Imbeciles and loudmouths
It made headlines last week when the largely obscure Sen. Markwayne Mullin from Oklahoma challenged the head of the Teamsters Union to a fight on the Senate floor and largely embarrassed himself, but what flew under the radar was when a fight nearly broke out between Ron DeSantis’ longtime ally Scott Wagner and the head of his super PAC, Never Back Down. Keep in mind that this argument arose over budgeting, at a time when DeSantis needs to come up with an effective way to go after Nikki Haley (something pretty easy to do, by the way) if he wants any shot at surviving until New Hampshire in the next few weeks.
It’s one thing for rival camps to fight each other before a general election, but these are people on the same team – and they probably wouldn’t have a need to attack each other either, if DeSantis didn’t find a way to burn through $200 million of a super PAC’s money before 2024 even came about. The media is largely reporting this as Republicans resorting to lawlessness and violence, but the real takeaway here is that the party is pretty much reduced to imbeciles and loudmouths – while most of the people with any brains fled the ship a long time ago.
I’m not saying Republicans can’t be dangerous – quite the opposite, as they still are and they’re not likely to go back to believing in democracy any time soon, but stop trying to rationalize any of their demented stunts as calculated moves. The party has always liked to brand itself as being tough and asking questions later (or never), but the problem is that this kind of mentality has brought them to a place where no one is able to steer the ship.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making