Fox News Today:
Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., blasted the Washington Post as “despicable” over an opinion piece that criticized her colleague for bringing her young son with her to a key House vote.
The opinion piece by Diane McWhorter, “The battle for Trumpism’s next generation,” condemned Rep. Martha Roby, R-Ala., for bringing her son with her as the Judiciary Committee voted in support of articles of impeachment against President Trump. Roby voted against the articles.
“This is despicable. @washingtonpost is attacking @RepMarthaRoby for bringing her 10 year old son to work. @hiattf you owe her an apology,” Cheney wrote. “Looking forward to all my colleagues, men and women, standing with Martha.”
McWhorter wrote that Roby sent two objectionably messages by “presenting her son for the cameras.”
“(1) a vote to defend this president is a positive civics lesson for our children, and (2) Trump is a role model we should endorse for our growing boys,” McWhorter wrote before diving into Roby’s family history and southern roots.
The Washington Post did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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“Of all the dying things touched by this presidency, one of the more poignant for me is the South’s premium on personal decency,” McWhorter wrote. “The gratuitous kindness routinely practiced by individual Southerners may have been compensation for gross societal evils (slavery and segregation), but it remained an outsize virtue in a low-self-esteem region and somehow helped rationalize America’s stubborn belief in its intrinsic goodness.”
The Post opinion piece went on to detail Roby’s father, who was a chief judge of the Atlanta-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which “was created from the rib of the 5th” Circuit.
“Under Southern apartheid, segregation was a totalizing condition, forming and deforming every aspect of human existence, from what hospital you were born in to where you were buried — not just where you sat on the bus or what water fountain you drank from. The South was well down the road to totalitarianism, and the 5th Circuit — or, really, four of its judges — was the last local checkpoint,” McWhorter wrote.
She then wrote about the expulsion of more than 1,000 city schoolchildren who marched against segregation in 1963. A 5th Circuit judge sent the children back to class, “thus sparing a generation of rising citizens from the extra challenge of being high school dropouts,” she wrote.
Connecting the two, McWhorter wrote that “Roby has no apparent practical concerns to account for her tribal compliance — no matter what deviancy her party deems defensible” because she’s not running for reelection.
“I still have enough faith in Southern decency to believe that Roby — who briefly unendorsed Trump in the wake of the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape — doesn’t really want her son to grow up to be just like him.”
