The GOP is in the ICU, stricken with a virus of its own creation.
It’s like those horror films where someone under siege realizes the calls are coming from inside the house. Only this time, the calls are coming from inside the House. Marjorie Taylor Greene is the infection in the Republicans’ midst – a mutation of their own longstanding disease – and they don’t have a clue what to do.
It was oh so predictable yesterday that gutless husk Kevin McCarthy, ostensibly the House GOP “leader,” failed to take any action against the newly elected QAnon loon who refuses to publicly renounce her suggestion that Nancy Pelosi should take “a bullet in the head,” or her belief that a 9/11 plane never hit the Pentagon, or her conviction that mass school shootings like Parkland and Sandy Hook were “false flag” operations staged by gun control activists, or a host of other conspiratorial idiocies that I’m too sickened to list.
McCarthy refused to revoke Greene’s committee assignments because he knows that nutjobs like her are now quite numerous within the Republican base. They’re seriously infecting the GOP from within, but hey, the GOP needs their votes. Most importantly, the Greene gang is just a more extreme version of the daft Republican mindset – the party’s longstanding stew of white grievance, baseless paranoia, and fear of factual reality.
Let’s face it, if someone smokes four packs of cigarettes a day for decades, the odds of getting really sick go up. If you get my drift.
The GOP has long flirted with white supremacists, pursued racist policies (starting with vote suppression), nurtured conservative media liars like Rush Limbaugh, waged war based on serial lies (Saddam has weapons of mass destruction! Saddam conspired with Osama bin Laden!), and most recently, if memory serves, they relentlessly indulged the most toxic fantasist who ever failed upwards to the White House. Just a few weeks ago, in fact, most GOPers in Capitol Hill bonded with Greene in their shared delusional belief that President Biden somehow stole the ’20 election.
On the Senate side, GOP leader Mitch McConnell is currently in high dudgeon, calling Greene a “cancer” on the party, lamenting that she “is not living in reality.” This is the same guy who’d just spent four years fleeing reality – staying mute while his president sided with Russia against our intelligence agencies, hyped quack cures for Covid, and lied multiple times a day.
As Republican Sen. Ben Sasse wrote 10 days after the insurrectionist attack, Greene and her QAnon friends are not merely “a few bad apples.” In truth, they signify “the blossoming of a rotten seed that took root in the Republican party some time ago and has been nourished by treachery, poor political judgment, and cowardice.”
Indeed, some top Republicans watered that seed; during the last campaign, they amplified the moronic QAnon belief that Biden and the Democrats were somehow involved in a global pedophilia ring. Election loser Donald Trump, to whom so Republicans still pledge fealty (McCarthy trekked to Florida to kiss his tush), praised QAnon cultists as “people that love our country” and repeatedly promoted their themes on Twitter. Trump and his senior son posted memes that purported to link Biden to pedophilia. GOP Sen. Ron Johnson, a notorious Trump flunky, went on Fox News and tried to link Hunter Biden to child porn.
No wonder Greene has barely been slapped on the wrist. Nutjobs like her are now members in good standing of the Republican coalition. According to a national Pew poll released last November, 41 percent of Republicans familiar with QAnon say the cult is good for the country. The GOP is stuck with its own sickness, and one symptom is a shrinking spine. Last August, McCarthy declared, “There is no place for QAnon in the Republican party.” Yesterday, the same guy said: “Q-on, I don’t know if I say it right, I don’t even know what it is.”
Senator Sasse, who indulged Trump for years and voted to exonerate him in the first Senate trial, has at least recovered to the point where he’s talking sense. He frames the Republican reckoning: “We can dedicate ourselves to defending the Constitution and perpetuating our best American institutions and traditions, or we can be a party of conspiracy theories, cable-news fantasies, and the ruin that comes with them…The GOP must reject conspiracy theories or be consumed by them. Now is the time to decide what this party is about.”
But as the old saying goes, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. If Republicans refuse to vaccinate against their own raging infection, good luck to them. And our civic sanity will continue to take a hit.