This weekend on Fox News, Matt Gaetz reassured the anchor that spending his entire last week preening for the cameras day after day, humiliating Kevin McCarthy, and humiliating the entire Republican Party, was not just a long trolling ploy meant for LOLs and campaign donations and because he likes to see himself on TV. “Do you consider yourself a serious legislator?” asked anchor Mike Emanuel. “Absolutely,” said Gaetz. Definitely you betcha.
And look what his weeklong vanity campaign got the Republicans! The weakest speaker in human history, which is exactly what you want when the Senate and the presidency are controlled by the opposite party. Also whatever’s on the secret document that wasn’t part of the rules package, the document that says what McCarthy really gave up to get the weirdo holdouts to either vote for him or vote “present.”
Unfortunately Bloomberg is reporting that Gaetz’s week of peacocking his abnormally large head around has earned him the title of Most Hated Republican In The Whole Entire World. (Bloomberg means most hated by other Republicans.) And that’s a world that still includes Ted Cruz, so it’s a really impressive feat.
Bloomberg notes this tweet from South Carolina GOP Rep. Nancy Mace:
Didn’t stop her from voting for the rules package, while complaining about backroom deals on Twitter.
Bloomberg also pointed to GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw, who referred to Gaetz and other holdouts as “enemies” during the speaker fight. Crenshaw also used the “narcissist” word. He also called the anti-McCarthy Republicans “terrorists,” and then apologized for that, like a coward. (For his efforts, Crenshaw lost his bid to chair the Homeland Security Committee to Rep. Mark Green of Tennessee, a seditionist lunatic idiot who was too homophobic, xenophobic, and bugfuck to be confirmed as Donald Trump’s Army secretary.)
Late Friday night, toward the end of Kevin McCarthy’s 14h failed vote for speaker, things almost came to fisticuffs as Gaetz refused to give McCarthy the vote he needed to at last win the thing. Alabama GOP Rep. Mike Rogers, who will chair the Armed Services Committee, very angrily advanced toward Gaetz and said, “We’re going to remember this. We won’t forget this.” (One of Gaetz’s demands is that he wants to chair a particular Armed Services subcommittee.)
That’s the iconic moment in American democracy we all saw on TV.
Thank heavens, those rough-housing boys made up on Twitter on Sunday. Gaetz said he didn’t believe Rogers should be punished “just because he had an animated moment.” Rogers said he was sorry he “briefly lost [his] temper on the House Floor Friday evening and appreciate Matt’s kind understanding.”
After all those big fights, and after the 15th vote, the one that was a “success,” Kevin McCarthy gave credit to Matt Gaetz, as opposed to the people who had been voting for him the whole time, or the holdouts who caved before Gaetz did.
“Matt really wanted to get everybody there,” Mr. McCarthy said of Mr. Gaetz during an informal news conference later in the night. “Through all of this people’s emotions go up and down, and at the end of the night, Matt got everybody there.”
And we all ask again, what did McCarthy have to promise them?
It remains to be seen whether Gaetz will really end up being long-term despised in the House the way Ted Cruz is in the Senate. It seems to us, though, that however his fellow Republicans really feel, they’re going to have to deal with the fact that he is the effective boss of Speaker McCarthy.
As long as he doesn’t start blabbing about the coke boner orgies or anything, he’ll be fine.
They Do. Not. Like it. When People. Talk. About. The Coke Boner Orgies.
You know, allegedly.
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