
The new secretary of the Broward County Republican Party once beat a young woman almost to death with a hammer.

Republicans have long branded themselves the party of upstanding moral character. And they still attempt to characterize themselves as such, despite electing a president who openly brags about sexually assaulting women.

But Trump is not an aberration. Republicans have elected reprehensible, hateful, and violent people all the way down to the local level. This is clearly evidenced by the Broward County Republican Party in Florida, which named an attempted murderer as its secretary.

According to Boing Boing, which picked up the story from the Miami Herald:

Before 28-year-old Trump supporter Rupert Tarsey was the freshly minted secretary of the Broward County GOP, he was Rupert Ditsworth, a student at the exclusive, high-priced LA Harvard-Westlake School, where he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor after taking a fellow student out in car, then hitting her over the head more than 40 times with a claw hammer and then choking her and dragging her out of the car, leaving her by the road with her skull split open. His victim survived the attack. The 6'2" Tarsey said the attack was self-defense.


Panicked GOP officials are trying to oust him, but he is refusing to resign.

While this story is sensational, it is not remotely unique. Republicans who represent their state and local parties all over the country have engaged in behavior that demonstrates a complete lack of moral compass.

Last year, Republicans in Austin, Texas, elected a man named Robert Morrow as head of the Travis County GOP. Morrow briefly gained national infamy for anointing himself "the face of the Re-pube-licking Party," referring to Hillary Clinton and Rick Perry as "rampaging bisexual adulterers" and repeatedly spamming the N-word on Twitter. Travis County Republican officials finally managed to fire him after he illegally filed to run for president.

In Kentucky, another Republican county chair, David Narramore, resigned in disgrace after he was arrested for exposing himself in a Tennessee department store bathroom.

And in New Mexico, yet another GOP county chair, Roman Jimenez, resigned after a Facebook rant that "violent leftists" in Charlottesville are "brainless robots that are created by evil Soros money" and they were "getting exactly what they asked for" from the white supremacist rioters who murdered a woman with a car.

All over the country, the GOP ideology is attracting people with vulgar, violent, and racist impulses. This is not an accident, and it disqualifies the party from laying any claim to morality.