McCarthy’s appointment: we almost witnessed a rat race

Since last Wednesday, I have repeatedly commented on the vagaries of a course for which we only find equivalents before the Civil War of 1861-1865. I come back to it one last time.

The age of emptiness

If arm wrestling is frequent when appointing a speaker, everything usually takes place behind closed doors.

What makes McCarthy’s nomination so spectacular is that we witnessed the entire saga live, with C-SPAN network cameras hiding nothing.

This is how we have been able to witness disgraceful moments between members of the same political party. A little more and we witnessed a real rat race.

Over the 15 rounds, I briefly hoped that we could witness a real democratic exercise. The twenty mutineers, duly elected, held the balance of power. Why not use it to push policies they hold dear? That’s what some of them did.

Others? Opportunists, like many members of both formations, they tried to grab coveted positions. Less noble, however, they monetized their “resistance” on social networks by relaunching fundraising campaigns.

For this new batch of elected officials inspired in the Trump way, whatever the motives, the important thing is to attract attention.

Politics differently

For some very conservative resistance fighters, there were therefore representatives of a new “way of doing politics”. Between the accumulation of clicks and the staging of each gesture, we seem to be heading towards a new type of influencer or the birth of political reality TV.

Among the anti-McCarthy we find elected officials like Paulina Luna, Lauren Boebert or Matt Gaetz. Members of the same brotherhood, all in style and very little in substance.

Here is an example of an advertisement that features Paulina Luna, a Republican rookie that observers are watching:

Lauren Boebert, also obsessed with weapons, did not hesitate to sink into racism to attack an elected Democrat of the Muslim faith.

Matt Gaetz is not to be outdone and his first days of January were occupied by a whirlwind of absurd “news”. He was first associated with an intimate relationship with his colleague Luna, herself the target of accusations of witchcraft by another Tory candidate. This candidate is linked, it cannot be invented, to the infamous Roger Stone.

Dragged into this whirlwind in spite of herself, Paulina Luna claims to have been sexually harassed. I recall in passing that in 2021, she had previously accused her rivals of planning her assassination.

I would not mention these vulgar gossip except for the fact that they reveal two important facts. The first is that we have confirmation that undoing Trumpism will take more than an election cycle. The second is that to achieve his ends, McCarthy had to give in to pressure from uncontrollable elements in his training. He will now have to take it.

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