A broken Congress is what MAGA always wanted
There have been MAGA true believers shitting on the floor of the Congress ever since Jan. 6, 2021. But the right wing’s active desecration of the U.S. government extends far beyond ugly recent events on Capitol Hill, and dates back long before the Trumpist insurrection of two and a half years ago.
In fact, the origins of the attacks on the government date back at least four decades to the Reagan administration, when the former president popularized the idea within his party that government was actually the enemy. His joke that the scariest words one could hear were, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” has metastasized from being a pitch for smaller government into a movement to blow the whole damn thing up.
What happened in the House of Representatives this past week, as Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) led the anarcho-moronic wing of the GOP in a successful effort to unseat Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, was a continuation of the MAGA riot Donald Trump incited in an effort to stop the certification of Joe Biden as president.
The goal was the same: to stop the government from functioning. The rationale was the same: if we can’t have our way, then fuck everyone and everything.
The only difference was that the stench left in the well of the House of Representatives this week was from the overheated, lie-laden rhetoric of a parade of smarmy politicians rather than from the steaming remnants of what the Trump rioters had for breakfast on Jan. 6. (Which, come to think of it, might be a distinction without a difference.)
It might have seemed like chaos to the unschooled observer. But the historic and yet somehow tedious dramedy that played out during the past few days wasn’t just the logical consequence of the GOP’s descent into being a nihilistic mob that stands in opposition to everything and in favor of nothing. It was also the culmination of the destructive tendencies of a long line of GOP leaders—from Newt Gingrich to Tom Delay, from the Tea Partiers to the Freedom Caucus, from Sarah Palin to Lauren Boebert. [Continue reading…]