It is hard to imagine a more uncivil, less bipartisan Republican party than the current lot. But Mandel sees room for lowering GOP standards even further in Washington. And considering his history, he might be the man to do it. Let’s see what Ohioans, who know him, have to say.
Brent Larkin, “the dean of Ohio’s political reporters”, made his feelings on Mandel quite clear in a piece for cleveland.com.
What former State Treasurer Josh Mandel does best is embrace hate groups and display the type of crass political opportunism and intellectual dishonesty that would make Marjorie Taylor Greene proud.
Pete Kotz, in ‘Cleveland Scene’, wrote an essay, “The Beginner's Guide to the Harrowing Soullessness of Josh Mandel”, a useful survey of Mandel’s lack of humanity, empathy, civility, and general all-round rottenness. It starts,
Former Lyndhurst Mayor Joe Cicero called him a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” and “inadequate as a human being.” Brent Larkin, the dean of Ohio political writers, described him as a “bottom feeder” of “unsurpassed intellectual dishonesty,” for whom “no gutter is too deep, no shot too cheap.”
Meet Josh Mandel, a man for our times.
Mandel checks all the boxes on the fundamentalist conservative’s hate list. He is against a woman’s right to choose, affordable healthcare, science (he is a climate change denier), gay marriage, gays in the military, and workplace/housing protections for gays.
He is a Trump Republican. He believes the second impeachment was a sham. He knows the election was ‘stolen’ — and that evidence will prove it. And he vows to fight for the “America First” agenda.
But Mandel is not just a cookie-cutter MAGA. He brings some personalized depravity to the table. He once voted against a bill that would have made cock-fighting a felony. He claimed his opponent in his 2009 race for Ohio Treasurer, African American Kevin Boyce, was a Muslim. Boyce is a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME).
His anti-gay stance was so strident that eight of his wife's relatives wrote an open letter asking him to stop raining hate on her cousin Ellen Ratner and wife Cholene Espinoza (who was a pilot in the Airforce and was only the second woman to have flown a U2 spyplane). He blew that off. Then he divorced his wife Ilana Shafran — but, unusually for a divorce case, the records are sealed. What’s he hiding?
As State Treasurer, he spent $1.7 million on ads featuring him and OSU coach Urban Meyer supposedly to increase awareness of an investment program for disabled Ohioans. However, critics noted that the ads ran just as he was gearing up for a campaign to try and win Sherrod Brown’s Senate seat. And most damningly he had broken down the expenditures so every amount was under the $50,000 threshold that would have necessitated authorization by the state’s Controlling Board. After that piece of deceptive, financial legerdemain, Ohio changed the rules.
In 2017, Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec, who had been prominent proponents of the anti-Hillary ‘Pizzagate’ conspiracy, and made remarks like “diversity is a code for white genocide," had been added to the Jewish Anti-defamation League’s (ADL) ‘alt-light’ list. They also founded a super PAC. The first candidate they supported was Josh Mandel. In return, Mandel, who is an observant Jew, took the side of these white nationalists over the ADL, tweeting,
Mandel is also not shy about invoking Holocaust imagery to make cheap political points. In arguing against ‘vaccine passports’ he tweeted “We’ve seen this before… Nazi Germany also registered citizens. Our Liberty is under attack!”
Let’s end where we started with Mandel talking to Santilli (who once said Hillary Clinton "should be arrested, tried for treason and shot in the vagina.") He added,
“We are in a fight for the hearts and minds of our kids. They’re trying to indoctrinate our kids. They’re trying to take our kids and teach them to hate America. They’re trying to teach our kids that somehow America was founded on the basis of racism or slavery, and we know that’s trash, that’s baloney, that’s garbage. America was founded on the principles of freedom and liberty. … And we also know that this great country was founded and grew strong on a foundation, on a bedrock, of Judeo-Christian values.
Not radical Muslim values, not atheism, but Judeo-Christian values. And we know in that Judeo-Christian ethic, we know to acknowledge good versus evil, and we know that we have an obligation to fight for good over evil. And there’s a lot of evil out there in the Democrat Party, in the Republican Party, in the deep state, in the swamp, and this evil will find no worse nightmare than having me, Josh Mandel, in the U.S. Senate.”
I agree. The man is a nightmare. But will he be worse than the dismal bunch of Republicans that are already there?
And, in case you wondering, he is leading in the GOP polls, over number two, J.D. (Hillbilly Elegy “I hate the coastal elites but go to fundraisers in the Hamptons”) Vance and a gaggle of other Republicans. His likely opponent is Democratic Rep Tim Ryan. The seat is rated leaning/likely Republican. But I suspect there are Buckeye Republicans who wouldn’t mind seeing the obnoxious pipsqueak getting a good kick in the ass.
