Kevin McCarthy- "I'm not stupid!" isn't the iron-clad defense he thinks it is

Especially when the leopards are eating your face

“I'm not stupid!” In Bean's experience, that was a sentence never uttered except to prove its own inaccuracy.”

• Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) wanted to be Speaker of the House badly. He yearned to have his name on the placard over the Speaker’s office. He wanted to be the one with the microphones and camera lenses in his face when BIG and IMPORTANT things were happening on Capitol Hill. He wanted to be in charge when it came to negotiating with the President over matters of great importance.

There’s just one problem. The wick on Kevin McCarthy’s intellectual candle has burned down to the nubbins. Yes, America, he’s as dumb as your average post turtle. If you watch him answering questions during a press gaggle, he has a constant deer-in-the-headlamps look of something bordering on abject terror about him. It’s like he knows he should be in charge, he wants to be in charge, but he’s about 10 seconds away from losing control of his bowels in the halls of Congress.

The man looks as if he’s entirely out of his depth…and he is.

You see, Speaker McCarthy thought he could control the Freedumb Caucus. He figured that by giving the Freedumb Caucus what they wanted before the House voted, he’d find a way to keep them under control. McCarthy hadn’t counted on the Freedumb Caucus embarrassing him by dragging out the vote through 15 agonizing ballots until they finally caved and deigned to vote for him.

“Should we leave him twisting in the wind while hanging by his ball sack? Or do you think he finally understands whose tune he’s dancing to?”

Still, McCarthy believed he was savvy enough to control and outmaneuver the Freedumb Caucus. Except that one of the kooks’ demands was to impeach President Biden. On what pretext, they couldn’t/wouldn’t say; they just wanted to impeach and embarrass the President. McCarthy put them off for months…until last week when Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) threatened to shut down the government if an impeachment inquiry wasn’t forwarded on the President.

Of course, no one had evidence of high crimes or misdemeanors, so no charges could be brought against the President, but that wasn’t about to stop the Freedumb Caucus. They wanted impeachment first, and they’d get around to finding evidence later.

READY!! FIRE!! AIM!!

The GOP clown car is careening along the Expressway to Hell…with no brakes.

Silly me. I’d always thought the Speaker of the House was supposed to LEAD the House. In this case, the inmates are running the asylum…all because the asylum director gave away all of his power to the inmates just to get the job.

What a fool. McCarthy is running the asylum, but the inmates have just enough C-4 to blow the place up at a moment’s notice. Or without any notice at all. And there’s little the Speaker can do about it.

They’re just crazy enough to keep everyone guessing…and that’s why the Freedumb Caucus has the power they do. They can’t win a majority, but they can booger things up and create chaos. WIN, WIN!!

Republicans in disarray? Pfffft…. Who could have seen that one coming, eh?

Not only is Speaker McCarthy likely to lose his gavel, but it seems increasingly likely that the GOP may lose control of the House and that Democrats might (possibly) retain control of the Senate.

It seems unlikely that McCarthy and Gaetz will be swilling beers together soon, and the enmity between them is pretty evident. Gaetz wants to burn things down, and McCarthy is a more conventional, if not exactly mentally incandescent, politician. Neither of them is a gifted, charismatic, and inspirational leader, merely opposite ends of the same clown shoe.

And their undying love for one another is, well, just a rumor, it seems….

McCarthy and Gaetz could be heard screaming at each other during a closed-door meeting.

THAT’S going to inspire confidence among the troops, eh??

While the war of words between the pair of Republicans is nothing new, the current clash comes at a precarious moment for the House GOP conference, as McCarthy navigates the fine line of avoiding a government shutdown without angering his right flank to the point of losing his gavel.

Tensions between McCarthy and Gaetz were on the rise over the August recess, with the Florida Republican warning the Speaker that he could lose his gavel if he stands in the way of Gaetz’s efforts to force votes on impeachment. 

Gaetz had also been voicing frustration about McCarthy not following through on priorities he raised during the Speaker’s race.

That posturing culminated with a fiery floor speech Tuesday, when Gaetz sent a clear warning shot to McCarthy — even after the Speaker launched an impeachment inquiry into Biden without holding a formal vote. The Florida Republican dubbed the inquiry a “baby step.”

“I rise today to serve notice: Mr. Speaker, you are out of compliance with the agreement that allowed you to assume this role,” Gaetz said in his floor speech. “The path forward for the House of Representatives is to either bring you into immediate, total compliance or remove you pursuant to a motion to vacate the chair.”

There are several problems with this scenario, the two biggest ones being:

1. Matt Gaetz should never be allowed near ANYTHING that gives him power over another human being. The man’s an accused sex offender and a confirmed flaming asshole who believes he’s God’s gift to Congress and 17-year-old girls.

2. Kevin McCarthy is well out of his depth as Speaker of the House. Honestly, he shouldn’t be managing a Dairy Queen in Devil’s Lake, ND, much less 435 divergent and, in some cases, sociopathic personalities in the House.

Not only does Gaetz give a new and even creepier definition to “oleaginous,” he’s become a younger and more objectionable version of Ted Cruz. And no, I DIDN’T think that was possible.

The California Republican acknowledged he had displayed “frustration” during the meeting, saying after the gathering that he was “frustrated with some people in the conference” after the Pentagon appropriations bill tanked.

Gaetz responded by saying McCarthy should better handle his emotions.

“Instead of emotionally cursing, maybe the Speaker should just keep his word from January on balanced budgets, term limits and single-subject spending bills,” Gaetz told The Hill.

And perhaps Speaker McCarthy should stop being surprised that the leopards are eating his face. Especially since he’s the one who set the leopards loose in the first place.

Even worse, he couldn’t lead a group of hungry Boy Scouts to a Burger King drive-through lane.

And now Republicans are about to prove once again that they can’t govern.

Why? Because they’re unserious politicians who refuse to take their oath to do the People’s business seriously. They’re chaos agents who know only one thing- f*****g things up to almost unimaginable degrees because they don’t know how to play with Democrats and, in some cases, members of their own party.

Too many members of the Freedumb Caucus are driven by freak-show conspiracies that have no basis in reality (QAnon, anyone? That’s still a thing, apparently.). They’re not concerned with constituent service or doing right by the American people. They want to burn shit down and create chaos by whatever means they have at their disposal. If, in Matt Gaetz’s case, that means shutting down the government to get the one thing he wants (unfettered access to a pipeline of underaged homecoming queens?), then that’s what he’ll do. The fact that his actions might create a tremendous amount of collateral damage is of no concern because, as a sociopath, he doesn’t care about the needs or circumstances of anyone else.

Not all assholes are Republicans, but it’s a safe bet to assume that all Republicans are assholes.

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