Hey, if you were paying attention to Washington political maneuvers inthe last few weeks – and you probably weren’t – you knew that the big story was how the Banana Republican caucus in the House of Representatives screwed themselves by voting out Speaker Kevin “King Pissboy” McCarthy (BR.-California) without selecting a replacement. This was really bad for their public relations but it also screwed the whole House because by law no work can proceed if the House doesn’t have a Speaker. At first they tried to nominate Steve Scalice (BR.-Louisiana), who on one hand told a local journalist he was “like David Duke, but without the baggage.” On the other hand, in today’s Republican Party, that made him the reasonable moderate. Which is probably why the Gossip Girl mentality of the caucus turned against him. Instead the consensus started to turn towards Gentleman Gym Jordan (BR.-Ohio) who previously was most famous for his time as a wrestling coach at Ohio State University, where he was “accused of turning a blind eye” to widespread sexual abuse of male students by staff physician Dr. Richard Strauss. This probably explains how he got the endorsement of Donald Trump. And yet despite his support for corruption and sexual degeneracy, Jacketless Jim Jordan couldn’t get more votes from the Trump Party than Kevin McCarthy did. In fact it only took three rounds of voting to make it clear he couldn’t clear the majority, and each round he actually got less votes than the last time, almost as if some people were holding out to make it clear how unpopular he was.
Allegedly one of the reasons Jordan couldn’t clear the hurdle is that like any good acolyte of Trump, Gym refused to admit that Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square, and therefore Donald Trump is the real president. One of the Congressmen who took this position was Ken Buck (BR.-Colorado) who told journalists that Jordan’s election denier posture was the main reason he wouldn’t vote for him. And, yet, Buck and literally every other Republican decided on October 25 to vote in Mike Johnson (BR.-Louisiana) as the new Speaker despite the fact that he’s that much more an election denier than Jordan is. “(Buck) drew a distinction with Jordan, arguing that Johnson did not engage in efforts to overturn the election at the same level that Jordan did. … But Johnson, too, was seen as an active player behind the scenes in in the effort to overturn the election results in late 2020 and early 2021. He collected signatures from fellow House Republicans in December 2020 for a legal brief that supported a lawsuit seeking to throw out the election results in key states, according to The New York Times. That lawsuit was defeated.”
So is Buck another spineless hypocrite like Susan Collins who goes along with the Mob regardless of their alleged principles? Well, he’s a Republican, so that goes without saying. But even if he had principles, it comes down to this: The Catholics have the Credo, the Muslims have the shahada, and the Church of Trump has “the election was rigged and stolen.” Excuse me, “STOLLEN.” This is what you have to believe, or at least pretend to believe, to be in the club, cause if you don’t, you won’t get far.
Basically, they’re ALL Trumpniks, so even if somebody like Buck would have had better taste, he didn’t have other options. Johnson is simply the Trumpnik election denier who had the least enemies. That, and Jordan’s example proves once again that being a bullying moron doesn’t work quite as well on Republicans if you’re not Trump.
Johnson at least seems well-mannered and capable of speaking standard English as opposed to Modern High GooGoo Muck or whatever Marjorie Taylor’s first language is, but he said in his first speech from the House podium, “I believe that Scripture, the Bible, is very clear: that God is the one who raises up those in authority” and told Sean Hannity “Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘It’s curious, people are curious. What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it.’ That’s my worldview.”
Y’know, any time somebody says they follow the Bible, I seriously doubt they mean ALL of it.
Which goes to the fact that so many liberals and moderates find it odd that this professionally pious man would be so devoted to President Coup de la pousse’, but I’ve already gone over the issue several times: These people are a lot more concerned with power than their declared morality, and they’re just as willing to adapt to Trump as he is to them.
The irony being that the Party of Trump’s lust for power at all costs is what made their leadership of the House so precarious and why it continues to be so even now. The Constitution requires the House to elect its leader from the entire floor, and since that rule was created before duopoly politics was a thing, the House doesn’t have the Senate’s ad hoc precedent of assuming that the majority party’s leader automatically runs the chamber. Both chambers are designed to run on consensus, and that normally happens because the idea is that the elected represent their district or state, not their party dictator. As is, McCarthy and other Republicans whined that this all happened because Democrats wouldn’t vote to save him, which is like whining about water being wet. Not like it’s Democrats’ obligation to vote for McCarthy in particular, especially after the way he treated them. Not like McCarthy HAD to prostitute himself so deeply for the sake of the gavel that he would allow a one-person motion to vacate, specifically to appease Matt Gaetz (BR.-Bugfuckerstan), knowing he would do exactly that for any reason or no reason at all, and it’s not like Gaetz HAD to challenge McCarthy, especially without a replacement in mind. If Republicans had a bigger majority in the chamber, they would have more room to maneuver, but they don’t, which in itself ought to tell them they don’t have the mandate to rule unilaterally. As of now, Democrats under Hakeem Jeffries (D.-New York) are not going to cooperate with Republicans, especially if they want to put election deniers in authority. As for Republicans, a large reason their internal standoff lasted so long was because no one was going to reach across the aisle. Republicans aren’t going to negotiate with Democrats any more than Israel is going to negotiate with Hamas, because Republicans hate Democrats MORE than Israel hates Hamas.
Oh yeah. Speaking of that:
Not even counting the fact that Hamas used the Yom Kippur period to raid Israeli kibbutzim, and kill Israeli civilians, and expatriate bystanders, AND Palestinians, in the wake of their barbarism, the politically correct crowd has decided that anti-Semitism is making a comeback. Really, it never left. But in Sydney, you had protests at the Opera House chanting “Gas the Jews“, you have similar statements coming from the Left in this country, and just recently a Telegram channel for the Russian Muslim community spread rumors that Russia was planning to resettle Israeli refugees on their land. According to the Institute for the Study of War, “The Telegram channel called on Makhachkala residents to demonstrate at the airport on the night of October 28 and 29 and posted flight tracker data for the plane from Israel ahead of its arrival on October 29. …Demonstrators also checked identification documents in search of Israeli citizens, although there are no reports of demonstrators finding any Israeli citizens. Demonstrators have chanted ‘death to Jews’ and have also occasionally gotten physical with security personnel at the airport.” (Remember, with Putin’s Russia, nothing is a coincidence.)
All you “anti-Zionists” wondering why Israel has so little regard for internal minorities or the international community, it’s because the international community clearly has little regard for Jews.
I personally think that if world civilization ever straightens up enough to create a real space program that breaks the lightspeed barrier and reaches alien civilizations, within 40 years of first contact, the natives of Alpha Centauri will be blaming TheJews for everything bad that has ever happened to them since the dawn of time.
Not that Israel doesn’t deserve condemnation – on its own terms. I used to think calling it an apartheid state was an exaggeration, but not so much these days, especially under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is clinging to office mainly to stay out of jail, owes his position to the nutcase religious right, and foisted a scheme to kill the judiciary’s power of independent review so that he would have that much more unitary control. No wonder Trump used to love him so much. Here’s the thing, Israel, very much unlike Hamas-run Gaza or Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon, is still a pluralist society where people from all walks of life (including the military) have been fighting against Netanyahu’s bullshit.
In theory, there’s a real difference between “anti-Zionism” and anti-Semitism, for instance with ultra-Orthodox Jews who don’t see the secular Zionist state as the legitimate government for the Holy Land. In practice, with those few exceptions, there IS no difference. The distinction is the idea that there is something uniquely illegitimate about the Israeli government not just in policy but in its existence, for example the idea that you can enforce BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) policies against it, but not against Communist China, whose human rights violations are that much more egregious, to say nothing of the United States, Israel’s main financial support and diplomatic shield in the United Nations.
But see, you can’t push Red China around, and you can’t push the US around. You can, apparently, push Israel around, or you think you can, and the fact that you can justifies doing so. But of course THAT position isn’t amoral.
If nothing else, the whole situation gives the lie to the idea that it’s impossible to be racist if you’re in an oppressed community, or that racism is defined only by power relationships. The Jews were an oppressed community practically everywhere, did that mean the Israelis learned fair play? Not really. And if being oppressed automatically gives the Palestinians the moral high ground, are they going to learn mercy and compassion when they get the chance to practice it? Well, Hamas gave us the answer to that question.
As a secular humanist, I would prefer that a religious ethnostate like Israel not even exist, but we know that it has to because Jews have not been safe as a minority in other countries – even the United States, to some extent. That’s part of why the US has basically treated Israel as having a blank check for support, because we know what would happen if it didn’t have one.
Which in a roundabout way gets back to the original subject, because the House prior to Mike Johnson still had to vote on aid to Ukraine, which is attacked by Russia. The House Republicans are dancing on Trump’s strings, and Trump is dancing on Putin’s strings. Hell, he’s practically twerking. Now under Speaker Johnson, the Republicans are obliging the rest of the government to choose between aiding Ukraine and aiding Israel, or in the case of one bill, choosing between Israel aid and funding the IRS.
Matt Gaetz started with a weak Speaker who was nevertheless capable of appealing to both Trumpniks and establishment Republicans, and now he has maneuvered things to where the House is led by someone who is that much more Trumpnik and election denying than McCarthy was. And in the interim he left the House leaderless and unable to approve foreign aid, and about the same time, Hamas, supported by Iran, which is an ally of Russia, decided to attack Israel. Almost as if they were waiting for a cue.
No, I can’t say for sure that Matt Gaetz is a paid agent of a foreign power. I am saying that if he were, it would be impossible to tell the difference.