Anti-McCarthyism

House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy abruptly pulled out of the election to be the Republican nominee for Speaker of the House when the GOP-controlled chamber meets to elect a new one to replace John Boehner.  His failure has cast light on one of the least impressive House careers in recent memory (and that says a lot).  

McCarthy got himself in trouble when he came right out and bragged about pushing for the creation of the committee to investigate Benghazi  to bring Hillary Clinton's presidential poll numbers down.  Even if Republcians like McCarthy sincerely believe rthat Mrs. Clinton is trying to hide something, the California congressman nonetheless phrased his sentiments in a way that made it sound purely political without any real good-faith effort to get to the bottom of anything.  His general phrasing of any utterance also turned out to have been troublesome; he displayed a complete inability to put a nouns and verbs together in proper syntax - he makes the senior George Bush sound like Aristotle - and he's referred to countries like "Hungria" while calling Mrs. Clinton "untrustable."

She may be untrustable - er, untrustworthy - and I've even said so, but McCarthy didn't do him or his party any favors by being too honest and too inarticulate at the same time.  All he did was embolden Hillary Clinton to the point where she can now suddenly be against everything she was either for or pretended to be for (like the Trans-Pacific Partnership) and go into Tuesday's debate a littel less worried about being upstaged by anyone . . . including Martin O'Malley, whom I'm supporting in part because, as noted, I don't trust Hillary Clinton.  (Though I have never called her untrustable.)

And now McCarthy has made it that much more likely that she will be the 45th President of the United States.  Thanks for everything, Kevin.  You're a guy.  Now you can go back to your top priority - stopping the high-speed rail project in your home state! :-p