Mike Johnson Doesn't Want Public Hearing Sex Stuff About Poor Private Citizen Matt Gaetz!
Keep whistling past that graveyard, sir.
It has long been one of our frustrations that practitioners of certain religions will claim on one hand to be the most godly and morally upstanding of people, while at the same time lying like rugs right to millions of faces because the Lord apparently also says that no lie is too immoral or underhanded so long as it helps them achieve power and reach their goal of establishing a Christian theocracy.
We especially can’t stand it when we’re being lied to by grim-faced bootlickers like Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, whose God has apparently told him that bending the knee and turning the country over to the vengeful psychotic pumpkin from Carved is fine, but so much as glimpsing a naked booby on the internet is such an unpardonable sin that even your adolescent son gets to reproach you for it.
What a small man Johnson is. On Sunday he spoke to Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union” about the House Ethics Committee report on now-thankfully-former Rep. Matt Gaetz, which was set to be possibly released on Friday. But Gaetz, in a transparent effort to escape whatever embarrassing details are in the report, resigned from Congress on Wednesday. He also got himself nominated to be attorney general in Donald Trump’s next administration, thereby turning the question of releasing the report into a test of Republican loyalty to Trump.
Tapper reminded Johnson that on Wednesday he had said that he had nothing to say about the potential release of the report, and that a speaker cannot be involved in such matters for obvious reasons. Which was, remarkably, the correct position to hold.
Then Johnson met with Trump on Thursday, and suddenly on Friday he announced that hey, that ethics report shouldn’t be released after all because Gaetz is no longer a member of Congress. Neat trick!
Johnson has this thing he does when he’s listening and preparing to lie, where his mouth curls into a frown so he looks like a church deacon warning kids to stop talking during a homily. Or possibly like the troll hearing someone trip-trapping across his bridge.
Tapper asked Johnson if Trump had “encouraged” his change of position. Johnson deflected by saying that his words are “entirely consistent,” and that he really has no idea what’s in this report. He then claimed:
“I didn’t even know about it until the middle of this week when it was announced in the press.”
He didn’t know about the report or he didn’t know it was to be released? If it’s the latter, sure, maybe. If it’s the former, ha ha, you want us to believe you didn’t know Matt Gaetz was being investigated by the Ethics Committee? Pull the other one! And then tell your son about it and promise to do better!
As to Johnson’s statement that golly gee, no, Trump hadn’t talked to him and gotten him to change his mind, yeah, right. And we’re married to Morgan Fairchild.
No, Johnson swears he is taking a principled stand that we don’t want the House Ethics Committee going after private citizens like, say, Jake Tapper. We’re a little disappointed that Tapper didn’t respond with, Hey jagoff, I’m not a former House member who is up for the job of chief law enforcement officer of the entire country, would you like to try that one again?
Anyway, Johnson is wrong that releasing this report would be an unprecedented action. The House has released ethics reports on former members after their resignations. Back in the late 1980s, the Ethics Committee investigated Buz Lukens after he resigned over accusations that, as with the Gaetz allegations, he had sex with an underage teenager. So there.
Tapper also put Johnson on the spot by asking if it mattered to Republicans at all anymore to have leaders who are “moral in their personal lives.” Which, ha ha, no, that has not been important for several decades. It certainly hasn’t been important for the length of our adulthood, and we were already a voting adult when Newt Gingrich was yelling at Bill Clinton about his extramarital affairs at the same time that he was cheating on his second wife with the woman who became his third.
Johnson’s response was to dodge the question:
“Uh, sure, that’s an important issue for anyone in leadership. What I’ll say about the nominees the president has put forward is that they are persons who will shake up the status quo. And I think what the American people … what they believe and what they’ve delivered with the mandate in this election is a demand that we shake up the status quo, it’s not working for the American people.”
In other words, Thanks for your question, Jake. Allow me to answer it with some irrelevant horseshit that will fill the few seconds we have left in this interview.
Way to dig in those tiny heels, Mike Johnson.
The speaker would have us believe that announcing he doesn’t think the report should be released is somehow not him putting his thumb on the scale in Matt Gaetz’s favor. But of course by protecting Gaetz and keeping the report away from the senators who will vote on his confirmation, that is exactly what he is doing.
Ah well, Mike Johnson did not get where he is by having any principles, aside from not getting all tingly in his naughty parts if a woman is showing too much ankle in public. He’s certainly not going to start now.
Inconveniently for Johnson, however, is that a lawyer who represents two women who testified to both federal and House Ethics investigators about Gaetz is spending Monday giving TV interviews with a little more detail about what may be in the ethics report.
POLITICO Playbook is being useful for once. It’s a nice change:
His clients, he said, told investigators they attended more than five and as many as 10 “sex parties” with Gaetz between the summer of 2017 and the end of 2018, during his first term in the House. At those parties, they testified, there were “group sex situations” and illegal drugs were present.
One of Leppard’s clients told investigators she witnessed Gaetz “having sex with her friend,” who was underage at the time, against what she recalled as some sort of game table, according to [lawyer Joel] Leppard.
Was the “game table” a kitchen table with Candy Land laid out on it? We are just asking.
A spokesperson for Gaetz noted that Joe Biden’s Department of Justice had investigated the congressman and chosen to not press charges. “Are you alleging Merrick Garland is part of a cover-up?” they apparently snarked.
To which we say no, we’re alleging that the nation should have a higher bar for its chief law enforcement officer’s job qualifications than “Managed to dodge criminal statutory rape charges despite what sounds like eyewitness testimony.” But we’re not the sort of person who has chosen to work for the likes of Matt Gaetz.
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"What I’ll say about the nominees the president has put forward is that they are persons who will shake up the status quo."
As conservatives, we have always taken the view that the status quo needs shaking up.
Meanwhile, in Upstate New York, it's going to be Matt Gaetz's favorite weather tonight!
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It'll be dipping into the teens.