Did you ever contemplate a future where the Speakership of the House would pass not only to “empty suit” “moron” Kevin McCarthy, as Nancy Pelosi has characterized him, but to the chaser of Parkland shooting survivors, and advocate of QAnon conspiracies, Marjorie Taylor Greene? Think of them as a two-headed Gorgon, sharing one gavel, and you’ve got the picture.
I call your attention to the fact that the minute McCarthy won, Greene sidled down the aisle to his side and posed for a selfie. That was McCarthy’s first official act.
McCarthy may be the majority leader and Speaker but Greene is clearly designated as the minority-of-the-majority leader, namely MAGA. She is the House MAGA leader. That is the deal that was cut, it’s pretty evident.
Not only that, but Fox News and the rest of the GOP is going along with it. Yes, Mitch McConnell spoke out against Greene back in the day, calling her a “cancer” on the Republican party and her ideas “loony” but have you heard him speak of her recently? No. And you won’t.
What you will see and hear is Fox News sanitizing Marge and in doing so baptizing her as Legitimate GOP and not a fringe freak, which is precisely what she is and was universally recognized as not very long ago. It’s already begun, as you saw in her softball interview with Howard Kurtz. Mona Charen, the Bulwark:
The bad internet sucked her in and forced her to believe that Obama was a secret Muslim; that the Parkland shooting and the Sandy Hook murders and the Las Vegas massacre were all false flag operations; that Bill and Hillary Clinton had a hand in killing John F. Kennedy, Jr; that 9/11 was an inside job; that a California wildfire was caused by lasers “beamed from space and controlled by a prominent Jewish banking family with connections to powerful Democrats;” and that Hillary Clinton had murdered a child in order to use her blood for a satanic ritual.
“So far in the past.” She hasn’t said those things since 2018! Why, since then, she’s been a model citizen. Except, wait, wasn’t it just in February 2022—so far in the past—that Greene spoke at a conference sponsored by the white nationalist/fascist Nick Fuentes? That was also the month that she described the January 6th defendants as political prisoners and denounced “Nancy Pelosi’s gazpacho police.” (Though, candidly, we owe her a debt of gratitude for that.) And if memory serves, in October 2022 she told a crowd that “Democrats want Republicans dead and they have already started the killings.” And wasn’t it in December 2022—last month—that she told the New York Young Republican Club that if she and Steve Bannon had organized the January 6th insurrection, “We would have won. Not to mention, it would have been armed.”
The Fox purification ritual was instructive. While attempting to put QAnon and Jewish space lasers in the distant past, Kurtz asked Greene about her chastisement of Chip Roy for voting to certify the election of Joe Biden. “Do you think that’s important to the base even now?” he inquired. Oh yes, she assured him. It was so ironic that some people were posturing as true conservatives when they “didn’t have the voting record that Kevin did,” by which she meant that McCarthy voted against certifying the election. So the mark of a true leader is to deny the legitimacy of legitimate elections. […]
But this is not a case of a politician who misspeaks or commits a gaffe and must make amends. She has a disordered personality. As a grown adult, she chased a teenager who had survived the Parkland school shooting down the street, harassing and berating him. She is drawn to hatred as a moth to a flame. She is the poison that courses through the veins of parts of the right—the vicious, reality-challenged right. If she is to be normalized by the GOP, it is the party, not she, that is changed.
This is who the GOP is, in 2023. The direction we’re inexorably headed is going to make the Tower of Babel seem whimsical. Fatuous, half-baked things are going to be said on a daily basis and normalized with equal speed. The fringe GOPers, the Andy Biggs and the Paul Gosars, are now in the ascendency. Louie Gohmert is no longer a joke, he’s an elder statesman.
If you doubt what I’m saying for a minute, just go to Twitter or even better yet, Truth Social. Calls for Joe Biden’s impeachment routinely ring through the air, Trump claims that the Chinese gave Biden’s think tank $54 million for classified documents (which probably translates as Putin would only give him $25 million for his classified documents. You know what a movie projector the man is), Andy Biggs recommends an investigation not only of Joe and Hunter but now of Jill Biden as well, Troy Nehls advocates the FBI raiding the Bidens’ home, Ronny Jackson screams in all caps about Biden deliberately hiding the documents that were found, and so it goes. One endless dirge of unreality.
We’re on this Disneyland horror e-ride for the next two years. Expect the unexpected and the never before seen because the latter stages of any terminal illness are never pleasant to see. The GOP is dying and this is what that looks like.
IF THIS IS WHAT THE G.O.P. DYING LOOKS LIKE, I WISH WE COULD PUT US OUT OF OUR MISERY AND JUST EUTHENIZE THEM (ALL!) ALREADY.
(Moderator’s Note: Not that this fellow veteran doesn’t share some of the same sentiment, but much as we like hearing from new folks in the future might I ask you to avoid all caps? A word or phrase is one thing, but an entire post another.)
If MGT had plastic surgery, she should sue her surgeon. That huge nose and those squinchy eyes and the skin pulled so tight from her last face lift left her with an outside that matches her truly hideous inside. Her ugliness goes bone deep, and her political beliefs are so at odds with her faux Christianity makes Franklin Graham look like a radical leftist.