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January 9, 2023

Rep. Dan Crenshaw gets slapped down in the House

By Andrea Widburg

I expect very little from politicians, but Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) still managed to disappoint me. When he ran for and won a seat in Congress, this former Navy SEAL seemed like a great choice. He loved his country enough to put his life (and vision) on the line and seemed to have both a fighting spirit and a calm demeanor. It turns out, though, that he dislikes those in the House who are fighting against the elite’s business-as-usual approach to governance. That’s why he deserved to lose out to another military veteran when it came to chairing the House Committee on Homeland Security.

The cracks in Crenshaw’s image began to show when he made it clear that he was a Liz Cheney partisan. Liz Cheney has dedicated the past few years of her life to destroying Donald Trump, never mind that he has been the most conservative president in 40 years. Her father was George Bush’s vice president, and Donald Trump insulted George Bush. Therefore, Trump must die (figuratively), and she joined Democrats to lead the charge.

Image: Dan Crenshaw . YouTube screen grab.

By pursuing this personal vendetta, Cheney caused irreparable damage to the conservative movement. What was the shocker was that Dan Crenshaw vehemently defended her:

Well, someone just drew a line in the sand! Crenshaw lost a lot of respect from former supporters (me included) for that stance.

And did you notice that line saying that “we can disagree without tearing eachother [sic] apart”? Crenshaw often likes to make the point that he’s Mr. Temperate. Just this past November, he said that we should stop focusing so much on January 6, but he didn’t add the corollary, which is that the Democrats’ focus means people have been kept in prison without bail for two years, violating their constitutional rights. Nor does he seem to care that the FBI, which ignored the BLM and Antifa protests, has 1,000 ordinary Americans on its hit list.

All pretense of his “can’t we all just get along” shtick vanished with the healthy fight to constrain McCarthy’s past failures to lead the House in a conservative direction. As a reminder, McCarthy does not have a hereditary claim to the speakership, although he acted as if he did when he moved into the Speaker’s office before any vote.

But it was Crenshaw who really felt that any challenge to McCarthy was out of bounds. He attacked those who demanded that McCarthy behave like a conservative as “terrorists”—a loaded term, especially from someone who faced actual, anti-American terrorists on the battlefield.

When called out, Crenshaw doubled down, appearing on CNN (!) to call his Republican colleagues “narcissists” and “enemies.” Speaking to another reporter, he called them “f***ing people” and “clowns.” That’s how Crenshaw speaks of politicians who are trying to do the people’s, rather than the political class’s, will.

Then, when Tucker Carlson appropriately called Crenshaw out, his response was to insult Tucker, too, saying that others (not Crenshaw himself, obviously) need to get a thicker skin in the face of a “figure of speech”:

When the political heat got bad, Crenshaw apologized…on CNN! Except, it wasn’t an apology at all. Instead, it was the classic narcissistic apology. That’s the one that goes, “I’m sorry you’re angry at me, especially because I did nothing wrong. It’s all on you.” So, while the word “sorry” appeared, an apology it was not.

Today, it emerged that Crenshaw is paying the price for turning on the American people (which is what he did). He desperately wanted to chair the House Committee on Homeland Security—but he didn’t get the gig. Instead, it went to Rep. Mark Green (R-TN), who has his own impressive background:

Green is an Army Ranger veteran who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, with his last assignment being a flight surgeon with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), a special operations unit known as the Night Stalkers.

Green was gracious in victory, which, frankly, is more than the post-January 6 Crenshaw deserves:

The sad thing is that Crenshaw probably won’t learn from this. Instead of following his own “can’t we all get along advice,” his non-apology hints that he’s just going to double down on his sense of ill-usage, and that’s a shame. Crenshaw has squandered so much goodwill because of his misplaced anger and pettiness.

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