A Tale of Two Republicans
Cliff Rosenberger and J.D. Vance went different ways when presented with the same problem.
Hillbilly cosplayer J.D. Vance is running as a Republican to represent Ohio in the United States Senate. He used to call Donald Trump things like “moral failure” until he realized that a diseased former game show host had overtaken the Republican Party in totality.
Now, with the backing of $10 million from PayPal Mafia freak Peter Thiel, Venture capitalist Vance is trying to present himself as a defender of the workingman. He probably thinks if Donald Trump, the New York City billionaire with a golden toilet, could pull it off, then why not him?
Vance ignores the fact that, unlike Trump, he is a sexless nerd with zero charisma. So you get tweets like this, which come off as a guy who went to Yale Law trying to sound like Trump:
It might be another 100 years before Democratic Senate candidates can get away with trashing Republican states as backwater hellholes infested by the walking dead. They will probably target Ohio and honestly I can’t blame them.
Yesterday, however, we found out which part of zombie-infested New York that Vance had to survive, and you will probably be shocked to learn it was a bunch of undead billionaires looking to fete him with money.
From Rachael Bade, Tara Palmeri, Eugene Daniels and Ryan Lizza of politico.com:
A LONG WAY FROM APPALACHIA — Ohio GOP Senate hopeful J.D. VANCE was in the Hamptons on Saturday night mingling with GOP titans of industry. JIM TISCH, REBEKAH MERCER, STEVEN PRICE and HEATHER HIGGINS were among those who came out to support the “Hillbilly Elegy” author at a fundraiser in Southampton. Before the event, Vance visited the East Hampton home of EMIL HENRY, a former senior Treasury official for GEORGE W. BUSH and a perennial sounding board for Republican presidential aspirants. Henry, a longtime supporter and adviser to Sen. ROB PORTMAN (R-Ohio), was an early supporter of JEB BUSHand notably declined to support DONALD TRUMP.
Nobody has more disdain for Republican voters than Republican politicians. This type of stuff should be instantly disqualifying, but Vance sold a New York Times best-selling book on Appalachia when he didn’t even live in Appalachia, so he probably sees bamboozling GOP primary voters as a lay-up.
What’s most pathetic about Vance is he can’t even match the ethics of a former Ohio House Speaker who resigned under a cloud of an FBI corruption investigation (no, not that one).
Former Ohio House Speaker Cliff Rosenberger, once a rising star in the Ohio Republican Party, resigned in 2018 after then-State Attorney General Mike DeWine tipped him off about an FBI investigation into his “lavish lifestyle” and “relationships with lobbyists and donors,” specifically with the payday loan industry.
The feds raided Rosenberger’s house and storage unit shortly thereafter, and though they have yet to charge him for any wrongdoing, they told his lawyer to fuck off earlier this year when he asked them to close the case.
Personally, I think Rosenberger is working off a possible jail sentence by pointing investigators in the direction of the decaying corpses that litter the scenery of state politics, but obviously I have no concrete proof of the matter.
Rosenberger, however, made the curious choice last year to leave the Republican party now that he no longer needs to solicit any of its votes.
From Andrew J. Tobias of cleveland.com:
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Cliff Rosenberger, a former Ohio House speaker who abruptly resigned from office in 2018 amid an FBI investigation that hasn’t led to any charges, said Monday he’s left the Republican Party over his concerns with the GOP’s continued alignment with former President Donald Trump.
“I’m a conservative, and I’m going to be a conservative,” Rosenberger said in a Monday interview. “But if the Republican Party is going to continue, which it seems that they are, going down the path of supporting a guy like Donald Trump, I’m not going to have anything to do with that. So at this juncture, I’m going to consider myself an independent.”
This is hilarious. Rosenberger doesn’t elaborate on his beef with Trump, though it can’t possibly be Trump’s blatant corruption considering only one of them had to resign due to an FBI investigation into their illegal activity.
Rosenberger also mentions that a lot of his former Republican colleagues have reached out saying “they don’t flow that way” when it comes to Trump but “they can’t go against the party.” That’s politician parlance for craving power more than doing the right thing.
Rosenberger also has the benefit of being out of public life at the moment. It’d be impossible to maintain control of the Ohio House Republican Caucus if he admitted to voting for Joe Biden.
Rosenberger is no paragon of virtue, but at least he made a stand against the nonsense that is the Republican Party. That is more than that phony Vance can say, and hopefully next year he’ll be joining Rosenberger in private life.
THOSE WMDs. The remarkable life of IBEW founder Henry Miller… 650,000 lead pipes still carry water in Ohio, the second most in the United States… 50 reasons why everyone should want more walkable streets… Flying dead bodies across the Land of the Midnight Sun… What is Pegasus software and how does it hack phones?