Dana Rohrabacher defeated!

[struggle4progress]

22. Russia's favorite congressman loses seat

Andrew Gumbel
Sat 10 Nov 2018 13.38 EST Last modified on Sat 10 Nov 2018 13.40 EST

... for 30 years, his southern California constituents have .. dubbed him “crazy Dana”.

He’s a guy who, in the days of the Soviet Union, signed up for a week to fight alongside the mujahideen in Afghanistan. A guy who, in the early 1990s, got into a drunken arm-wrestling match with a young Vladimir Putin. Putin “put me down in a millisecond”, Rohrabacher recalled years later. “His muscles are just unbelievable.”

He’s notorious for making an ill-advised link between “dinosaur flatulence” and global warming; for his open disdain of homosexuals and undocumented immigrants; for welcoming a notorious Holocaust denier to Washington; and for thinking that the Oklahoma City bombing – widely regarded as a conspiracy of homegrown far-right radicals – was an Islamist plot cooked up by Middle Eastern radicals in the Philippines.

... After 15 terms on Capitol Hill, though, he is almost certainly about to be an ex-congressman ...

He defended Russia’s incursion into Georgia in 2008 and the annexation of Crimea in 2014. He has consistently pushed back against sanctions and lobbied to repeal the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which imposed penalties on Russian oligarchs accused of corruption and human rights abuses.So accommodating has Rohrabacher been of Russian military aggression and policy interests that as early as 2012 the FBI warned him the Kremlin was seeking to cultivate him as an intelligence asset and had even assigned him a code name. Ed Royce, then chair of the House foreign relations committee, was alarmed enough to curtail Rohrabacher’s powers as head of the subcommittee dealing with Russia. Last year, the Republican majority leader, Kevin McCarthy, was caught on tape saying he believed Rohrabacher was indeed on Putin’s payroll ...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/10/dana-rohrabacher-loses-congressional-seat-orange-county-russia-putin