If you've been sitting at the poker table for five minutes and you don't know who the sucker is, you're the sucker.
Watching something like Marjorie Taylor Greene being stripped of her committee assignments can be entertaining and educational. But if you believe everything you're told about it, see above.
In the wake of Our Brief National Nightmare on January 6, Democrats feel the need to make an example. Someone's head has to roll, and it has to be someone on the other side. Despite his already having vacated the office, the second impeachment of Donald Trump grinds on. But the odds of two thirds an evenly divided Senate voting to convict lie somewhere between "nonexistent" and "hilarious." Similarly, removing Ted Cruz and or Josh Hawley from the upper chamber is a non-starter. AOC's wild accusations give her a hold on her own tribe but they don't work on anyone else, and there's no legal case to speak of.
So Greene it is. There's no to convict, just to register disapproval. She makes it easy enough. But the idea that she poses a unique threat in the history of Congress doesn't hold water. Not when you recall that the House of Representatives recently held Allen West, a bullethead xenophobe discharged from the Army for torturing a foreign prisoner. West lost his seat to reapportionment after one term, but frothing lunatic Bob Dornan held on for quite a bit longer. Those are the Republicans. Democrats tend to be Lawful Evil rather than Chaotic Evil like the GOP, so they make for fewer splashy examples.
And Greene isn't really a QAnon lunatic. By the preponderance of evidence she's a huckster, one who found it useful to curry favor with the online cult for a time, but now that time is over. Having just been handed more free time by the House majority, it sounds a lot like she'll be making plans to run for President in '24, which will also be a huge grift. That's not the same as an assault on the commonwealth.
Ambrose Bierce defined "politics" as "A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles." Now's not a good time to forget that.
2 comments:
I really like your term 'Our Brief National Nightmare'. Jer wondered if you were referring to the Onion headline on GW bush's Inauguration day:
'Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is over.'
Yes, it's all getting so much crazier with each passing day that I've become tired of eating popcorn.
I remember somebody having said that nowhere in the Constitution does it stipulate that a House member must have the mental capacity to cook on all four burners. The only credentials required are those that state members need be 25 years of age and have been a citizen for at least seven years. Marjorie Taylor Greene qualified on both counts and, as you say, there have been at least equally crazy members of Congress for as long as the institution has been around. No wonder they're known as 'congresscritters'. At the same time there are a lot of nutty people in the country who also need to be represented in government.
Since I don't have the best memory for such things I decided to see who else from Georgia might have caused similar problems, not the same but related to large scale troublemaking. It turns out Larry McDonald came close. He was a John Birch Society official who supported the Bircher agenda of communist conspiracies; he regarded Francisco Franco as a hero; he argued Martin Luther King Jr. was a demagogue “wedded to violence.” He also operated his own spy operation. Georgia probably would have continued sending McDonald to Washington had he not been on the Korean Airlines Flight 007 the Soviets shot down in 1983.
I'm sure you're right that Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley not only won't be removed from the Senate but it's also likely one of them, and I rather like Hawley, will be on the presidential ticket in 2024.
AOC has had her own wackiness on display recently and ought to be embarrassed about her behaviour that day. I mean, really! That's a young woman so caught up in the general hysteria of her social media circle she couldn't back down - or apologize to the poor security guard she humiliated.
I have a collection of favorite quotes and this classic remark by Yeats fits the theatre of American politics quite well:
“The best lack all conviction/ while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
I hadn't been thinking of that Onion headline, but I do remember it now that you mention it. Ah, the W years were something else all right. Now a lot of his old supporters have crossed over to the other side, and they've brought their pathologies with them.
There are indeed a lot of crazy people out there. And of course there is some highly specialized media made for them. Cause, or effect? Don't know, but establishing media wanting to regulate or even shut them down is not the way to go about things. I mean, why should nutty red staters trust news that's been filtered through CNN and the NYT? Why should anyone?
I've read up a little on Larry McDonald. Interesting story. He was stationed in Iceland and met and married a woman there. That's also where he picked up his obsession with communism. It's natural enough to get a little wiggy when you're exposed to state secrets. As the saying goes, if you're not paranoid, you're not paying attention. It sounds like he took it in some less-than-constructive directions, though. It's almost too perfect that he died in an international incident.
I haven't gotten invested in a potential 2024 candidate yet. It will be interesting to see if anyone challenges Joe or Kamala (whichever of them runs) for the Dem nomination. The GOP might have to worry about Trump attempting a comeback a la Grover Cleveland. If they don't want to take that ride again their best bet may just be to bribe him.
I did have high hopes for AOC when she first surfaced. She seemed engaged with her constituents in a way that most congresspeople aren't and youthfulness helped. Some acquired situational narcissism seems to have set in, though. She'll be in the House for years, though, so we'll see.
That's from "The Second Coming". Which was florid enough so that most people probably thought he was just talking about imminent disaster. But there's a lot about it that remains relevant.
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