A couple of weeks ago I raised the interesting question of whether Rep. Matt Gaetz, who comes across as a walking parody of “Florida Man”, complete with nudie pics on the cellphone, is being framed as a sex trafficking pedophile, when in fact his only “crime” is, well, being a “Florida man”. Well, the sometimes excessively virtuous Glenn Greenwald, in a long-winded yet 90% accurate take on how the CIA plays the media and the media plays us, suggested to me an additional reason why “the Blob” might have wanted poor Mattie to be removed from the scene: Not only is he a party animal, he’s an anti-war party animal!
Yeah, you read that right. Glenn devotes the majority of his post to describing how the “shocking” story of Russian intelligence forces paying “bounties” for the deaths of American soldiers in Afghanistan (something the U.S. did to the Evil Empire back in the day) suddenly emerged in late June 2020, soon after Wild Man Donald proposed removing U.S. forces from that country, a story that, shockingly, appears not to have been true! This “fake news”, as it were, proved very helpful a few days later when the House Armed Services Committee held hearings on the 2020 defense budget, along with two amendments, one “Democratic” and one “Republican”, that would bar use of any funds for withdrawing from Afghanistan. Writes Glenn
On July 1 and 2, the House Armed Services Committee held its hearings and votes — I watched all fourteen hours and reported on it in a series of articles and a 90-minute video report — and it not only approved this massive military budget but also both amendments to bar troop withdrawal. Over and over, the union of pro-war Democrats and Cheney-led neocon Republicans steamrolled the anti-war faction of left-wing and right-wing war opponents (led by Congressmembers Ro Khanna (D-CA), Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL)), and repeatedly used the Russia bounty story to justify continuation of the longest war in America's history.
Matt Gaetz has not been arrested; he has not been charged. Maybe he’s “guilty”; of “something”. But right now I wonder if Matt’s problem isn’t that he loves the ladies too much, but rather that he doesn’t love war enough.
The older I get the more cynical I’ve become. Didn’t like or trust the bounty story, but didn’t associate the timing of the vote. As for Gaetz, couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy .