“Kevin McCarthy is a liar and a traitor.”

April 25, 2022

[Audio version here]

          Over the weekend, Senator Elizabeth Warren said, “Kevin McCarthy is a liar and a traitor.” Although Senator Warren’s statement referred to McCarthy by name, she condemned the entire leadership of the Republican Party. She said,

[T]hat is really the illness that pervades the Republican leadership right now, that they say one thing to the American public and something else in private. They understand it is wrong . . . an attempt to overthrow our government. . . . Shame on Kevin McCarthy!

          Senator Warren is right. It is time for Democrats and the media to stop treating Republican leadership as though they retain even the tattered veneer of legitimacy or decency. They do not. They have dropped all pretense and signaled to the American people they no longer care about truth or the rule of law. Okay. Point taken. We should take them at their word and call them by name. Kevin McCarthy is no longer “Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy,” but “Known Liar Kevin McCarthy.”

          McCarthy demonstrated utter contempt for the American people on Friday. Earlier in the week, the Times reported that McCarthy told colleagues he believed Trump should resign after January 6th. McCarthy attacked the reporting as “totally false and wrong.” The Times then released an audio recording of a phone call in which McCarthy told colleagues he believed Trump should resign. Thus, McCarthy was caught red-handed in a bald-faced lie.

          At that point, McCarthy had several options. One option was to tell the truth, admit he made the statement, but claim that he changed his mind. Another option was to say nothing. But no one expected McCarthy to deny the word-for-word audio recording of McCarthy saying Trump should resign. But that is what he did. In the face of unequivocal evidence, McCarthy told the American people that he did not say the words contained in the audio recording. He went on to say that he never believed that Trump should resign.

          The implications of McCarthy’s doubling-down on his lie are staggering but not surprising. First, as noted above, repeating the lie in the face of incontrovertible proof to the contrary shows contempt for the American public. Second, McCarthy rightly concluded that Republicans don’t care if their leaders lie. See Talking Points Memo, GOP Rep: McCarthy’s Lying Won’t Ruin ‘Very Strong Support’ To Become Speaker Third, McCarthy repeated his lie after receiving Trump’s “forgiveness”, which amounts to a free pass to repeat the lie. And, so the cycle continues.

          Known Liar Kevin McCarthy should not be received in polite company, much less in the hallowed temple of democracy. He should be shunned by friends, family, church members, community members, and members of his party. Instead, he is embraced as one of their own, lionized for “sticking it to the libs” by showing he has no shame, no conscience, no moral compass, and no decency. And no backbone. By groveling before Trump to seek forgiveness (again), he has confirmed his status as Trump’s hand-puppet, playing the role of party leader with a falsetto voice and cartoonish pantomimes supplied by Trump.

          But Elizabeth Warren’s example should not stop with Kevin McCarthy. GOP senatorial candidate J.D. Vance has said that if Trump is re-elected, he should ignore valid orders from the Supreme Court—in effect, calling for a coup d'état by placing the president above the law. Governor DeSantis just signed a bill punishing Disney Corp. that plainly violates the First Amendment. The Michigan GOP has just nominated a candidate for Secretary of State who has repeatedly cast doubt on the 2020 election results. And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene testified on Friday that she never called Nancy Pelosi a traitor—acknowledging the truth only when confronted with a videotape of Greene saying that Nancy Pelosi was a traitor.

          These examples and hundreds more demonstrate that Republican leaders and candidates do not care whether they are subjected to shame or humiliation for taking outrageous positions. Let’s test that proposition by calling them by name. Some are insurrectionists, some are liars, some are despots, some are traitors, and others are corrupt. By labeling them for who they are, the point is not to descend to name-calling. It is to stop the charade in which Democrats and the media maintain the fiction that they are responsible participants in our democracy. They are not.  

          We need more Democratic leaders who will speak the truth about what is happening in the Republican Party. Until others in leadership step up, we must do what we can by shaping public opinion in newspapers, news website, and social media. We don’t have to convince everyone that Kevin McCarthy is a liar. We need only convince enough of them to prevent McCarthy from becoming Speaker in January 2023.

          I will close this topic with a passage from Dan Rather’s essay, Standing Up to Bullies, that expresses sentiments similar to my last newsletter, Florida’s Bully-in-Chief. Dan Rather’s advice applies equally to bullies, liars, and traitors:

But what if those who oppose these contemptuous tactics were to loudly and unequivocally call out the bullying, and the bullies? What if politicians, the press, and good and decent people across the country were to, at least rhetorically, punch back? What if the upcoming election focused on the fact that Trump’s outrages have now infected large swaths of the Republican Party? Can we imagine what that might look like? Would it galvanize voters? Would it inject energy into the fight for the soul of America?

Putin’s war against the Ukrainian people.

• New York Times: Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met Sunday with President Volodymyr Zelensky. They announced the U.S. will return an embassy presence to Ukraine and provide $322 million in additional aid.

• Per the The Kyiv Independent,

  “The Russian Defense Ministry reported that since the start of a full-scale invasion, 951,000 Ukrainians had been forcibly deported to Russia from occupied Ukrainian territories, including those taken before Feb. 24. This number reportedly includes 174,689 children.” [Note: the Russia source for this story appears to be blocked; I am reporting from a secondary source, the Kyiv Independent.]

• Russia continued shelling during the Orthodox Easter holiday, killing civilians, including children, in several cities. The Kyiv Independent, “Russian Easter shelling kills two children in Donetsk Oblast.”

• Institute for the Study of War: Ukrainian Military Intelligence reported on April 22 that several Russian officers had been fired or imprisoned for failures in Ukraine, including the arrest of the Commander of the Black Sea Fleet, Admiral Osipov.

• Another take on Garland’s failure to act (so far) on Mark Meadows.

          Many people, including me, have been highly critical of Merrick Garland’s failure to act on the House’s referral of criminal contempt proceedings against Mark Meadows. Meadows refused to appear before the House Select Committee and was referred to the DOJ last December. The long silence has been viewed as further proof that Merrick Garland does not have the intestinal fortitude to pursue Trump or his high-level co-conspirators.

          Marty London begs to differ. In his latest post, Don’t Sell Merrick Garland Short—Yet. As Marty explains,

Recent disclosures have made it clear that Mark Meadows’ criminal exposure goes well beyond a misdemeanor count of contempt of Congress. . . . Meadows may be facing a raft of felony charges for conspiracy and sedition, and the five-month delay in acting on the contempt referral may very well be because Garland has something substantially larger in store for Mr. Meadows.

          I hope that Marty London is correct in his intuition about what is going on behind the scenes. While I personally would not give Garland the benefit of the doubt in the way that Marty does, I respect his judgment greatly, so I pass on his thoughts for your consideration.

Concluding Thoughts.

          I don’t know about you, but I am sick of journalists breezily talking about the 2022 mid-terms as if the only elections on the ballot will be for the House of Representatives. While control of the House will be significant, a change in control will not put Republicans “in charge” of the federal government for the obvious reason that the presidency will remain in Democratic hands. Predictions of disaster for Democrats in congressional races ignore the fact that tens of thousands of other elections will be on the ballot in 2022. For example,

• There will be 6,166 state legislative seats (or 84% of all state legislative seats) on the ballot in 2022;

• There will be 308 state executive offices up for election across 44 states in 2022, including 36 gubernatorial seats, 30 lieutenant gubernatorial seats, 30 attorney general seats, and 27 secretary of state seats.

• There will be hundreds of mayoral elections in major cities and tens of thousands of city council and municipal elections on the ballot in 2022.

          So, if you live in a deep-red, gerrymandered district where chances are slim that you can flip your congressional seat to blue, there is a better chance that you can elect Democrats to statewide, legislative, and municipal offices. As we learned in 2020, local officials form an important line of defense in the bulwark of democracy.

          Here’s my point: Don’t let anyone diminish your enthusiasm and commitment to voting in 2022. Every election matters. We can’t predict which obscure officeholder may be the hero who refuses to bend to the corrupt plans of the GOP. Vote in every race on the ballot, top to bottom. The democracy you save may be your own!

          If you find the above information motivating, I urge you to share it via social media by itself or by sharing this newsletter with like-minded friends, acquaintances, and total strangers!

          Talk to you tomorrow!