Yes, I am getting awfully tired to yelling insults at Megan McArdle. Why, it seems like I was yelling at Megan only three weeks ago for her arrant hypocrisy in blaming the fall of pro-seditionist Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker on the Democratic Party, because I was!. And now she’s turned around and written the same column again, blaming the Democrats for “electing” pro-seditionist Mike Johnson in McCarthy’s place! Writes/lies Megan
Of course, Republicans chose Johnson. They own that. They also own the long years in which they have cravenly capitulated to Trump and his face-eating friends, allowing the leopards to devour their party from within. This was bad for Republicans and bad for America, especially after the leopards used this perch to mount an attack on the legitimacy of our elections, the very core of our democracy.
But the fact that Republicans made horrible choices does not absolve Democrats from any obligation to make good ones. Democrats are not amoebas, capable only of instinctive reactions to environmental stimuli; like Republicans, they understand cause and effect and ought to act on that understanding.
If Kevin McCarthy wanted the Democrats’ help, he should have asked for it. He should have come to the Democrats with 10 or 20 brave Republican moderates—how about that for a double oxymoron?—and proposed a real bipartisan governance for the House. Instead, he made deals with the very worst of the Republican right, the “face-eating leopards” Megan refers to in her first paragraph (a labored meme she developed earlier in her column—in the hopes, I guess, of diverting attention from her own hyena-gnawed countenance).1 He did so, of course, because he knew that if he dared to ask for help from the Democrats—if he dared to suggest that he had a compromising bone in his body—the face-eating leopards would tear his carcass limb from limb. And Megan would probably remark that it was a shame.
1. If I may wax Dantean—and I will—the teeth that gnawed Megan’s face were her own.
