Several House Republicans are calling out The Washington Post after the paper published a nasty column Monday attacking Rep. Martha Roby (R-AL) for bringing her young son George to last Friday’s House Judiciary Committee vote on articles of impeachment.
The column was written by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and fellow Alabamian Diane McWhorter, who said Roby bringing her son to the vote reminded her of the supposed death of “the South’s premium on personal decency” in the Trump era:
For this citizen, Southerner and mother, the crystallizing image of the impeachment season was the young son of Rep. Martha Roby (R-Ala), perched on her lap as she cast her Judiciary Committee vote Friday in support of President Trump. By presenting her son for the cameras, Roby sent two messages: (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.Of all the dying things touched by this presidency, one of the more poignant for me is the South’s premium on personal decency. 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. Pondering the cold world that young Roby will shape as well as inherit took me back to an encounter I had several years ago with his grandfather, and the hard history it revisited and foretold.
After strongly insinuating she was not a fan of Roby’s father Joel Dubina, a former chief judge for the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals (after all, as she noted, he co-authored the 2011 ruling that declared Obamacare unconstitutional), McWhorter returned to insulting Roby, snidely suggesting that perhaps all hope was not lost for the Congresswoman nor her son:
…. Martha Roby has no apparent practical concerns to account for her tribal compliance — no matter what deviancy her party deems defensible. She is not running for reelection. And 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.And yet, she showcases the boy as her impeachment-vote partner, reminding us that this long civil war is a national inheritance. Trumpism’s next generation will carry on the fight — against the Parkland survivors or the teenager the president tweet-baited for earning the cover of Time.
One wonders if McWhorter, a civil rights historian for the state of Alabama, will ever understand the irony of her lamenting the supposed death of civility and southern grace in the age of Trump while at the same time shamelessly using a Republican Congresswoman’s 10-year-old son as a tool to attack her with?
By the way, the opinion piece was headlined “The battle for Trumpism’s next generation” – but the original headline for it was “Martha Roby sends a chilling message on Trumpism’s next generation,” as seen from the screengrab below taken from a Google search:
Watch Inside Edition’s short segment on Roby and her son below:
Roby’s Republican colleagues went off on the Washington Post for publishing a mom-shaming column about a Republican woman in Congress, noting the paper’s hypocrisy:
Leah Garner, the communications director for Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, summed things up perfectly:
Indeed.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY