Back in July I wrote about Virginia Republican Senate candidate Hung Cao. Well, he had a debate with incumbent senator Tim Kaine, and it went as well as you might have thought:
Hung Cao, the Republican candidate for Virginia’s U.S. Senate seat, blamed a drag queen for low military recruitment numbers and said the military needs self-cannibalizing “alpha males and females” instead.
During his Wednesday night debate against incumbent Sen. Tim Kaine (D), Cao — a Navy veteran endorsed by former President Donald Trump — was asked about his former comments claiming that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives under the administration of President Joe Biden were causing the lowest military recruitment numbers in 80 years.
“When you’re using a drag queen to recruit for the Navy, that’s not the people we want,” replied Cao. “What we need is alpha males and alpha females who are going to rip out their own guts, eat them, and ask for seconds. Those are young men and women that are going to win wars.”
Yeah, moving on.
There has been a funny coincidence popping up among GOP candidates across the country—a bunch of them seem to have fake lives.
For example, super-MAGA Congress member Mike Rogers doesn’t appear to live at the address on his voter registration:
The Detroit Free Press’ M.L. Elrick looked into the matter and explained in his latest column, “I don’t know where Mike Rogers lives, but it’s not where he’s registered to vote.”
Rogers, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, changed his voter registration on July 2 to a home in White Lake Township that is under construction. A month later, he used the White Lake address to vote (presumably, for himself) in the four-way race for the GOP nomination to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow. There’s just one problem: The house did not — and still does not — have a certificate of occupancy. That means Rogers could not live there legally. And if he didn’t live there, he may have broken the law by using that address to vote.
Before changing his registration in July, Rogers apparently listed his brother’s address as his own, though locals suggested they never saw him and he never lived there.
But Derrick Anderson, running for an open House seat in Virginia, has taken everything a step further: he’s invented an entire family for some of his digital products.
It looks like a typical white American middle class family of smiling people. Only they’re not his family—they are the wife and children of one of his friends. And Anderson is angry people are accusing him of faking having a family just because he posed several times with people who aren’t his family. I can’t even with these Republicans anymore.
And the thing is: he has a family. He’s tweeted photos with his extended family, and he’s even made a video with his fiancée. So why deliberately create fake familial scenes with friends? There’s an Inside Edition interview with Anderson where the host asks where his friend’s husband is and he weirdly said he was at work because he needed to work. So what is actually going on?
Part of it is probably because in the suddenly children-crazy GOP, childless people are suspect. And Anderson has no children. But instead of leaning in on the fiancee angle, he creates a fake family. Something is weird here.
It’s not just me, right? Republicans are getting weirder and weirder.
I’ll leave you with Sly and the Family Stone:
Well, Cassandraisright, you opened an old sore for me. Mike Rogers is just continuing an old Republican senatorial tradition. Rick Santorum of PA lived in Great Falls, VA. Roger Marshall of Kansas lives in Florida. Josh Hawley of Missouri lives in Virginia. These guys use a variety of schemes to hide residency. They use relatives’ addresses, buy cheap-ass little cabins or barely-maintained starter homes or put themselves on the deed to parent’s house or purchase homes with living trusts. Dr. Oz tried this in PA, but was caught and not elected. Several other rich Republicans running right now have questionable residency.
Derrick Anderson and his friend’s family is a skeevy story, but apparently he wanted “daughters” around the kitchen table agreeing with him on his anti-abortion lecture…a fiancee is not as good a look.
Finally, Hung Cao’s big story is that he was “blown up” in war and had several surgeries to put him back together. BUT, he was never awarded a Purple Heart or a Combat Service Ribbon. He has a Bronze Star, but that was not awarded for being “blown up.” My suspicion, if the story is in any way truthful, is that Hung Cao made a serious mistake handling ordnance (his job) and caused injury to himself…you don’t get medals for that!! 🤬
it’s all so endlessly infuriating.