On this episode of Thick & Thin, the boys discuss the latest in the ongoing saga of the tea party rebellion against Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy. They also discuss whether or not the tea parties are really as bad as they seem.
00:00:04.720I did want to talk about this because I, you know, I was so down on Trump and rightfully, you know, disappointed, certainly by even by 2017, disappointed off the Trump train, voting Biden, making fun of MAGA.
00:00:29.840Constantly on Twitter, you know, the story, but, you know, there's just something, I don't know, maybe I have this contrarian instinct that when mediocre, boring people start, when they create a consensus and when they start hating on someone, I'm almost like tempted to defend him.
00:00:54.480And so I have this kind of like weird, weird fascination again with Trump now that he's a wounded animal.
00:01:05.000I almost like have a desire to defend him.
00:01:09.380I think I also have a right, a self-righteous, you could say, desire to defend him in the sense that the Republican Party, someone like Kevin McCarthy, and John Boehner actually used this term quite explicitly.
00:01:25.920He said effectively, we wrangle the crazies.
00:01:29.780So don't worry about the Tea Party, you know, the adults will lasso them and get them in the right chute.
00:01:38.160And I feel like Kevin McCarthy, first off, he was so obsequious to Trump.
00:01:44.240I mean, he denounced J6 and then the moment that, you know, there was a chance to kind of move forward and honestly assess the situation.
00:01:56.180He decides to go into quasi-semi-J6 denial mode.
00:02:03.140He supports the revolution the moment it fails, basically.
00:02:08.020You know, I kind of don't like the idea of these boring, mediocre people like McCarthy, like pretty much the rest of them.
00:02:20.320In some ways, like drafting off the populist energy and wave.
00:02:28.980I mean, and this gets to a theme that's been pretty recurrent with me and Trumpism, which is that the so-called flaws are really its virtues or the bugs are a feature of this thing.
00:02:44.860So someone like Kevin McCarthy couldn't be as successful as he has been as a national figure, local congressman, of course, but kind of a national figure.
00:02:57.660If he didn't draft off that energy of the crazies and Trumpism and this deep anxiety that Republican voters feel and that is expressed in all sorts of rather unhealthy and unhelpful ways.
00:03:14.820And so when they start to try to tame the beast, I almost instinctively support the beast because these people are being fundamentally dishonest in a way.
00:03:28.580They rode the beast into town and then they're now trying to tame the beast or put the beast in a cage or pretend that the beast never existed or maybe even slaughter it.
00:03:39.340And I just have a kind of instinctive sympathy for the beast at this point.
00:03:47.680So you can say a lot of things about the speaker's race.
00:03:54.400One criticism you could say is that McCarthy has already given in to all of the demands of Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert and company.
00:04:05.140He's already I mean, there are reports that he agreed to some kind of situation where there could be a no confidence vote in the speaker with like five votes or something shockingly low.
00:04:19.060So which is which obviously disempowers the speaker.
00:04:22.440I mean, he was willing to go that far to get the prize because this is what his life, adult life is all about.
00:04:29.840He's being speaker of the House. So he's willing to do that almost a suicide act of sorts, because you're going to create a rule like that.
00:04:39.360Someone's going to use it. He's bent over backwards.
00:04:47.880Can they express whom they want as an alternative to McCarthy?
00:04:53.600And to a very large degree, the answer to that question, those questions is no.
00:04:59.820They were now back in a mode of the Tea Party or something.
00:05:06.800It's this vague anxiety about spending and reining in the government.
00:05:14.820And it's, you know, kind of rather abstract in a way they're talking.
00:05:20.600Actually, I've heard talk of term limits. I've heard talk of a few other things.
00:05:25.240I actually listened to Matt Gaetz late last night on a space that he hopped into.
00:05:30.520It was one of these conservative spaces that I'll go into, you know, I don't know, once a week or so.
00:05:35.520And I'll often talk. And he was he was in there kind of explaining these things.
00:05:40.860And it really reminded me of the Tea Party era and this kind of, you know, vague desire for tax cuts and spending cuts.
00:05:49.500And the debt is out of control. I think they've gone backwards in a way.
00:05:53.580So these are some kind of bad things you could say about this rebellion.
00:05:58.560And you certainly could say a lot of bad things about Gaetz.
00:06:02.320You could say a lot of bad things about Lauren Boebert. She's, you know, just kind of dumb, etc.
00:06:09.220But I don't know. I just I just I have a certain sympathy for what they're doing.
00:06:16.960And I guess because the the GOP has relied on this populism to get elected and absent populism, the GOP's got nothing.
00:06:32.320It's just got a bunch of unpopular policies that have been pulled for some time and are clearly unpopular.
00:06:42.660And so they need populism. They need that dark energy.
00:06:47.780You know, Clarice Starling has to go visit Hannibal Lecter.
00:06:50.780They've kind of got to go there in order to be successful.
00:06:55.020But then when they when they completely deny the basis of their own electoral existence, I just I move from like being opposed to them to just having outright contempt for them.
00:07:09.920You know, I mean, that donkey is the thing you rode into town on.
00:07:17.260And you guys are nothing. I mean, I get it.
00:07:20.100Trump's a wound wounded at this point, maybe fatally wounded, but you're nothing without that type of energy.
00:07:27.440What you are is Mitt Romney in 2012 or McCain or whatever.
00:07:32.820You're just unpopular policies, maybe a decent person at the helm in terms of Romney, but just over.
00:07:39.880You can't win, but you can do something.
00:07:43.240You can win, first off, and you can at least capture imagination and create a grand spectacle.
00:07:50.480If you tap into the dark side and and that's what these people are tapping into.
00:07:59.040And so I just kind of like it on some level.
00:08:03.860And like the other thing that I noticed is that this I mean, this whole dynamic is laid out through Matt Gaetz nomination of Donald Trump for speaker.
00:08:22.960And this is there is a precedent for this.