Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 37. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:30 PM for 9h 05m 03s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 56% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) is formed.
On his Twitter account, as late as August 2021 — eight months after the January 6th attempted insurrection — Speaker Robin Vos was flying with Trump, praising Trump, and touting his selection of Michael Gableman to conduct a “top-to-bottom” election investigation.
How odd, then, to read from Molly Beck at the Journal Sentinel a credulous account that Speaker Robin Vos says he will ‘try as hard as I can to make sure Donald Trump is not the nominee’ in 2024:
Robin Vos first started campaigning for Republicans 44 years ago, eight years before he could vote for them. His politics gave him a lifelong career. He is described by Wisconsin historians as the longest-serving Assembly Speaker since the state formed. But for the last two years, Vos has been the target of insults, taunts and calls for his removal from the leader of his party.
Now, as Vos prepares for a new presidential election season that will hinge on Wisconsin voters, and in the wake of a midterm election that delivered Republicans fewer wins than expected, he is signaling he won’t vote for Donald Trump if he is the nominee in 2024.
“During my entire life, I have always voted for the Republican. So I am going to try as hard as I can to make sure Donald Trump is not the nominee,” Vos said in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Vos was with Trump in 2016, in 2020, and even after January 6th, but now he’s reformed, and we should see that he, Vos, is the true victim of “insults” and “taunts” from the very Trumpists he once supported. Indeed, Speaker of the Assembly Vos has suffered so much from the Trumpists he once encouraged that he has received — steady oneself — “calls for his removal from the leader of his party.”
Vos’s supposed injury in this is that he might no longer be the speaker in a gerrymandered legislature. No list of serious injuries will ever include the upset of one man from Rochester, Wisconsin that he might not remain speaker as long as he wants. (Indeed, even the mere call for his removal is accounted as meaningful.)
Many suffered under Trumpism, but Beck’s reporting presents Vos as the true victim. (The first paragraph, cited above, is in Beck’s words, not Vos’s.)
It’s no surprise that Vos is beginning a statewide Not-as-Reprehensible-As-You-Thought Rehabilitation Tour. It’s disappointing, however, that the Journal Sentinel would become Vos’s press agent for the effort.
Texas bats released into the wild after they were found frozen in Arctic storm: