The media suddenly approves of the congresswoman just because she’s said a few things they agree with.

O ver the past few decades, any Republicans who lived to hear something favorable about themselves from the legacy media would know they were near death. That’s because in order to hear your name uttered in a favorable light by the liberal media, you had to be dead.

It happened to all the conservative stalwarts; as soon as Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Antonin Scalia left the earth, the instant respect from publications that hammered them during their tenures commenced. The New York Times article on Richard Nixon’s death managed to scare up some words of praise, noting that his presidential tenure “wrought foreign policy accomplishments of historic proportions that had proved beyond the reach of his Democratic foes.”

(The paper even called Nixon a “victim of Watergate,” which is a bit like saying Bill Clinton was a victim of the White House intern program.)

In the Trump years, however, the mainstream press has identified a new brand of Republican worth spilling ink (or pixels) over. It is the “Republican Who Criticizes Donald Trump.”

Sure, there have always been Republicans who knew they could crowbar their way into news stories by criticizing their own party. John McCain rode this strategy to national prominence until the press turned on him during his 2008 presidential campaign against media favorite Barack Obama.

But turning on Trump seems to make someone especially newsworthy, given that the president demands undying fealty from members of his own party. That means Republicans once reviled by the media are granted newfound respect because of their willingness to express disgust at actions that are, by definition, disgusting.

Remember George W. Bush, the president who took us to war in Iraq over weapons of mass destruction that never turned up and who was for years deemed a “war criminal” by the left? One scatological reference to a Trump speech, and his entire administration took on a different hue in retrospect. Dick Cheney, whose very name made liberal cerebellums boil, seemed much more reasonable when he was defending his congresswoman daughter, Liz, from Trump’s attacks.

And then, of course, there was Mitt Romney, vilified for a full summer because he dared to express an interest in promoting women within his Massachusetts gubernatorial administration. The phrase “binders full of women” was purposely misconstrued by Obama supporters and the media (a single circle in a Venn diagram), contributing to Romney’s loss in the 2012 presidential election. But when Trump hit the scene and Romney made his comeback, the Utah senator became a media darling because of his principled opposition to Trump’s ludicrous behavior.

Romney is a decent person with values, so it made some sense that the media would cling to him to represent their values. But the national media now have a new plaything of the indecent variety.

In July, Zaid Jilani wrote in the Washington Post that former QAnon adherent and continuing national embarrassment Marjorie Taylor Greene is “winning his respect.” Last week, the New York Times ran a glossy feature piece on the Republican congresswoman from Georgia, the style of which the paper normally reserves for unserious Democrats. For her criticisms of Donald Trump, writers at other outlets (including this one) have labeled Greene a “firebrand,” which must be a flattering euphemism for “once spread conspiracy theories about school shootings and believed that on 9/11 the Pentagon was hit by a missile, not a plane.”

Memo to the national media: treat MTG with the skepticism you would have if your child came home from college and announced she were engaged to someone she met on a dating reality show. In both intellect and consistency, MTG makes George Santos look like JFK.

While she has apologized for her years of following QAnon and its users’ belief that the world is run by a cadre of billionaire pedophiles, just weeks ago she suggested America was in the midst of a “Muslim takeover” and warned that American women would soon be living under “Sharia law.” She ruminated that the 2025 death of Pope Francis was an example of “evil . . . being defeated by the hand of God.” In 2024, she suggested that the government controls the weather and that Hurricane Milton was geo-engineered to harm Republican areas.

In 2023, she called for a “national divorce,” suggesting that Americans should separate by red states and blue states. It is likely because of her actions that your eyeballs were poisoned by the phrase “polyamorous tantric sex guru.” In 2024, she mourned America’s deceased war heroes on Memorial Day by posting a photo of herself in a bikini. (A shrewd political move no doubt first executed by Rutherford B. Hayes.)

The New York Times brushes that all aside, saying those days are all now behind her. It is now attempting to sanewash her because she is taking positions more consistent with Democrats than with traditional Republicans. For instance, she has been critical of Israel in its ongoing conflict in Gaza, often spouting Hamas propaganda to make her point. She has criticized Trump for bombing Iran. And now she is swimming in newfound mainstream respect for urging Republicans to support the extension of large Obamacare subsidies to keep health-care premiums down.

And, of course, she hasn’t quite shed her QAnon roots. MTG has continued to press Trump on releasing the “Epstein files,” a list purported to expose a clan of rich pedophiles (some of them friendly to Trump himself).

Yet in pitching this lunacy-spouting politician as some sort of voice of reason within the Republican Party, the media are engaging in the same mental bargaining that traditional Republicans use to justify their support of Donald Trump. They engage in a cognitive compartmentalization that allows them to recognize the thimble of things they like about a politician while ignoring a Mount Vesuvius of malignancy.

This is not how the world works. We don’t get to pick a handful of sane things a person has said and declare them fit. This would be like renaming the Tony Awards after one of America’s greatest stage actors, John Wilkes Booth.

Nonetheless, because she now suits their purpose, Greene is being pitched by the media as newly making sense. But the media’s effort to memory-hole her past shouldn’t be allowed to succeed. Just because she has strung a few sentences together that they agree with doesn’t mean she should be built up to respectability.

So just remember, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but the enemy of your enemy might also believe the Jews are in control of space lasers.