The Road to Splitsville MAD MEN. AND WOMEN.

The Newsletter for Subscribers to THE SPLIT

If, after reading 29 of these newsletters, you’re still thinking, “Splitsville schmitsville. The red states exiting the USA and forming their own country is crazy. Who could possibly be in favor of such a thing?” we invite you to keep reading. Not that you’re wrong. The idea that the political right would want to engineer a split like the one dramatized (to such great effect) in The Split is indeed crazy.

But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have a host of enthusiastic, committed supporters. True, they would have to be crazy, too. But what if such people are not all that rare? What if, in fact, they’re all over the damn place, and they go by the name of The Republican Party?

Too glib? Too reductive? That’s what we thought, too—until we read this absolutely hilarious piece by Dana Milbank in the Washington Post. It’s a sort of Study Guide summary of the buffoonery, stupidity, and sheer derangement of House Republicans over the past few years, from which we learn several important things, including the fact that it’s easy (and may be psychologically necessary) to forget just how many idiots the GOP has been sending to Congress.

With this article Milbank has done us the great service of roping all these yahoos together into a group portrait at once disturbing and hysterical. (The piece is adapted from his new book—which, if it’s anything like this excerpt, will be the laff riot of the season.)

We also learn, from this, the pernicious effect of “normalizing.” One embarrassing doofus per Congressional term is par for the course. But a jabbering, chattering army of them, chairing committees and holding press conferences and calling for hearings and attempting to impeach people for no reason and otherwise polluting the political atmosphere—well, hear about it often enough, and you get used to it. You read about newly-elected Speaker of the House Mike Johnson addressing “a group of Christian nationalists” and you barely blink at this:

Confirmed speakers and award recipients for the gathering Johnson addressed included: a man who proposed that gay people should be forced to wear “a label across their forehead reading, ‘This can be hazardous to your health’”; a woman who blamed gay people for Noah’s flood and more recent natural disasters; and various adherents of “dominionist” theology, which holds that the United States should be governed under biblical law by Christians.

This would be the same Mike Johnson who had “informed his audience that God ‘had been speaking to me’ about becoming speaker, communicating ‘very specifically,’ in fact, waking him at night and giving him ‘plans and procedures.’” Now, we take it as axiomatic that if you talk to God, that’s called “praying,” and is socially acceptable, and not considered a sign of mental ill-health. However, if you think God talks to you, that’s called “being insane.” This is the Speaker of the House.

God, said Johnson, told him that “we’re coming to a Red Sea moment” and that Johnson needed to be prepared — to be Moses! Throughout the speakership battle, “the Lord kept telling me to wait,” Johnson recounted. “And it came to the end, and the Lord said, ‘Now, step forward.’” Johnson told them that “only God saw the path through the roiling sea.”

Those seas have not calmed much since. In 11 months as speaker, Johnson has led the House Republicans not to the promised land but into deeper water, where they have been thrashing, splashing and dog paddling without end. 

Can we get an Amen?

All your favorites are here: Marjorie Taylor “Jewish Space Lasers” Greene; Anna Paulina “I Was Raised As A Messianic Jew” Luna; Lauren “Handsy Oakley” Bobert; the man Milbank refers to as “the excitable Jim Jordan”; and, of course, the King of the Fabulists, George Santos. But there are some you may have forgotten, or never been aware of, including Iowa’s Zach Nunn, who, per Milbank, “described the bloody Jan. 6 insurrection as ‘a bunch of middle-aged individuals … walking onto the floor.’”

You will be the opposite of astounded to learn that this, the GOP Congressional Class of 2022, has been profoundly, almost impressively, unproductive. Milbank: “Calculations by political scientist Tobin Grant, who tracks congressional output over time, put this Congress on course to be the do-nothingest since 1859-1861 — when the Union was dissolving.” But does that mean they’ve done literally nothing? Oh, goodness, no.

In lieu of consequential legislating, they passed bills such as the Refrigerator Freedom Act, the Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act and the Stop Unaffordable Dishwasher Standards (SUDS) Act. On the House floor, the Republican majority suffered one failure after another, even on routine procedural votes. Seven times (and counting), House Republicans voted down their own leaders’ routine attempts to begin floor debates — something that hadn’t happened once in the previous 20 years. 

It’s important, and enjoyable, to mock these boneheads, hypocrites, and morons. But when the laughing stops, the depressing truth emerges: Every one of them was sent to Washington, D.C., by a majority of the voters in their districts—in many cases, more than once! Yes, some human beings in Georgia actually saw how Marjorie Taylor Greene comported herself in the Class of 2020, when she said, among other things, that

Democratic officials ought to be executed; pandemic public health restrictions were akin to actions of Nazi Germany; joining the U.S. military is “like throwing your life away”; the 9/11 attacks were an inside job; various school shootings were faked; members of Congress are being spied on by “Nancy Pelosi’s Gazpacho Police”; Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are murderers; and “the Democrats are a party of pedophiles.”

They saw that, and they decided, “We like the way she represents us. Indeed, we like the cut of her jib. We don’t even know what a jib is, and we like how hers is cut. Let’s send her back again!”

The same can be said of other Republican monsters not currently in Congress, e.g., the egregious and frankly horrifying Mark Robinson, Lt. Governor of North Carolina, and, of course, the buffone di tutti buffoni, the Orange Julius himself, Donald Trump.

Millions of people have voted for, and will continue to vote for, these clowns. They send people to the House of Representatives, not to get things done, but to keep things from getting done—to subvert “government,” which they have been bamboozled into believing is their enemy. When they vote for Donald Trump, it will not be in spite of his incoherent ramblings, his idiocy regarding tariffs, his explicit racism, his well-known sexual predations, his endless grifting, his inability to tell the truth about literally anything, and the disastrous record of his first term. It will be because of these things. They think these are exactly the personality traits necessary in a leader who will put liberals in their place and send immigrants back home.

Which is to say, they think they need a dictator to ensure their “freedom.”

Why do they think this? Because between the inherent irrationality of their religious beliefs, the steady diet of hate from right-wing media, the relentless flood of lies from every member of their political party, and the manipulative propaganda issued by plutocrats driven by greed, they have been made mad—in both senses of the word. Angry-mad, and crazy-in-the-head/bats-in-the-belfry/toys-in-the-attic nuts.

And—Fun Fact--even if Trump loses, they’ll still be out there. They’ll still be who and what they are—and now with an additional chip on their shoulder. They’ll feel “cheated” by “the steal.” So ask yourself this: After they stage the civil disturbances, after the consequent deaths, after the arrests, after their savior has been sentenced for some of his crimes and faces possible trials for others, why wouldn’t they want to leave the bad, bad Union that did these mean things to him? Because it’s “crazy”? Oh please.