Last Thursday night, in dueling sound bites, Paul Ryan and the tag team of Gaetz/Greene presented starkly different visions of the future of the Republican party.
Ryan talked about things like policies and plans. Gaetz/Greene mocked such things. They talked Trump. They claimed they were the drivers of the Republican Party. Ryan, only a few years ago the intellectual boy wonder of conservatism, is now a dinosaur without a home.
On Friday, the Republican Party in the Senate proved Gaetz/Greene right. They voted down a proposal to investigate the attack on themselves because anything that hurts Trump now hurts the party. It is the party of Gaetz/Greene.
And that means the embrace of one of the most obvious and ridiculous lies in American history. That the election was stolen from Trump. And it is at least the implicit acknowledgment that the notion of an insurrection led by Antifa or fake Trumpers is false. Otherwise, why fear an investigation?
Truth is now Republican kryptonite. Truth is the light switch thrown that sends Republicans scattering for the cracks. The lie is now too big to fail.
A man Republicans used to admire once said, “The truth will set you free.” As much as Republicans claim to be about freedom, truth freedom is not what they have in mind. Truth freedom will set them free from power and their jobs. No thanks.
As embarrassing as it must be for many of them to admit, the worst president in American history is now the unchallenged leader of the Republican party.
Well, perhaps that’s not exactly correct.
John Lennon got a great deal of grief from Christians when he said, “The Beatles are more popular than Jesus.”
A new poll demonstrates that the mysterious Q can now mouth those words with some accuracy. Q is at least as popular as Jesus. But I doubt that will get much flack from Christians, as the overlap between evangelicalism, at least, and QAnon is tight.
The poll showed that just one in five Republicans fully rejected the premises of the QAnon conspiracy theory. One in five.
Poll analyst: “Thinking about QAnon, if it were a religion, it would be as big as all white evangelical Protestants, or all white mainline Protestants.”
This is a core belief of today’s Republican party: A cadre of pedophiles leads the country. Donald Trump is all that stands between the pedophiles and our destruction. But an apocalyptic heavenly force will soon arrive to sweep said pedophiles away and restore Donald Trump, “our only hope” as a current meme declares, to office.
This is the Republican Party circa 2021. Running from the truth into the saving arms of the fictions created by two of the most ridiculous figures ever to cross the stage of history.
Comical. Ridiculous. Dangerous.
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Jonathan Bernstein documented in his newsletter a key difference between the Democratic and Republican parties.
Nuts surface on both the left and the right.
But nuts tend to get taken out by 30 or 40 points in Democratic primaries. Bernstein cites Alan Grayson in Florida as an example.
Bernstein: “The point is that both parties produce duds of various kinds who find their way into high office once in awhile, but how they handle them is very different. The Democrats didn’t exactly cut ties to Grayson, but they didn’t do much to encourage him, either. Yes, he was originally given visibility through party-aligned media, but that didn’t last long. Once it was clear he was an embarrassment to the party, his strident partisanship couldn’t save him, and now he’s relegated to the fringes of the party with a comeback unlikely.
On the Republican side, embarrassments are the toast of the party. In the House? There’s the one who is being sued by a former staffer for endangering everyone in his office (and using a room in the Capitol as housing for his son). There’s the one who has somehow managed to miss a whopping 16% of the votes on the House floor this year, despite the emergency availability of proxy voting. The one in a personal sex scandal. The one who is accused of covering up abuse. The one whose siblings run TV ads against him. The conspiracy-theory spouting one who is apparently stalking a fellow member of the House. The … well, I don’t even know where to begin with Lauren Boebert.
This is not close to a comprehensive list, even of current House Republicans. And to be clear: None of these are serious legislators who also happened to be involved in scandal. They’re showhorses, not workhorses, and (like Grayson) irresponsible ones at that — partisan blowhards who contribute little or nothing positive to the work of Congress.
Thirty years ago, Republicans would probably have marginalized them and, for those enmeshed in more serious problems, tried to ease them out of office quickly and quietly. Now? They’re among the most visible Republicans, not because of scandal-mongering media, but because these are the folks that the party wants to promote. Has anyone in the party even called for Florida’s Matt Gaetz to resign if the sex-trafficking charges against him are true? Certainly not many.
The behavior that the Democratic Party tries to winnow out is what the current Republican Party and its party-aligned media rewards. And it’s having the effect that one would expect.”
In related news, Mark McCloskey, the gun-waving St. Louis man who, with his wife beside him, threatened peaceful BLM protestors a few months back, has decided to run for the Senate.
McCloskey to Tucker Carlson: “God came knocking on my door disguised as an angry mob. If we don’t stand up now and take this country back, it’s going away.”
God once again proves to be a hell of a recruiter. I see a long future ahead for McCloskey in the Republican Party.
And here’s another candidate with prospects:
“In Wyoming, state Sen. Anthony Bouchard (R), a leading primary challenger to U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney (R), shared a secret from his past with the Casper Star Tribune: When Bouchard was 18, he impregnated a 14-year-old girl, and married her in Florida when she was 15. They divorced when she was 18 and the unidentified young woman committed suicide at the age of 20.”