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Fire-Breathing Matt Gaetz Burns Down Half of Florida
Matt Gaetz in Florida yesterday, flying low, throws sonic booms into the crowd and across the nation with this awesome speech capping a remarkable year of accomplishment (so far) for one young Representative. The points he makes are the points you want made, the goals he seeks are the goals you want achieved, and he delivers! So why don’t you approve of him?
Those who hated the Tea Party also hate Gaetz. These are the people who thought a decade ago that McCain, Boehner, and McConnell, and for that matter Obama, Holder and Lerner were right to “crush” the Tea Party, and they have no use for Gaetz. He’s everything they don’t want in a Republican Party. But they probably haven’t read this far, so back to the “you” I’m really talking to.
Matt Gaetz is whom we have to thank for this conservative Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. Others helped, but Gaetz led, and Boy! did he deliver. It was Gaetz at the beginning over a year ago, but I’d say that he only really surfaced in the January Speakership wrestling match. Gaetz forced a debate, set the terms, and accepted Boehner’s — I mean McCarthy’s — pledge. And then Gaetz held McCarthy accountable when he backslid, which brings us up to date.
I’m not saying that Representatin’ is easy, and McCarthy was in a bind, true. But much of that bind was arranged, like so much in Congress, like when the EPA arranges to be sued by its lunatic friends, so that a court commands the EPA to assume powers and take actions repugnant to the Constitution, neither intended nor spelled out in any law. Win-win for the bad guys, and so it goes with much of the Congressional log-rolling, the sort of stuff that Mitch McConnell and John Boehner promised was OVER when they said “the era of business-as-usual IS OVER.” And then they went right back to business as usual, and vowed to “crush the Tea Party,” so that’s how that relationship went.
If you were Tea Party back in the day, please recall what we wanted — not to form another actual party. Recall that the title “Tea Party” is of course a reference to the Boston Tea Party, and describes an energetic rejection of abuses by a self-selecting group of people, not the formation of a formal political faction. We never (most of us) wanted to form a new party, but to take over the existing Republican Party by holding it accountable. Is this not now being done?
Matt Gaetz is the leader who stepped into that void, seemingly while we weren’t looking, and has brought order and results from chaos and a pattern of defeat.
Remember this speech in 2027. Something tells me you will be reminded.
h/t @bobthompson for spotting this speech linked in an article at the Conservative Treehouse.
I’m also working on a post describing the “post road” I took to Matt Gaetz. Keep your eyes peeled.
Published in General
Because the teevee told me not to.
Dang. Exactly the focus of my next post (teased already in this one). Drew is awake today.
Hell of a speech. Great points, good laugh lines. Fine delivery. Frankly, I’m a bit surprised.
EDIT: The RNC is clearly desperate.
I think some of the Lawfare people tried to eliminate Gaetz early when they saw he was trouble. Same tactics they have ongoing with President Trumph except in the President’s case they are using fake or mal-interpretation of law. Sundance has some very good commenters on his blog (along with some not so good) but I like this description of the purpose behind the Lawfare strategy from a couple of commenters.
The commenter goes by Battleship Wisconsin:
“In a comment posted to that other article, Mike Robinson made this reply to my remarks:
“Fake news. Even if Biden did “reclassify,” a former President retains the highest level of security clearance forever. And he has special rights concerning his own materials. The National Archives are exactly that: “Archivists.” They do not make the rules.
The ones who broke the law were the FBI agents who pawed through material they had no right to see, then carried it out the door of the secure facility and loaded it into unsecured trucks.”
My response to Mike’s remarks was this:
A better understanding of how lawfare tactics operate is required here. The objective of this particular form of lawfare attack on President Trump is to keep him and his staff tied up in defending themselves against criminal charges.
What special rights President Trump either has, or does not actually have, as a former president have been placed into legal question as a direct consequence of the Mar-a-Lago raid. From a lawfare tactics perspective, that was the purpose of the raid.
As a lawfare tactic, the raid itself was the process means of automatically establishing a legal doubt that these presidential rights actually exist; and if they do actually exist, under what conditions and circumstances those rights exist. In other words, the DOJ has ignored the true legal merits of the raid in order to automatically establish a long and expensive lawfare process for examining the legal questions.
The fact that the courts have accepted the Mar-a-Lago indictment and has initiated criminal process hearings is evidence that the DOJ’s lawfare approach has been relatively successful so far. And so one cannot dismiss the Mar-a-Lago raid and its aftermath as having no consequences for the 2024 election cycle.
IMHO, President Trump is certain to be convicted of some number of bogus criminal charges in one or more venues before the 2024 election cycle is out. The larger question remains, will any of these bogus criminal convictions have any impact on his march to become our 47th president?”
The new House Speaker along with President Trump on the campaign trail may be the only major “bully pulpit” type resources available in the coming year so we need to get everything we can from them.
Gets tiresome, huh?
That sounds like the usual BS to me. It’s not that clear. EO 13526 addresses the subject, but I’m not sure it is the final word.
You should see the contents of the “SPAM” folder. Mike Johnson, James Comer, and a couple others.
And that’s why the Lawfare strategy works.
What is this an image of?
Dude. After these guys went out of their way to contact you personally with a hand-typed email, the least you could do is mail them 25$ so that they can put you on the list for the 50$ DOUBLE LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD – with all the additional benefits it entails!
A “Lifetime Achievement Award” while I’m arguably still alive: WTAF? Who knows what I could accomplish for the RNC in the next day or two?
I’m “like” #13, yay!
It also works as an acronym, Taxed Enough Already.
I loved the analogy Gaetz made of the Congress omnibus budgeting as your wife saying “Honey! You have to give me $100,000 right now or we can’t buy food all year!”
Yep. Pleasantly refreshing. People need to get over his feral Spock eyebrow.
I would endorse the full scoop of public disrespect for McCarthy delivered here if only he had piled on yet another scoop.
I thought Gaetz had it right a month ago but I didn’t know what the outcome would be. I think we got as good as could have been expected and now we must take advantage of that. Maybe my last years will be interesting times after all.
I suspect that is strategic, the lack of another scoop. McCarthy is still a member, whose vote will be needed at various times. Gaetz is better at this stuff than McCarthy.
I watched it twice. I think that is the best GOP speech I have heard in decades. It is funny, specific, and blistering mixed with slow setups. The pacing is remarkable. If we had a dozen leaders like this, we might just save this country.
That was a great speech. Anyone who has a problem with it, please explain. I heard nothing that I didn’t like.
Thank you for posting this. I agree wholeheartedly: Gaetz was in the right. The GOPe is indeed an enemy of their constituents.
And the new Speaker is a very big step in the right direction.
I was a Tea Partier. I also recall none other than Andrew Klavan comment on hearing a Republican official (elected, not elected? Andrew declined to provide names, but said we would certainly know the person) express utter contempt for the Tea Party and claim that the Republican Party would shut down the Tea Party (in the event it was Obama through the IRS, and Lois Lerner, that bolloxed up the Tea Party with delays in applications for tax exempt status and illegally shut Tea Partiers out of civic participation, with malice aforethought. But the Republican Party was completely on board with that effort. Hence, Trump. I for one have all the disdain for elected Republican officials generally that they have for deplorable me.
Back when I still subscribed to a couple of print magazines, I read an article about the TEA party that described them as going up and down the street swaggering into bars and intimidating people. They admiringly spoke of The Turtle saying that when you bully your way into his bar, he locks the door so you can’t leave. That was a reference to bar fight scene in the movie A Bronx Tale. McConnell was quoted as saying of the TEA Party, “We’ll crush them.” I’ve despised the bastard ever since.
I don’t know what constitutes having been in the Tea Party. I supported them but I didn’t go to any events.
One thing I remember is that some higher up republicans joined, apparently to disrupt them, and try to steer them into establishment directions.
It used to be, very long ago, antebellum probably, that the representatives in the House were numerous enough that people knew their representative personally. Senators were chosen by the state government and represented the States.
Now, senators are no different from representatives except for the term of office is three times longer. And now, representatives represent so many people that few people have ever met or seen who they voted for.
I suspect that if representatives had constituencies closer to 10,000 people, maybe a lot less, there might be more communists in the House, but at least they’d be in the minority.
Yeah, who’s going to build the Congress building for almost 40,000 members? And it would need to increase by about 100 members per year, due to increasing population.
Zoom. And the public can vote on their filters, if any.
Yeah great, China runs Zoom. Let’s give them even MORE control over us.
Why not just put the government on TikTok while we’re at it?
We’ll do a new one, then.
No matter how you do it, a multi-thousand-seat House isn’t going to be workable. Dividing up into 50 separate “countries” wouldn’t avoid that problem either.
The way I see it, that makes you a member in good standing.
Enemies and “friends” alike wanted us to organize, either to be co-opted, to be led by them, or to have to justify our existence or begin eating sin for somebody else who also calls himself Tea Party. Screw that. I always said that if we organize, we die. With no leader, there’s nobody for the left or the Establishment to shoot at.
Eventually I started answering “who’s in charge of the Tea Party? Who determines x, y, and z?” with “I am. You talk to me.” I figure each of us is in charge of a small Tea Party cell, even if it’s just one. Tea Party is not a standing army in the political realm. It’s a guerilla force in waiting.
And every one of us is still here. Just because Lois Lerner unlwfully disenfranchised millions of Americans through IRS persecution, that doesn’t mean that we died. Trump was a good synonym for Tea Party. Now Gaetz, holy crap. Mike Johnson. And these are just the high profiles. Tuberville in the Senate is making good things happen — making the snakes come out from the cracks, Republican and Democrat alike.
The Tea Party is like clandestine resistance. You stop asking who it is and where to contact, you assume that it exists, and you do your part. When the right fight comes along, you join it.
Anyway, my .02.