s been nominated for. She claimed to be a victim of the Old Game five years ago, so why is she playing it now? The public keeps telling the media and political class that we’ve had it with the usual dragging people through the mud of their private sins. They refuse to listen and then they wonder why they’re held in such low regard.
The Old Game is a loser’s game now. People are sick of it.
But Joni Ernst is nonetheless saying she hasn’t been convinced to support Pete Hegseth even after a meeting the two had on Wednesday.
Republican U.S. Senator Joni Ernst, a combat veteran and sexual assault survivor, said on Thursday she is not yet ready to back Pete Hegseth to lead the Department of Defense, dimming the confirmation hopes of President-elect Donald Trump’s embattled nominee.
Ernst, a senior Armed Services Committee member, said she had not yet gotten to “yes” on the nomination and wanted more investigation of allegations against him, after a lengthy discussion with Hegseth during their meeting on Wednesday.
“I think you are right,” Ernst said in an interview on Fox News, when asked whether she had got to “yes” yet. “I think for a number of our senators, they want to make sure that any allegations have been cleared. And that’s why we have to have a very thorough vetting process.”
Considering that Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski actually voted four years ago to confirm an open transvestite responsible for killing thousands of senior citizens by introducing COVID-infected patients into their nursing homes, we really shouldn’t be in the mood to see these people talking about a “very thorough vetting process” for Trump’s appointees — which, naturally, Collins and Murkowski are now fully on board with.
The “very thorough vetting process” apparently includes Joni Ernst hounding Donald Trump about getting the job of secretary of defense herself…
Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, has been leading an “aggressive” personal jihad against Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, multiple sources within Trump world with direct knowledge of her outreach to Trump told The Federalist on Wednesday.
Ernst’s efforts included personal calls to Trump to urge him to dump Hegseth ahead of her meeting with the Army veteran on Wednesday afternoon. Ernst did not tell Hegseth during her meeting with him about her efforts to derail his nomination, sources told The Federalist.
“She’s waging a campaign to replace Pete with herself,” a Trump source familiar with her phone calls with Trump said…
Sources told The Federalist that Ernst began calling Trump within the last two days threatening to get all the female senators to vote against Hegseth if the president-elect didn’t pull his nomination. When asked when exactly Ernst called Trump this week to deliver her anti-Hegseth ultimatum, a source in Trump world sighed and said, “It wasn’t just one time.”
“She’s constantly calling and nagging him,” the source said.
Ernst is not working alone in her efforts to tank Hegseth’s nomination, however. Another source added that the Republican senator dispatched Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., over the weekend to nag Trump to ditch Hegseth and replace him by nominating Ernst.
Graham gave credence to the slanderous allegations against Hegseth on Tuesday, telling CBS News he finds the allegations “very disturbing.”
“I think some of these articles are very disturbing. He obviously has a chance to defend himself here, but some of this stuff is going to be difficult,” Graham said. “Some of the things have to be addressed, and we’ll see.”
Ernst’s people later told The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood that reports of her attempting to replace Hegseth as Defense Secretary are “just more Washington whispers.” Yeah, OK.
This is the Old Game. People are very, very tired of the Old Game. How come Joni Ernst wasn’t willing to play the Old Game four years ago? She was awfully docile when the most disastrous secretary of defense since Bob McNamara came through his confirmation process. Ernst had no problem confirming Lloyd Austin…
Senator Joni Ernst (R) voted to confirm Lloyd Austin for Secretary of Defense who turned our military into a woke laughingstock but is refusing to say if she will confirm Pete Hegseth.
So she supports all this trash but doesn’t support a strong Conservative who will strengthen… pic.twitter.com/F2nKpoIQy6
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) December 5, 2024
And it appears that when 2026 rolls around there will be repercussions of the Old Game.
This morning Iowa Senator, Joni Ernst, made the horrible mistake of still refusing to confirm support of Pete Hegseth’s nomination. Since then we’ve discovered she:
-Voted to confirm Lloyd Austin for Secretary of Defense (responsible for the horrific Afghanistan withdrawal,… pic.twitter.com/JDFqPBzd23
— Savanah Hernandez (@sav_says_) December 5, 2024
The days of the Stupid Party Republicans playing petty Old Game Beltway politics are over. Joni Ernst and Lindsey Graham appear too slow to understand this. The American people have spoken and continue to speak. Trump’s transition team has an approval rating of around 60 percent in recent polls; these people can’t claim anything close. Probably because most of us know how much they hate us.
Wake up, Joni. Nobody gave you a mandate. They gave Trump one, and it was to drain the Swamp. Hegseth, for whatever dirt might be on him, is committed to doing that at the Pentagon, and the reason you aren’t going to be defense secretary is that absolutely nobody trusts you to do it. (RELATED: Mitch McConnell Did Not Win a Mandate)
John Fleming and Bill Cassidy
As bad as Ernst is, and she’s definitely bad, Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy is worse. Cassidy was one of seven Republicans voting to impeach Trump following the Jan. 6 debacle, and we now know that all of the elements of his justification for that vote were fraudulent.
That impeachment vote came only a few days after Cassidy had voted in favor of a motion declaring the impeachment unconstitutional. So first he said the impeachment was unconstitutional and then he voted against the constitution. A couple of days after that, Cassidy did an interview with Bill Clinton propagandist George Stephanopoulos in which he said he was committed to upholding the Constitution.
He’s had a 12 percent approval rating with Republicans in Louisiana ever since.
Cassidy predicted Trump would fade from the political scene. He hasn’t. And now former Congressman John Fleming, Louisiana’s current State Treasurer and a veteran of Trump’s first administration — he was deputy White House chief of staff — has jumped into the 2026 race against Cassidy.
And when Fleming announced he was running, the first thing Cassidy’s camp did was to bash him through a spokesman who said…
I thought he wanted to be State Treasurer? John Fleming wants to get out of Louisiana. He publicly said he wanted a job in the Trump administration, and apparently, they didn’t want him. So after less than a year as State Treasurer, he’s looking for another job to return to Washington. Again, I thought he wanted to be State Treasurer, but apparently not.
Team Cassidy is immune to irony, it appears, because Cassidy ran and won re-election in 2020 as the Trumpiest Trump Who Ever Trumped, and then not two months later he was voting for what he’d already called an unconstitutional impeachment. Maybe try not to impugn the consistency of anybody else if you want the voters, who already think you’re a man of weak character and suspect intellect, not to be inflamed against you.
The political insiders are warning that Cassidy, who already has $6 million in Washington donor-class money in his war chest, will have $10 million or more to spend on the Republican primary (Louisiana has, thank God, ditched its notorious jungle primary system for federal elections beginning with the 2026 cycle). I’m not sure that money is going to help him. People are very, very sick of the Old Game and Cassidy, like Ernst, seems oblivious to that fact.
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