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One of the most fascinating concepts in politics is the concept of gaps. It is a difficult concept to put into words, but it is a natural phenomenon that occurs in any number of areas. Essentially, there is a gap between perception and reality. Occasionally, there is a gap between how people feel about something depending on what it is called. If you simply describe the Affordable Care Act you’ll find that the individual planks that make up the law get very high approval ratings. Usually, the law itself gets solid marks for favorability if you use the specific label of the ACA. If you call it Obamacare then it suddenly tanks. We’ve seen this for years. It isn’t a new thing.

There are countless examples of people screaming “keep the government out of my Medicare!” Either way, the favorability for the ACA is at nearly 60 percent presently. Yet, many of those same people are screaming at their representative to repeal Obamacare and replace it with something better. We can dwell on this and I could be mean here, but we will just leave that here as an example of what we are talking about.

Liberals, progressives, and leftists have been dealing with this for years. The greatest example would be the scourge that is socialism. Most people would tell you they hate socialism and think that everything evil is socialism. Yet, when you break it down brick by brick you suddenly find that they support the individual aims that many socialists support. Even when we aren’t talking about socialism itself, the challenge is fighting against the overwhelming perception of what we (whatever you want to call all of those groups collectively) support. For one, we* are not the same. We do not support the same things no matter how often right leaning politicians want to paint us that way.

The challenge for the Democratic party in general and for each of those groups specifically is to find a way to convert people’s approval of the ideas into approval of the platform in general. If you support a majority of the aims within the platform then you support the platform. That seems overly simplistic, but sometimes we need to make things simple.

All politicians label their opponents. It is blood sport in Washington and at the statehouse. Yet, conservatives have been better at it. Somehow a collection of common sense suggestions have become socialism. Socialism has somehow become a Venezuelan hell scape where everyone goes hungry and all of your freedoms get suspended. Most of Western Europe is socialist. The only thing happening there is that people have a robust safety net. Their college education is paid for. Their health care bills are taken care of. They get help with family leave. Their retirement benefits are better. It sounds like hell on earth.

I am not an expert on messaging and that sort of thing. Maybe I could have become a speech writer if I had gone another direction in graduate school. What I know is that we got here through a very targeted and purposeful campaign by conservatives and right wing media. They played the long game. I know that people left of center tend to look at these faulty perceptions and assume that the folks are just stupid. We have to start the slow and painful process of repeating the truth over and over again. Maybe people will start waking up and supporting the things they actually say they support.

It just a matter of time before they all do it.  It’s when a Republican doesn’t outrage you, disgust you, scare you, or make you want to punch them in the face. It’s cringe time.  It’s when you gotta stand against wall to keep that feeling from running up and down your spine until you’re doubled over so badly that you have to eat lunch in a dog bowl.  Republicans can do that to you. And, they seem quite proud of it.

Prime example today: Speaker of the House, second in line to the presidency, and grown ass man without a bank account Mike Johnson has a semi-codified hanky panky relationship with his 17 year old son.  They proudly spy on each others use of pornography.

Okay, that’s not normal. And to make it Olympic contender weird, Johnson hisownself announced out loud into a damn microphone that people will be glad to know that his son is completely porn free including but not limited to the Sears Roebuck catalogue.  Okay, so I made up the catalogue part but everything else is true.

Now, wouldn’t it just be easier to buy his 17 year old son a tee shirt that says “I’m Afraid Of My Weiner” and have him wear it to school?  I dunno how y’all do it in foreign states but in Texas if you have a heterosexual 17 year old male who does not want to look at ta-tas, you get nervous.  And if he’s homosexual, topless pictures of Superman on his bedroom wall bring delight to anybody, am I right?

These people just want to get their noses in everyone else’s private business.  They are far more ashamed of their desire for pornography than their willingness to let people be.

That makes me cringe.

There is an entire real world thing going on while the theater of politics goes on in Washington. The events of this week saw the House of Representatives vote on expelling George Santos. Fortunately for him, the vote failed. The vote failed largely because there was a block of Democrats that voted against the measure. Even if it had succeeded I am sure he would have busted out the “well, my name is not George Santos. It is actually Jethro Simpson so I can stay as long as I want.”

The idea is that since he has not been convicted of anything or levied a successful ethics penalty in the House of Representatives then voting for his removal would be a dangerous precedent. That kind of thinking has the added benefit of foresight and willful blindness all at the same time. Yes, such a move could be used in the future to expel a member that should not be expelled. However, I don’t think a single person would come out and vouch for this guy whatever his name may be.

If you were to shoot the 30+ Democrats would truth serum I am sure a part of them wanted to keep Santos around. Santos is a living, breathing reminder of the GOP’s slide into moral bankruptcy. You can fund raise off of that. You can easily defeat him as over 70 percent of Republicans in his district want him to resign. Resignation would be a rare sign of propriety for someone that we can’t even credibly name at this point. If he were to resign now you could get a fresh Republican on the ballot and possibly retain the seat. Obstinance is a pure act of selfishness on Santos’ part. Of course, he has gotten through life with a kind of bluster that conmen frequently exhibit. Maybe he just assumes it will all work out as it always has.

The whole spectacle points to two very troubling issues in our politics. In the short term, we are incapable of governing when so many people within our government or morally and intellectually useless. We have a government shutdown looming mid-month. We have crises in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe. We have the economy, environment, and so many other alarming situations brewing and we can’t even get the mechanisms of government to function.

The wider or more troubling issue is the nature of our elections themselves. No, this isn’t about voter fraud. That’s yet another made up issue to get the rubes riled up over phantoms of the opera. The issue is who these people are voting for. It’s one thing to vote for an idiot like Tommy Tuberville. That is alarming by itself, but when you have people like Santos and Lauren Boebert that can’t even perform the basic tasks of a member of Congress you have to wonder what in the hell people are looking at.

There is a very troubling undercurrent happening when you are telling voters we have to immediately expel the person YOU just voted for. You are essentially saying that they were never fit in the first place. Well, that brings two immediate questions to the forefront. First, how in the holy hell did they get on the ballot? Secondly, once they are there shouldn’t a majority of the people be able to identify a crook or half-wit when they see one?

Cyndi Lauper recorded a song a few years back called “True Colors”. It dealt with acceptance and self love. “True colors” is a phrase that describes what is beneath the visible surface of someone, or a group of someones.

Their true nature.

So today, as if on cue, the Republicans in the House, along with their newly-minted leader, MAGA Mike, revealed their true colors. $14.3 billion in military aid to Israel must…MUST be offset by $14.5 billion in cuts to IRS funding that was put in place by the Inflation Reduction Act.

That’s a new one.

Military Aid for a military ally has never been offset by cuts to any US government function.

But there it is. The first issue out of the chute in this post-McCarthy Era is to ensure that rich tax cheats can lie, cheat and steal from their fellow American taxpayers once more. Because if they can’t cheat, Israel will suffer.

It’s called a Poison Pill. You wanna help military allies? Here, swallow this first.

When we hear about Mike Johnson’s adopted son, we notice that Hhe doesn’t seem to be in any of the family pictures. He was adopted when he was fourteen. Maybe he is the one taking the picture. Maybe he doesn’t like being in pictures. Maybe we should respect his privacy as Johnson alluded to in the article linked above.

This is an uncomfortable talking point. Admonishing our own is never a joyous experience, but it is one that has to be done every once in awhile. There always seems to be a trail that follows those with prolific anti-gay rhetoric. I think that is when Shakespeare said, “doth protest too much.”

It is in this vain that progressives and gay rights activists seem to be going after Johnson. Perhaps it is just a group of people that watch a little too much Investigative Discovery in their spare time. Years ago there was a similar story involving Matt Gaetz. He apparently adopted a boy from Cuba. Considering how sleazy and sexualized Gaetz is, there was plenty of speculation about what was really going on there.

That same speculation is happening now. Johnson has made a career of ant-gay and anti-lesbian rhetoric and championed legislation that would promote those views. He has opposed legislation that would support those groups. His wife dangles in the gay conversion therapy that feels so repugnant. One thing leads to another and the amateur sleuths assume Johnson is gay and trying to repress it. They are assuming the boy was a furtherance to that end.

I’m really not sure which is worse. On the one hand, you have a young man that really doesn’t want to be in the limelight and you are openly attempting to out him against his wishes. The fact that none of it could be true cannot be understated. You also have a legislator that has said and done some pretty questionable things above board and you are spending your time trying to catch him in some sort of hypocrisy below board.

Is Mike Johnson secretly gay? I really don’t know and I really don’t care. What I do care about is what he will actually do as speaker of the house. I care that he attempted to push the big lie forward and actually did things behind the scenes to make it happen. I care that this fact didn’t seem to be a disqualifying point for his House colleagues. I care that he is already going back on his word to push through aid for Ukraine at the same time as they pass aid for Israel.

I care about a looming shutdown in November that no one has done anything about since they passed the last continuing resolution. I care that he is seen as an improvement over Jim Jordan just because he doesn’t yell as much and seems able to find his sport coat on a daily basis.

What I don’t care about is whether or not he is a closeted homosexual. Maybe that fuels his homophobia and far right views. Maybe it drives him to go whole hog on the evangelical thing. I care what you do. I care how your actions affect those around you, me, and everyone else. Whether there is a deep seeded reason for those actions matters not to the people suffering the consequences of those actions. I’ll let the psychologists and psychiatrists worry about repressed feelings, self-loathing, and all of the other buzzwords we like to throw around these days. Let’s focus on the real stuff and let others worry about the imaginary stuff.