Moving Past the Speaker Vote Was a Mistake
Friday, January 13th, 2023
by Shower Cap | American Madness
https://showercapblog.com/moving-past-speaker-vote/
Watching Republicans take control of the House of Representatives has been like looking at TikTok videos where they give sea monkeys knives and meth. Which I hope isn’t a real thing. It’s fuckin’ nutty out there, is what I’m trying to say.
Well, it took a display of buffoonish dysfunction unseen in a century, but the new MAGA majority finally managed to anoint Kevin McCarthy, who ascended to the post of Grand High Kakistocrat with a swagger most unbefitting a man who spent an entire week devouring Chip Roy’s shit on live television.
The most shocking part of the whole affair was when someone intervened to save Matt Gaetz from perhaps the most deserved whoopin’ in Washington. I would’ve thought some sort of evolutionary instinct kicks in, when the herd stumbles into an opportunity to rid itself of a tantrum-prone child molester.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/07/us/politic...ogers.html
But we are not dealing with bright people here. Thanks to Kev’s first-class leadering, the looniest loons in his razor-thin majority seized the power to yoke the whole party to the deranged agenda that blew up in their faces during the easiest midterms of all time, aka the GOP’s third consecutive electoral disaster.
You sort of want Clarence from It’s a Wonderful Life to torment these dorks with a vision of the Congress they could’ve had, the Congress they lost by nominating telequacks and white nationalists and Some Guy Who Painted a Reality TV Character On His Lawn. It’d break their hearts; Mr. Potter makes the townsfolk take turns carrying him around on a litter, and JFK Jr. finally comes back.
You see fuckin’ McCarthy thank Trump? Jesus Christ. It’s like thanking a colon polyp. Kevin’s life is a floor, and every inch of that floor is covered in Donald Trump’s Legos, and he still cannot stop sucking on that ass. Cool leader, House Republicans.
Anyway, experts from across the ideological spectrum agree, the new majority’s inflation-fighting plan is flawless, apart from not existing. Problem-solving isn’t really these folks’ “thing.” Think of this particular branch of the federal government as a publicly-funded content farm for the Murdochs for the next two years.
They want to jump right into these hearings, y’see, because obviously, what America’s thirstiest for right now is more performative batshittery. They think all they have to do is push the Benghazi button over and over again until all their cares disappear. The belief that Donald Trump would’ve been reelected, if only more voters had seen Hunter Biden’s dong, while demented, seems both widespread and sincere.
So hearings it is, then! Insurrectionist legislators who begged for pardons two short years ago now get to “investigate the investigators,” which is every crook’s fantasy, I suppose. Gym Jordan will chair the newly-formed House Select Committee to Hopefully Disrupt Criminal Investigations Into Republican Treachery With Inane Screeching. Scott Perry apparently wants to get on that one, figuring it’s his best shot at getting his phone back.
Ok, if this is really what y’all want…send in the clowns. Paul Gosar’s certainly got a few ideas, if you’re feelin’ frisky. After your midterm washout and your 15 Speaker votes. Everything’s goin’ great, kids, keep doing what you’re doing. Go ahead, normalize Marjorie Taylor Greene, see where it gets you. Heck, why not “expunge” one of Donnie One-Term’s impeachments, that’ll get the gibbering fuckwits off.
Anyway, outside the community theatre-level show trials, the rest of the GOP platform has been transcribed directly from the peasant torture porn Rick Scott composes. They struck a mighty, populist blow for America’s wealthiest tax cheats, for example, because sometimes the oldest cons work best.
Like, at one end of the Republican Party, you’ve got the culmination of Pete Ricketts’ cartoonishly corrupt plot to purchase himself a Senate seat, and at the other sits human corncob Ben Shapiro, prudishly whinging about Dr. Dre lyrics in defense of MTG. It’s an absurd system, but it’s worked my entire life. “I’m so mad about this toy potato’s gender, I hereby DEMAND the government make my boss richer!” Well…okay, if you’re sure.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/m...itals.html
And of course it wouldn’t be a new Republican Congress without a fresh assault on reproductive rights, despite the electorate’s resounding rejection of their regressiveness. Glenn Youngkin, who bumbled by pure chance into the sole, fleeting moment of the past half decade when his party wasn’t electorally toxic, once hoped to ride a 15-week abortion ban all the way to the White House, but after a Dem flip in a special election for a state Senate seat, he’s looking more and more like just another overreaching wingnut shithead, which, coincidentally, is what he is.
Amazingly, I’m still not done documenting the stupid shit House Republicans did with their first-but-really-second week in charge. There’s the “fair tax,” and the promise of lewd gyrations come debt ceiling time, and if you really want to poke yourself in the brain, I guess you can read about the squabble over the Zelensky bust, but I wouldn’t recommend it. The serious governance is right around the corner, though.
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/3810567-ho...n-capitol/
Perhaps the most distressing trend in politics right now is the growing movement demanding George Santos’ resignation. How dare you seek to rob us of this magnificent goon? America deserves this subplot, you joyless puritans. Shit, it barely took a week to reduce him to podcasting with a pedophile; let’s find out how low this little creep can go. Both he and his party deserve this spectacle so fucking much.
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archi...es/672692/
I guess we should touch on the Biden docs story. Sigh. You knew the moment you saw that headline that our poor, befuddled media wouldn’t be able to handle it. It’s like watching the family cat get his head stuck in a cup again. “Oh, sweetie, your poor little cat brain just can’t figure this out, can it?”
They don’t know whether to shit or go blind. “Something Joe Biden did bears superficial similarities to one of Donald Trump’s dozens of crimes*? Clearly our only option is to ignore the magnitudes of severity separating these alleged acts of wrongdoing, and treat them as perfectly equivalent scandals!”
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-vs-tru...023-01-12/
*Why, just this week, his business received the maximum allowable fine (of just $1.6 million? WTF, legal system?) following 17 felony convictions.
…maybe just pushing the Benghazi button over and over again isn’t such a bad plan after all. Sssssssssssssssssigh
I see the Brazilian wing of the International Brotherhood of the Angry and Subpar staged a sad, flaccid, copycat riot of their own, which somehow failed, despite the involvement of super-successful American coup-plotters like Steve Bannon and Jason Miller. Many, if not most of the global Right’s problems stem from deference to losers, when you think about it.
Seriously, lookit the dumpsterful of used buttholes supporting this pathetic knockoff coup: Ali Alexander. Tucker Carlson. Andrew Torba. And yeah, fucking Bannon. Imagine following Steve Bannon this far past his expiration date.
Like, personally, I would not look to Steve Bannon for guidance on much of anything, but on the specific issue of using mob violence to overturn the results of an election? C’mon, man. I can’t imagine what Steve’s wheelhouse is, but we know it’s not that.
Jair himself is still chillin’ down in DeSantistan; I’m told he’s getting a mah-jongg group together with Madison Cawthorn and some of the other new kids in the neighborhood. Getting pretty freaky down in Florida, innit? I guess when you’re pitching your state as a retirement community for fashy fuckups, you pursue some wacky policies, like, say, I dunno, hypothetically, a state-sponsored, theocratic assault on a public college?
https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/colu...795278007/
The bone-chilling deep dive of the week comes once again from the Failing New York Times, profiling Montana’s rightward drift into Christian nationalism, in the age of Greg “Remember When I Physically Assaulted a Reporter? I’m Governor Now!” Gianforte. You might wanna bookmark Jon Tester’s ActBlue page, is all I’m saying.
Good news, the Missouri House of Representatives shall ne’ermore be tarnished by the filthy, undulating, bare arms of those harlots brazen enough to flaunt them. No, they’ve instituted a brand new dress code, which “requires women’s arms to be concealed,” because Republicans aren’t afraid to tackle the tough stuff.
Seems Donald Trump does not enjoy being compared to Hitler. I mean, I wouldn’t, either. Which is one of the big reasons why I don’t act like Hitler. Which is an option. In most situations, I’d think. Not to get all cat poster on anybody, but every passing minute is another chance to stop acting like Hitler. But you have to want it.
While we’re plumbing the depths of our 45th President’s psyche, we’re told that in 2017, he concocted a plan to nuke North Korea, and blame it (the nuclear holocaust) on somebody else, (Tiffany, no doubt) a stratagem that would be dismissed as ridiculous and unrealistic on any playground in America, but just another day at the office for the visionary genius who tamed the coronavirus with bleach enemas.
Speaking of geniuses, what’s Elon Musk been up to? Reinstating conspiracy theorists’ Twitter accounts and losing more money than anyone in human history, you say? And bless his heart, he still doesn’t see the link, one hundred and eighty-two billion dollars later.
I don’t laugh out loud at a lot of headlines, but Paul Ryan Savagely Attacks ‘Proven Loser’ Trump broke me. Wow, that sounds so exciting! You’d never guess it linked to a story about a has-been milksop test-driving a couple one-liners that didn’t catch on. The only thing Paul Ryan ever savagely attacked in his whole life, by the way, was his own dignity.
Former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg was sentenced to prison this week, as was mewling white supremacist gadfly Baked Alaska. So you see, things fit rather snugly on that Ricketts/Shapiro scale I proposed a few paragraphs back.
I missed it last week, but John Bolton and/or the genocidal mustache-shaped gremlin symbiotically attached to his upper lip are officially running for President. Some poor rookie political reporter is gonna get stuck covering Bolton rallies in Iowa, and they’re not even gonna get any good stories out of it.
Look, I don’t want to keep you, I know you have your orders, from Fauci, to confiscate your Real Murican neighbors’ gas stoves, and replace them with Obama Ovens™️, which run on turds harvested from furry kids’ litter boxes at woke public schools. Surprisingly clean energy source, furry kids’ turds. Science is amazing. https://www.businessinsider.com/gas-vs-electr...ruz-2023-1
After this latest reshuffling of his top brass, I bet Putin’s got the deck chairs juuuuuuust how he likes ‘em, but the iceberg’s getting tanks now, so I don’t think he’s out of the woods just yet. How the iceberg wound up in the woods is a matter for another night, and a better writer.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2023/01...e3bf7dd2f8
A more sober one, anyway. The beer fridge overfloweth, thanks to the generosity of the readership, and I remain humbled and thankful. So y’all stay safe out there, and we’ll do this again next week.
Friday, January 13th, 2023
by Shower Cap | American Madness
https://showercapblog.com/moving-past-speaker-vote/
Watching Republicans take control of the House of Representatives has been like looking at TikTok videos where they give sea monkeys knives and meth. Which I hope isn’t a real thing. It’s fuckin’ nutty out there, is what I’m trying to say.
Well, it took a display of buffoonish dysfunction unseen in a century, but the new MAGA majority finally managed to anoint Kevin McCarthy, who ascended to the post of Grand High Kakistocrat with a swagger most unbefitting a man who spent an entire week devouring Chip Roy’s shit on live television.
The most shocking part of the whole affair was when someone intervened to save Matt Gaetz from perhaps the most deserved whoopin’ in Washington. I would’ve thought some sort of evolutionary instinct kicks in, when the herd stumbles into an opportunity to rid itself of a tantrum-prone child molester.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/07/us/politic...ogers.html
But we are not dealing with bright people here. Thanks to Kev’s first-class leadering, the looniest loons in his razor-thin majority seized the power to yoke the whole party to the deranged agenda that blew up in their faces during the easiest midterms of all time, aka the GOP’s third consecutive electoral disaster.
You sort of want Clarence from It’s a Wonderful Life to torment these dorks with a vision of the Congress they could’ve had, the Congress they lost by nominating telequacks and white nationalists and Some Guy Who Painted a Reality TV Character On His Lawn. It’d break their hearts; Mr. Potter makes the townsfolk take turns carrying him around on a litter, and JFK Jr. finally comes back.
You see fuckin’ McCarthy thank Trump? Jesus Christ. It’s like thanking a colon polyp. Kevin’s life is a floor, and every inch of that floor is covered in Donald Trump’s Legos, and he still cannot stop sucking on that ass. Cool leader, House Republicans.
Anyway, experts from across the ideological spectrum agree, the new majority’s inflation-fighting plan is flawless, apart from not existing. Problem-solving isn’t really these folks’ “thing.” Think of this particular branch of the federal government as a publicly-funded content farm for the Murdochs for the next two years.
They want to jump right into these hearings, y’see, because obviously, what America’s thirstiest for right now is more performative batshittery. They think all they have to do is push the Benghazi button over and over again until all their cares disappear. The belief that Donald Trump would’ve been reelected, if only more voters had seen Hunter Biden’s dong, while demented, seems both widespread and sincere.
So hearings it is, then! Insurrectionist legislators who begged for pardons two short years ago now get to “investigate the investigators,” which is every crook’s fantasy, I suppose. Gym Jordan will chair the newly-formed House Select Committee to Hopefully Disrupt Criminal Investigations Into Republican Treachery With Inane Screeching. Scott Perry apparently wants to get on that one, figuring it’s his best shot at getting his phone back.
Ok, if this is really what y’all want…send in the clowns. Paul Gosar’s certainly got a few ideas, if you’re feelin’ frisky. After your midterm washout and your 15 Speaker votes. Everything’s goin’ great, kids, keep doing what you’re doing. Go ahead, normalize Marjorie Taylor Greene, see where it gets you. Heck, why not “expunge” one of Donnie One-Term’s impeachments, that’ll get the gibbering fuckwits off.
Anyway, outside the community theatre-level show trials, the rest of the GOP platform has been transcribed directly from the peasant torture porn Rick Scott composes. They struck a mighty, populist blow for America’s wealthiest tax cheats, for example, because sometimes the oldest cons work best.
Like, at one end of the Republican Party, you’ve got the culmination of Pete Ricketts’ cartoonishly corrupt plot to purchase himself a Senate seat, and at the other sits human corncob Ben Shapiro, prudishly whinging about Dr. Dre lyrics in defense of MTG. It’s an absurd system, but it’s worked my entire life. “I’m so mad about this toy potato’s gender, I hereby DEMAND the government make my boss richer!” Well…okay, if you’re sure.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/m...itals.html
And of course it wouldn’t be a new Republican Congress without a fresh assault on reproductive rights, despite the electorate’s resounding rejection of their regressiveness. Glenn Youngkin, who bumbled by pure chance into the sole, fleeting moment of the past half decade when his party wasn’t electorally toxic, once hoped to ride a 15-week abortion ban all the way to the White House, but after a Dem flip in a special election for a state Senate seat, he’s looking more and more like just another overreaching wingnut shithead, which, coincidentally, is what he is.
Amazingly, I’m still not done documenting the stupid shit House Republicans did with their first-but-really-second week in charge. There’s the “fair tax,” and the promise of lewd gyrations come debt ceiling time, and if you really want to poke yourself in the brain, I guess you can read about the squabble over the Zelensky bust, but I wouldn’t recommend it. The serious governance is right around the corner, though.
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/3810567-ho...n-capitol/
Perhaps the most distressing trend in politics right now is the growing movement demanding George Santos’ resignation. How dare you seek to rob us of this magnificent goon? America deserves this subplot, you joyless puritans. Shit, it barely took a week to reduce him to podcasting with a pedophile; let’s find out how low this little creep can go. Both he and his party deserve this spectacle so fucking much.
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archi...es/672692/
I guess we should touch on the Biden docs story. Sigh. You knew the moment you saw that headline that our poor, befuddled media wouldn’t be able to handle it. It’s like watching the family cat get his head stuck in a cup again. “Oh, sweetie, your poor little cat brain just can’t figure this out, can it?”
They don’t know whether to shit or go blind. “Something Joe Biden did bears superficial similarities to one of Donald Trump’s dozens of crimes*? Clearly our only option is to ignore the magnitudes of severity separating these alleged acts of wrongdoing, and treat them as perfectly equivalent scandals!”
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-vs-tru...023-01-12/
*Why, just this week, his business received the maximum allowable fine (of just $1.6 million? WTF, legal system?) following 17 felony convictions.
…maybe just pushing the Benghazi button over and over again isn’t such a bad plan after all. Sssssssssssssssssigh
I see the Brazilian wing of the International Brotherhood of the Angry and Subpar staged a sad, flaccid, copycat riot of their own, which somehow failed, despite the involvement of super-successful American coup-plotters like Steve Bannon and Jason Miller. Many, if not most of the global Right’s problems stem from deference to losers, when you think about it.
Seriously, lookit the dumpsterful of used buttholes supporting this pathetic knockoff coup: Ali Alexander. Tucker Carlson. Andrew Torba. And yeah, fucking Bannon. Imagine following Steve Bannon this far past his expiration date.
Like, personally, I would not look to Steve Bannon for guidance on much of anything, but on the specific issue of using mob violence to overturn the results of an election? C’mon, man. I can’t imagine what Steve’s wheelhouse is, but we know it’s not that.
Jair himself is still chillin’ down in DeSantistan; I’m told he’s getting a mah-jongg group together with Madison Cawthorn and some of the other new kids in the neighborhood. Getting pretty freaky down in Florida, innit? I guess when you’re pitching your state as a retirement community for fashy fuckups, you pursue some wacky policies, like, say, I dunno, hypothetically, a state-sponsored, theocratic assault on a public college?
https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/colu...795278007/
The bone-chilling deep dive of the week comes once again from the Failing New York Times, profiling Montana’s rightward drift into Christian nationalism, in the age of Greg “Remember When I Physically Assaulted a Reporter? I’m Governor Now!” Gianforte. You might wanna bookmark Jon Tester’s ActBlue page, is all I’m saying.
Good news, the Missouri House of Representatives shall ne’ermore be tarnished by the filthy, undulating, bare arms of those harlots brazen enough to flaunt them. No, they’ve instituted a brand new dress code, which “requires women’s arms to be concealed,” because Republicans aren’t afraid to tackle the tough stuff.
Seems Donald Trump does not enjoy being compared to Hitler. I mean, I wouldn’t, either. Which is one of the big reasons why I don’t act like Hitler. Which is an option. In most situations, I’d think. Not to get all cat poster on anybody, but every passing minute is another chance to stop acting like Hitler. But you have to want it.
While we’re plumbing the depths of our 45th President’s psyche, we’re told that in 2017, he concocted a plan to nuke North Korea, and blame it (the nuclear holocaust) on somebody else, (Tiffany, no doubt) a stratagem that would be dismissed as ridiculous and unrealistic on any playground in America, but just another day at the office for the visionary genius who tamed the coronavirus with bleach enemas.
Speaking of geniuses, what’s Elon Musk been up to? Reinstating conspiracy theorists’ Twitter accounts and losing more money than anyone in human history, you say? And bless his heart, he still doesn’t see the link, one hundred and eighty-two billion dollars later.
I don’t laugh out loud at a lot of headlines, but Paul Ryan Savagely Attacks ‘Proven Loser’ Trump broke me. Wow, that sounds so exciting! You’d never guess it linked to a story about a has-been milksop test-driving a couple one-liners that didn’t catch on. The only thing Paul Ryan ever savagely attacked in his whole life, by the way, was his own dignity.
Former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg was sentenced to prison this week, as was mewling white supremacist gadfly Baked Alaska. So you see, things fit rather snugly on that Ricketts/Shapiro scale I proposed a few paragraphs back.
I missed it last week, but John Bolton and/or the genocidal mustache-shaped gremlin symbiotically attached to his upper lip are officially running for President. Some poor rookie political reporter is gonna get stuck covering Bolton rallies in Iowa, and they’re not even gonna get any good stories out of it.
Look, I don’t want to keep you, I know you have your orders, from Fauci, to confiscate your Real Murican neighbors’ gas stoves, and replace them with Obama Ovens™️, which run on turds harvested from furry kids’ litter boxes at woke public schools. Surprisingly clean energy source, furry kids’ turds. Science is amazing. https://www.businessinsider.com/gas-vs-electr...ruz-2023-1
After this latest reshuffling of his top brass, I bet Putin’s got the deck chairs juuuuuuust how he likes ‘em, but the iceberg’s getting tanks now, so I don’t think he’s out of the woods just yet. How the iceberg wound up in the woods is a matter for another night, and a better writer.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2023/01...e3bf7dd2f8
A more sober one, anyway. The beer fridge overfloweth, thanks to the generosity of the readership, and I remain humbled and thankful. So y’all stay safe out there, and we’ll do this again next week.
