Friday Squawking Points
[Editor's Note: We have a very special (and abbreviated) column today, for reasons that should become obvious. Regular Friday Talking Points columns will resume next Friday. Have a great day, everyone!]
You'll have to forgive our brevity this week, but we have been invited to a cocaine-fuelled sex orgy by Washington persons we cannot name at the moment, so we've got to go get ready a little early this week.
Ahem.
Madison Cawthorn caused quite a stir among his fellow Republicans after telling an interviewer he had been invited to orgies by his fellow Republican politicians, and furthermore that he'd witnessed them doing "key bumps of cocaine" right in front of him. He got pushback from his peers because he so obviously broke the Republican Golden Rule -- you can say the craziest possible things about Democrats, but never about fellow Republicans!
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy gave Cawthorn a stern talking-to, after which he emerged and announced he had in his hands a list of all the Republicans who had been inviting Cawthorn to sex parties and another one of those blatantly snorting coke in the Capitol, and that he would be making the list available to reporters soon, after he had had a chance to talk to each of them and offer them the option of just suddenly resigning.
Cawthorn, for his part, sheepishly announced that he had only actually attended "sixteen or seventeen" of these orgies, had never actually seen any Republicans doing lines off anyone's naked posterior, and that the whole thing was really "no big deal, since everyone in America does stuff like this, right?"
Donald Trump immediately weighed in on his new social media network Truth Social, with only the second message he's posted: "I don't know why anyone has a problem with Sex Parties, many people say you can meet very Interesting Girls at these parties -- girls who are, like, 8s or 9s, sometime even 10s -- and that only the best-looking Republicans get invited, never any radical left Democrats or anything, so what's the big deal? And cocaine should have been legalized long ago, everyone knows it's just a fun thing to do. Hey, did I mention I got a hole-in-one the other day? Everyone's talking about it!"
Trump also took the time to respond to the shocking news that there was a gap of over seven hours in the White House call logs for January 6th, saying: "I took a big nap during that time, how could I have been on the phone with anyone? Also, the toilets in the White House were lame -- it takes like 10 or 15 flushes to get rid of a huge wad of paper." These two comments seemed to be connected in his mind, for some reason.
Trump was also in the news for denouncing Biden's ad-libbed call for Vladimir Putin not to "remain in power," which Trump called "a really stupid, stupid thing to say." Trump continued: "Putin is a strong leader and knows what to do with power, unlike Sleepy Joe. Putin should be the one helping me with a regime change right here in America. In fact, if Putin does do me this favor, I promise I would appoint him to be my Secretary of Defense." This rather astonishing statement was apparently handled on social media in some strange way, because every Republican who was asked to comment on it either "hadn't seen it" or "hadn't heard about it." The only one willing to comment was Marjorie Taylor Greene, who wholeheartedly backed Trump up: "That would work for me -- we need to run the military with an iron grip, they've been taken over by the radical woke lefties."
Soon afterwards, the Republican National Committee announced that they had formed a strategic partnership with the Kremlin, so they could both be assured they were singing from the same songbook with their talking points. "It gets confusing the way things have been going," a spokesperson for the committee said, "what with Hannity saying something and the Kremlin using it for propaganda, and then the Kremlin coming up with something that GOP members of Congress parrot -- we decided that what we needed was better coordination, that's all."
Democrats, of course, denounced both Trump's comments and the GOP's announcement as "nothing short of treason," and "selling out American democracy to the Russians." Republicans responded: "What's treasonous is high gas prices -- and we aim to lower them by removing all those pesky sanctions on Putin and the Russians, as soon as we take power after the midterms. Because you know who profits from all those sanctions? That's right -- Hunter Biden. His laptop proves it!"
There was no comment from the Justice Department on any of these accusations of treason, because it all erupted during Merrick Garland's naptime.
President Biden this week signed a landmark anti-lynching law, but while he had invited prominent Republicans to the signing ceremony, none of them showed up. Ted Cruz later released a statement: "Republicans were fine with passing an anti-lynching law, but the Democrats refused to even consider our amendment to it, which would have allowed, under certain circumstances, the vice president to be lynched. We thought it was a prudent exemption to the law, because you just never know when a mob is going to demand the right to hang Mike Pence. Which is all about freedom, of course." Cruz then tried to enter his office, which was almost completely blocked by all the authors of teen self-help books who were desperately trying to convince Cruz to publicly denounce their books -- since this is now the fastest way to guarantee a place atop the bestseller lists.
Senator Mike Braun, when asked, responded that the anti-lynching bill was acceptable but he would have added his own amendment to overturn Loving v. Virginia, because "who gets married to whom is really a matter for the states to decide." Later, we saw Will Smith roaming the corridors of the Capitol, looking for Braun so he could "offer the senator the benefit of his wisdom on whether interracial marriage should be legal." Smith seemed rather tense, but there's no word yet on whether he had made contact with Braun in any way.
Over in the House, 193 Republicans voted against making insulin only cost $35 a month, because, as Kevin McCarthy put it, "Conservatives believe everyone should pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and if one of those bootstraps happens to be lining the pockets of drug makers or dying, well, that's just tough beans. Making prescription drugs affordable is nothing short of socialism, plain and simple! And who wants that?"
President Biden announced the biggest release of oil from America's strategic reserves, which will continue daily for the next six months, in an effort to lower gas prices. The truckers' convoy outside of Washington responded by packing up and leaving town. They weren't impressed by Biden's actions, but rather (as one trucker put it): "We're fed up with ninety percent of the cars on the Beltway being driven by Antifa, and we're sick of getting flipped off 15 or 20 times per mile. So we're heading back out on the open road, where hopefully we'll be surrounded by drivers that cheer us on and wave to us like real Americans should." When asked how long the convoy would be aimlessly driving around the freeways of America, he answered: "Until we stop getting all those donations that allow us to fill up our tanks and not do our jobs -- I've been pleasantly amazed at the gullibility of all those people sending money to us, and I hope it continues forever!"
Speaking of fringe views, Ginni Thomas tweeted out her thoughts for what Republicans should run on in the midterms: "Republicans need not only to support raising taxes on over half of Americans and letting Medicare and Social Security die on the vine, but we should make it a priority to pass national legislation which will once and for all ban the use of litter boxes in K-12 schools, because accepting schoolchildren's contention that they identify as cats is just wrong!!! This should be our highest priority after the midterms!"
And for our final item of the week, the Capitol Police got a celebrity visit this week, from none other than U2's Bono. Bono had written a limerick for the occasion, but to the relief of all he found he had left it behind in his hotel room.
[Poisson d'Avril, y'all! Note: There is only one completely true paragraph in this entire article, and (sadly) it was the one about what Madison Cawthorn said, right up at the beginning. There are other factual launching points sprinkled throughout the rest of it (Bono did indeed visit the Capitol Police, for instance), but the scary thing should be how plausible a lot of this stuff sounds. As American politics gets weirder by the day it becomes harder and harder to write satire -- which is the real lesson of today's column. Hope everyone had a great day today and we'll see you all back here next week as regular Friday columns return.]
Chris Weigant blogs at: ChrisWeigant.com
Follow Chris on Twitter: ChrisWeigant
Full archives of FTP columns: FridayTalkingPoints.com