TX GOP Rep Van Taylor Had A Really REALLY Bad Day Yesterday

Who among us hasn't tripped and found our penis in an ISIS widow, right?

There's blowing up your career, and there's whatever Republican Congressman Van Taylor did last night. According to (Dead) Breitbart and the Dallas Morning News , the Texas congressman was having an extramarital affair with the widow of an Islamic State fighter just last year. After the woman's story was made public by an also-ran Republican challenger, Taylor narrowly missed hitting the 50 percent threshold and avoiding a runoff. But now he's dropping out of the race entirely, because yeah, no shit, you idiot .

“About a year ago, I made a horrible mistake that has caused deep hurt and pain among those I love most in this world,” he wrote to his supporters last night. “I had an affair, it was wrong, and it was the greatest failure of my life.”

So, in a way, the "ISIS Bride" yoked herself to not one but two suicide bombers. (Sorry, not sorry.)

In a classic "meet cute," Tania Joya, who once traveled with her children to Syria to wage jihad, reached out to the politician in 2019 for help with her program Preventing Violent Extremism. By late 2020, they were romantically involved, according to Breitbart.

“He considered me his girlfriend. He labeled me his girlfriend, his mistress,” Joya told the website. “I told him that I found him attractive. After that for an entire month, every day during October 2020, he wouldn’t stop messaging me like crazy. It was just so distracting. He was going crazy for it.”

Breitbart's got one of Taylor's graphic sexual texts to Joya, and if you want to give those goons a click, have at it. We're not going to comment on what consenting adults do in private, but let's assume that this guy had some extremely unpleasant conversations with his wife and three daughters this weekend when the story went live.

According to the News , Joya approached Suzanne Harp, one of Taylor's Republican challengers, last Thursday after getting sick of seeing her ex-lover's face on billboards.

“All I wanted was for Suzanne Harp to just say, ‘Hey, I know your little scandal with Tania Joya. Would you like to resign before we embarrass you?’ But it didn’t happen like that,” she told the paper. Instead, she says Harp got someone to record her, then fed the story to the rightwing noise machine on Sunday.

Which could be true, but we can't help noticing that Joya was pretty chatty with Breitbart, which ran its piece Monday, complete with the text and a bank statement showing a $5,000 payment on June 3, 2021, that she says was to compensate her for deleting additional personal messages.

Whatever Joya's motivations, the publicity was apparently enough to keep Taylor under 50 percent yesterday, forcing him into a runoff, although not with Harp. Assuming Taylor officially drops out, the second place finisher, Collin County Judge Keith Self, becomes the Republican nominee without need of a runoff, despite receiving just 26.5 percent of the vote.

Self is also gross, but in a more obvious way. Here's a fun little snippet from his campaign website :

Our current Congressman, Van Taylor, has lost his way. Here in Texas, he said he was a conservative—but when he went to Washington, he went Washington. Congressman Taylor was one of only two Texas Republicans (of 23) who voted to create the January 6 Commission, which gives Nancy Pelosi and RINO Liz Cheney the power to harass and embarrass Republicans. He voted to strip our nation’s history from the Capitol. He even joined a bipartisan caucus that tries to negotiate big-spending agreements between Democrats and Republicans. In short, Congressman Taylor is not who he says he is.

Ewww, bring back the nasty philanderer!

In summary and in conclusion, these people are all gross. But Texas Republicans made this an R+14 seat, so, congrats to incoming Rep. Self, the luckiest sumbitch in Plano.

[ Breitbart / Dallas Morning News ]

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