Happy New Year!
Sorry for the belated wishes, but I’ve been busy planning my new book. Its tentative title is Failure to Detox: Why Republicans Can’t Kick the Trump Habit. I'll be talking about it much more in the coming weeks.
One of the book’s themes is that Republicans are objectively worse than normal human beings. There are an infinite number of dispositive examples of this assertion. But a glance at today’s news is just as illustrative.
Of course, you all know about George Santos, the pathological liar who lied his way into a congressional seat from New York. It’s hard to know whether his lying is more pathological than Trump’s, but it’s certainly even more brazen.
Trump has never yet admitted to lying. He just lies and lies and lies and moves on. Santos, by contrast, has taken the Trump drug and boosted it with Fentanyl-laced heroin. He admits that he has lied—and then he lies about that, saying that he’s always lived a good life. And to double down on that, he lies some more, saying that he’s never been accused of bad actions. (He has, of course. That is why he is being investigated on the local, state, federal, and international levels.)
That Santos is a Republican is no surprise. You could not even imagine a Democrat getting away with such childishness.
But what really shows that Republicans are worse than normal people is that most of the Republicans in the House are refusing to discuss bouncing him from Congress. The despicable Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, who is also a deeply vacuous moron, even tried to turn the tables on a reporter who was asking why McCarthy isn’t doing anything about getting rid of Santos. McCarthy implied that the reporter was unfairly judging Santos, demanding to know what the “charges” were against Santos and bombastically exclaiming that people are innocent until proven guilty in *his* America.
The reporter rightly responded that Santos had admitted to lying on a monumental scale, no doubt expecting that McCarthy would realize that it isn't necessary to charge a self-confessed criminal. But McCarthy just moved on to other excuses, like claiming he couldn't remove Santos without his constituents’ assent. But that too is a blatant lie, since Congress has always been able to unseat representatives who are too corrupt to hold such a post. (Remember how Nancy Pelosi got rid of the sexual pervert Anthony Wiener?)
OK, you say. McCarthy, Santos, and all the Republican congresspeople who are keeping mum about this are the lowest of the low. But what about the six or so Republican congresspeople who are demanding Santos’s resignation. Aren’t they at least as good as normal people?
No, they are not. The proof is that none of them stood up to Trump, the industrial-scale dealer of vice to Republicans. They stood with Trump through all his criminality, all his vicious hate-mongering, all his grifting, all his lying. They stood with him because he was useful to them. Because he got them power, which is what they really care about.
So why are they stumping against Santos? Because he doesn’t bring them power. He brings them embarrassment, continual struggles to explain why he's there, and guilt by association. It's not hard to explain the self-interest involved. But it shows that Republicans are praeternaturally self-interested, much more so than normal people.
Normal people have a self-investigation mechanism. They constantly ask themselves whether their decisions are being made more for their own benefit than for the benefit of others. Like everyone else, they often act out of self-interest, but they have a limit beyond which they begin to feel uneasy. And they eventually chide themselves if they become too selfish.
That is not the way of Republicans. At least not any more. There may have been a time when there were normal people among Republicans. But the Trump phenomenon has pushed them all out of the party. The low-lifes can’t tolerate them because low-lifes have no limits to their self-interest. And Trump gave them the excuse to pursue it without check.
That is why today’s Republicans lie flagrantly. That is why they say one thing if it suits their aims one day and the complete opposite if it suits their aims the next day. Self-interest trumps everything—ethics, religion, decency, patriotism. And contradicting oneself in public has no consequences, as Trump proved day-by-day, hour-by-hour.
People like that are simply objectively worse than normal people. And so are today’s Republicans.
So when you hear McCarthy and his associates complaining that Republicans are treated differently than Democrats (as they are now claiming that Biden is getting off lighter than Trump for classified document infringements) please remember this: worse people deserve to be treat worse than normal people. They are just getting what they have worked so hard to earn—treatment that befits liars, grifters, con men, thugs, insurrectionists, and Republicans.