Crude Republican attack on Sen. David Wilson reflects a sickness in the Alaska GOP

Sen. David Wilson is a conservative legislator from Wasilla.

Now he is under attack from the Republican Party in Wasilla for joining the 17-member majority coalition of eight Republicans and nine Democrats that will lead the Alaska Senate in January.

In a crude and tasteless diatribe, the party “leaders” of Wasilla called on him to resign his position from the Legislature by Friday at 5 p.m. or else. He “betrayed the voters” of his district, according to 10 GOP Mensa members. For some reason, he paid no attention to this nonsense.

Wilson has learned on the job in Juneau and become a far better legislator than he was at the start of his career. That’s how things are supposed to work. He and the seven other Republicans in the Senate who joined the majority will have the ability to get things done for the state.

That the extremists in the GOP machinery find him despicable proves that he is doing something right for Alaskans.

Elijah Verhagen, the right-wing candidate who lost a state Senate race to Sen. Click Bishop, tried Saturday to introduce a resolution denouncing the eight GOP senators at a state central committee meeting, but says the chair “steamrolled” him and he couldn’t. His resolution said the eight senators “must” pay back whatever money they got from the GOP if they don’t obey the party people.

One of the benefits of ranked choice voting is that the power of extremists to wield power over other Alaskans has been greatly reduced. Some in the Alaska Republican Party don’t know it yet, happily censuring their way to oblivion.

According to the Republican Party blog, the party “leaders” want to stop censuring elected officials until the next election in two years.

And now that Sen. Lisa Murkowski has won a new term, the brightest bulbs in the Alaska GOP are down on their knees, begging Murkowski for forgiveness.

They have revoked the fatwa.

It’s a task worthy of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping braintrust.

The Republican Grand Poohbahs claim they didn’t mean it when they censured Murkowski for refusing to bow down to Donald Trump. They didn’t mean it when they condemned her for linking Trump to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

They didn’t mean it when they said the “party hereby separates itself from Senator Murkowski’s conviction vote of President Trump.”

They didn’t mean it when they created a Republican Purity Committee that would purge Murkowski and others, such as soon-to-be-Sen. Kelly Merrick, for being disloyal. They wanted to prevent Murkowski from ever running as a Republican for anything.

(The 17-member Republican Purity Committee, officially the “Membership Committee” was to be headed by National Committeewoman Cynthia Henry and the National Committeeman, now Craig Campbell. They wanted to prohibit Murkowski from calling herself a Republican on the ballot, which they couldn’t do because the law allows a candidate to make that decision. The Purity Committee still exists, in name only.

The GOP politburo say they didn’t mean it when they refused to list Murkowksi as a Republican candidate on their website, saying they only recognized Kelly Tshibaka and Buzz Kelley.

Murkowski had been erased from the record. The GOP website still refuses to list Murkowski as someone who ran in 2022.

Tshibaka, the chosen candidate, marked the one-year anniversary of the Republican expulsion of Murkowski last spring by saying it happened because of “a years-long pattern of consistently contradicting Alaska values and the things that Alaskans support.”

Now the GOP leaders claim they were just kidding. They have lifted their condemnation. Murkowski has been rehabilitated. She is welcome at Trump’s party.

Why? Murkowski won. Nothing else matters. The “principles” that led to her banishment have been exposed once more as fraud. Something similar happened in 2010 after Murkowski beat Joe Miller by a write-in campaign.

Had Tshibaka won, they would have continued to say Murkowski Who?

Now they say they didn’t mean it when they condemned Sen. Mitch McConnell for his “inappropriate endorsement of censured Senator Murkowski.”

The obsequious Alaska Republican Apology Tour, which will run for six years, has begun.

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