About Kevin...

Lawd-a-mercy, after declaring definitively last Tuesday that, having been ousted as Speaker of the House (a historic first), he would not run again for the job…yesterday Kevin McCarthy announced a few times that he’s available for his old job, if his (Republican) colleagues want to put him back in it.

It’s absolutely true what they say: you can’t believe a single thing Kev says.

I don’t know how this would work, or how he imagines it would work. If you recall, back in January (having already moved his crap into the Speaker’s office the weekend before Congress was in session), McCarthy suffered through 15 ballot (another first!), successively giving up more and more power to the RWNJ caucus run by Matt “Rapey McForehead” Gaetz before he finally achieved the apotheosis of his ambitions. That was with McCarthy actively campaigning, actively begging for votes, actively surrendering swathes of the speakership just to hold the gavel.

He lasted 23.7 Scaramuccis.

How does he imagine it would go with two rabid cons (Gym Jordan and Steve Scalise) already in contention and not one voice saying, “Hey—what about Kevin?” Is he hoping they’ll cancel each other out and an exhausted Republican caucus will turn to him to save the day? Is he thinking they might actually kill each other and he’ll be there to pick up the pieces?

I’m not seeing it. Since his very hard-won election, he hasn’t been able to get much of anything done in the House, because—despite holding a numeric majority—those RWNJs don’t play well with anyone and it’s strenglich verboten that any R work with Democrats to actually, you know, legislate. Every bill was laden with Tea Party appeasement crap to the point that anything that made it through the House was nixed in the Senate.

This no-Dems-allowed thing is a policy McCarthy is actually down with. The problem is that he doesn’t have enough Rs who are not RWNJs to pass anything without Democratic help. But any whiff of him talking across the aisle gets him beaten up and losing his lunch money on the way to school.

That situation, by the way, has not changed. If the Archangel Gabriel descended to the House floor and scattered pixie dust upon its denizens long enough to get a majority to cast their votes for the fro-yo mogul from Bakersfield, he’d still be faced with the Gaetz gang’s antics and he still wouldn’t be able to govern.

But obviously, Kev just can’t stop the yearning. He’s like the spotty dweeb in high school who nonetheless dreams of showing up at the prom with the hot blonde cheerleader and basking in the resplendent glory of showing everyone up.

It’s like he’s a political incel, which would be pathetic if the consequences of his incompetence weren’t so staggering.

I think the word I'm looking for, actually, is...pathetic.