MR Frank Bruni is spot on in this opinion piece. I have frequently brought up the vile hypocrisy of supporters of NOT MY pres drumpf/trump and his no class spawn, NOT MY vp vance, their ass licking cabinet, the gop / greed over people-republican party and the billionaire and mega millionaire puppet masters that control them all. There has not been a pro American democratic Republic national republican since Eisenhower, instead they have all been committed to corruption, greed, class warfare, race warfare, fearmongering, disunity and authoritarianism. Mr Bruni offers examples of real right wing hypocrisy that are valid responses to attacks on Democrats and Democratic Socialist. Searching through republican politician's positions on drumpf/trump and his policies starting with his first presidential campaign starting 16 JUN 2015 through his attempted coup on 6 JAN 2021 and now his second campaign and term starting in NOV 2022. This from the New York Times.....
Aug. 31, 2026
By Frank Bruni
Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.
I’ve come to think of Abdul El-Sayed as the gotcha piñata.
The Democratic nominee in the crucial U.S. Senate race in Michigan is stuffed full of past comments that placed him to the left of most American voters — a difference that he’s now minimizing.
And Republicans are whack-whack-whacking at him, hoping for those goodies to tumble out.
The preternaturally smug Fox News host Jesse Watters administered some of the whacks last week, when El-Sayed sat for an interview that had all the cordiality of a cage fight. Watters resurfaced El-Sayed’s expressions of support for the Green New Deal and defunding the police, as well as his suggestion that the country ditch the Second Amendment. When El-Sayed repeatedly countered that he wanted to discuss Americans’ economic anxieties, Watters spun those responses as deflections and deceptions. These slippery lefties! They show different faces on different days.
Well, let’s examine the different faces of Mike Rogers, a former House member and El-Sayed’s Republican opponent in the Michigan contest.
The face that Rogers flashed in January 2021, when President Trump was scheming to overturn Joe Biden’s victory, signaled disgust with Trump. Rogers denounced his behavior as “more gangster than presidential” and decreed: “This trend of refusing to accept free and fair elections, without any proof of fraud, must end for the sake of our democratic republic.” In response to news reports that Trump was privately accepting some blame for a MAGA mob’s storming of the U.S. Capitol, Rogers said: “You’re damn right you had responsibility for this.”
How firm. How furious.
How fleeting.
When Rogers went on to make his first, unsuccessful Senate bid in 2024, he pretty much groveled for Trump’s endorsement, then proudly touted it. Not a word about Trump as thug, Trump as fabulist, Trump as ringleader with blood on his hands. For his current race, Rogers has again cozied up to Trump; while most Republicans tried to ignore the president’s bizarre and largely baseless primetime speech last month about American election irregularities, Rogers made a point of praising it.
I wish Democrats would whack at that even harder than they already have.
There has been extensive discussion lately about the extremes to which many Democrats took wokeness, about their repositioning now, about how honest versus expedient that transformation is. Such scrutiny is more than fair — it’s necessary. When politicians change their tunes, whether by downplaying former preoccupations or refashioning their views, they owe voters an explanation.
But there’s also a lopsidedness to all the attention to Democrats’ inconstancy. Republicans have more to answer for in that regard. Many of them, like Rogers, condemned the bloody events of Jan. 6, 2021, back when they thought that the violence spelled the end of Trump’s political viability. But now, at his insistence, they pooh-pooh that perfidy or wholly rewrite its history. They’ve worked their way around to forgiving an assault on the peaceful transfer of power and blessing a failed coup attempt. Democratic contortions on policing and pronouns pale in comparison.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did such twisting in an interview with ABC News this month, laughing merrily as she told Jonathan Karl: “Woke 1 was crazy.” Indeed it was, and as my Times Opinion colleague Carlos Lozada wrote last week, “Ocasio-Cortez, who called for abolishing prisons and adopted terms such as ‘menstruating person,’ was a resident in good standing of the asylum.” She hasn’t adequately explained her pivot to sanity.
But neither Ocasio-Cortez nor El-Sayed can hold a candle to Vice President JD Vance when it comes to political reinvention. There’s nothing in either of their backgrounds that clashes with their current incarnations the way Vance’s disparagements of Trump in 2016 contradict his doting now. “What an idiot.” “I find him reprehensible.” “America’s Hitler.” “Cultural heroin.” Vance said, wrote or posted all of that and more.
The party that has proved most fickle and cynical over the past decade is the Republican one, which jettisoned principles it once claimed to hold so very dear — on free markets, free trade, institutional integrity, individual character — because they didn’t suit Trump. Better to bury your conscience or reveal that you never had one than to incur his wrath.
So if midterm contests are to be fought over whether Republicans or Democrats are more generally trustworthy and likelier to be true to what they’re saying these days, it seems to me that Democrats have the upper hand. Or should.
El-Sayed has certainly made remarks and taken positions that I find rash. Republicans have a right — even a duty — to flag any and all of them. And he’s sidestepping or soft-pedaling aspects of his record. Hence the delight Republicans take in their game of gotcha.
But are there any gotchas more damning than all the evidence that Republicans saw Trump clearly — and gasped at the sight — before laundering his lies, parroting his fictions and pretending all is well with his bulldozing of not only Washington but also the foundations of our democracy? Their moral collapse may be old news. But in the nine weeks between now and Election Day, Democrats would be wise to treat it as fresh fodder.
Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers says he saw Bin Laden’s body with his ‘own eyes’. He did not
Ex-House intel committee chair, now running against Abdul El-Sayed, instead saw photo of Osama bin Laden’s body
Robert Mackey
Sat 29 Aug 2026 11.07 EDT
In a recent fundraising email, the Republican candidate for Michigan’s open US Senate seat, former congressman Mike Rogers, appeared to mislead supporters about his past by suggesting that he had played an active role in the killing of Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaida who was shot and killed in an American military raid on his compound in Pakistan in 2011.
“When I served as a US army officer and an FBI special agent, I swore a sacred oath to defend the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” Rogers wrote, according to a screenshot of the email shared online by Azi Paybarah, a former Washington Post reporter now with Straight Arrow News. “I dedicated my life to keeping our families safe – working in the shadows, hunting down terrorists, and standing on the frontlines of our national security.”
He then added, in a section of the email highlighted in bold type: “I saw the dead body of Osama bin Laden with my own eyes, knowing that together, we had delivered justice for America.”
Rogers, however, was not in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on 1 May 2011, when Bin Laden was shot and killed – nor was he in the White House Situation Room, where then president Barack Obama and senior administration officials at the time, including Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, followed the raid in real time.
Instead, as Rogers told reporters the next day, and recounts in a campaign video, he was at home in Washington DC – where, as the chair of the House intelligence committee at the time, he was informed about the raid in a phone call from Obama’s CIA director, Leon Panetta.
While the Rogers campaign did not respond to requests to explain what the former congressman meant by his claim, Paybarah, who first reported the fundraising email sent by Rogers on Sunday, suggested that Rogers must have been referring to the fact that he was one of a select few US officials to have seen a photograph of Bin Laden’s dead body.
Rogers said – days after the raid – that the photograph he’d seen made it clear that Bin Laden was dead. But he said he supported Obama’s decision to not make the graphic images of the raid public.
“The risks of release outweigh the benefits,” Rogers said in a statement at the time. “Conspiracy theorists around the world will just claim the photos are doctored anyway, and there is a real risk that releasing the photos will only serve to inflame public opinion in the Middle East.”
In the years since, though, Rogers has frequently referred to his role as a congressman who helped provide funds for US intelligence agencies in vague terms that seemed to exaggerate his role.
Since Abdul El-Sayed, a Muslim doctor and former public health official, became his opponent in the Senate race, Rogers has repeatedly cited his own role in the US war on Islamist terrorism in his campaign statements.
“Abdul doesn’t represent a vision for the future. He’s leading a movement grounded in ideological fanaticism,” Rogers said the night that El-Sayed won the Democratic nomination. “I spent years hunting terrorists and bringing Osama bin Laden to justice. Never in a million years did I think that I would be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11.”
A New York Times factcheck pointed out that the second part of Rogers’s “incendiary statement” was false: it was not El-Sayed, but one of his supporters, the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who once said that the US deserved 9/11, before retracting and apologizing for that statement seven years before he endorsed El-Sayed.
For his part, El-Sayed has clearly denounced the 9/11 attacks for years. In a recollection of that day written in 2021, El-Sayed wrote:
“I watched terrorists with names like mine attack my country in the name of my faith. Three thousand of my fellow Americans were killed in the craven terrorist attacks in New York, Washington DC and Pennsylvania. The attack devastated me.”
