I Give Up

I kept saying throughout the 2024 presidential campaign that Trump would make dissent a capital offense if returned to power.  This past week, he moved to do just that.  

Six congressional Democrats - Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, Pennsylvania Representative Chris DeLuzio, New Hampshire Representative Maggie Goodlander, Pennsylvania Representative Chrissy Houlahan and Colorado Representative Jason Crow - posted a video on social media, directly addressing the country’s current military and intelligence officers and urging them to refuse to obey an illegal order.

They ended the video by using that old motto from the War of 1812 - "Don't Give Up the Ship."

Sure enough, Stephen Miller called their comments "seditious" and Donald Trump suggested that the six Democrats could be tried and executed for treason.  

Treason, by the way, is currently defined as any comment that offends Donald Trump.  I'm willing to bet that, at this point, someone could make fun of Trump's hair on Monday and be sent to the executioner on Wednesday.  Tuesday would be for the trail.  Because everyone accused of treason will be given a fair trial.

And their families will get free passes to the hanging.

Meanwhile, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has apparently committed treason by demanding the release of the Epstein files and standing firm with the women who were sexually abused by Epstein.  Trump has responded by calling her a traitor.  As if doing so would inoculate her from being condemned to die, Greene just showed how serious she is at being disillusioned and disgusted by a man she once championed by resigning her seat in the House, effective January 5, 2026.

But, given her history, her motives are not above suspicion.

Don't give up the ship?  No, no, no.  We have met the enemy and he is us.

The Notorious MTG

CBS's "60 Minutes" aired a Lesley Stahl interview with U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene this past weekend. Because the reboot of "The Equalizer" was pre-empted by a country-music awards show, that meant that CBS viewers were only subjected to one obnoxious woman on a Sunday night. 

Alas, obnoxiousness is actually one of  Marjorie Taylor Greene's good points.  She has long been a politically reactionary she-beast who is on record as opposing aid to Ukraine, strongly supporting massive cuts in government spending and zeroing out subsidies for environmentally friendly energy, and claiming that "Jewish space lasers" are responsible for the wildfires in California.  And the Georgia congresswoman didn't tone down her rhetoric for Lesley Stahl either, insisting that the Democrats in general and  President Biden in particular are pedophiles.  Taylor Greene told Stahl that Democrats  groom children for sexual purposes by supporting sex-affirming care as proof. 

CBS got a lot of blowback for letting this interview even happen, but pundits have pointed out that, if Stahl had not given the blonde QAnon Republican missing link oxygen, Taylor Greene would have still found a way to get some.  Ignoring a celebrity boor no longer works.  People of Taylor Greene's ilk have learned how to become so popular and so important they can't be ignored; Donald Trump perfected such a modus operandi to an art form long before he even entered politics.   By interviewing MTG - and also contradicting some of her most glib and outrageous statements - Stahl was able to show Americans what they are up against - and how important it is to see just what a dangerous loose cannon she (MTG, not Stahl) is.

Though I'm surprised that Stahl, who, in common with a lot of people of her religion and ethnicity, is Jewish, didn't press MTG about those Jewish space lasers.

Trawling For Tropes

Ilhan Omar, the most famous woman of Somali descent whose name isn't Iman Abdulmajid, was booted off the House Foreign Affairs Committee for saying that Americans suck up to the Israelis and disregard their inhumane policies toward the Palestinians because it's all about money.  That's showing her!  Kevin McCarthy is absolutely right to advocate for punishing House members who spew out anti-Semitic tropes.

Now when is he going to punish Marjorie Taylor Greene?

Watch out for those Jewish space lasers, Marge!

Omar has charged Republicans for singling her out because she is an immigrant, a woman and a Muslim.  Republicans dislike her for all of those things, but I think the real reason they're punishing her is for wearing a terrapin on her head.  Agreed - we can't have that in the House of Representatives.

Hold it just a minute, I've been corrected.  Omar wears a turban on her head - not a terrapin.  Oh, well, that's all right.  Jut as long was she doesn't have a terrapin on her head.  As far as I am concerned, any House member who wears a terrapin on his head should be expelled from the House completely.

Guess that makes Steve Scalise House Speaker.

Wait!  What's that chocolate syrup on his head?  There ought to be a law against members of Congress serving with chocolate syrup on their heads!  Anyone with chocolate syrup on their heads should be removed from Congress immediately!  It should be a capital crime!  Off with his head!  Off with his chocolate syrup!

Seriously, Omar was removed from the House Foreign Affairs Committee because of statements critical of her own government and its transgressions against weaker countries in the developing world, and she has vowed to speak out more loudly and forcefully.  Good for her.  Unfortunately, Republicans were already anticipating that. 

I think someone saw Lauren Boebert buying a pair of these at the Pennsylvania Avenue CVS.  There ought to be a run on this product there soon.

Oh yeah, I didn't want to bring it up, but McCarthy once accused  George Soros, Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg of trying to buy the 2018 midterm elections.  Now, what do these fellows have in common - aside from being billionaires? 

Maybe, as punishment, we should dip Kevin McCarthy in chocolate syrup.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Except the two of them are women.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy just announced, revealing the Faustian bargain he made to get the speakership, the appointment of Republican Representatives Paul Gosar (AZ), Scott Perry (PA), Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA) and Lauren Boebert (CO) to the House Oversight and Accountability (formerly just Oversight Committee.  This is the committee that will look at President Biden's administration for possible wrongdoing.  

Taylor Greene is also being appointed to the Homeland Security Committee.

Democrats are laughing at these selections, but they laugh at their own peril - much like they laughed at Donald Trump or at the idea that Hillary Clinton was unelectable.  These House members have the power to bring Biden down on any charge of wrongdoing, no matter how contrived or hyperbolized, in order to clear a aph for a Republican - maybe Trump himself - to win the White House in 2024.  This quartet is ready to lock and load, and don't think I only mean that figuratively.

Be afraid.  Be very afraid.

The New McCarthyism

The new McCarthyism is defined by the new McCarthy - Kevin McCarthy.

The philosophy of Kevin McCarthy, U.S. House Republican leader from California, is simple.  Do what it takes to attain power.  Use your power to satisfy your political base according to their demands, no mater how foolish or inconsistent they may be.  Punish your opponents.  If they maligned your political benefactor or are simply women of color (like the Squad), that last point goes double. And when you get the chance, demoralize your opposition by bestowing power onto the scariest person in your inner circle.

A Republican House under Speaker Kevin McCarthy, like a Hillary Clinton Presidency has been called inevitable.  With one key difference; McCarthy's speakership actually is inevitable.  The Greedy Old Potentates have at least a 70 percent chance of winning the House, and Kev Mac has already put out his policy list for 2023. One is that there will be no blank check for aid to Ukraine anymore; given that the U.S. House of Representatives had the power of the purse, the Ukrainians will have to rely on someone else to supply them arms, like France, a country not known for political instability in this century.   McCarthy also plans to cut speeding domestically and he has not said he will rule out drastic cuts to or five-year reauthorizations for Medicare and Social Security, although Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) has already ruled them in if the GOP takes over the Senate.  And the California Kid has one other task on his mind - throw Democratic members of the soon-to-disband January 6 select committee off their regular committees for investigating Trump with no hope of being reassigned to other committees.  Folks like Adam Schiff will have nothing to do in the House unless they substitute once in awhile for the sergeant-at-arms.  

And once McCarthy is Speaker, he will most likely to delegate authority to the one Republican House member who can push for the passage of the Trump agenda in order to "Save America" (or SA, which also stands for Sturmabteilung, i.e., Storm Troopers) and pave the way for Trump's triumphant return to the Presidency in January 2025.

That would be Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

Prepare for the fateful moment when you hear the click of goose-stepping boots down Pennsylvania Avenue.

It's inevitable.

The Grass Is Always Greene

I don't know why people are celebrating Marjorie Taylor Greene's permanent suspension from Twitter for spreading COVID misinformation.

Yes, it lowers the volume of the Georgia congresswoman's horrible public utterances on social media.  But bear this in mind - it was only her personal Twitter account that was suspended.  Her official U.S. House of Representatives account is still up.  And, apparently, the only way she can lose that account is if she gets voted out of office in November (highly unlikely).

So, her followers will simply go to her official account.  This isn't a big deal for her.  It;s not even a slap on the wrist. 😠

MTG KO'd

It's a knockout.

If looks could kill, they probably will, which is why I'm glad that U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has to wear a "face covering" in Congress.  ("Censored" - what a kidder!)  But at least Representative Taylor Greene has been neutered. MTG (as I will call her hence) lost her House committee assignments when the House Democratic majority and eleven Republicans voted to remove them from her portfolio.  Now all she can do representing Georgia's Fourteenth U.S. House District is vote on bills.  She has no more power than anyone who takes part in the the surveys on Michael Smerconish's weekly CNN program but she'll still be around to shoot off her ironically covered mouth.

And that is why Republicans are afraid to deal with her.  Despite her crazy beliefs about staged mass shootings, Jewish space lasers, and demonic sacrifices, the QAnon congresswoman has so much support from the Republican - i.e., Trump - base that no one wants to offend the Trumpists by punishing or even reprimanding MTG, so the Democrats had to do it for them.  House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has warned the Democrats that he and his caucus can discipline Democratic House members next time the Republicans are in the majority in the House - which, thanks to gerrymandering and voter suppression, could happen as soon as 2023 - by removing a Democrat from committee assignments . . . maybe like, say, Rashida Tlaib for calling Trump a motherfucker.  Or maybe they'll do the same for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for her barbs against fellow politicians.  Please - AOC is too busy going after other Democrats to bother bashing Republicans.  But the Democrats have no regrets about punishing MTG for her hateful, wacky comments, and they're certain that they will be vindicated in the end.  Though I would get ready to sue the Republicans for voter suppression as soon as they start pulling their tricks.  (They've already started; they're trying to tighten voting requirements in MTG's home state of Georgia.)   

Meanwhile, in the Senate, Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz must think that all of the attention MTG is getting have allowed them to get off the hook for their treasonous crimes.  Don't look now, guys - you're next! 

Greene New Deal

Lawrence O'Donnell attempted to set the record straight on his MSNBC show about the vote in the Senate earlier this week on whether or not to have an impeachment trial for Trump was actually a vote for whether or not to have a debate on the constitutionality of a trial for a former President now or later.  The outcome of the vote was in favor of having the debate later - and Senate Republicans such as Rob Portman of Ohio (who's retiring after his current term expires at the end of next year) and John Thune of South Dakota have made it clear that a vote for such a debate now doesn't mean they'll vote to acquit Trump later.  So there's some sanity in the Republican Party.

But not in the House.  It seems that Marjorie Taylor Greene (above), freshman Republican congresswoman from Georgia, has some interesting ideas she's bringing to Washington.  For example, she wants Nancy Pelosi executed.  She also thinks that the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida was faked to embarrass gun-rights activists, and explains the California wildfires as having been caused by space lasers funded by the Rothschilds and other Jewish interests.

Even the leaders of Nazi Germany would have found that to be ridiculous.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy would have talked to her about all this like he promised, but he was too busy kissing Trump's ring at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, which is why he couldn't talk to Florida Republican congressman Matt Gaetz about his trip to Wyoming to rally voters against the state's at-large House member, Liz Cheney, for voting for Trump's second impeachment.

The only way President Biden is going to get any unity in this country is to do something about those promoting disunity.  These people - Republican congressmen and right-activists alike - are dangerous, and it may not be long before QAnon folks like Taylor Greene are forced out of Congress - because they can't not be forced out - and other extremists are investigated and ferreted out by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.  A new war on terror.  I'm certain mainline Republicans like Mitt Romney would approve.

By the way, remember all of those calls for more women in Congress.  Next time, those folks should be careful what they wish for. 

QAnon and On

Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia won the GOP nomination for the U.S. House seat of her district, and the party establishment happily welcomed her to the team after having previously denounced her for being a follower of the QAnon phenomenon, which is a cult of tin-foil-hat-wearing individuals who believe in an anonymous person known as "Q".  Q claims to be a supporter of Donald Trump who has information linking d many Democratic politicians and politically liberal celebrities to devil-worshipers and an international child sex-trafficking ring. Q has also claimed that Donald Trump pretended to collude with the Russians to get Robert Mueller to investigate him so he could, by "accident," expose a plot by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, among others, to stage a coup d'état against Trump in their quest for world domination.

 

So many Republicans buy this theory, though, that it threatens to dictate policy in Washington and have Republicans go after Democrats in a witch hunt that suggests that Nancy Pelosi is literally a witch.

I miss the Tea Party right now.

Conspiracy theories have been a part of the American body politic for a long, long time, but now it's going beyond the pale, so undereducated and misinformed are Americans today.  Anyone who doesn't take this QAnon thing seriously had best wake up, because if enough of them get into power, they'll snuff out the freedoms that they pretend to be standing up for.

We must look even more ridiculous to the rest of the world than we ever did before, and that's a huge accomplishment.  If Biden wins the Presidency, and if Democrats keep the House and gain back the Senate,  one can only hope that the QAnon caucus is relegated to back benches so far back they'll be sitting in broom closets during congressional sessions.  There may not be enough broom closets in the Capitol to fit them.