Adam Kinzinger: This Republican congressman says his party is acting like ‘children’
In a two-minute video posted to Twitter on Tuesday — which had already garnered more than 400,000 views by midafternoon — Kinzinger sharply criticizes members of his party for what he sees as their unwillingness to speak out against the crisis in Ukraine.
“We are being governed by a bunch of children,” says Kinzinger. “By a bunch of people that are not serious about running the United States of America and truly don’t understand the threat that’s out there from Vladimir Putin, from China and from some of these actors in the world that want to destroy our place here.”
Kinzinger mentions only House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Fox host Tucker Carlson by name in the video.
But his indictment of the lack of focus on Ukraine — and the obsession with “some woke thing on Disney or whatever it is” — covers a decent-sized chunk of the House GOP, many of whom take their marching orders directly from the Fox airwaves.
(Fox has been covering Disney’s opposition to what critics have dubbed the “don’t say gay” bill in Florida relentlessly of late.)
Kinzinger is issuing a call to action for his party to get serious — and castigating it for so far refusing to do so.
“The world order is being challenged for the first time since World War II and they’re sitting around thinking today about how we can win our next election, what the newest outrage is, what’s the next thing we can do to get people angry and upset and get their money from them for our reelection,” he says in the video.
Will Kinzinger’s impassioned message change many — or any — minds among the Republican base? Likely not.
Around the same time Kinzinger was posting his video, Michigan Rep. Fred Upton — who, like Kinzinger, was one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump last year — was announcing his retirement in the wake of the former President endorsing his primary opponent. (Kinzinger has already said he isn’t running again.)
Given that, Kinzinger’s voice — and his warning to his party — seems doomed to fall on deaf ears.
The Point: Kinzinger’s diagnosis of what ails his party is right on. That doesn’t mean his party will listen to it.
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