LGBTQ Nation wrote a droll headline last week: “George Santos denies that he was a pageant queen named Kitara Ravache.” The denial revealed political inexperience. Santos should either have made no comment or said, “What happens in Rio stays in Rio.”
So the congressman loves lying and doing drag (yes, there’s video). Is he trying to supplant Rudy Giuliani? He also echoes the discredited claim that gay parents are harmful to children. Old smears die hard.
On the presidential front, commentator Bakari Sellers tweeted regarding the leading GOP alternatives, “If Trump is Pepsi, DeSantis is Crystal Pepsi.” May I humbly suggest that these queens get better drag names?
A scarier headline grabber last week was Solomon Peña, the failed Republican candidate accused of paying gunmen to shoot up the houses of four Democratic officials in New Mexico. Peña attended Donald Trump’s Stop the Steal rally on January 6, 2021. After losing his own race, he insisted he had been cheated despite trailing his opponent by 48 percentage points.
At least the New Mexican Republican Party reacted responsibly, saying, “We are thankful that nobody was injured by his actions. If Peña is found guilty, he must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.” Wait, don’t they have that backwards? I recall a line from the trial over who stole the tarts in Alice in Wonderland: “Sentence first, verdict afterwards.”
Setting aside the finer points of courtroom procedure, it is dispiriting that the fair city of Albuquerque was a target of domestic terrorism. But silly me: The concept of domestic terror is absent from our laws. Terrorism is something we pretend only dark-skinned foreigners do, evidence be damned.
Actor Kevin Sorbo, a MAGA type, tweeted, “If you think the AR in ‘AR-15’ stands for assault rifle, you can’t comment about guns.” Really? What matters is what a thing does. AR-15s are tools of mass slaughter, for which the Second Amendment grants no conceivable right. If the avowed originalists at the Supreme Court were true to their principles, they would restrict us to 18th-century muskets. Ah, but for displays of manhood, a musket could never match a semiautomatic with a 50-round clip.
Pardon my irreverence. Sometimes we laugh to avoid screaming — or we do both in quick succession. “I can handle a sick old woman,” says actress Vera Miles in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 thriller Psycho, referring to the character Mrs. Bates. The audience laughs because they have seen that Mrs. Bates is no harmless old lady.
The GOP’s collapse into madness and mayhem risks reducing us to a screaming, laughing movie audience. After chuckling, say, at the know-nothing fanatics who have taken over the lower house of Congress, we need to confront the fact that know-nothing fanatics have taken over the lower house of Congress.
The unrelenting winger wackiness is exemplified by the marketing of a “JR-15” assault rifle to children. When “owning the libs” trumps protecting one’s own children, it is clear that the insurrection is metastasizing. At the same time, the forces of civil sanity and accountability have also had successes. Nearly 1,000 insurrectionists have been charged. The Electoral Count Act has been revised to guard against another January 6.
White supremacists dispute the assertion that diversity is a strength. For centuries they stole the wealth of others while insisting they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. Now their only hope of retaining power is to disenfranchise as many people unlike themselves as possible. They think they make themselves more secure by shielding children from the more unsavory aspects of our history.
But greatness is not an entitlement, notwithstanding America’s endless self-flattery. Despite having the most bloated military in world history, we are increasingly challenged economically in the global marketplace. We discredit ourselves by embracing wild conspiracy theories, rejecting science for medieval quackery, and exalting selfishness in the name of freedom.
After World War II, America led international efforts to advance democratic systems. Now we see a surge of fascism and autocracy.
Those who stoke endless grievance and rage are arsonists, not firefighters. We must come together to resist them. As organizer Oren Jacobson tweeted about the debt ceiling fight, “Donald Trump added $7.8 trillion dollars to the debt. And now the GOP doesn’t want to pay the bill.”
The truth will out. With the peril posed by the Republican Party’s crackup, the time is coming for Americans, as it were, to meet Mrs. Bates.
PS: Don’t go into the cellar.