Poor Republicans. They finally got rid of Donald Trump, thanks to the smart people of the republic, who voted by large majority for Joe Biden, but now they’re stuck with Kevin McCarthy, House member from California (?) as their lead spokesmodel. Something about jumping out of the frying pan, into the fire.
Okay, Joe Biden is part of their problem. Nothing makes stupidity vivid like intelligence and competence. Poor Republicans, they are so desperate to gin up a line of attack against Biden that McCarthy is out here insisting that Trump has more energy than Biden:
Something about working smarter, not harder. Maybe this relative lack of energy that Rep. McCarthy claims to espy is why Biden’s record for golf trips pales compared to Trump’s.
But McCarthy is holding himself out, inadvertently, one supposes, as the leader in post Trump Republican dumb without explicit reference to Trump. He keeps handing easy criticisms to Democrats. Michael Fanone, a U.S. Capitol police officer who suffered injury during the assault on the Capitol, has met with various Democrats in Congress and wants to meet with McCarthy. Who knows why, but I am not much inclined to argue with anyone who has gone through what he has.
McCarthy, however, refuses to meet with him, thus allowing what could be an entirely minor moment in his day become an ongoing news issue. He is a very easy target, as he posts video of himself energetically (!) riding a bicycle with police officers, for people to demand why he refuses to meet with a cop who wants to meet with him. Because he’s too busy shooting “back the blue” videos, no doubt:
This is just dumb. He could kill this story with a 20 minute meeting.
Since dumb knows no bounds, this is not the only dumb move McCarthy is busy perpetuating. His fellow member of the House from California, Democrat Ted Lieu, has been hounding him for weeks now about the galloping conflict of interest inherent in leaving Matt Gaetz on the House Judiciary Committee with oversight of the FBI, when that agency is investigating Gaetz:
This is actually not a serious problem, since Gaetz is only one member on the Committee and a member from the minority Party at that, but it is obviously a conflict of interest.
One can only surmise that McCarthy has decided that he will resolutely, and energetically, no doubt, take a “see no evil, hear no evil” approach to his fellow Republicans. Party loyalty is their only strength and it has worked far better than it should have for some forty years now, so why give it up? The image that comes to mind is that of a toddler with his fingers in his ears, yelling, “Not listening! Not listening!”
Their chief goal as a Party at the moment is to regain control of the House of Representatives, and the Senate, presumably. They seem to be relying on the well established pattern according to which the Party that controls the presidency loses seats in Congress from midterm elections, which occurred in 2010 and 2018, but history can always be different, and they are running against a president who has unusually high approval and has clearly done a far better job than his immediate predecessor at handling the most pressing issue of the day. Against that, they offer McCarthy, who recently presided over the expulsion from Party leadership of one of the few honest members of his Party in Congress, for her lese majeste of telling the truth about Trump. This makes him an even easier target:
It was everyone’s favorite Republican lackey, Rick Santorum, who commented that the Republican Party will never have smart people on their side. Certainly nominating the likes of Donald Trump is not going to help.
Going from dumb Trump to dumber McCarthy is only making the situation worse for them.