John Danforth, who sat in the U.S. Senate for two decades on behalf of Missouri, and who was also an ambassador to the U.N., counts his priestly ordination to The Episcopal Church among his bona fides. Though a Republican, he’s recognizable to the Stewart-Colbert crowd for rankling the ranks of the GOP on occasion.
Danforth says the gaggle of Republicans running for president right now is mortifying.
I’ve been watching some of these Republican debates and they’re just terrible. Terrible.
… he said on KTRS’s McGraw Show on Wednesday.
What have been the big applause lines in these debates? Well, a statement that the governor of Texas is responsible for killing 234 people on death row. Or that we favor torture. Or that we’re creating a fence on the Mexican border that electrocutes people when they try to cross it. Or when people show up at the emergency room at hospitals and they’re not insured don’t treat them. And that, I mean these are the big applause lines, people just hoop and holler when they hear all that.
It doesn’t have anything to do with the republican party that I was a part of. This is just totally different. And all of these people who are saying this, y’know, and claiming that, y’know, they’re for all this stuff, they also sort of ostentatiously say, “Oh, we’re very religious people. We really, we’re just very pious, Christian people.” They were for torture, and electrocution of the people on along the border and all of that. That doesn’t have anything to do with, is contrary to the Christianity that I understand.
A year ago, Danforth, in consideration of the defeat of Richard Luger, suggested the influence of the Tea Party was pushing Republicans “so far overboard [as to be] beyond redemption.”
h/t Think Progress