The Trump Wing Of The GOP-- David Duke Says He's Serious About Challenging Republican Whip Steve Scalise

David Duke has had almost as much plastic surgery as Herr Trumpf

So Bernie endorsed Hillary yesterday. No surprise there. It's what he had to do, I guess. I mean who would want to be complicit in electing Donald J. Trump-- aside from a very one dimensional Paul Ryan? Ryan's excuse is that he wants to sell his party's deadly and toxic austerity agenda. Poor Ryan thought he could be the GOP's "voice of moral clarity," but the base picked Trump for that job and "he now finds himself in the most chaotic climate his party has seen in more than a generation."

“The underlying dynamics that drove out John Boehner remain,” Mr. Dent said of the former speaker. “Now you have Donald Trump and all his rhetoric, and he knows most of his members want him to support Trump while others like me want to keep their distance. Then, not being able to pass a budget may be one of the greatest frustrations for the speaker. A lot of members don’t want anything to do with firearms or the budget. They want to cancel the session after the election. That is where we are.”

...It is particularly rankling for Mr. Ryan, a former chairman of the House Budget Committee, that he is unable to pass a budget. The most conservative House Republicans do not want to honor a deal struck by Mr. Boehner and the White House last year, which raised statutory budget caps to increase government spending. Many have made it clear they will not vote for a budget with that higher spending level.

This has made the appropriations process equally charged. But that is where Mr. Ryan has other problems. Those bills have failed because of fights over an amendment to bar federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, fights over the use of the Confederate flag and other social issues.

With Republicans likely to lose seats in November, narrowing their large majority in the House, the most conservative members are likely to make up a larger, not small percentage of his conference after November. Gerrymandered Republican House districts, which produce very conservative members, and the probable sweeping out of moderate members in a presidential year combine to make it so.

No one in their right mind could describe Ryan's chief whip, Steve Scalise of a backward, blood red-- and whitest-- Louisiana district, as a "moderate." He's a hard right ideologue who was forced on the leadership so that the lunatic fringe would feel they had their own man in the decision-making process. But, no one ever accused David Duke, former KKK Grand Dragon or High Wizard or something of being in his right mind. And now Duke, who used to represent the heart of Scalise's district (Metarie) in the state legislature, claims he's going to run against the whip and Cantor him. (The filing date in Louisiana is just over a week from now, July 22.)

Scalise once campaigned in the district by calling himself "David Duke without the baggage." Duke is running on a purely racist platform and his statements sound a lot more like Trump's than like Paul Ryan's. He calls Scalise, who recently voted to ban Confederate flags in V.A. cemeteries, "sellout Steve Scalise" and issued a Trump-like statement: "I don’t take any satisfaction in the fact that I was right, but I have been right. Unless European Americans stand up, they are going to lose everything they care about in this country. There are millions of people across the country who would like to have me in the Congress. I’d be the only person in Congress openly defending the rights and the heritage of European Americans. We are on the offensive today. There’s no more defenses."

He accused Scalise of crawling "on his hands and his knees to the black caucus," and there are few things you can about a politician in that part of Louisiana that is more insulting. He's said similar crap about the Newtster for his recent speech that intimated that blacks are human, and told the media that he would be a better VP pick for Trump. But he claims that Trump "won’t reach out to him because the candidate fears 'offending the oligarchs,' a term Duke uses for the political establishment he said is controlled by Jewish, Hispanic and African American interests." By the way, McCain won LA-01 with 73% and Romney won the district with 71%. Last cycle, Scalise was reelected with 78%.