The Wages of Sin

Kevin McCarthy has been “ousted” as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. In order to become speaker, and to remain so for this long, McCarthy had to play to Donald Trump and his cult, tell lies for them, and promise to defend them and their moronic causes at the highest levels of the national discussion, rather than consigning them to their natural habitat, the basement beer-guzzling belly-scratchers club. Now, a few congressional members of that club have led a mini-revolt to vote him out of the speakership for his (they say) insufficient fealty to Trump and the MAGA agenda, aka the Putin agenda. A more amusing case of reaping what you sow will rarely be found.

“But if he hadn’t appeased them, he couldn’t have been elected speaker in the first place.” Very likely, and what does that tell us about McCarthy the man, McCarthy the politician, the current state of the Republican Party, and the chances of the United States of America surviving in any recognizable form for another ten years? 

Could Kevin McCarthy have become a good and effective leader of the U.S. Congress if he had not been compromised by the Putin’s-Useful-Idiot wing of his party? No, he would have been a tyrannical, self-serving hack under any circumstances. But would any of those PUIs who voted against him, such as Matt Gaetz, make a better speaker than McCarthy? That’s as ridiculous as asking whether Donald Trump would make a better president than any other Republican who has run in the GOP primaries since, say, 1992. (I use that as my cut-off point only because Pat Robertson ran in 1988, and I cannot say with confidence that he would have been any more rational or reliable than Trump.) There is America’s problem, in a nutshell.