Exhuming McCarthy Having narrowly averted a government shutdown, the United States is, as ever, having a profoundly normal one. Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has been ousted by his colleagues, the first US house speaker to suffer such a fate. Only one has enjoyed a shorter term than McCarthy, and to give you a sense of how long ago that happened, the guy, Michael C. Kerr of Indiana vacated the office by dying of consumption.
Fewer than a dozen rebel Republicans, numbering among the party’s far right and led by Donald Trump loyalist and villain from an ’80s teen movie Matt Gaetz, voted to get rid of McCarthy, but the Republicans’ wafer-thin majority in the house and the Democrats’ (no doubt highly amused) decision not to bail him out sealed his fate.
McCarthy’s crime was nominally his recent concessions to President Joe Biden, advancing the stopgap funding bill that averted the shutdown, but the party’s far right has long used him as a way to burnish its MAGA credentials. He had attempted to win them over by announcing an impeachment inquiry into Biden, and had been talking tough as recently as last month, telling a private meeting of Republicans to go ahead and “file the fucking motion“.
The looming question of whether Trump would weigh in to save or condemn McCarthy was sort of answered in the negative — he expressed frustration via his Truth Social network that “Republicans are always fighting among themselves” rather than “fighting the Radical Left Democrats who are destroying our Country”, but nothing more concrete than that.
In a classic case of “dog catches car” though, it appears the Gaetz crew doesn’t have an obvious replacement in mind — and given the contortions McCarthy had to go through to get the gig, only to be offed after less than a year, we wonder who’d want it. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina has taken up the chair temporarily, so the work of the house will continue.
Trump watch Of course this all emanates from Trump, that seismic agent of change, one of the most significant figures of our century so far, whose impact on world politics will be studied by theorists and historian for generations to come (assuming we get any). Let’s check in on the man himself at a recent rally, playing an unprompted and slurred game of “would you rather” with himself regarding whether he’d prefer to die at the hands of a shark or via electrocution:
Blinken you’ll miss it Meanwhile, Democrats are clearly worried they’re falling behind in the demographics that vote for parties whose representatives make them embarrassed to be alive. Here’s how they fought back — by having Secretary of State Antony Blinken perform blues legend Muddy Waters’ classic of swaggering sexual bravado “Hoochie Coochie Man” at a State Department function launching The Global Music Diplomacy Initiative:
His singing is perfectly adequate. Everything else about it is clatteringly tone deaf. The top few comments give an indication of how it’s gone down:
Islands in the Stream Last week we brought you the story of the tipster who asked Australia’s streamers if they were going to keep Russell Brand’s movies on their services after a series of allegations including rape and abuse levelled at the former comedian. They received a lot of carefully worded lip service from Binge and Disney+ — but we had a look, and all of the movies are still there:
Hell, as far as Stan — which never got beyond auto-reply in engaging with our original tipster — is concerned, Brand’s work in Rock of Ages is simply “Must-See”:
