Much has been made in the last week about positions supported and comments made by U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, who represents the northwest corner of the Peach State, just across the state line from Chattanooga.
In one instance, she "liked" a post that mentioned something about a "bullet to the head" being a quick way to remove U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California.
Many of the comments and support were made months before she entered a race for Congress that year, not that it excuses them.
Let us say at the outset that had this page endorsed a candidate in Georgia's 14th Congressional District Republican primary, it wouldn't have been Greene.
In the first place, we didn't appreciate her opportunism for jumping from the 6th District race she'd originally declared for to the 14th because she thought it looked easier to win. The rules, in fact, allow candidates to run in districts in which they do not live. They only must live in the same state. Nevertheless, we believe it is in bad form to do so.
Indeed, it does not lend itself to trustworthiness.
Jon Ossoff, who Georgia elected to a U.S. Senate seat in a runoff early this month, did the same thing when he initially ran for Congress in 2017.
(READ MORE: Biden impeachment articles planned by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene)
Greene also wouldn't have been our choice because the primary race had several better candidates, including Lookout Mountain's Clayton Fuller and John Cowan, the neurosurgeon who lost to her in the primary runoff.
She won a spot in the runoff and then won the runoff because she was perceived to be the most pro-Trump candidate in the race.
Greene, during the campaign, declared she "stands with President Trump and against the left-wing socialists who want to wreck our country."
She further said, "I'm running to stop gun control, open borders, the Green New Deal, and socialism."
Greene's campaign said this: "Radical socialists want Americans on the same government-run healthcare plan with welfare recipients and illegal immigrants. Marjorie Greene is fighting against these radical socialists and will take the fight to Congress."
Pretty far-right stuff, but not over the line. And since Trump won 73% of the vote in the district in 2020, she was speaking the language of many who live there.
Since being sworn in, though, Greene has been intentionally confrontational with members of the media, has refused to wear a mask at the Capitol or on the House floor, and has made wildly unproven allegations about election illegalities.
Many people in the country share her concerns about fraud in the 2020 election and in the direction the new administration could take, but her constituents elected her to act on those concerns in Congress, not to make herself the center of attention.
Of course, Greene's not the one digging out her old pronouncements, but once they're made, it's impossible to unsay them.
For instance, she claimed the 2018 mass shooting at Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, wasn't true, and that the Pentagon wasn't attacked on Sept. 11, 2001.
Most recently, it was the comments she "liked" about Pelosi and about executing FBI agents who were part of the "deep state" thought to be working against then-President Trump.
Greene in recent days has blamed "teams of people" who "manage my pages" for the support of some positions, which sometimes "did not represent my views."
Twitter has temporarily suspended her account.
Greene, to her detriment, is a conservative and a Republican. Liberals and Democrats are rarely taken to task for their heinous comments. To wit:
* U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-California: "If you see anybody from that [Trump] Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd, and you push back on them, and you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere."
* Singer Madonna: I've "thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House."
* U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, D-South Carolina: "How do you elect a person president, then all of a sudden you're going to give him the authority to be dictator? That's what Hitler did in Germany."
* Actor Johnny Depp: "When was the last time an actor assassinated a president? ... It has been a while and maybe it is time."
* U.S. Rep. Julian Castro, D-Texas: "[O]ne of the things that [the Third Reich] did was to dehumanize people. ... [I]t's very clear that we have a president who is bound and determined to dehumanize people to create fear and paranoia about them in order to boost his own political fortunes."
* Actor Robert DeNiro: "I'd like to punch [Trump] in the face."
* Then-candidate Joe Biden: Trump is "sort of like [Nazi propagandist Joseph] Goebbels."
None of the above was chided by the mainstream media for the comments they made.
False, reprehensible and dehumanizing rhetoric did not start with Greene. We understand her inclination to hit back to what has been heaped on Trump and Republicans, but we'd much prefer that she keep her comments fact-driven and that she try to win in the arena of ideas.