Matt Gaetz: Swamp Monster Slayer or Shameless Hustler?
Is Gaetz all the showboater, the used car salesman, the sex pest, the demagogue the establishment accuses him of being?
Even if we grant that he is, he’s still only 1/1000th as repugnant as a Mitch McConnell or a Lindsey Graham.
Related: MSNBC News Actor, Race Scholar ‘Confront the First Amendment’s Dark History’
At any rate, showboaters and used car salesmen and sex pests abound in Congress.
Alleged sexual perversion is not why it was knives-out for Gaetz when Trump put him up for AG; that was merely the cover.
The real reason they abhor Gaetz is that he is a party-crasher, proverbially and literally. The governing class has been bleeding the American middle class dry for decades now in the service of their multinational corporate state masters, and Gaetz is one of the few in the austere and respectable Congress willing to point it out.
Is the above a PR stunt?
Probably.
You have to get it how you live, as the brothers say, and Gaetz would never get any attention from the legacy media the conventional, respectable way; the kind of Republicans they give preferential air time to are people like Mitch McConnell and D.C.’s most notorious closet case, Lindsey Graham, whenever they have a war to sell.
In the final analysis, I care really only about the fruits of whatever labor a politician or pundit undertakes. In this case, that fruit is increased awareness of the criminality of members of his own class — a rare treasure coming from a man in his position, indeed.
Related: Trump Really Screwed the Pooch With His Surgeon General Nomination
The much more lucrative and safer course of action — which doesn’t result, for instance, in one being the target of an intelligence-run honeypot operation — is to bend the knee, claim one’s own rightful place at the trough, and go hog-wild with the sex stuff without any real fear of ever being exposed via Congressional ethics inquiries, which are reserved for class-traitor heretics like Gaetz.
“Three thousand miles of wilderness overcome by the flow
A lonely restitution of pavement, pomp and show
I seek a thousand answers, I find but one or two
I maintain no discomfiture, my path again renewed
Against the grain, that's where I'll stay,
Swimming upstream, I maintain against the grain”
-Bad Religion, ‘Against the Grain’
Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
Follow his stuff via Substack. Also, keep tabs via Twitter.
Support always welcome via the digital tip jar.
Bitcoin public address: bc1qvq4hgnx3eu09e0m2kk5uanxnm8ljfmpefwhaw