Alright, for those not in the know, it is April Fool’s Day, and at this point of the post, we’re giving away the game out front. 364 days of the year, this blog profiles fanatics from the Republican Party for their corruption, their extremism, their sexism, their criminality, their bigotry, lack of critical reasoning skills, etc. etc.But, on April Fool’s Day, we concede that there are SOME Democrats (far fewer than their Republican counterparts) that are in some way disappointing to us. The biggest difference isn’t just in the number of offensive things that they’ve done, but it ‘s also that at least the Democratic Party has the sense to show these people the door and not support them past whatever scandal they endure for long, if at all. Without further adieu…
The Pulse Shooting in June of 2016 was a tragedy that took the lives of 49 people, and wounded another 53 others. It was one of many mass shootings that galvanized gun control activists in Florida over the past few years, as well as rallied the LGBTQ community against hate. One of the Democratic candidates who rose in the wake of the shooting was Catherine Elizabeth McCarthy, who touted having worked in an emergency room and “removed 77 bullets from 32 of the victims.” While that might have given some massive credibility to her own stance on guns as she ran for District 28 of the Florida House of Representatives, there was one problem… Catherine Elizabeth McCarthy was completely full of it. Not only was she not present to remove bullets from shooting victims, she wasn’t even a doctor. She was just someone looking to exploit a tragedy for political credibility. As a result of her lies, she not only withdrew from the ballot, but was fined $3,000 in Florida for impersonating a medical professional. We’ll note that she was shamed out of Democratic politics immediately upon her deception being publicly known, as opposed to several Republican members of Congress right now like George Santos, Andy Ogles, and Anna Paulina Luna, who in spite of being caught lying about major parts of their backstory, have been given a pass by their party and remain in office. It’s like… both parties aren’t the same, and one actually takes truth seriously, or something.
Mary Ann Lisanti is a former member of the Maryland House of Delegates, who served District 34A from 2015-2023. Shortly after winning her second term in office in the 2018 elections, she was overheard using a racial slur, referring to St. George County in Maryland a “n----- district”. She was censured by the state legislature 136-0, but refused to resign her seat, finishing out her second term out of spite. Mary Ann Lisanti, for whatever reason, thought that in 2022 she could sneak into the upper chamber and into the Maryland State Senate, but was soundly defeated in the Democratic Primary. Again, it’s like the Democratic party hold people accountable for racism, and the GOP is a white nationalist party that now have half their number defend it, and the other half celebrate it outright.
For three terms from 2017-2023, Jewell Jones was a Democratic member of the Michigan House of Representatives from District 11. While that would have meant he was just facing term limits after three terms, it was he legal woes that made sure his career came to a quick end. Sure, if you get busted once for driving with an open alcohol container in your vehicle (but aren’t drunk), that’s not great…But to get busted three years later in 2021 for DUI after getting pulled over literally with your pants down at twice the legal limit, AND you resist arresting officers AND you tried name-dropping Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s name to get out of being arrested AND you try to have someone sneak a handcuff key to you while you’re in jail to potentially escape? Just… those are uh… definitely decisions. All of them stupid. Jewell Jones was stripped of all his committee assignments for the remainder of his last term in office. A political comeback seems pretty unlikely.
For a term and a half beginning in 2017, Brian Benjamin was a New York State Senator serving District 30 of that body. While he had an unsuccessful run for New York State Comptroller in 2020, He was appointed to be the Lieutenant Governor of New York by Gov. Kathy Hochul after she replaced disgraced Gov. Andrew Cuomo in September of 2021, and seemed like he might be a rising star in the New York Democratic Party heading into a re-election campaign in 2022…But then he was arrested and indicted on wire fraud and federal bribery conspiracy charges in April of 2022, related to illegal campaign donations he received in that 2020 campaign for Comptroller, and was forced to resign. While most of those charges ended up being dropped, he is still not out of the woods, still facing charges of falsifying records.He’ll be lucky to avoid jail time, and it’s extremely likely he never even sniffs political office again.
Lisa McCormick is one of those “perennial candidates”, having run multiple unsuccessful campaigns to become a U.S. Senator from New Jersey, an unsuccessful bid to become the U.S. House Representative from New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District (a campaign where she sent out e-mails using Democratic Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman’s letterhead to try to confuse voters into thinking the Congresswoman was anti-Semitic and a Donald Trump Supporter), and in 2021, ran an unsuccessful primary challenge against Gov. Phil Murphy, in which she got literally ZERO votes. Like, she didn’t even bother voting for herself.That last campaign failure may have had something to do with the fact that it was discovered that many of the petitions to have her put on the ballot were fraudulent, and most of the people who supposedly signed electronic petitions admitted they had never heard of her or her campaign, at all. Well, there was one person who signed who couldn’t say one way or another if he actually did, because that guy died at the age of 97. 85% of those who supposedly signed to put McCormick on the ballot had last names that began with “A” or “B”, and many of the signatures that were obtained had people misspelling their own name.Lisa McCormick is currently trying to avoid facing criminal charges for harassment and zoning violations. She’s more likely to end up in prison than elected to anything. Well, at least as a Democrat. Republicans have embraced lawlessness as their brand.