The House Speaker Fight Was a Good, Healthy Skirmish – The American Spectator

One way to know when an internal Republican skirmish is something good is when Left media salivate over it. Oh my, how they delighted in 15 rounds of voting for the House speaker! How they reveled in watching the House Republican Freedom Caucus slow down the rush to elect Rep. Kevin McCarthy House speaker! They absolutely loved it.

#MeToo.

If you cannot easily determine what is good or bad for the country, check out the corrupt Left Media Monopoly — ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post — for guidance. Have they rallied behind John McCain as a worthy Republican to oppose Barack Obama? Uh-oh. Have they urged the early voters of Iowa and New Hampshire to advance the “exciting” and “attractive” candidacies of McCain, Jon Huntsman Jr., Jeb!, or Mitt Romney? Yikes! Bad news!

So — are they celebrating now? Great. Happy New Year — and just wait for the ball to drop on Mayorkas, Hunter, and the FBI.

I personally like Kevin McCarthy. His is not my ideal political flavor, but I like him. I like that he is among the few who, so far, have found a way to be all things to almost all Republicans, to unite us for 2024. We need a united party that will not be a house divided against itself. We need the Trump Forever and the Trump Sometimes and the Trump Never people to find a way to live together by 2024, or this Republic is cooked, if not already doomed. We are just about out of time.

Average people are stupid. The word for average is “mediocre.” That is what “mediocrity” means: ordinary. Look it up. And yet “mediocrity” is deemed an insult, not a compliment. That tells you all you need to know about so-so average people, the bearers of common wisdom. Average Americans whined for two years about the Afghanistan withdrawal; skyrocketing inflation; gasoline prices through the roof; their dwindling retirement funds; the impossible cost of food; the strangling of American energy exploration; the deaths of tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars when the Keystone XL pipeline was nixed; transgenderism in the elementary schools; critical race theory everywhere, including our military; anarchy at the border; the depletion of the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve; the absence of baby formula and the need to import it from overseas; Antifa domestic terror and cities on fire; supply lines in chaos; crime in the streets — smash and grab, no-bail “stay out of jail free” cards; and a documented fool and liar and cheat — frankly, a common scoundrel — in the Oval Office, with someone even less qualified as the No. 2.

For two years, the average American whined to surveyors. Even today the polls show widespread discontent — with Biden, with Kamala, with the direction of the country. And then, when average, ordinary Americans — the Great Mediocrity — had a chance freely to do something about it, those average Americans voted to remain steady on the course to disaster. At least masochists consciously understand what they are doing and have an escape word or phrase. But for voters in November 2022, the phrase was “more of the same.”

America needs a shake-up, a controlled earthquake. The Left owns Hollywood and Broadway, movies and television and theater, academia and classrooms, print and most digital media, most social media (with Twitter potentially but not yet liberated). The results are stark. A forthcoming generation has been lost. Under Trump, Europeans and others abroad hated us but respected us. Under Biden, as under Obama, they love us — and laugh at us behind our backs. This has to change. Iran needs to fear us. Putin needs to regard us. Criminals on the street must learn anew to be scared of the police and of courts and judges and jail and prison.

Kevin McCarthy can work with Trump and can work with Never Trump. At this moment in time, that is good. But it is easier and lazier to default to Never Trump than it is to keep up with the aggressive demands of the MAGA agenda. That is why the recent GOP House exercise in democracy was so valuable.

McCarthy now knows that he can lead as long as Nancy Pelosi did, but he has to mollify the right flank every day. No more Bob Michels, Dennis Hasterts, John Boehners, and Paul Ryans. We need meaty leadership determined to pursue a meaty agenda — regardless of whether motivated by principle, ego, or survival. We need tough, no-nonsense.

It is encouraging that McCarthy promised early to throw Ilhan Omar off the House Foreign Affairs Committee, even though no one in the House has engaged in as many foreign affairs as she has. There is a silver lining in that McCarthy has proven, by refusing to back down after 14 consecutive failed votes, that he can be a tough sonovagun when he wants something enough. He wants the speakership enough. All he has to do is play ball with the Freedom Caucus. (READ MORE: The Weakest Speaker)

The Left now is salivating. That’s OK. Salivate away. It is better that Republicans fight, even washing their dirty linen in public, than that they kowtow to leadership for two years of drivel. They should have erupted internally like this, when they last had the chance and the numbers, to demand of Paul Ryan more funding for the wall. Instead, they trusted his good intentions.

This is going to be a worthy GOP House now, with flavors reminiscent of the early days of the 1994 Newt Gingrich “Contract with America.” In time, those Republicans waxed fat, got lazy, passed funding for bridges to nowhere, and spent precious resources on an impeachment to nowhere aimed at toppling a henpecked Washington politician for lying about his zipper’s problem fighting gravity. This time around, let the impeachments focus on Mayorkas’ betrayal at the southern border and on the Bidens’ betrayal of America by exploiting their private access to power to access millions for everyone in the family up to the Big Guy. It is time for the Hunter to be Hunted. That will take the smirks off the faces of Left media. Time for another good healthy skirmish.