McCarthy to Carlson to Lindell — An Infield from Hell

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

February 26th, 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once. It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.” – Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

You have to wonder how many deaths Kevin McCarthy will suffer before Death,the real one, takes pity on the pathetic little sod and hauls his craven, twitching little ass away. It really would be a mercy at this point; I honestly cannot think of an individual in the entire scope of American history whose personal cowardice even approaches that of McCarthy.

He became Speaker, not because he was resolute and stood firm for what was right; the GOP wanted him because he was never either of those things in his entire political life. The extremists in the MAGA caucus knew he had the spine of a jellyfish and the ethical standards of a sewer rat. The rest of the GOP, not exactly great American heroes themselves, knew the bigots and traitors of the extreme right would block any other nominee.

There have been many instances in American history where groups of opposing views have agreed on a least objectionable candidate. Political conventions are famous for such. The results are usually either bad (Alf Landon),or mediocre (Hubert Humphrey), and sometimes the unobjectionable nebbish turns out to be a lion. (Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and now, it seems, Joe Biden).

This is a far rarer situation, where a rump party minority holds out for the MOST objectionable candidate, and will accept no alternatives. I’ve tried to find instances in history where this has happened and come up short. Short of invading countries installing puppet rulers (American products included a number of regimes in Central and South America), the closest I can think of would be Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, both chosen explicitly by their party because they were easy to control and put a pleasant smile in front of an ugly reality.

With McCarthy, even the pretense of decency and resolve is completely missing. They didn’t want someone to look pretty for the cameras; they wanted someone who would do whatever the fuck he was told and not even hesitate.

When he was giving away the store to the lunatics of the far right in order to get the fifteen votes he so desperately needed in order to become elected speaker, he told them he would release all the video tapes from the Capital area that recorded the events of January 6th, 2021. That would be 41,000 hours of video recordings from over 5,000 cameras that explicitly showed all the emergency protocols used to protect members of the government on that day, both known and confidential.

If McCarthy had just released them to the press, that would have been a grave act of irresponsibility. Some of those recordings would show how to assassinate members of Congress by revealing the protective steps taken when dealing with a hostile invader. Anyone who hates America and the American government will love getting access to the information on those tapes.

But McCarthy didn’t do that: he released the tapes to Tucker Carlson.

Carlson isn’t even remotely a journalist. He is a propagandist, a paid liar, and a stooge for the far right. He’s a fascist and a demagogue, and recent revelations have shown incontrovertibly that he will cheerfully destroy the United States in the name of ratings and a small modicum of power. He’s quite possibly the sleaziest and most reprehensible character McCarthy could have picked. Carlson, of course, is the darling of the lunatics who made McCarthy’s speakership possible. And McCarthy, in an action so craven it would appall Doctor Smith of the old Lost in Space television show, gave Carlson exclusive rights to the footage.

Enter Mike Lindell. You know. The pillow guy. He has two things in common with Carlson. He’s getting sued for defamation by Dominion Voting, and he is Carlson’s equal as a journalist. Basic arithmetic, that: zero equals zero. The only real difference is that Lindell, who is something of a crackpot, apparently genuinely believes the election was stolen from Donald Trump in 2020. Carlson, of course, never believed a word of that.

So Lindell is now suing McCarthy, arguing that he has at least as much right to those video recordings as Carlson does. (Again, true. 0=0).

I suspect there are going to be many such suits filed. The Proud Boys will want those tapes. So will the Oath Keepers, Qanon, Al Qaida, Putin, and Xi. You never know when you might need information making it easy to wipe out most elected officials in Washington in one fell swoop.

McCarthy will eventually face civil and criminal charges for his actions. He belongs in prison for at least twenty years just for the security breaches. His actions, giving sensitive national security date to a hostile party (and Carlson has proven his hostility to the United States) border on treason.

McCarthy belongs in a prison cell, one next to Donald Trump’s.

The Cowardice – If you are a bigot, you are a coward

November 1st 2018

The main premises underlying bigotry are fear of those who are different in some way, any way, and a desire to twist society to give yourself an unfair advantage over the people you hate and fear.

It is cowardice.

That’s not a descriptive; it’s the absolute basis for bigotry. Without fear there cannot be bigotry.

It’s said that we all harbor racist impulses. If you are walking down a street and you find yourself surrounded by people who are different, it’s normal to feel a slight sense of anxiety. On bad days, we may all see someone who is different do something boneheaded or foolish, and think “typical.”

We all are anxious about the Others, and that transcends all races, all ethnicities, all religions.

It’s what we do about it that either makes us decent human beings, or cowards.

Decent people understand what the animal impulse is, and set it aside. Cowards use it to justify and feed their fear.

You can choose to be a coward. You can choose to be a bigot. You have then chosen to be a weak and vicious person. You have chosen to be contemptible.

I can’t help but wonder what the 15,000 troops Donald Trump is sending to the Mexican border are feeling. They’re under discipline; they can’t express their thoughts and opinions on the matter. But they have to know that in being sent, heavily armed, with orders to shoot “rock throwers” from a group of families with children and grandparents, some barefoot, who are walking the length of Mexico and have 1,300 miles to cover, and that they are being used by a low, loathsome man for a low, loathsome purpose.

The Pentagon knows. They leaked a risk assessment report, something they never do. Their conclusion: there is no threat. There have been previous caravans from the desperate lands colonized by American corporations that used vile fascism to control workers and protect industry. Many caravans of frightened, desperate people, taking everything they can carry on their backs, hoping for a better life. They are sometimes barefoot, pregnant, carrying children. Elders ride in hand-drawn carts.

Mexico is a wild and forbidding land, variated and beautiful, but daunting to hike. These people are walking the equivalent of Maine to Florida, through jungle and desert.

It’s something the Pentagon has seen quite a few times, and very few of the people in the caravan actually make it to the American border. And when they get here, they aren’t interested in throwing rocks; they want jobs, and a chance to educate their kids, and a better life.

There has to be a lot of contempt and disgust for this President and his weak followers amongst the American military leadership. They signed on to defend America and the Constitution, and not a mob of inchoate, cowardly strutting bigots. Trump and his howling followers are as alien to American as Hitler and his brownshirts were to Germany in 1923.

Many Germans thought they were better than that, and most of them were. But enough weren’t.

Forty percent of Americans support Trump. They are the worst of America; the coward, the bigots, the vicious and violent, the ignorant and the godstruck. Their strutting masks deep fear.

So they consider it courageous to shoot Jews at their place of worship. They admire Trump for going and desecrating the grieving and mourning of the survivors. They moan about how they are victims and will be until they have put themselves above the law and all others are subject to their laws. Gays have no rights. Immigrants have no rights. African Americans have no rights. The list of people they think don’t deserve rights is very long, and based on a sense of grievance, an insane notion that people who have the same rights they do have an advantage.

Cowardice.

Trump is trying to harvest the Coward-American vote, with grandiose promises to throw hundreds of thousands into tent-cities (with hot and cold running Zyclon-B, perhaps) playing on their yammering fear to crowd around his ersatz aura of Father Invincibility. He vowed to greet the caravan with live ammo, perhaps the most craven moment in American history.

If you agree with Trump, you aren’t just wrong, not just inhumane. You are a coward. You are contemptible. Shooting kids because they look like they could be capable of throwing rocks? It’s why Israel, once the most broadly supported country on Earth, is now met with scorn and disgust. But Netanyahu, another strutting bully and coward and disgrace to his country, seems to be Trump’s role model. Shoot kids. I’ll make you look strong and resolute.

I believe Americans are better than this. The only question is if they contain the ones who aren’t better than this. After all, we have the example of Germany to look to. Lot of good people in Germany.

Just not enough.

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