Mogadishu Redux: Bring In the  Malignant Clowns

Hoo boy. Now that Kevin McCarthy's sold the farm and House Oversight Committee to a ragtag band of shouty MAGA "chuckleheads" - Gym, Lauren, MTG who's finally gonna get Hillary for killing RFK - the House is working hard to expose "the Biden crime family," shred the safety net, and ignore news that serial fabulist George Santos was a drag queen. Their buffoonery offers black comic relief, but many warn the chaos also signals a perilous "slow civil war." Jon Stewart: "We cannot mistake absurdity for lack of danger."

Promising what one pundit calls a looming "year of the asshole," the GOP House sorrowfully confirms that, after so much awful in lo these endless past few years, they still haven't hit the bottom. Lacking any real ideas, policies or principles and flaunting what John Cusack's hitman in Grosse Pointe Blankterms "a certain moral flexibility," a fear-and-vengeance-fueled GOP has chosen to focus on several bizarre goals nobody else in America supports: depriving women of the right to choose, fewer books, no bad things said about white people, fatter fat cats funded by a 30% sales tax on the proletariat, more hunger, poverty and unwanted children, and getting a peek at Hunter Biden's penis. Their dubious hallmark is willed stupidity super-glued to shameless hypocrisy: They want to cut a bedrock Social Security and Medicare in the name of their "mission to end wasteful Washington spending" despite the fact that 25% of the national debt over the last 200-plus years was accrued by their feckless Art-of-the Deal guru in just four years, and despite his unprecedented record of crimes, grifts, scams and corruption they're intent on uncovering "every corrupt business dealing, every foreign entanglement, every abuse of power" by Biden.

These dubious efforts will be headed by a piteous and deeply beholden McCarthy who's turned the critical House Oversight Committee - charged with investigating said imaginary crimes - into what's been deemed "a Tucker panel" and an easily dismissed "circus of deplorable clowns" unfit to run a blender, never mind a House. Almost every member is an election denier, conspiracy theorist, Jan. 6 fan-boy or other crackpot extremist, from Aryan white Nationalist Paul Gosar to QAnon-er Anna Luna to puffed-up moron Gym Jordan to dimwit Chairman James Comer, who's obsessed with Hunter Biden and "the Biden family influence-peddling investigation." To ensure he'd totally stripped Committees of any competence or credibility, Kevin also removed Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from key posts - for, respectively, "lying" he didn't know the whistleblower who sparked Trump's impeachment on Ukraine though there's no evidence he did, and knowing someone who may or may not have been a Chinese spy even though law enforcement said he was "under no suspicion of wrongdoing." That didn't stop Lauren Boebert from shrieking they're "a bunch of Blue Anons and "conspiracy theorists," because irony is dead.

Also, because we are now in The Twilight Zone, "SNL gold piece" Marjorie Taylor Greene got plum posts on Oversight and Homeland Security, so whew now she can keep a look out for dastardly Jewish space lasers. In her vaunted if insane new roles she has proclaimed herself "the leading MAGA voice of Congress," which makes total sense given she believes the world is run by a secret cabal of Democratic pedophiles; she's claimed Hillary Clinton killed RFK to become "Senator of New York City" - "It was one of those Clinton murders" - despite a 20-plus-year discrepancy in the timeline; she recently urged followers to "no longer serve the Uniparty and the Globalist agenda," vowing, "Vengeance is mine declares the Lord. God will not let evil go unpunished"; and every day she gets out of bed seemingly just to parade around Congress bleating to any microphone in sight, "Impeach Biden! That's what we need to do!" Twitter has other ideas: "Asking the universe to stop giving that dope mike time." Some of her own colleagues seem to agree: A former adviser called her "a mentally deranged fool" for citing "a so-called plane" hitting the Pentagon on 9/11, and after she just bravely declared, “I for one will not sign a clean bill raising the debt limit” - House Reps don't sign bills and they're just paying Trump's debts - GOP pol Michael Steele raged, “This woman has no clue...Stop with the stupid."

Theirs is not the only internecine bickering in this ignorant pack of fraudsters, bandits and narcissists. MTG and Lauren Boebert had a catfight in the bathroom, Florida Rep. Vern Buchanan, passed over for chair of Ways and Means despite seniority, reportedly assailed McCarthy with, "You fucked me! I know it was you," and much of a discomfited GOP views serial fabricator George Santos/ Devolder/Zabrovsky, under pressure to resign and facing local, state, federal and international investigations, as one clown too many - and that was before they learned the party obsessed with banning drag queens as groomers and perverts has now evidently elected their first (open) drag queen. Having lied about his entire life story - his schooling, religion, work history, mother dying on 9/11, stealing money from a disabled vet for his dying service dog, fantastical show business career (Hanna Montana!) - he's now refuting multiple reports, evidently confirmed, that he performed at drag queen beauty pageants in Rio de Janeiro under the name Kitara Ravache. From a former friend and fellow queen, "He's changed a lot, but he was always a liar." Despite his denials - charging, without irony, the media “continues to make outrageous claims about my life” - Politico cites further proof in the barely literate Wikipedia bio of a Santos alias: He "startted his ‘stage’ life at age 17 as an gay night club DRAG QUEEN (and) won sevral GAY ‘BEAUTY PAGENTS.’" Cue delighted tweets. "The realest thing about curious George is that he's a drag queen," said one, and, "This is divine."

Others are having a fine time with the tawdry chaos. After McCarthy placed Ravache on two committees, including Science, Dem members gleefully welcomed him. From (actual) retired astronaut Rep. Scott Kelly, "Awesome to have former NASA astronaut and moon walker (Santos)...To infinity and beyond!" From Rep. Bill Foster, "As the only recipient of the Wilson Prize for High-Energy Particle Accelerator Physics serving in Congress, it can get lonely. Not anymore! I'm thrilled to be joined (by) Dr. George Santos, winner of not only the Nobel Prize but also the Fields Medal (in) Mathematics for his groundbreaking work with imaginary numbers." Much like Kyle Rittenhouse, dubbed "the George Santos of George Zimmermans" as he whines about events cancelled by "the woke mob," or the Orange Guy newly babbling he only kept "ordinary folders with words printed on them" as a "cool keepsake," it's easy to dismiss these morons as insufferably bad stand-up comics. But the dark underbelly of their outlandishness - their "whiplash-inducing willingness to straight-up lie in total lockstep about literally anything" - is a key part of what's been dubbed a seriously unfunny "slow civil war." Thus, the friendly reminder of one recent protest sign: "It doesn't take that many fascists to make fascism."

In the latest episode of his podcast, "The Problem With Jon Stewart," the ever-perspicacious Stewart mulls "insurrection, the end of democracy, autocracy on the move." Noting Brazil just "had a little insurrection...It was a Carnivale insurrection," he brings up Santos and what one of his guests calls, even before the drag story broke, his "sprawling cheesecake factory of stories - it's astounding what he's offering up to us." Stewart laughingly agrees, comparing Santos' unease on the House floor to a "Fresh Meat" scene in a prison movie: "He looks like he just had to give up a carton of smokes to get to keep his muffin." But then he pivots to Trump, whose idiocy he first viewed as a "comedic gift of Heaven...I thought it made him a buffoon, (but) it made him the perfect vessel. Because it takes people with no shame to do shameful things...I thought he was so ridiculous, and then you realize the worst people in history have been ridiculous" - Hitler and his mustache, Gaddafi raving, Kim Jong-un's haircut. "The thing we have to be careful of, and I always caution myself on this," he somberly concludes, "is we cannot mistake absurdity for lack of danger." He's seconded by Liberal Redneck Trae Crowder, who recounts the current GOP tomfoolery - gas stoves, drag queens - celebrates what we got done before "we as a society got hit by the dumb truck," and likewise warns, "We gotta stay vigilant, y'all." "Do not let their hollering about these nonsensical thin-air controversies," he urges, "distract you from the truly nefarious undertakings to which they are indeed fully committed."

Anti-COVID-precaution propaganda going out in the mail, part of "a slow civil war."Twitter photo