FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: GOP RETURN TO RELIGIOUS MANIA EDITION.

Now that Britney's a best-selling author and Taylor Swift rules the box office
let's us guys give girl pop stars the benefit of the doubt.

I skipped last week’s ‘Round-the-Horn because I was busy/burned out.  I ain’t firing on all cylinders now, either, but I can’t leave you good people hanging forever.

Before I mention the freebies at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, I should remind you that non-subscribers can just go in the front door and any posts on the list that don’t have a lock icon next to them are accessible to all. And that’s going back through years of daily posts, including evergreens like “Cancel Culture My Ass” and “E pluribus a-hole.” (Sound like cuts from a Patrick Sky album, don't they?) The really smart play, though, is a subscription – five days a week, $7/month, or 35 cents an issue. At these prices you’d be crazy not to subscribe! 

From the past week, the big one was my fantasia on the internecine Speaker of the House brawl, with special guest appearances by Fox News celebrity Poopmouth and the Giant Trump Hologram – kind of a mix of de Ghelderode’s Chronicles of Hell and Olsen and Johnson’s Hellzapoppin’. Fun, of a sort, and I think it gets at the spirit of the thing (the thing being the Destruction of Democracy in America). 

Since publication, the House Republicans have decided to bestow the gavel on full-on fascist Jesus freak Mike Johnson of Louisiana. His anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-Ukraine, insurrectionist record is ridiculously out of sync with what normal Americans want, but (as Dan Froomkin points out) the prestige press is still treating him as just another fresh-faced GOP Rising Star, and people are passing around clips of Johnson fielding softball questions from Sean Hannity as if it means anything besides “we won’t let this guy within 100 yards of anyone who might blow his cover.” 

Yet the fucking New York Times leads its takeaways from the Hannity blowjob with “1. Johnson’s views stem from the Bible” and “2. He acknowledged that same-sex marriage is the law of the land” – making him sound like a nice young pastor who wants to put all that stuff behind him (didn’t he chortle in the interview that Christ calls him to love all people?), rather than an operative who has spent years denouncing LGBTQ people as “destructive” “sinners” and pushing for gay sex (and heterosexual sodomy) to be made illegal again – and whose actions as a conspirator in the plot to overturn the 2020 election suggest that he’s not one to accept anything that doesn’t go his way as “settled.”

The rightwing press plays its part in the con; “Dems race to vilify new speaker,” for example, is the Washington Times’ way of saying Dems are telling people what the guy actually stands for. They quote Rep. Richard Hudson (R.-N.C.):

“It’s a game they tried to play with John Boehner and Paul Ryan. ‘He’s going to push granny off the cliff in a wheelchair,’” Mr. Hudson said, referring to the fiscal cliff political ad battle Democrats slammed Republicans with during the 2012 election season.

Anyone remember who won the 2012 election? Every single GOP House member voted for Johnson. The party that used to give smaller offices like Secretary of the Interior to religious maniacs is now putting them in positions of major power. It's not a positive trend. 

Also yours for the asking: My review of Killers of the Flower Moon – one theme of which, perhaps coincidentally, is how evil people get soft-headed men to do their bidding on grounds of racial destiny.