Surrealistic MyPillow

Here’s where the Republican party is right now: [Note the Politico framing of a remarkably successful evacuation of more than 100,000 people in a week under extreme peril]

As hard as Kevin McCarthy has hammered the White House over the chaotic and deadly U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, he’s under rising pressure from his right to go further.

The House minority leader has repeatedly pushed back on rank-and-file Republicans who want to make a high-stakes call for impeaching Biden over his handling of Afghanistan — a vow that would come due should the GOP take back the chamber next November. But multiple House Republican sources said that even before Tuesday’s fraught end to the U.S. military mission, their offices were being bombarded with calls from base voters for a future Biden impeachment or another more forceful response against the administration.

“It’s a grassroots pressure — we’re feeling it,” said freshman Rep. Barry Moore (R-Ala.), a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus. “I think even some of the Democrats are feeling it.” . . .

Members of the House Freedom Caucus discussed whether to endorse calling for Biden to be impeached during a meeting last week, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the confab. While some were not ready to commit to impeaching Biden,almost all members agreed that “doing nothing is not an option at this point,” according to a Freedom Caucus member at the meeting who talked about it candidly on condition of anonymity.

Freedom Caucus members were “preparing for calling for resignations and or impeachment” last week, this GOP lawmaker said, but were also realistic about the Democratic line of succession.Some Republicans say privately that they have raised the ascension of Vice President Kamala Harris to constituents as a reason why they are not behind impeachment.

In its lovable clumsy fashion, the Democratic party’s collective unconscious decided last year that the way to get things back to normal was to offer up the most anodyne elderly white man possible to all those, um, “economically anxious” diner denizens.

Well this is what’s normal now. (I literally can’t even imagine the level of hysteria on the right if Democrats had elected a woman. If she was a black woman, it would just be 1/6 24/7).

I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Biden is impeached as soon as the GOP takes the House next year, if they do, because the way this works now is that Republicans elect a president who commits lots of flagrantly impeachable offenses, which means that any subsequent Democrat elected to the office has to be impeached, too, because BothSides Do It. (Whether it will be over the withdrawal from Afghanistan or the Right Wing Outrage of the Week at the time is a trivial detail).

Basically the Republican party now openly rejects the idea of any Democrat being a legitimate president. This is what the Big Lie is actually about.

Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., on Sunday promoted false claims about election fraud and warned that there could be “bloodshed” over any future elections Republicans consider to be rigged.

“The things that we are wanting to fight for, it doesn’t matter if our votes don’t count,” Cawthorn said at the Macon County Republican Party headquarters in Franklin, N.C. “Because, you know, if our election systems continue to be rigged, and continue to be stolen, then it’s going to lead to one place, and it’s bloodshed.” . . .

The 26-year-old freshman lawmaker, the youngest member of Congress, has repeated false claims made by former President Donald Trump that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Cawthorn then implied that he would resort to using a gun if necessary to defend against voter fraud in the future.

“I will tell you, as much as I am willing to defend our liberty at all costs, there is nothing that I would dread doing more than having to pick up arms against a fellow American,” said Cawthorn, who added that they need to “passionately demand that we have election security in all 50 states.”

Under present conditions, the idea of pursuing bipartisanship in American politics is a wild delusion.

. . .

An attendee later asked what Cawthorn was “doing to support the 535 Americans that were held — captured in — from Jan. 6,” apparently referring to rioters in law enforcement custody.

Cawthorn described them as “political hostages” and “political prisoners.”

“The big problem is we don’t actually know where all the political prisoners are,” Cawthorn said. “And so if we were to actually be able to go and try and bust them out — and let me tell you, the reason why they’re taking these political prisoners is because they’re trying to make an example, because they don’t want to see the mass protests going on in Washington.”

Another attendee then asked, “When are you going to call us to Washington again?”

“We are actively working on that one,” Cawthorn said. “We have a few plans in motion I can’t make public right now, but this is something that we’re working on. There are a lot of Republicans who don’t want to talk about this.”
…
Luke Ball, a spokesman for Cawthorn, sought to clarify that the first-term lawmaker “wants due process for the prisoners” and “was not advocating for any form of illegal action, only that they receive full due process.”

Ball also clarified that Cawthorn is “not actively working on any ‘protest’ or ‘plan’ to bring people to Washington.”

h/t Alex Saltzberg