By Rich Lowry
Monday, April 08, 2024
The first time that Republicans toppled their own
speaker during this Congress, it wasn’t a particularly edifying spectacle, but
Marjorie Taylor Greene is reaching for new lows.
To paraphrase Marx: first as a farce, then as a more
preposterous farce.
Greene made her anti–Mike Johnson case on Tucker Carlson’s show last
week, and it was — as you’d expect — a stew of conspiratorial thinking and
sophomoric ranting. You might say the anti-Johnson forces aren’t sending their
best, but such is the weakness of their case that MTG is the
best they’ve got.
There’s a serious case against funding Ukraine, based on
the scarcity of our matériel and the geostrategic preeminence of Asia over
Europe, but Greene and her friendly and encouraging interlocutor didn’t come
within a hundred miles of it.
Greene complained that in the space of a couple of
months, Johnson has gone from a good Christian conservative to being
indistinguishable from Nancy Pelosi.
Put aside the rank and grossly unfair exaggeration, what
might have happened to change Johnson’s view of his role in Congress? Would it
have something to do with the fact that he went from a backbencher with no
responsibility to the leader of a narrow, fractious majority that, unless
it can show some minimal ability to govern, is headed straight to the political
dustbin?
Just asking questions . . .
Obviously, it’s one thing to inveigh against spending
deals when what you say or do doesn’t matter much; it’s another to be the one
who has to decide whether to lead your party into a shutdown fight that it will
definitely lose, blighting its political prospects for no good reason.
Similarly, Johnson should feel a responsibility to at
least get a Ukraine package to a vote. There’s a bipartisan majority in both
chambers of Congress in favor of sending more aid to Ukraine, and Johnson is
the one standing in the way. If he doesn’t move and Ukraine subsequently
collapses on the battlefield, he will have played an outsized role in the
defeat of an ally at the hands of a U.S. adversary. That’s something to think
about.
Greene, who has nothing if not an inquiring mind,
speculated that it is really that Johnson might be getting blackmailed.
It’s not clear what this insinuation is supposed to be
about. Johnson is an Evangelical Christian attorney who has not, as far as
anyone can tell, lived a life conducive to creating material for a blackmailer.
What did Johnson do: mess up a citation in a brief ten years ago? Miss a filing
deadline once?
On the question of Ukraine, Greene and Carlson are
self-professed nationalists who apparently have no idea why people might want
to defend their homeland.
Greene said supporters of the war in the West care most
about “murdering” Ukrainians, a bizarre way to characterize support for a war
of self-defense. As if we would be doing Ukraine a favor by letting it get
conquered and subjected by a predatory neighbor.
If this is the standard, every leader who has ever
resisted a foreign invasion has engaged in the “murder” of his or her own
people. If only Joan of Arc hadn’t been party to the murder of so many
Frenchmen as she tried to expel the English in the Hundred Years’ War, and if
only Elizabeth I hadn’t murdered so many British sailors in the course of
checking the Spanish Armada.
Or, to extend the logic further, the French in World War
I when they were a bulwark against Wilhelmine Germany? Reckless
warmongers. The French in World War II when they capitulated to Nazi
Germany quickly? Admirable realists and humanitarians.
Carlson, as he often does, made much of the Ukrainian
government’s actions against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Whether you
agree with what Ukraine has done or not, it is relevant to know that the church
is a cat’s paw of Moscow, although, of course, that wasn’t
mentioned.
Greene went on to say that it violates “every tenet of
our Christian faith” to aid Ukraine, and people who support Ukraine can’t even
call themselves Christians. That the United States should feel a moral
compulsion to sit by and watch authoritarian states threaten the European order
in pursuit of a neo-imperial and anti-Western agenda is, shall we say, an
interesting interpretation of the word of God.
Doing a little somnology from afar, Greene also noted
that Johnson is always complaining that he’s tired and only getting three hours
of sleep. Since she, too, has been very busy in her life but always gotten
seven or eight hours of sleep a night, she believes this shows that Johnson
must have a guilty conscience that’s keeping him up. (Carlson thanked her for
making this “deep point.”)
Maybe Johnson’s sleep is disturbed by the thought that
his majority is so small that someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene matters. And
who can blame him?
No comments:
Post a Comment