I have to admit, when I try to follow right wing logic my head hurts. The notorious MTG recently came on and tried to give all of us a lesson in global economics. I’m not following. Then again, I don’t have a degree in Economics. My degree was in Political Science with a minor in History. I did take some Economics classes, I took the certification exam in all of the Social Studies and made a 100 on the Economics portion of the test. I’ve taught high school Economics for a few years in my career. I like to think that I’m smarter than the average bear, but what in the heck do I know?

Greene: This comes down to consumers like a single mom who can't afford to buy cereal because the price of grain has gone up so much with this war in Ukraine.. and this is why we have to do everything we can to impeach Joe Biden pic.twitter.com/hnC0kr7xZD

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 11, 2023

So, let me get this straight, we are supporting the war in Ukraine and that somehow is raising the price of grain world wide. Let’s take this slowly and think through this like we were in elementary school. Russia attacked Ukraine. Ukraine is a sovereign nation, so they resisted this attack. They fought back. Are we good so far? Does anyone want to contest this before we move on? In the process of attacking Ukraine they managed to destroy a lot of the supply of grain in Ukraine. This is something countries do when they fight dirty. It makes it more likely that the attacked country will surrender if they are running low on supplies. Am I good so far?

So, essentially what MTG is arguing is that we shouldn’t support Ukraine. We should allow Russia to win. Maybe she could explain how this would help us with the cost of grain. She needs to game this out. She needs to explain this to us like we are five years old. I’m not that educated. I just have a masters degree, so I’m just spitballing here, but I assume she wants to support Russia. She knows most people don’t want to support Russia. She would be right on that account. So, if she came out and said that she wants to support Russia she would be roasted by everyone in the media. So, instead we are going to tell people that if we support Russia then cereal will be cheaper. Maybe that’s true. Maybe those supply chains would be rebuilt faster if Ukraine just surrendered. I’m guessing that’s not the case, but I reiterate that I’m not an expert on global economics.

What I do know is constitutional law. I know Congress controls the purse. I know they are the ones that decide how much money to give to Ukraine to help them against Russia. I’m struggling to see the connection between this and impeaching Joe Biden. Even if you were to say that Biden was solely responsible for the policy, you cannot impeach because you disagree on policy. You are free to make an argument against funding Ukraine. Again, I think most Americans support Ukraine in this conflict. So, instead we are going to say Biden should be impeached for um, well, er, ah, yeah, well you see, geez I’ll get back to you on that.

There are occasionally moments that make you smile. They are hard to explain. We shouldn’t smile in these moments and we often feel guilty about not feeling guilty about someone else having a hard time. The Germans came up with a name for it. They called it schadenfreude. The closest English translation I have heard when describing this uniquely German word is “shameful joy.” It seems the notorious MTG was wielding the gavel for some stupid reason and she was trying to bring the House to order. As you might suspect, it went about as well as any of us could imagine.

I’m usually not one to laugh at other people’s misery. It’s like watching someone stumble down the stairs. You want to make sure they are okay first. After all, none of us really aims to be that big of an asshole at the end of the day. We aren’t rooting for bodily injury here. However, if someone just has a bruised ego we find ourselves unable to suppress at least just a tiny chuckle at their expense. The beauty of schadenfreude is that others feel it about us in equal proportion. Paul McCartney once said, “the love you take is equal to the love you make.” In this case, the bad vibes you take are equal to the bad vibes you create.

MTG is the kid in the back of class that heckles the teacher every day and makes his or her life a living hell. Then, suddenly when the teacher is gone the assistant principal gives her a dose of her own medicine and puts her in charge for a day. Suddenly, she gets to feel the way that just about every other adult in that room feels when they have to deal with her performance art. Normally, I wouldn’t condone this kind of behavior from anyone. Normally, I would say you need to rise above it all and show the world you are the adult party. That would ignore the fact that these are not normal times.

I couldn’t tell you how all of this ends. A part of me wonders whether this is just the natural course of things. I have to wonder if my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents felt the same way about their elected leaders. Did they see a few statemen mixed in with a whole group of performance artists that couldn’t care less about doing actual good? Was it always like this? Were we always somehow represented by the worst among us? Deep down, I know this isn’t true, but I keep holding out hope that we can somehow bypass these idiots to keep this thing going. In the meantime, enjoy a good laugh.

Like everything else in our reality, media is ever evolving. The question is whether it is evolving in the right direction. That question could not be clearer following Marjorie Taylor Greene’s interview on 60 Minutes. Someone somewhere along the line said that the fourth estate’s job was to call balls and strikes. However, after decades of accusations that the mainstream media is liberal, mainstream media decided their job was to make sure there were an equal number of walks and strikeouts. It sounds the same and sometimes looks the same, but in a world where one side of the ideological divide has allegedly gone insane, calling both pitchers the same doesn’t do the same thing when one is throwing pitches against the backstop and into the dirt.

The decision to interview a MTG cannot be an easy one. On the one hand, she is a leader within the modern GOP. It is difficult to ignore someone with as much clout and sway as she has in the modern GOP. Yet, the modern GOP has become something beyond a mainstream political party these days. She is anything but mainstream. So, it begs the question of whether someone like her deserves to be thrust into the mainstream. One could argue that it introduces an important current figure to an audience that might not be familiar with her. If done correctly one could claim that showing her warts and all could be a public service should her star rise even more. On the other hand, you are single-handedly putting forth ideas that are far outside of the mainstream. There is an inherent danger there.

If one were to look at the best possible outcome they could compare this to the Katie Couric Sarah Palin interview. Palin was the vice presidential nominee for the GOP and seemed very charismatic. That was until the Couric interview revealed that she knew very little. The interview is attached for anyone that really wants to relive that, but Couric did very little pushback. She played matador and allowed Palin to self-destruct on her own. One could argue that Lesley Stohl was trying to do the same thing in her interview of MTG. She allowed those crazy ideas to come bubbling over with very little pushback. Democrats were called pedophiles. We know she once called school shootings false flags. Palin was revealed to be an empty suit. Was MTG revealed to be an extremist? Only time will tell.

Was it wise to give her a platform in the first place? That’s not an easy question to answer. What would have been the most effective way to handle the interview? That’s an even harder question to answer. As satisfying as it would seem to just ambush her with all of her crap over the last half decade, it is possible that such a gamut would backfire. Those that know of her have already formed an opinion. Those that haven’t might feel like ambushing her feels cruel and unnecessary. Allowing her to throw out her manifesto unchallenged doesn’t feel right either. The key was for average everyday Americans to come away seeing her for what she really is. How much faith do you have in the intellect and gumption of the average American?

Perhaps I’m not the right guy to deliver this particular message. After all, I had to remind my supervisor that I hadn’t sat in a math class in 25 years when he decided that I should support a high school Geometry class. However, I worked it and managed to survive on the other end. Understanding basic math is probably a bonus, but I have no way of knowing for sure. As far as I know, Geometry is mainly about triangles and stuff. It’s not like we were splitting the atom.

The notorious MTG might be the most brilliant mathematician in Congress. She has mistaken millions for billions more than once and even then the results were hilarious. A quick tutorial for Marge: a billion dollars is 1000 million. One billion people is 1000 million. In the case above, she said one school had gotten a 5.1 billion dollar grant. That’s amazing. I want to work at that school. I’m sure teachers are getting spa treatments and corporate retreats during their conference period.

MTG tweeted that since Biden took office, 6 billion people have crossed the border illegally. Also:
– Lauren Boebert stole her Friends lunchbox
– 50 trillion Chinese spy balloons have been disguised as decorations at birthday parties
– The Jewish space lasers bleached her hair pic.twitter.com/JIOVbK8P8C

— Paul Rudnick (@PaulRudnickNY) February 24, 2023

Maybe that is why I had 97 kids in my 6th period English class all of the sudden. Of course, I’m being sarcastic lest anyone believe we really have more than 100,000 kids in each high school. Then again, maybe we could accommodate those 100,000 kids if someone threw 5.1 billion our direction. Maybe the cross fit is starting to mess with her brain. Maybe the numbers of new billionaires has clouded her judgement about how much one billion actually is. Of course, it’s just more likely that she’s a dumbass. Remember children, numbers matter and we can’t just make up any stupid figure that enters your brain. Pencils down. This has been your daily math lesson with the notorious MTG.

There is an episode of “Night Court” where the characters believe that one of their colleagues had died. The hold an impromptu memorial service for him and all of them try really hard to say something nice about him. One by one they all get up and one by one they all fail to produce anything. Luckily for him, they only thought he was dead. He was in the back soaking all of this.

One wonders whether that will be Majorie Taylor Greene someday. In her latest statements I have to wonder if her goal is to sit in back of that court room and watch her colleagues to fail to come up with anything. Apparently, she questioned why anyone would want to join the military. According to her they are just throwing their life away.

It’s a remarkable turn of events that somehow echoes the former president. So, are her comments an extraordinary example of someone trying to curry favor the leader of the abyss. Lemmings will follow each other off the cliff. Salmon will swim upstream only to die in the end. Republicans will echo the words of a sadist until they cease to be what they once were.

It doesn’t take much to remember a time when conservatives were the ones that loved the military. They would spend on them with reckless abandon. They would heap love on them with every opportunity and would accuse the other side of a failure to love them. Whether their love was true or not, they certainly wanted you to believe it was.

In its place is some kind of cultural nihilism. Nothing is sacred. Nothing outside of self is paramount. There is no high honor. We instead focus on invisible sex traffickers while we ignore the sex traffickers sitting right next to them in Congress. These are all empty pursuits in the name of owning the liberals and maintaining power.

Keith Olbermann used to have his “worst person in the world” segment on his old MSNBC show. Even then it seemed that the moniker was temporary. Someone else would hold that honor the next day. I’m not sure anyone can at this point. MTG is stealing good oxygen from the rest of us. It’s high time that she went away never to be heard from again.