Bob Rat and the Abolitionist Queens.
We got a letter to the editor email today and a phone interview about a meeting of the Tulsa County GOP Central Committee last week.
Sources had warned us that some really bad people were about to attack a good man so we had published a warning to others to attend the meeting and everything that we had been warned about had come to pass that night. You can read the letter to the editor and the interview in the next story.
Tulsa used to be a conservative place until the last few years. Their GOP was rock solid conservative in the early days of the Tea Party but boy has it fallen on hard times the past couple of years. Currently there is a RINO named Bob Jack, AKA Bob Rat, a former V.P. For Manhattan Construction, and more than a bit of a tin horn despot. Bob Jack had ran for Senate in 2016 and failed to win, losing in a four way race by coming in third place with a tiny percentage of the votes. Interestingly enough Bob Rat was against Medicaid Expansion during the campaign but since then has been pushing for the expansion to help fill some of the hospitals his former employer built in Tulsa.
Bob Rat was elected as Tulsa County GOP Chairman last spring and it became obvious that he styled himself more after a hard nosed corporate CEO than as an actual leader. Bob Rat liked to shut down discussion and dissension, attempting to intimidate those he disagreed with. First was ordering everyone not to support incumbent challenges, then it was said that he ordered the county Republicans to not support anyone running against a Democrat City counselor.
And when Oklahoma State GOP Chairman David Mclain got in trouble old Bob Rat was the first to leap to his aid and to help cover things up.
But last week Bob Rat crossed a line when he partnered with a handful of religious radicals, abolitionists, in an attempt to drive out State Committeeman David Van Rissenghem, commonly called David Van. The story started with a couple of sources claiming that Bob Ratt was planning a take down of David Van, calling for his resignation, one source claimed because Van was “divisive” and the other claimed that Bob Rat was upset because Van wasn't attending the local meetings. Van's real crime was in hosting the widely read Sooner Politics on Facebook and online, which hosts dozens of bloggers via RSS feed.
The problem of course was that David Van was elected to his position as State Committeeman after running unopposed. Van's job was to attend all State Committee meetings to represent Tulsa County GOP. Bob Rat had gotten his feelings hurt or something as he had started shunning David Van in the early summer of this year. Literally refusing to speak when spoken too, return calls or return emails. Van obviously was uncomfortable with attending the local meetings so he focused on the few state meetings.
But that didn't stop Bob Rat. At the latest Tulsa County GOP meeting Bob Rat laid clear his enmity by threatening to call for David Van's removal from office. And when a handful of City Elder/Abolitionists showed up it was Bob Rat's chance to take over.
Yet without a quorum, no business could be settled at the meeting so Bob Rat settled on an ugly resolution calling for some sort of vague punishment of David Van for unspecified charges. Which aren't legal under the GOP rules that state an officer is removed from office in the same way he came into office, meaning a County Convention.
David Van for his part is quite active and quite a liberty minded conservative Republican. Van runs Sooner Politics on Facebook, volunteers with NAMI, the mental illness patient advocate group, and runs a small business and takes care of his family.
Witnesses stated that Bob Rat was quite animated while he marched around with a microphone, ranting on about censoring David Van, reacting at one point to an audience member laughing at the flimsy accusations by yelling at the guy asking if he thought this was funny. Despite having no where near the number required for an actual legal meeting, one tenth of the number required, Bob Rat asked for a standing vote censoring Van.
Two of Bob Rat's biggest supporters are Amanda Teagarden and Rhonda Vuillemont Smith and like Bob Rat, both are failed politicians. Teagarden lost the primary for Senate District 39 in 2016 and Vuillemont Smith ran for Senate District 25 in 2012 where she was beaten soundly by nearly three to one votes. Both are fairly radical John Birch Society members/supporters and support the radical City Elders group.
Teagarden is an older woman, at least in her mid sixties I would think. For several years she acted as a lobbyist for the John Birch Society front group OK Safe. She also made a run for GOP office in the past, losing of course. While acting as the John Birch Society lobbyist she ran various open borders type legislation and railed against conspiracy theories until the front group ultimately folded from non support. She is known to be a viscous woman on political matters who holds grudges for the smallest slight whether intentional or not.
Ronda Vuillemont Smith is in her late fifties, ran and failed to win the Tulsa County GOP chair race in 2015 along with the failed Senate race. She has done a good job with the Tulsa 912 group by keeping it in existence. She was one of the co founders of the OTU, Oklahoma Taxpayers Unit, the group that failed at the aborted effort to challenge the teacher raises.
What ties these three together seems to be a sense of entitlement and bitterness at being rejected in political races, along with a radical view of religion, believing that their sect is superior to other Christian faiths, which gives them both the right to win political office and the right to criticize others while being immune to criticism themselves. During the long rant against Van's “divisiveness” none of the three admitted to going on KFAQ radio and trashing Oklahoma Vice Chair Mike Turner when he responded to Chairman David Mclain's calls for Turner's resignation.
Tulsa County needs to drive these religious fanatics from the Party in the coming year. None of these folks are true Christians, all three are vicious bitter failures in politics, all three are failures as leaders in the Party and in the conservative movement. About all they are good at are being divisive and driving away those that have a different faith and a more moderate outlook on being a Republican. Strangely enough they are good at driving away some of the more liberty minded and conservative minded Republicans. Seems all they want in the Party are fellow religious extremists that are more aligned to the Taliban than to Christianity.
