Kevin McCarthy: The Man in the Boat

 

More performative BS from Marge Greene, Kevin McCarthy, Elise Stefanik and other Republicans down at the southern border today. pic.twitter.com/tWqjADqoab

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) April 25, 2022

What a fun time House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy seems to be having doing performative bullshit down by the river while pretending that anything has changed with respects to the Biden Administration's prosecution of border security! It's all bullshit, as I've certainly been saying.  But why this performance art, and why with these people at this point in time?

Oh, is it because there is still audio evidence of his perennial two-facedness coming out in the media? Because that is exactly what is happening.  In the most recent offering, McCarthy is heard suggesting that the actions and rhetoric of far right-wing members like Matt Gaetz and Mo Brooks are definitely bad news and liable to lead to bloodshed. He's not wrong, and even Steven Scalise has a point--what they are doing is potentially illegal. It's the old "yelling 'fire' in a packed theater" conundrum. Aren't folks responsible for inflammatory speech in a situation they know is potentially set up for calamity?  

You would think, as with McCarthy's promise to tell Trump to resign, that McCarthy is showing some kind of backbone, for an instant. But just like his claim that he would tell Trump what was what, he didn't have any intention of holding those wild-ass off the ranch maverick crazypants insurrectionists to account at all, either. I certainly don't think he did any such thing. Where would he find the stones--deep in his chicken's craw? 

He lies as easily as he lives--like bitchily pretending today that the partisan bullshit du jour regarding activists fuxxoring up school board and PTA meetings with death threats is exactly the same thing as people just being normal parents and pretending that the FBI is investigating the latter, not the former. 

So of course he was just trying to be normal to appeal to normal old-school Republicans in the event that some kind of backlash against the stupid baddies manifested, but he was hedging, obviously. 

Is that saving his yellow chicken-yolk ass? Absolutely not--Tucker Carlson is going in on him. He says McCarthy sounds like an MSNBC host and is a Democratic operative, so that's some baleful invective (Carlson's #1 son worked for Jim Banks and I have nothing to say about what that means to Tucker, at all, at all). I do know Tucker is going to Iowa in the most homophobic way possible. And I have anticipated where this is going and think it certainly should not.  But right now, Carlson is trusted more than McCarthy is, despite McCarthy's best attempts at doing gutless culture war shit. 

He could probably free his entire set of principles and clear his conscience because his being Speaker isn't ever going to happen. Just sing his down-low shit knowing, occasionally rule-respecting heart out.  But maybe he's more of an NPC and isn't even programmed to know when to leave the boat. 

All I know is, the man in the boat is getting exactly no satisfaction right now. Typical.