Gaetzgate just keeps getting uglier

| 12:01 pm EDT April 4, 2021
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As you almost certainly know by now, Florida man and Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz is being investigated by federal prosecutors for sex trafficking. Some wonderful bedfellows the conservatives have.

Gaetz first rose to fame as the baby-faced, pompadour-toting fascist gadfly who served D.C. the storming hors d’oeuvre to the 5-course January 6 Capitol storming. Specifically, Gaetz and some of his fellow Republican buffoons in the House stormed a private House deposition in a SCIF (sensitive compartmented information facility) for the first Trump impeachment.

Gaetz always sounded like a caricature of a Republican lackey. I can’t confirm whether it’s true, but purportedly he once said something to the effect of “The best real estate in the world is between the president’s ears.” To be clear, he was talking about the Orange One, not President Biden. Gaetz’s virtual fetishization of Donald Trump baffled me for a time until I learned that, essentially, Gaetz is a Dollar Tree, wannabe Trump. He’s a bad pastiche of a man who thinks a “pastiche” is a kind of nut. This Mother Jones article lays it out for you, but the long and the short of it is that Gaetz exploited connections, became a real estate sleaze, and rode on the coattails of his translucent skin until he was elected to the House of Representatives.

And now, the man who has spent his entire public life posing as a sanctimonious, officious, zealous, “paragon” of an American might be a pedophile and/or a sex trafficker. That’s especially rich given Gaetz furthered the completely fictitious Pizzagate narrative.

Pizzagate this is not. Gaetzgate, this is, and it is proof pudding pop that sometimes life imitates art (or at least internet conspiracies). I should probably get to my point, and it is this: time and time again, when politicians act with suspicious amounts of priggishness, the suspicion is justified by some later revelation of that politician’s very unsavory improprieties.

Think of how Lindsay Graham, Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, and others conduct themselves in that mold. For God’s sake, Lindsay Graham had a tantrum so theatrical and overwrought during the Kavanaugh hearings, it made North Korean newsreaders look stolid. All the more suspicious in the context of Graham’s positively whiplash-inducing flip from Never-Trumper to Trump’s saggy bosom buddy. One can’t help but wonder why.