Casey Murschel is a former Republican legislator. To clarify, she is a former legislator—three terms in the House from 2001 through 2006—and now a former Republican.
Murschel says she’s voting for Democrat Jamie Smith this fall, because she trusts him to govern South Dakota, not just use South Dakota as a set for national campaign videos:
But Casey Murschel, 71, said she plans to vote for Smith. A former GOP state representative in the Sioux Falls area, Murschel said the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, led her to leave the party and identify as an independent. She said she trusts Smith to focus on governing the state and to advocate for abortion rights.
“Kristi has gone Hollywood,” she said. “She has basically turned her back on South Dakotans. We’re like props for her” [Stephen Groves, “Noem’s Balancing Act: Big Ambitions, South Dakota Reelection,” AP, 2022.10.09].
When he announced his campaign for governor in February, Smith said he could get some of his fellow legislators from across the aisle to support his campaign. Let’s see if any current Republican legislators can come to their senses the way former Republican legislator Murschel has and publicly back an honest Democrat who promises to do the job they elect him to do rather than a camera hog who’s turned her back on South Dakota.
Rep Murschel was ALWAYS a fair honest and decent legislator.
Great!!About time true Republicans took a stand. Noem has always been a Trump functionary and has yet to comment one way or another on the insurrection and attempted hanging of Mike Pence. She is a supporter of sedition. As a former member of the Congress, she is a traitor to that institution and to our country. As long as she remains silent and identifies herself as a supporter of Trump, she is deserving of our contempt. There is no defense for her sophistry.
The Republican Party seems to have no room left for fair and honest public servants. More people like Murschel and Liz Cheney need to speak up and demand a reboot of the party that has abandoned them and American values.
Christi can’t make a comment without putting her foot it it. If she said it she is wrong.
Casey was a basic Democrat. She registered and ran R to get a seat. In the legislature, she was better than most. Mainly, she illustrated the idiocy of “party.”
My good friend Bob is righter-than-right on this.
Skeleton outline of the “death spiral” of the GOP.
The Milwaukee Journal observed, “The general went far toward surrendering ethical and moral principles in a frenzied quest for votes.”
Eisenhower, who decisively won the election, would later regret his decision to cut the anti-McCarthy paragraph.
The fundamental mission of the Birchers was to promote crazy McCarthyistic conspiracy theories (Fluoridation was a Red plot!).
Goldwater nomination: “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”
President Lyndon Johnson used Goldwater’s embrace of extremism to thrash him in the general election, and pundits claimed the GOP and the conservative movement were all but finished. But Goldwater had brought a flood of radicals into the Republican Party—and they weren’t leaving.
Reagan, the onetime B-movie star who had won the California governorship in 1966 by exploiting white backlash to the civil rights movement and social unrest…[said]:
“I believe in states’ rights”—the mantra of Southern segregationists. It was an unambiguous sign that Reagan would continue the Republican practice of appealing to racists.
August 1980, he appeared at a Dallas gathering of thousands of Christian fundamentalists, including 4,500 pastors, which was underwritten partly by oil tycoon Nelson Bunker Hunt, an ardent Bircher.
George Bush, Satanic dupe—that was Pat Robertson’s claim [founder, Chridtian Coalition]. The Wall Street Journal called his book a “compendium of the lunatic fringe’s greatest hits.” Yet in search of votes, Bush and the GOP validated this antisemitic and paranoid zealot and signaled to his followers and the world that he and his ideas were worth heeding.
Christian Coalition would become further integrated into the GOP and help Newt Gingrich and the Republicans gain control of the House in 1994. Six years later, Robertson and his group would rescue Texas Gov. George W. Bush when Sen. John McCain threatened to defeat him in the Republican presidential primary. W. welcomed the assistance of the nut who had pegged his dad as Satan’s useful idiot.
[The] Tea Party was shot full of paranoia, racism, and rage. At rallies, attendees waved Confederate flags and claimed Obama was a secret Muslim born in Kenya….At the mention of Democrats’ health care plan, the Tea Partiers shouted, “Nazis! Nazis!”
[Speaker John] Boehner and other Republicans had emboldened a nativistic and tribalistic right-wing force that would soon provide a political base for Trump’s jingoistic, racist, and demagogic campaign.
For more than 70 years, the Republican Party has stoked animus and conspiracies, often capitalizing on unfounded apprehension about internal enemies subverting the nation.
That is why convincing people not to drink the fluoridated water is sage advice. The Zero water filter is the only one I have found which filters absolutely everything, including the toxin our municipal water treatment plants are ordered to inoculate us with. No anti-vax republicans cry around about the government forcing them to drink China’s byproduct without consent. I am suspicious of anything given to poor and colored counties, whereas places like Vermont are skipped with the ingredient in their water responsible for the calcification of the pineal gland.
I think republicans are losing women voters by going to the extreme. To ban abortion with no exceptions is condoning incest and rape by punishing the child. Many mothers are like rhinos when it comes to protecting their child from harm, especially something so sick and barbaric. Traditional republican women don’t accept a Herchel Walker character, they’re repulsed by men who father so many children and treat women like vessels.
I took an anthropology class that focused on deviants, taboos, and cultural change. This country is accepting behaviors that were similar to those religious and superstitious tyrants who so swiftly started witch hunts throughout history. The denigration of women is palpable in S.D.
Ironically, the party of traditional values has become the party of deviants who have no values.