Our current congressional McCarthy, Kevin — a hapless sock puppet for radical nationalists — appears to aspire to the carnage wreaked by the original MyCarthy, Senator Joseph, in the 1950s. The Senator’s culture war/crusade/reign of terror against the US government, a witch hunt now known as the “Red Scare,” certainly succeeded in sowing fear and distrust in the federal government during the ani-communist hyteria of the time, which Republicans are hoping to reproduce today.
Just substitute “communist” every time they say “socialist” and you will have the script, pretty much word for word.
Sen. McCarthy claimed to possess a list of “200 known communists within the State department,” a thinly-disguised attack on President Truman's foreign policies. Only the list was a secret, you see, so names were never actually revealed and the number kept changing and also, there was no actual evidence. HUAC “investigated allegations of communist activity in the U.S.”, and just like today, kept throwing spit at the wall to see what stuck.
Channeling McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee, the new McCarthyites have invented the “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government”. However, today’s version is apparently a slapstick comedy remake, which is “investigating” Hunter Biden’s underpants. Like they did with Bill Clinton. Anybody else sense an obsession?
Look how much nothing ever really changes in American politics! Except maybe for the worse, these days. The rest of the world stopped taking this country seriously during Grandpa Crazypants Trump’s rodeo-clown regime, and these hearings so far — dreamt up by his acolytes — have only produced cringey performances like poor old Chuck Grassley, once considered a sentient being, acting as a sort of senile has-been commentator, like on the movie channel.
“Grassley described his ongoing efforts to investigate the Biden family as something out of a “fiction spy thriller,” with senior FBI leadership working to improperly release information about Hillary Clinton’s email servers, conceal the connection of the Biden family to foreign powers, and restrict information to stymie his investigations with Johnson.”
“This story of government abuse and political treachery is scarier than fiction,” Grassley said. “It really happened. Help us write the last chapter in this real-life drama. You must relentlessly produce the facts and the evidence.”
YOU must produce the evidence, because they don’t have any.
Johnson followed suit, painting a picture of a global leftist cabal enacting its agenda within federal government agencies. “It is important to recognize corrupt individuals within agencies that I am talking about are not acting alone,” Johnson said. “They operate as vital partners of the left-wing political movement that includes most members of the mainstream media, Big Tech, social media giants, global institutions and foundations, Democratic Party operatives, and elected officials."
And also, space aliens, larger species of lizards, clouds, and your weird neighbor, Bob, who wears those funny hats. I think they forgot the part about themselves being “elected officials,” too. And also, “elites".”
Even Fox didn’t carry Jordan’s Freudian projection/ “weaponization of the federal government” hearing, even though some of their stars were testifying for the GOP. “We’ll get back into it for anything newsworthy,” anchor John Roberts said after showing a brief clip. But there wasn’t anything newsworthy, just a bunch of cranks airing their long, long lists of grievances and being embarrassed by the Democrats on the panel, and they never cut back.
Even worse for politicians playing to Fox News, that network’s primetime host Jesse Watters moaned, “I’m sick of these hearings . . . Tell me this is going somewhere.”
Democrat Jamie Raskin was especially devastating —“Your subcommittee can absolutely become part of a proud history of serious bipartisan oversight stretching from the Teapot Dome investigation, to the Boeing investigation, into the Watergate hearings, to the tobacco hearings, to the select committee on the January 6 attack,” Rep. Raskin, D-Md., told the committee. “Or you take oversight down a very dark alley filled with conspiracy theories and disinformation. A place where facts are the enemy and partisan destruction is the overriding goal. Millions of Americans already fear that representation is the right name for the special subcommittee, not because weaponization of the government is its target, but because weaponization of the government is its purpose. "
And of course, there was the prancing, shouty demagoguing about stuff that actually happened during the trump administration, which really did do a spectacular job of — weaponizing the federal government. Anyway, Jimmy Jordan, his shirt open to the waist to reveal his scrawny chest as usual (you have to wonder if he thinks that’s sexy, or wtf?) kept whining about how conservatives were being “targeted for censorship” - apparently oblivous to the actual truth — that they are so boring nobody wants to listen to them.
But Jimmy J finally got to the crux of the whole fantastic slack-jawed drooling delusion that keeps their cultists enthralled — that the FBI and/or other government officials interfered in the 2020 election by getting social media companies — especially Twitter — to suppress a New York Post fantasy about a mythical Hunter Biden laptop.
“I think you guys wanted this to be taken down,” Rep. Jordan told former Twitter executives on Wednesday. “I think you meet with these guys every week. … They send you all kinds of emails.
“They send you documents on the ‘supersecret James Bond Teleporter’” (I am not sh*tting you people, he said that).
“You get information on that. I think you guys wanted to take it down. I think you guys got played by the FBI. And that is the scary part.”
I don’t know about you, but I think the “scary” part is that Republicans might actually believe the crazy they are spewing. Which is worse, that they believe it, or that they think you are stupid enough to believe it?
"Which is worse, that they believe it, or that they think you are stupid enough to believe it?"
Make no mistake, compared to the run of the mill con artist, it's always worse to have delusional people in positions of authority.
That being said, it is often the case that delusional people just know that they are smart, savvy, able to discern 'what's really going on', while equally convinced that the rest of us are stupid, ignorant dupes.
In other words, we are confronted by a cohort composed of contemptible, drooling jamokes who are truly delusional and also Machiavellian, so it's not particularly useful to wonder which they are, or which would be worse.
They're both, and they're awful, and it's awful,