Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine on Sunday decried former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were eating dogs and other pets as “garbage” but stopped short of directly condemning Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, for spreading the false claims.

“There’s a lot of garbage on the internet. You know, this is a piece of garbage that was simply not true. There’s no evidence of this at all,” DeWine said in an interview on ABC’s “This Week” when he was asked whether it’s responsible for Trump to push the false claims.

Asked what he would say to Trump after he pointed out that there is no truth to his claims, DeWine condemned groups that have marched in Springfield as part of a hate campaign against Haitian immigrants and went on to praise Haitians as hard-working people who have brought “positive influences” to the town.

  • mpa92643@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    The vast majority of elected Republicans are opportunists willing to use any opportunity to advance their narrative even if it’s clearly blatant lies or bullshit.

    Vance pushes the “eating pets” crap to anyone who will listen, and when he gets hard enough pushback from someone and can’t bullshit his way out of it, he falls back to the “okay, maybe it’s not true, but it represents real concerns people have so it’s valid for me to talk about it.”

    Which is exactly what happened with the election results in 2020. They pushed the stolen election crap until it was pretty much irrefutably disproven, then went around saying they had to make it harder to vote because their voters, for some strange reason, thought the election wasn’t fair.

    DeWine is one of the very few Republican politicians left that has any sense of principle and isn’t a cynical opportunist, even if most of those principles are pretty shitty.

    • sarcasticsunrise@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      100 percent. To your point on Vance, it’s odd that the right wing keeps rolling with this Haitian Satanic Panic. Wouldn’t it be incumbent on Senator JD Vance (Ohio) to be responsible for this “problem” that’s taking place in Ohio?

      • mpa92643@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        They also like to complain about the “crime in blue cities,” but somehow never seem to acknowledge that if it’s a problem that’s so easy to solve, why do red states with red legislatures and red governors not just fix the issue in their blue cities?

        5 of the top 10 cities with the highest violent crime rates are in red states with Republican legislatures and Republican governors. They sure as hell act like they know the simple solution to violent crime in cities, but for some reason they don’t seem to implement those obvious solutions in their own states. Instead, they blame the Democratic mayors.

        It’s almost like it’s a lot harder of a problem to solve than Republicans let on and they’re being disingenuous about knowing how to fix it…