I read well-informed people’s opinions as much as I can in the midst of the ongoing Republican flight from reality with growing sadness. It should be considered a waste of intellect and effort to pay serious attention to the open sore of sycophancy which is today’s GOP, but we’ve seen what happens when it’s left to fester, and if prognostications are correct, we’re enjoying only a brief respite from the maelstrom, as the mad cow disease which is the Big Lie takes a serious toll. Most believe the house will turn red in 2022, while right wing Neanderthals and a few DINO’s are set against Biden’s agenda for progress, medically and economically. Enjoy competent governance while you can. Apparently, in this country, it’s a bug and not a feature.
The GOP has slathered itself w/ crazy cream and begun to eat those who haven’t, typically a Dem tendency. The latest denials of reality take them far beyond whatever passes for partisan politics. In the era of instant video documentation, what some Repubs are now saying about Jan 6th is tantamount to having them look at horrific scenes from Jonestown in 1978, literal acres of bloated corpses, and hearing them opine that all those people were simply taking simultaneous naps. As some have put it, in the simplest of terms: these are not serious people.
Understanding the tawdry “nothing up my sleeve” mendacity of today’s GOP is fairly easy to understand if you factor in who they’re playing to. The “Hang Mike Pence” set votes for these charlatans because they feel met at the basest, most coarse level of inclination. Somebody’s gonna get beat up, and they want to watch. It’s little more than UFC fandom tuned into a political cage match, where blood is being spilled to cheers. Cradle robber Matt Gaetz and assorted QAnon quacks have seats at the table while Liz Cheney is turned away for having the audacity to wash off the MAGA mud her cohorts are covered in. This citizen isn’t the first to suggest that more than a few of them should go out hunting with her famous father.
If she manages to motivate enough conservatives to splinter off and form dedicated opposition, the party’s purge of all principle could backfire. She’s no Lincoln Project devotee, espousing a carnivorous conservatism far in excess of anything her replacement ever has. Elise Stefanik was formerly lauded for being susceptible to reason, able to reach across the aisle as a fairly moderate Repub. Now she’s grabbing for the bronze MAGA ring on the cuckoo carousel, becoming just another gratuitous gargoyle going round and round. Meanwhile, Trump surrogate Kevin McCarthy is looking more and more like Monty Python’s Black Knight. For him, losing a backbone isn’t any different from losing an arm- it’s just a flesh wound. Cue the sound of coconut hoofbeats.