Send Out the Clowns

 

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.) 

“I won't miss the circus around here, but I might miss some of the clowns.” -former Congressman Steve Stivers, May, 2021

"I haven't given it any substantive thought at all. I've chuckled, on occasion, but what's going on with this group of people that Nancy Pelosi has put together?" -Mo Brooks (R-Defendant)

They're already here.

     And, unless we the people and the "authoritarian" members of Congress don't do something about them, they'll be here to stay. Like the Wicked Witch's flying monkeys, Republicans began blackening the sky as they flew in Luftwaffe-precise formation to defend America, and its patriotic invaders, from truth, justice and the American way.

     Of course, they'd taken to the skies and the airways for decades before Nixon was mumbling at the oil portraits of his predecessors. But this breed of Republican party is enough to make one nostalgic for the good old perfectly sane Republicans that got back-flushed into Congress in the Republican Revolution of 1995. You remember that class, right? Those were the rabid pack of upholstered jackals who rallied around a pudgy philanderer and his Contract on America so they could go after another pudgy philanderer over a blow job.

     Yet, as if their comments and actions in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election and the deadly hissy fit over the results on January 6th hadn't already clued you in, the current crop of evolutionary dropouts make that Congress of power-drunk assclowns look like models of governance by comparison. 

     And it's not just the indigenous wildlife of the Cujo Caucus that we have to worry about but also their reliably far right mouthpieces on OAN, Newsmax and the seediest side of the tracks of Fox. There was Tucker Carlson, that perennial warmup act for the 4th Reich, who couldn't handle being called the worst human being in the world, slinging verbal dead cats at Micheal Fanone by saying, “Because actually what happened on January 6, according to video, did not look a lot like Iraq. It’s not Fallujah.”

    Well, the jury's, literally, out on that one, although one could make a persuasive argument that the difference between Fallujah and DC was about 100 IQ points favoring the Iraqis and that they were legitimately aggrieved by their country being invaded and their people killed. So, while Carlson and Matt Gaetz are bleating like two stuck pigs about name-calling and whistles, guys like Michael Fanone get sneered at by the pretend jocks who'd never worn a badge in their privileged lives for describing before Congress the brutality they'd suffered on January 6th.

     Meanwhile, the Dollar General Eva Braun, Laura Ingraham, was hardly any more hinged. Last Tuesday night, Ingraham held the "Angle Awards" on her white nationalist bilefest of a show, giving the four officers who'd testified before the committee earlier that day faux acting awards. "The theatrics were intended to produce an emotional reaction, logic and facts be damned," she sneered in her best bitchy head cheerleader voice. Because why listen to the boots on the ground that day who got pummeled, sprayed and tased when we can just unthinkingly take the word of a fugitive right wing fuck doll declaiming from the remote safety of her Fox sound studio?

Mr. Winston Smith Goes to Washington

 

Andrew Clyde barricading the House chamber against a peaceful tour group.

It's inconceivable even after nearly seven months after the fact, that mainstream Republicans from Trump on down are still defending the Capitol rioters. They're called "political prisoners" (The right wing 4G network of Gaetz, Greene, Gosar and Gohmert got turned away at the prison the rioters were at, presumably because Matt Gaetz was told he couldn't bail them out with his Venmo account) and patriots.

     

Andrew Clyde screams in terror at the thought of peaceful guide tourists.

   Andrew Clyde, converted gun store owner that his district thought would make a corker of an addition to the shit-smeared halls of Congress, was taken apart by Jamie Raskin at a Rules Committee hearing yesterday. Raskin asked him if he meant what he'd said in describing the rioters as mere "tourists." In typical defiant Nazi at Nuremberg fashion, he said, "I stand by that exact statement as I said it."

     Again, it ought to be pointed out this is the position of the mainstream GOP. Over 120 Republicans from the House alone agreed to challenge the electoral college results just hours after their workplace was violently invaded and desecrated. An even greater number of them signed on to Ken Paxton's Hindenburg of a lawsuit against four states outside of Texas because he didn't like the results.

     The usually disciplined Republicans, who are renowned for staying on message if nothing else, can't seem to agree on a single narrative. We're hearing the rioters weren't really rioters, they were patriots who'd heard some troubling theories that primarily came from the guy who'd sent them special delivery that day. And if they were rioters, well, then, they were antifa or BLM or even the FBI.

    Never before in American history have we had so many government officials simultaneously working at cross purposes with the interests of the fundamentals of our democracy. The rioters were bad enough but they were just the symptom of a more insidious and long-standing disease festering within the body politic and that disease is modern-day conservatism. It's a disease that, since November, has been allowed to infect the minds of tens of millions of Americans.

     It's a malady that successfully supplants reason with ill-informed emotion, ascertainable facts with unfocused suspicion and actual, all-inclusive patriotism with screaming racism, hyperpartisanship and white supremacy. Some would argue the latter-day GOP isn't copying chapter and verse from Hitler's book of grievances from 1933 but you could've fooled me. The modern-day conservative movement has been headed in this direction for decades. Yes, it has been decades in the making ever since Prescott Bush that same year had been scheming with fascist industrialists to supplant FDR with a right wing "co-president".

     As with the well-coiffed insurrectionists and 5th columnists today posing as lawmakers, Prescott Bush was rewarded by getting elected to the Senate.