Big GOP donors in Missouri are threatening to cut off any state Republican elected official or candidate who fails to "actively support" Gov. Eric Greitens. ThinkProgress:
State lawmakers in Missouri claim they’ve been threatened with a sharp decrease in donations unless they actively support embattled Gov. Eric Greitens (R), who has been charged with photographing a woman while she was naked and using the image to threaten her with blackmail. Greitens has also been accused of assaulting the woman and coercing her into a sexual relationship.
The story about family values campaigner Greitens tying up and blindfolding a woman with whom he was having an affair—and taking nude pictures of her without her consent and threatening to release the photos online if she told anyone about the affair—broke back in January. Greitens was indicted on an invasion of privacy charge in February. Then a Missouri House committee released its report on the allegations earlier this month and the new details made Greitens look even more monstrous:
He then began to kiss her stomach and motion toward attempting oral sex on her when, she says, “I just started freaking out and I started ripping down my hands. I was like, Get me out of here. I’m not ready for this. I don’t want this. I don’t want this.” “I was definitely fearful,” she said. She told him, “I don’t want this,” and, “I’m leaving,” and he “grab[bed] me and like—like, in a bear hug, and was like, Shh, shh, it’s okay, calm down, calm down, and like, lays me down on this ground in the basement.”
She says she started crying uncontrollably. “He starts undoing his pants, and he takes his penis out and puts it, like, near where my face is,” she recalls. At that point, convinced that he would not let her leave otherwise, she performed oral sex, she said. When investigators asked if it was consensual, she replied: “It felt like consent, but no, I didn’t want to do it... Coerced, maybe. I felt as though that would allow me to leave.”
What kind of man shoves his penis in the face of a woman who is crying uncontrollably? The kind of man who is currently the Republican governor of Missouri.
Greitens dismissed the Missouri House committee report as "fake news," essentially called his victim a liar, and blamed his indictment on a "reckless liberal prosecutor." (He's obviously been studying Trump.) And this is the man major GOP donors are rallying around in Missouri and other GOP elected officials in that Republican-dominated state are hesitating to call on to resign. Because it could cost them campaign donations. True paragons of moral virtue.
So in addition to finally admitting that the GOP isn't the party of fiscal responsibility... maybe we can we stop letting the GOP get away with calling itself the party of family values? The GOP and its evangelical base put Donald Fucking Trump in the White House—a man with five children by three different women and countless adulterous affairs and Stormy Daniels and Russian sex workers and pee tapes and "grab 'em by the pussy" and 19+ women who've accused him of everything from unwanted advances to sexual assault and bragging about walking in on naked teenage girls. The Republican National Committee’s national deputy finance chairman just had to resign after the Wall Street Journal reported he paid a pregnant Playboy model with whom he was having an affair $1.6 million to go away and abort their unborn child and a Republican elected official—a member of Congress—also recently had to resign after he got caught urging his mistress to get an abortion and another Republican member of Congress was reelected by his pro-life constituents after the news broke that he pushed his mistress and his wife to get abortions and on and on and on and on and fucking on.
We Democrats have our Weiners and Frankens—neither of whom is in office, much less an oval one—but Dem sex scandals, while upsetting, don't have the same hypocritical stank that GOP sex scandals do. Because Dems don't campaign as defenders of "family values." Dems campaign on policies that are better for working families—for all families—and don't set themselves up as moral examples or arbiters. The GOP does and this may have the effect of attracting damaged men with something to hide.
