I Keep checking Trump's Twitter Feed For Defenses Of Paul Gosar And Jim Knoblach

Paul Gosar is a crackpot dentist, multimillionaire and teabagger representing nut-country in Arizona, AZ-04. The district is massive, albeit mostly empty. It stretches from the exurbs east, north and west of Phoenix, down to Yuma up to Lake Havasu, through the Mohave Valley to Bullhead City to the Utah border. Prescott and Kingman are what passes for population centers. The PVI is R+21, by far the worst in the state. Trump won the district 67.7% to 27.5%.

Most members of Congress consider Gosar a joke. He kept trying to get Eric Holder charged with murder for some paranoid right-wing conspiracy theory, "Operation Fast and Furious." Needless to say, Gosar is a member of the Freedom Caucus.

The video up top features his 6 brothers and sisters telling his constituents not to vote for him and to elect his Democratic opponent instead. SIX brothers and sisters. How embarrassing is that? Do they invite him and Maude to Thanksgiving dinner?

And that wasn't even the most horrible thing that happened in Trumpland this week. Remember Michele Bachmann, another far right extremist? She was caught embezzling money and bribing people and all kinds of things but was allowed to get off scott free in return for retiring from Congress. She representing the St. Cloud area on Minnesota. And the state Rep. from there is Jim Knoblach, at least as bizarre as Bachmann. Yes, of course, like Bachmann and Gosar, he's more a fascist than an actual Republican. But that isn't why he was in the news Friday.

He "abruptly ended his re-election campaign Friday as MPR News prepared to publish detailed accusations from his daughter of inappropriate behavior toward her since childhood... Knoblach, who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, declined to be interviewed after being approached more than a week ago. In a written statement, Knoblach called the allegations 'indescribably hurtful' and said he would work toward healing his family." Maybe Trump could appoint him to Brett Kavanaugh's Circuit Court seat once Grassley rams Kavanaugh through the Senate and onto the Supreme Court. Let's keep those seats reserved for Republican perverts in the hands of Republican perverts.

"I love my children more than anything, and would never do anything to hurt them. Her allegations are false," Knoblach wrote. "I and other family members have made repeated attempts to reconcile with her in recent years, but she has refused."

The timing of his exit could make his St. Cloud-area seat, already a top target for Democrats, impossible for Republicans to hold, barring some kind of court intervention or a write-in campaign by a substitute candidate. Knoblach was seeking a ninth term and was being challenged by Democratic candidate Dan Wolgamott, also of St. Cloud. Knoblach plans to serve out his term.

Knoblach's daughter, Laura, alleges that the prominent legislator inappropriately touched her for most of her life, behavior she confided to close friends, family and authority figures at her school and church for more than a decade.

She said she decided to tell her story to MPR News after exhausting other means to hold her father accountable, including a 2017 investigation by local law enforcement. No charges resulted. She provided MPR News with extensive documentation about her attempts to get help.

Laura Knoblach, 23, said she first remembers her father, an eight-term state representative, touching her when she was 9 years old. He came into her room after she'd gone to bed and climbed in and laid down behind her.

"He would put his arm around me and not let me get up or get away and he would lick my neck or bite my ear," she said in an interview with MPR News.

These visits to her room, or similar kissing across her arms and neck and biting her ears while they watched movies on the couch, happened so often throughout her childhood and teenage years it became a defining part of her relationship with her father, she said.

There were other routine behaviors, she said, including more than 30 instances where her father approached her from behind and pressed his body against hers in the kitchen of their home, pinning her against the refrigerator or dishwasher and using his weight and strength to keep her from getting away.

On one occasion as a 15-year-old girl, she said her father held her down and asked her if she liked the kissing and playing, and that she responded yes because she felt afraid and like she had no choice.

Susan Gaertner, Jim Knoblach's attorney, said while her client denied the allegations, he "does not want to drag his family through six weeks of hell."

Gaertner suggested Laura Knoblach disagrees with her father's political beliefs and her actions are politically motivated.

"There have been family conflicts, as is true of any family, some of them have been quite difficult," Gaertner told MPR News. "You add a layer of family conflicts to politics, and that makes the situation even more difficult."

But Laura Knoblach said the inappropriate behavior continued from ages 9 to 21, including an incident in 2015, when she was 20, where she said her father pinned her against a car and licked and kissed her neck.

In December of 2016, after she moved away from her family to Boulder, Colo., she posted to her Facebook page that her family had tried to "silence" her about the behavior she described but that it was important to speak out. After a burst of media attention and pressure from her family, she said she removed the post, but that an uncle of Laura's contacted the police.

In January of 2017, the St. Cloud Police Department and Sherburne County Sheriff's Office opened an investigation into the case and two officers traveled to Boulder to interview Laura Knoblach.

Two months later, the case was closed and the Sherburne County Attorney's Office declined to press charges because there was "insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Jim Knoblach had committed a crime."

...Knoblach was first elected in 1994 but left the House to wage an unsuccessful bid for Congress in 2006. He returned to the Legislature in 2014 and is among the most powerful figures at the Capitol.

He's the chair of the House Ways and Means committee, where every request for more funding or proposals to slash programs must flow through.

Powerful men-- and the women they owned-- refused to believe her. Sound familiar? It's part of the DNA of conservatism and very much a dominant-- and very ugly-- feature of the Republican Party, especially with Trump at the top of the dung heap.