If you didn’t see the news yesterday, Jackie Walorski, a GOP congresswoman from Indiana, was tragically killed in a car accident in her district. Her comms director, Emma Thomson, and Zachery Potts, chair of the St. Joseph County Republican Party, were in the car, and were also killed, as was the driver of the car that reportedly crossed the center lane on the highway and collided with them head on.
Everything about that is awful. On a personal note, this writer has been close to far too many people who have died the same horrible way, or close to their loved ones. We are so, so sorry when we hear any kind of news like this, no matter who it is. It’s devastating.
That said.
When a person dies, especially if they are a public figure, their biographies tend to get written in their obituaries. And Fox News is so mad at the Washington Post for doing just that.
The Washington Post highlighted Rep. Jackie Walorski’s, R-Ind., decision to vote against the impeachment of former President Trump and the certification of President Biden’s victory in Arizona and Pennsylvania in their report on the representative’s death. […]
The Washington Post’s report noted the congresswoman’s religious conservatism and anti-abortion stances, including her opposition to the Women’s Health Protection Act and the Ensuring Access to Abortion Act.
“A Donald Trump supporter, Walorski voted against impeaching the president in 2021 for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, which resulted in the deaths of one police officer and four others and injured more than 100 law enforcement officers. She also voted against confirming Democrat Joe Biden’s victories in Arizona and Pennsylvania in the 2020 presidential election,” the end of the Post’s report said.
Fox News showed this tweet from Ellen Carmichael, identifying her as a former House GOP staffer:
To its credit, Fox News also mentioned that the Post‘s article featured outpourings of condolences and sadness from both sides of the aisle and a bunch of other stuff too.
But again, louder for those in the back, and we are sorry to have to state this so plainly: when a public figure dies, the things they did in life tend to get printed. This was a member of Congress who, with her votes, participated in Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow the American government on January 6, 2021, and then a few weeks later, affirmed she was just fine with what Trump did that day, by voting against his impeachment. And quite frankly, those appear to be the most notable things Walorski has done recently, at least that have risen to the level of making a lot of news. Maybe she did a lot for her district, we don’t know.
As far as we can tell, the only other time she’s appeared on Wonkette is when she asked to be removed as a sponsor of an anti-abortion bill in 2015 because she wasn’t on board with the way Republican men can’t stop themselves from parsing which rapes are “legitimate rapes” and which ones aren’t.
“WHAT IS WRONG WITH Y’ALL,” asks the performatively outraged former GOP staffer, who is mad at WaPo for stating some facts. When writing the story of a politician who died, journalists are going to say something about who that politician was.
Are those somehow offensive facts? Do these people think this is not how history will remember them? Do they really not understand that, for most Republican members of Congress, what they did during Donald Trump’s coup will be somewhere near the top of news stories about them when they die?
As to the outrage we see from Fox News and the former GOP staffer, are they in a roundabout way acknowledging that the authoritarian, anti-American project Republicans have committed themselves to these past several years is incredibly shameful?
Huh. Maybe it’s that. And we wouldn’t want that on our tombstone either.
OPEN THREAD.
[Fox News]
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