Boebert on Top

 

One of the primaries I was interested in this year was Lauren Boebert's primary in CO-4, having moved from CO-3 to get a better chance at keeping a seat. After all, her "theatrics" that got her kicked out of a musical last year weren't going to do her any favors, were they? 

What do you think? She beat out a field that included five others. 

This goes a long way to confirming my suspicion that Republicans want mascots, not serious people. Name recognition because of, not in spite of, her often childish and extreme behavior worked for, not against her. (And Twitter tells me a few people familiar with CO politics don't necessarily think there was a better candidate to get behind.) 

This is a GOP problem--it's just that when people get down to voting for literally anyone with an "R" after their name, well, they will, won't they? They can't get better candidates that way. But then again, they don't seem to want them. 

TWGB: All the King's Goons

 

It took me awhile, but I remembered when Matt Gaetz used Twitter to harass witness against Trump, Michael Cohen (he was cleared of wrongdoing for that, but you know, and I know, he crossed a line), and then again, there was this time he and his fellows stormed a SCIF during Trump's first impeachment--an actual stupid and futile gesture:

So am I really shocked to see Matt Gaetz thugging it up the 2020 election way by declaring he is "standing back and standing by" in an echo of the Proud Boys? 

Of course he is. Little Lauren Boebert, handy as always, lent her 1776 spirit to Thursday's proceedings. In an echo of unwise guy Tommy Tuberville, she copped to being there to be a disruption and say things Trump can't say under the gag order. 

GOP GONE WILD!!!

 

What in the hell was up today in Congress? First off, it seems like former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy nailed Tim Burchett in the kidneys so hard that Matt Gaetz had to file a report. That's wild. Apparently, McCarthy isn't settling into his post-Speaker life that great. And I do not know what is up between Gaetz and McCarthy but the mutual disrespect is real. Also, McCarthy has been talking shit about his fellow Republicans and this isn't the first time. 

Sounds very stressful.

Also, in the Senate, Markwayne Mullin thought he'd try to throw down with a Teamster on the floor and it got denied by Senator Bernie Sanders, a damn adult in the room. Mullin later appealed on Twitter like this:

For the benefit of the Comfortably Smugs and probably Catturds of the social mediaverse. Look at those guns and those firearms. At the risk of sounding sexist: this man is benching a lot of male insecurity and supplementing with Daddy issues. Somebody hand him a testosterone wubbie to suck on. 

James Comer got DAGGONE DEFENSIVE when Jared "the Smurf" Moskowitz called him out on his own loan to his brother of $200K--exactly like the Crime Family Bidens' Terrible Secret! Why so tense? I wonder? 

Shit, why is everybody so tense?  Is it because the Christian Nationalist who was supposed to be hardcore MAGA offered a clean CR and isn't a big fan of a Biden impeachment because there's no "there", there? (MTG has already voiced her threats misgivings.)

What's next? Is this just a case of elephant musth? Or can we expect MTG to kneecap Lauren Boebert like she was Nancy Kerrigan? (She been going around calling her a "whore" which is just hours of family entertainment where I come from.) Should we expect Harriet Hageman to finally lasso and hogtie somebody like I truly think she's been fixing to do? 

I don't even want to pretend I know. I only know I want to blame Trump because he made violence feel more like an acceptable thing, but that isn't it exactly, either, is it? 

Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?

 

(A post also to be known as "Republicans in Disarray.) 

I don't know why I'm leading with the story that a resolution from Matt Gaetz drafted September 15th was found under a baby changing table in the restroom underneath the House floor.  I guess it's because of my astonishment that we didn't hear about such a resolution like, Friday. And who left it behind? Maybe Gaetz himself, setting up the changing table with a couple parallel o' grams of Bolivian Borax to chase away the Floridian palmetto bugs in his high-rise skull? I know Gaetz was opposed to McCarthy even being Speaker like he was a new stepdad threatening to be the boss of him. 

And of such drama is the current House GOP currently made. They can't pass a resolution on Pentagon spending. None of them know what they want. They want to cut the spending. They want to fund border defense. They want to strengthen the defense but maybe not fund aid to Ukraine (the Moscow Marge Caucus, I guess you'd call it). Kevin McCarthy can't count votes and he doesn't count in uniting his troops. And I seriously don't know who is supposed to be Speaker for the GOP if McCarthy isn't. Scalise? Maybe they don't want nobody to be the Boss of Them. 

They just want to shut down the government for no good reason and impeach the Democratic president for no good reason the year before the presidential election? Is that so wrong?

(YES?)

What it means is they can't govern. But take heart!

Um, Trump is the leader of their party and a hapless fuckwit, also, too. It seems like, while in my heart of hearts I wanted Trump's document investigation to reveal selling secrets or something very dire, the bare reality is Trump just apparently took boxes of paper to save trees, because clearly, there were clean bits you could still use. All of this lovely notepaper for grocery lists and whatnot--says a Mar-a-Lago employee. 

And the material is back in the hands of the government to review with his peculiar Sharpie handed seismic handwriting and all. He also obstructed justice by telling his secretary she didn't know anything about the boxes she saw, just like nobody was supposed to know about all the boxes. Of all the stupid, stupid things. 

Yesterday's Durham Hearing Was Interesting

 

MAGA wants Durham to be someone he is not and say something he cannot. pic.twitter.com/AJFhrKDf3a

— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) June 22, 2023

There's the rub--at bottom, you can't actually deny the evidence of Russia interfering. What you can do, is ignore the evidence of willingness to accept that interference on behalf of the Trump campaign, but at the risk of seeming out of one's depths--as if it were possible to investigate an investigation and come up knowing nothing about it. Even fash-friendly five-head Matt Gaetz was wondering what Durham had been doing with this time. (ALthough he alleged a "cover-up".)

Or you can make false statements to congress because there are just some things you can't say about Trump and Russia--you know, like it never was a hoax. 

After all, Congressional Republicans just censured Rep. Adam Schiff for just that--telling the truth. And for what it's worth, for all the giddy Republicans who noted that Trump's poll numbers and fundraising could benefit from the indictments against him--how do they think a transparently unfair censure of Rep. Schiff is going to make loyal Democrats react? 

This is where the House GOP is now, Speaker McCarthy barely has a grip on his folks, and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert were inches from a catfight over the privilege and pleasure of impeaching President Biden for...something. Eating crackers, I guess. (They also want to expunge Trump's impeachment, but we will always remember the "perfect phone call.")

What's that tv quote going around? These are not "serious people".

The Muckrakers and the "Penitent"

 

There is a rumor about one of our GOP congresspeople that I want to obliquely address because it is not well-founded and the timeline doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense. The person in question is not someone I am a fan of, in fact, I think she is a clown who cheapens the political discourse and has no real interest in government policy as much as signifying and showing herself. 

I will not ever call out someone for fucking for money, because if you know what it is to need the money, you get it. And I also don't think anyone's abortion is immoral. If you ever did sex work or terminated a pregnancy for reasons--those are your reasons, and I don't come at someone for that. But if you ever have been there, a sex worker, or having had emergency reproductive care, you don't get to judge other people about what they have done for their lives. Good for me and not for thee isn't morality, it's just selfish and judgmental. She has done other things.  

Jesus, Guns, Babies, and American Exceptionalism

 

Rep Brian Babin (R-TX): "The United States of America has always had guns. It's our history. We were built on the Judeo-Christian foundation and with guns" pic.twitter.com/vldB0ODaS7

— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) May 25, 2022

When Senator Ted Cruz got visibly disturbed during an interview and walked away after the words "American Exceptionalism" were spoken, something snapped into frame for me:  so much of American history seems to assume our current status in the world is the result of faith and superior firepower. The idea of the gun as a sacral part of our national religion isn't really just a metaphor for some of us--it is reality. 

The religious right has long suggested that if "they" (a tyrannical leftist, probably godless Communist, government) come to take the guns away, the Bibles are next. It always sounded like fear-mongering to me of the typical "Red Scare" tropes, but it also resonated as tangentially white supremacist to me because gun-grabbing was the impetus of the uprising in the neo-Nazi classic The Turner Diaries. I'm starting to see it, though, as an artifact of our founding myths, and it defines the divide in our politics--what makes the US unique or great? Are we a creedal nation or a story of blood and soil? And was any of this especially ordained by God? 

Leave it to the "Jesus, Guns, Babies" lady for clarifying this for me--even though she lost her bid for the GOP gubernatorial nomination (or did she? Mike Lindell is asking, so, uh, there's that). The quick capsule review of American history that a lot of people seem to have absorbed goes a little something like this: 

Christopher Columbus discovered the promised land in 1492, then the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock to form a shining city on a hill, so America overthrew British tyranny, had a civil war over states rights, freed the slaves, conquered the West (by killing most of the people previously living there) and then kicked everyone's ass in WW2 because we have nukes now, so thank you Jesus and Smith & Wesson. 

          And they called it manifest destiny. And it was good.

I may be exaggerating, but I don't think I'm off by that much. This is why CRT and the 1619 Project have set the usual suspects off--it challenges their post-Columbian chapters of the American Bible. It's like arguing against creationism.  It fiddles with a worldview where American primacy is founded in freedom and God has always been on our side. They don't see the past is existing outside of the formalized, handed-down from Mount Rushmore version*, and then continue to operate as if might made right. 

And that's where the guns come in. The iron rod is how the faithful Americans earn their New Canaan. The land is purified in blood, because we're in times of tribulation. Wars. Rumors of wars. Pestilence. Famine. You know. Same shit, different century. So you have to be morally and militarily prepared. 

And how do the people in the Church of American Exceptionalism mentally cope with the violence? It's supposed to happen.  It's the Abrahamic sacrifice to show fidelity in order to get that which has been promised. The Lord provided a sheep for the holocaust--and it's hopefully other people's babies. 

That sacrifice is supposed to make us exceptional and give us the freest and most prosperous country on earth. It's why people all over the world want to come here, after all, whether we want them to or not.

Four Women and a SOTU

 

Behind President Biden at the State of the Union Address this evening were Vice-President Kamala Harris and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, two women on a stage that for so long never had us. In the audience were Republican Representatives Margorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, who behaved in a way that made me ashamed for them. They were without dignity; they were partisan hecklers at a solemn event. They were there to be seen and we saw them. 

I am so ashamed for them that we saw them, because I don't know that they know how to be ashamed for themselves. Maybe they could be taught shame, as if they were still toddlers and the experience of being seen by others in public was still new. 

They tried to start a "Build the Wall" chant. It's an affront to sense. FYI: the wall was always stupid. It's a material, not a legal barrier, that can be easily thwarted by such things as "over, under, around, and through. " Anything that might costs millions if not billions to maintain across a thousand miles and can still be overcome by cheap ladders, by pick and shovel, by a flotilla of fucking inner tubes on the water  at the edges, that is made of steel but has feet of clay and gets toppled by a hard rain, is a stupid tribal fetish, not an immigration solution. 

Sticking with it is appalling dopiness. It's just sad. 

Budget Palin Wants To Be Part of the War on Christmas

 

One of the many ways to be a parent in politics is to not expose your children to the white hot spotlight of the gotdamb culture war, but this is apparently not the choice Lauren Boebert has made. She featured her kids in a gun-brandishing Christmas post in support of Thomas Massie, who was being a whole thing there on the internet for a minute. Yeah, very supportive of....displaying weapons of war to celebrate the Prince of Peace, dumbass. Nice job.

But as Dan Crenshaw (also a thirsty boy) has noted, there are definitely some famewhores in the GOP caucus right now. And Boebert was already being a center-stage clown regarding her jihad-squad nonsense regarding Rep. Ilhan Omar, which she has apparently been working out at the open mic nights that are GOP fundraisers for more than a minute. It's tacky, but it becomes her, like flypaper or a glue trap.

Now, far be it for me to say she's playing at using her own kids and the sacred holy day that is Christmas just to promote her branding, but I will note, that she did get a fundraiser in Las Vegas in support of her Islamophobia, so yeah, definitely.  It's exactly like she goes out of her way to to seek out attention, and is rewarded for it. And she will probably try to benefit herself from getting shut out of her committee assignments, too, because why wouldn't she try?

Because here she is responding to the backlash for her putting guns in the hands of her babies:

Oh noes! A Democrat is attacking her because of Christmas and children and somehow, not because she cynically used her kids to promote guns even while we are a country that has mass shootings, even at schools, even at schools with young kids. Even at schools with young kids really close to Christmas, like the babies of Sandy Hook. 

Ms. 1776 over here thinks her act is cute. But Iola Boylan's evil twin is not cute. It might be half-cute, but it's entirely not what anyone should want in a US Representative. 

Trying to Shame the Shameless

The problem with things like a censure vote against Rep. Paul Gosar (AZ, Repulsive) is that, while necessary, it also served to give the similarly-shameless, violent-minded and dishonest people in the GOP caucus something to grandstand about. And that is starting to feel like most of them, these days.

If ever an example of defense through "whataboutism" was ever mounted, it was on display here. The craven Rep, McCarthy displayed the permissiveness of a man led by his party rather than the other way around. Rep. Lauren Boebert used the opportunity to spread lies and hate. 

They were who we thought they were.

There really isn't any shaming the shameless. They wouldn't censure President Trump when he said malicious things about "the Squad", so why should Gosar's video be any different? They've already made their peace with an actual insurrection where a violent mob attacked their "house". Some of these members are already, themselves, receiving death threats because of one vote that displeased the mob--and find themselves incapable of even politely requesting the temperature be brought down.

It isn't for them--it's for those who are watching and understand: these are performers, not statemen. And very bad actors, at that.  Also, if they ever want to cry about civility again, this is what should be thrown in their shameless faces. 

UPDATE: Needless to say, after many GOP members cited his taking the video down from Twitter as a sign of good faith, Gosar re-tweeted it. The thing with people who do things for attention is, if they don't get quite the attention they want, in kind or in quantity, they will escalate. That's why people like him and Marjorie Taylor Greene should not be in Congress. We will just keep seeing these conflicts and this degradation of office on repeat.