Kevin McCarthy Scum Again
It's your Sunday show rundown!
Last week GOP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was happy as he could be on the Sunday shows, over the statistical and historical possibility he'll be Senate majority leader once more.
This week it's GOP House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, sporting a red face we can only assume he got from a penis charging station -- allegedly! -- on "Fox News Sunday."
Host Mike Emanuel lobbed every softball question he could to McCarthy, which gave McCarthy ample opportunity to turn the interview into a 14-minute infomercial of canned talking points.
He began by criticizing President Joe Biden's aid to Ukraine as "too slow."
MCCARTHY: If we would have taken those actions earlier instead of waiting until after Russia invaded, they probably never would have invaded had we done that sooner.
Emanuel pointed out that just this week, President Biden announced an additional $800 million in military aid. That's a total of $2.6 billion in security assistance, which included weapons. McCarthy, however, couldn't outline what President Biden could have done more, so he just said the thing about it being too slow again.
MCCARTHY: Ukraine was craving the ability to defend themselves. Had we moved the weapons to Ukraine earlier, that they could defend themselves, it would have saved thousands of lives and probably the decision of Putin not to enter.
It will surprise no one, other than the gullible voters he counts on to fall for his bullshit, that McCarthy was one of the many who saw nothing wrong with Donald Trump using military aid to extort Ukraine, and opposed both Trump's impeachments.
But if you think McCarthy's support for Ukraine and opposition to Vladimir Putin will last, here he is refusing to condemn the Putin wing of his caucus:
EMANUEL: Last week, 63 House Republicans voted against a symbolic resolution of unequivocal support for NATO. Are your colleagues wrong on this one?
MCCARTHY: No, there's a strong support for NATO moving forward. Always has been. NATO is in the process of defending themselves but the one thing we need to make sure these NATO countries spend the money, more than two percent.
Translation: He's gonna do nothing about the Putin wing, while pretending he is, and then use Trump's NATO rhetoric. It's the same kind of leadership that gets Marjorie Taylor Greene a wrist slap for attending a white nationalist convention, and makes him very disappointed with insurrectionist Madison Cawthorn only after Cawthorn starts yammering about cocaine orgies.
Of course, being scum is not new for McCarthy.
He after all, was the guy who lost his first chance at speaker when he said the quiet part out loud about the true nature of all the Benghazi investigations. Then Paul Ryan became speaker. Later, during a closed-door meeting prior to the 2016 election, McCarthy said out loud that he thought Putin was paying Dana Rohrabacher and Trump. Let's not forget all McCarthy's scummy moments relating to his phone calls with Trump on January 6.
All these moments of self-revealing cowardice and his devotion to the Trump/MAGA wing of his caucus may indeed make him the next failed GOP speaker of the House. He'd join the ranks of Paul Ryan, John Boehner, Newt Gingrich and Dennis Hastert. You know, if Matt Gaetz and the MAGA chumps don't screw him out of it first, that is.
But if it happens, then congratulations, Kevin McCarthy. Hope when your temporary joy at being speaker, passes, all the craven complicity will have been worth it.
Have a week.
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Trump Wishes He Had Attacked Capitol Personally, And 568,761 Other Bugf*ck Quotes From His WaPo Interview
Aiyeeeeeeeee.
Remember the old days, when once a week or so Maggie Haberman or the Axios bullet point squad would sit down with Donald Trump and copy/paste just miles and miles of bugfuck and batshit that fell out of the then-president's mouth? We don't miss those days.
But WaPo's Josh Dawsey recently went down to Mar-a-Lago to hook his mouth up to the bugfuck spigot, and oh boy, he got some goodies.
Trump Wishes He Could Have Attacked Capitol Personally
We all know what happened on January 6, when months of incitement and fascist Big Lies from Trump about the election he lost culminated in a domestic terrorist attack on the United States Capitol. Donald Trump told his followers he was going to join them in their march to the Capitol, but instead he waddled back to the White House and gleefully watched the attack on TV.
But oh boy, he wishes he could have gone:
Trump said he deserved more credit for drawing such a large crowd to the Ellipse — and that he pressed to march on the Capitol with his supporters but was stopped by his security detail. “Secret Service said I couldn’t go. I would have gone there in a minute," he said.
So that's damning. Of course he probably would have just slowed the attackers down, especially if there were any ramps involved.
Trump Not Missing For Seven Hours, NANCY PELOSI Missing For Seven Hours!
Trump would have done something about that whole riot he incited if he could have, but he couldn't have, because it wasn't his job, it was somebody else's job:
“I thought it was a shame, and I kept asking why isn’t she doing something about it? Why isn’t Nancy Pelosi doing something about it? And the mayor of D.C. also. The mayor of D.C. and Nancy Pelosi are in charge,” Trump said of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot in a 45-minute interview with The Washington Post. “I hated seeing it. I hated seeing it. And I said, ‘It’s got to be taken care of,’ and I assumed they were taking care of it.”
If somebody had only told him Pelosi wasn't fixing it! Opportunity missed.
Also, about all those missing phone records, Trump told Dawsey he doesn't think he got "very many" telephone calls that day — "Why would I care about who called me?" he literally asked, about the hours during the attack on the homeland that he incited — and still says he recalls exactly zero burner phones. What is "burner" again"?
Trump Pretty Excited About Size Of Crowd That Came Out To Tailgate His Insurrection
So pathetic:
“The crowd was far bigger than I even thought. I believe it was the largest crowd I’ve ever spoken to. I don’t know what that means, but you see very few pictures. They don’t want to show pictures, the fake news doesn’t want to show pictures,” he said. “But this was a tremendous crowd.”
There must have been at least a billion people there!
Hey Remember That Batshit TV Doctor Scott Atlas Trump Brought Into The White House?
The one who hated masks and figured the best strategy was to do nothing about coronavirus? He was farting around Mar-a-Lago during the interview for some reason.
“Doc!” Trump said, before complimenting Atlas on losing weight. “Look who we have here!”
“This is the center of the universe,” he said, shortly after Atlas walked away. “Come back later,” he hollered after him.
Yeah we bet. "The universe."
Donald Trump Loves Volodymyr Zelenskyy! Because Remember After The Perfect Call When Zelenskyy Said 'No Quid Pro Quo' And That Trump Did Nothing Wrong?
“I liked Zelensky from the beginning for one reason. When we had the impeachment hoax, based on a perfect phone call, he totally backed me up, and I didn’t ask him to do that. They asked him, and he said, he absolutely did nothing wrong," Trump said. “He said there was no quid pro quo. He didn’t even know what his people were talking about. He thought they were crazy. ... So I gained great respect for him there.”
Everybody said it was a quid pro quo.
OK John Bolton called it a "drug deal," but everybody else.
Donald Trump Still Loves Vladimir Putin More Though!
He just can't stop himself:
He said he thought Russian President Vladimir Putin was a savvy negotiator for sending troops to the Ukrainian border ...
A "savvy negotiator." For amassing troops on the Ukrainian border, and then proceeding to send those troops across the border to massacre small children in the streets. We all realize that if Trump was still president, he'd be openly encouraging Putin's war from the White House, right? He just can't stop himself.
Trump did say that "they" could stop Putin's war by "lower the price of oil by using the liquid gold we have underneath our feet." Is that how that works? Does anybody think Trump knows how that works?
Donald Trump Also Loves Viktor Orban, Who Only Is Still Leader Of Hungary Because Trump Endorsed Him.
You know how Hungarian voters are, always waiting for direction from Mar-a-Lago.
Earlier this week, Trump claimed, Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, called him to thank him for endorsing him and to credit Trump with the win. “After I endorsed him, he went up like a rocket ship,” Trump claimed of his unusual endorsement.
Everybody else calls him for endorsements too. Everybody in the whole world.
“These other leaders, they want endorsements,” he said. “I’m the king of endorsements. It’s more than just this country. It’s other countries."
He declined to specify which other world leaders had pressed him for an endorsement — or whether he would be giving more. “You’ll see,” he said.
Babble Babble Millions Of Illegal Votes Babble Babble Ron DeSantis Owes Me Everything Babble Babble Is He Running Again In 2024? He's Not Telling But Everybody Will Be Very Happy When They Find Out Babble Babble Babble
The end.
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Your Weekly Dose Of GOP Non-Answers And BS, Courtesy Of The Sunday Shows!
We watch so you don't have to.
The Republican Party has long given up on governance or the appearance of even trying. It's so plain that even when they publicly confess that truth, it's met with a shrug rather than any pushback.
Translation: We have no agenda other than obstructing like it's 2008!
It's nevertheless infuriating when the GOP tries to cover its bullshit with a thin veneer of legitimacy.
Roy Blunt on ABC's 'This Week'
A great example of this is GOP Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, who got his own dedicated Wonkette post about this earlier today. Blunt was asked about where he stood on the upcoming vote to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. Blunt decided to pretend he just really wanted to be a part of this historic moment, but just couldn't vote for this particular person:
BLUNT: Really, there are two criteria, I said immediately. One is, is the person qualified for the job? And two is, what's her judicial philosophy?
She's certainly qualified. [...] But the judicial philosophy seems to be not the philosophy of looking at what the law says and the Constitution says and applying that, but going through some method that allows you to try to look at the Constitution as a more flexible document, and even the law. And there are cases that show that that’s her view. [...] And I won't be supporting her but I'll be joining others in understanding the importance of this moment.
If only the very qualified Judge Jackson had answered that question about her judicial philosophy. Oh wait. We guess Blunt just missed it during the confirmation hearings or when it was reported by The Wall Street Journal or Slate or The New York Times or Des Moines Register. I'm sure once Sen. Blunt's staff does a quick Google search, he'll get right on confirming Judge Jackson.
Right? Right?
John Cornyn on 'Fox News Sunday'
Speaking of lack of consistency, Texas GOP Senator John Cornyn was asked about Donald Trump doing that thing where he asks Russia to interfere in our elections (again) and asks for dirt on a political opponent (again) in plain sight and on tape. Because crimes done in plain view aren't crimes, we guess.
His answer will not surprise you if you've paid attention or have a longer political memory than a goldfish.
Asked on Fox News Sunday about Trump asking Putin for dirt on the Bidens even as Russia wages war on Ukraine, John Cornyn says "I wouldn't trust Vladimir Putin" but stops short of criticizing Trump or calling his comments unwisepic.twitter.com/jGU0CvbkJS— Aaron Rupar (@Aaron Rupar) 1648994648
The acrobatics it takes to be against Russia while your presumptive presidential nominee for 2024 and the leader of your party is kissing Putin's ass is "Flying Graysons" level of difficult.
Ron Johnson and Bill Hagerty on Fox News's 'Sunday Morning Futures'
Some in the GOP, rather than twist themselves into pretzels, just barrel on with their propaganda. So here's noted 4th of July Moscow vacationer and Wisconsin GOP Senator Ron Johnson!
Johnson went to Maria Bartiromo's conspiracy safe space show to spread the same old debunked conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden and the same old lies about Trump/Russia collusion being a hoax.
The cover-up of the Biden\u2019s vast web of foreign financial entanglements by our intelligence agencies is the worst corruption I\u2019ve ever seen in the United States government.pic.twitter.com/sTzP5U8dEY— Senator Ron Johnson (@Senator Ron Johnson) 1649079510
Later on the same show, Tennessee GOP Senator Bill Hagerty didn't have much time for questions about mass graves found in Kyiv, because he was on location to do some fearmongering at the OTHER border Fox News is freaked out about. "I want to talk about what's happening here at the [southern] border," he said.
Cornell Belcher on NBC's "Meet The Press"
We conclude with Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher telling a very plain truth that explains why Hagerty and the GOP want to switch topics to immigration, and more broadly why they don't have solutions to any problems.
BELCHER: Let's get real about immigration reform here, right? There's a reason why that's in almost every Republican ad, right? And look, we've seen this play before, right? This is part of that, more fuel for driving the tribalism that Republicans see as part of their political calculus as how they drive this. [...] Dissatisfaction with immigration has been driven by Republicans and they're feeding this. Not so long ago I remember when a guy named Barack Obama thought he had an immigration deal with the Gang of Eight. But it was in the Republicans’ benefit to not have a deal, comprehensive immigration reform, that included border security, that included a pathway. And by the way, most Americans think that you should pay a penalty, and there should be a pathway. And that's not going to happen. You know why it's not going to happen? Because Republicans in Congress don't want it to happen.
They have no plans or solutions because there's no political consequences for it (yet). They are counting on it for the midterms and beyond.
I hope we can prove them wrong.
Have a week.
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The Bad, The Worse And The 'Grim Reaper'
It's your Sunday show rundown!
It was a cavalcade of conservatives on the Sunday shows, as it so often is, with two topics dominating: Ukraine and the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.
So let's just dive right in!
The Bad: Rep. Liz Cheney on 'Meet The Press'
Liz Cheney has received a lot of praise for clearing the very low bar of not supporting insurrection attempts. But as we've said many times, There is no "good Republican." Cheney proves it here when Chuck Todd lobs a softball about whether the current war on Ukraine and the January 6th investigation make in her hindsight regret her vote to not impeach Donald Trump the first time around.
CHENEY: [.H]aving sat through, watching the hearings, watching the evidence that was put on for the first impeachment, at the end of the day, the evidence that was put on didn't make the case.
Translation: I was the third ranking Republican in the House leadership back then. Despite clear evidence of using military aid to extort Ukraine and snubbing President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the time because they wouldn't provide fantasy dirt on a political opponent, I chose party over country.
Again: No good Republicans.
The Worse: Sen. John Barrasso on ABC's 'This Week'
George Stephanopoulos asked Barrasso about Josh Hawley's QAnon-dogwhistling attack on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson ahead of her confirmation hearings. Barrasso, naturally, deflected without condemning Hawley.
STEPHANOPOULOS: [D]o you think Senator Hawley's attacks were fair?
BARRASSO: Well, he's going to have his opportunity to question the judge as will all the members of the committee. The last time we had a hearing with [Brett] Kavanaugh, he was accused of being a serial rapist with no evidence whatsoever. So, I think we're going to have a fair process and a respectful process, unlike what the Democrats did to Justice Kavanaugh.
"No evidence whatsoever?" If we exclude direct testimony from victims, sure I guess.
Based on what we've seen so far, we're not confident Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz will be respectful, instead of being grandstanding attention-seeking monsters like they always are at these hearings.
The Grim Reaper: Sen. Mitch McConnell on CBS's 'Face The Nation'
We end with probably the most evil and cynical politician to ever be elected to the Senate.
When asked about Ukraine military aid provided by the Senate and President Joe Biden:
MCCONNELL: Well, we've given him plenty of money. I think he needs to step up his game. He's generally done the right thing, but never soon enough.
That's rich coming from a guy who ran a sham trial for Trump during his first impeachment for withholding the timely delivery of similar aid.
McConnell was also asked about the Russian apologists in his party like Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
MCCONNELL: Well, there's some lonely voices out there that are in a different place. [...]The vast majority of the Republican Party writ large, both in the Congress and across the country, are totally behind the Ukrainians. [...] So, there may be a few lonely voices off the side. I wouldn't pay much attention to them.
"A few lonely voices" is the new "a few bad apples," we guess.
McConnell was also asked about Ketanji Brown Jackson's confirmation hearings, and, while he has praised Judge Jackson, he's made it clear how he really feels:
MCCONNELL: I don't want to prejudge how I might actually vote, but I ask her to defend the court. Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Justice Breyer both publicly opposed court packing that is trying to increase the number of court- court members in order to get an outcome you like, that would have been an easy thing for her to do to defend the integrity of the court. She wouldn't do that.
How dare she not insist the number of SCOTUS seats remain the same, after McConnell cynically stole at least two of them?
Have a week.
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