The Figleaf Cover of "Moderate" Republicanism Comes Off

The fraud of "moderate" Republicanism is crumbling in Maine, the home of "moderate" Republicanism and its two flagship examples, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe

Mike Isgro is the scumbag Mayor of Waterville,  Maine,  the same town that had the scumbag ex-38% governor of Maine Paul Lepage* as Mayor, Isgro became controversial last year when, fresh on what the students who had survived the Stoneman Douglas High School went through, Isgro issued a disparaging tweet against one of them, David Hogg.  There was a recall effort in Waterville to get the scumbag Isgro removed as Mayor, which didn't work (which, considering Waterville's scumbag Mayoral history isn't surprising) but which also led to much condemnation of him.  There was some wishy-washy disapproval from some Republicans who knew their election depended on getting independent and Democratic votes and the niceness voices in the Democratic Party made some typical noises in that direction, as well.

“Barring the unlikely event that this tweet was somehow manufactured, Nick Isgro should be ashamed of his comment,” said Maine Democratic Party Chairman Phil Bartlett in the release. “Simply put, it is not representative of the people of Waterville.

Well, the failure of the recall sort of discredits the idea that he isn't representative of the people of Waterville, which seems to be surpassing Lewiston as the town most associated with hate in my state.    If there's one thing I've come to conclude, when a district or municipality or state returns someone like Isgro to office or refuses to remove them, they deserve to have people judge them by whoever it is they have chosen to represent them.

Phil Bartlett was proven wrong in this part of his remark, too

“Isgro’s remarks reveal a dark strain of ideology within the Maine Republican Party — one that is not shared by the vast majority of Maine Republicans, but one that seems to have found a home within the party nonetheless. That’s why today we call on the Maine Republican Party to condemn Isgro’s remarks instead of hiding from them, and urge Republicans across the state to stand up against this type of hatred and bigotry.”

We can know that that was wrong because the Maine Republican Party, far from distancing themselves from Nick Isgro elected him to be the Vice-Chair of the Maine Republican Party in January.   What I just said about Waterville goes more so for the Maine Republican Party who not only knew what Nick Isgro is, a younger version of Paul LePage if not worse, they elected him knowing full well what he had tweeted, it was certainly among the reasons they elevated him to that position.

Now the scumbag Nick Isgro is tweeting again, spreading some especially ironic Republican racist slogans, tying immigrants to the spread of disease while being, himself an anti-vaxxer friendly libertarian on the matter of mandatory vaccination and the Republicans are doing their ritual dance of trying to pretend they aren't associated with the guy who THEIR PARTY chose, fully knowing what he is.

Republican leaders in Augusta are taking two approaches in responding to controversial statements made last week by Maine GOP vice chair Nick Isgro falsely linking immigrants to the outbreak of once-eradicated diseases: some are condemning Isgro's remarks, others are avoiding them altogether. Isgro, meanwhile, is standing by his assertion that Americans should be free to not vaccinate their children against disease.

In a series of tweets sent from the Maine Republican Party's official account last week, Isgro declared that it's time for a "serious talk" about vaccinations and migration.

He went on to say that migrants crossing the border from countries lacking vaccinations had caused "certain diseases to return."

As a longtime student of American eugenics and its conjoined twin, scientific racism - racism that makes itself accepted by adopting the esteem science is held in - it is especially ironic to read someone with an Italian surname spouting exactly the same things in 2019 that a century ago American bigots, KKK members, and other associated WASP nativists in Maine and elsewhere would have said about immigrants from Italy, perhaps his grandparents or great grandparents.  But when someone has no more morals than Paul Lepage (about whose heritage the same point could be made) or, for that matter, any Republican of Irish heritage, they are likely to be Republicans.  As we can fairly judge a town that retains a Nick Isgro as Mayor under those circumstances above, we can fairly come to other conclusions about the character of such people, hypocrisy on top of lying and spreading hate is a smallish thing.

Republicans in 2019 are the party of the Isgros, the LePages, the Trumps, the Stephen Millers [Mitler] it is the party of racism and bigotry and negativism as certainly as it was in the 1884 when the pride of Maine Republicans, James G. Blaine, a deeply corrupt gilded-age scumbag, lost the presidency by one of his spokesmen shooting his mouth off about "Rum, Romanism and rebellion".   The "dark strain" that Isgro exhibits has been there since at least the Grant administration, it has seldom not been the dominant strain of the Republican party, the party of criminals and, with the Goldwater-Nixon Southern Strategy, it took in the Democratic Party's worst and similar faction.

There is no "moderate" Republican Party, there are, arguably, a few deeply compromised people who are less depraved than its mainstream but they're the kind of people who not only make reluctant deals with devils, they make common cause with them.  The only good Republicans in 2019 are ex-Republicans.  And some of those you have to wonder why it took them so long to leave the criminal gang.

*  As I've pointed out before, LePage had the support of both of the queens of Maine "moderate" Republicanism,  Snowe's first husband, Peter Snowe was his political godfather.