A “reign” of morons is the collective noun
Charlie Pierce was right. In his usual understated way.
Lest you think the Republican rot started with Donald Trump, as early as 2013, Charlie Pierce attributed the spreading madness (mockingly) to prion disease. Even then, Pierce suggested Republicans ate the monkey brains back during the Reagan administration:
OCTOBER 04, 2013, 5:00am
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
Only the truly child-like can have expected anything else.
In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress — or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress — a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that does nothing more than extend the possibility of health insurance to the millions of Americans who do not presently have it, a law based on a proposal from a conservative think-tank and taken out on the test track in Massachusetts by a Republican governor who also happens to have been the party’s 2012 nominee for president of the United States. That is why the government of the United States is, in large measure, closed this morning.
We have elected the people sitting on hold, waiting for their moment on an evening drive-time radio talk show.
We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.
We have elected a national legislature in which Louie Gohmert and Michele Bachmann have more power than does the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who has been made a piteous spectacle in the eyes of the country and doesn’t seem to mind that at all. We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation’s insurance companies is the equivalent of standing up the the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson’s account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th Century. We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble.
We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.
This is what they came to Washington to do — to break the government of the United States. It doesn’t matter any more whether they’re doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party’s mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan’s First Inaugural Address in which government “was” the problem, through Bill Clinton’s ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being “over,” through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find “common ground” and a “Third Way.” Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country’s higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.
Pierce lamented lamentables like Reps. Gohmert and Bachmann sitting on the future Trump-branded side of the aisle. But in the fullness of time we got a larger set of whackadoodles.
COVID-19 was late to the party. The prion infection was ubiquitous among G.O.P. lowlights before 2020.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins for some reason thought it worth air time to interview former Trump attorney general, Bill Barr. She asked why, after Trump smeared him he still supports Trump for president in 2024. After endorsing Trump, Trump mocked Barr for it. And Barr? He shrugs it off.
Collins: Just to be clear, you’re voting for someone who you believe tried to subvert the peaceful transfer of power, that can’t even achieve his own policies, that lied about the election, who is facing 88 criminal counts
Barr: The answer the question is yes.
In a Friday promo spot for his special “MisinfoNation: The Trump Faithful” (Sunday at 8 p.m.), CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan played a clip of a woman of the MAGA persuasion insisting that God is referenced throughout the Constitution (not true). She thinks the reporter is dissing her by questioning it. R-E-A-D it, she insists, and pulls it out her cell phone to prove it to him. Guess what?
It’s prion disease, isn’t it? Unless they’re all lizard people.
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