Posted on April
26, 2020
Danger Looms
Laura Loomer
is just what America doesn't need
by
Daniel
Clark
Floridian congressional candidate Laura Loomer is the first of what is bound to be a long line of
Trump wannabe candidates threatening to morph the Republican Party into an
ideologically vacuous vessel of obscure personalities, who imagine they can
replicate Donald Trump's knack for commanding people's attention.
Loomer
idolizes her mentor, former Trump political advisor Roger Stone, who is now
serving time for lying to Congress and witness tampering. She was also briefly
employed as a pseudo-reporter by conspiracy-mongering dementoid
Alex Jones and his web publication InfoWars. Being
among the most irresponsible people on the face of the earth is not the only
thing Stone and Jones have in common.
Stone
and his then-wife Ann cofounded a pro-abortion organization called Republicans
for Choice in 1989. He went on to manage Arlen Specter's 1996 presidential campaign,
and later left the GOP for the Libertarian Party, where he managed the New York
gubernatorial campaign of prostitution ringleader Kristin Davis. Jones, also a
Libertarian, produced the 9/11 "inside job" conspiracy film Loose Change. Neither of these men is a
conservative, but they are both exhibitionists, and that's what this new,
smugly shallow brand of politics is all about.
If anything, Loomer seems
bent on discrediting conservatives with her Michael Moore-like tactics. Early
last year, she and three accomplices supposedly made a point about sanctuary
cities by pitching a tent on the lawn of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Loomer justified climbing the fence on the basis that it
did not have a "no trespassing" sign, and even claimed to have tried
to open Pelosi's front door. These antics succeeded in amusing her hero Stone,
and turning a widely disliked politician into a sympathetic figure for a day,
but otherwise accomplished nothing.
Loomer
wasn't feeling so bold at a Republican primary debate last November, when she
was asked under what circumstances abortion should be made illegal. She
immediately contradicted her initial utterance that, "I am a pro-life
candidate" by adding, "I believe in the law of the land, and
ultimately I don't make these decisions." Of course, she's running for a
seat in the House of Representatives, where it would be her job to create law.
Moreover, Roe v. Wade is not a law,
but a grotesque example of judicial activism to which a conservative should pay
no deference.
"We
can have debates," she continued, "and try to get people on these gotcha questions, but as a congresswoman [which,
thankfully, she's not yet], I represent my constituents." Mind you, this
is a woman who had her press credential revoked at the Conservative Political
Action Committee convention for chasing down and screaming at people. Yet she
calls it a gotcha question when someone calmly asks
her to explain where she stands. She went on to explain her ambivalence on the
basis that she's running in a majority-Democrat district. Her entire,
excruciating answer didn't amount to much more than the latest iteration of the
Jimmy Carter "personally opposed, but" position.
If you're agnostic on the abortion question, you might
think it doesn't matter if she strays from conservatism on that one issue, but
nobody does only that. One of the things that makes abortion such a quietly
dominant issue in politics is that it is a touchstone for so many other issues.
Anyone who's willing to reject the Constitution where the right to life is
concerned cannot be trusted to hold the line on property rights, gun ownership,
or the free expression of religion, among other things. For decades, Big Tent
fetishists have been on a quixotic search for a "pro-choice"
Republican capable of leading the party, and what have they come up with?
William Weld, Christie Whitman, Lincoln Chafee, Pete Wilson, Olympia Snowe,
George Pataki, Rudolph Giuliani, and the aforementioned Arlen Specter.
Add to that track record the fact that Loomer is a practitioner of the politics of snot, by which
flippancy suffices for argument, and poses substitute for principles. To
dismiss an opposing viewpoint by insulting the person who holds it is a
hallmark of liberalism, with its ingrained tendency to accuse every opponent of
a variety of isms and phobias. Indeed, Loomer expends
infinitely more energy denouncing people as anti-Semitic than she does exposing
the folly of liberal beliefs and policies.
If you click the "issues" link on the Loomer for Congress website, you'll see no mention of any
issues at all, but only a video of Loomer talking
about herself. That tells us everything about her campaign that we really need
to hear.
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