"No, I wanna hold the pitchfork!"

"And Congress Adjourned." (Library of Congress)

     I was certain that by now, the third day into the 118th Congress, the House of Representatives would already be hard at work, vigorously fighting drag story hours, investigating Hunter Biden's laptop and impeaching his dad for faking the moon landing.
     Instead it's paralyzed: six votes where the hapless erstwhile leader Kevin McCarthy fails to win his coveted speakership. That's like the Bears putting the ball on the one yard line and failing to get it over in six tries. A failure both shocking and characteristic. It's almost like he accepted a bar bet that he couldn't find a way to debase himself even lower than he had by rushing to Mar-a-Lago to roll like a puppy at the feet of Donald Trump.
     With no end in sight. Democrats are rightfully gleeful. Seeing the clown car MAGA faction — Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Paul Goser, really, it's like the rogue's gallery from a Dick Tracy comic — hold the party hostage is a delicious, lunatics-taking-over-the-asylum moment that seems to demand schadenfreude. (Oddly, Marjorie Taylor Greene isn't in that group, she's supporting McCarthy, a kind of meta betrayal of the betrayers). The situation generates so much exuberant analysis — "McCarthy is finding it impossible to stop a brakeless freight train driven by morons," Molly Jong-Fast writes in Vanity Fair — it almost seems a buzz-kill to remind ourselves that the reason the nutjobs don't want McCarthy is that the election-denying, Trump-butt-nuzzling former human being simply isn't extreme enough for them. You can squint and McCarthy seems almost like an adult person, or did at one point, and that just will not do. Besides, he has experience in Congress, and that's fatal. Though this isn't about policy, or government, or ideology. It's about unleashing the dogs of chaos, the legislative version of Jan. 6. They don't want Kevin McCarthy to lead them; they want Jack Napier.
     The childlike optimist in me wants to hope that somehow, half a dozen moderate Republicans, should they exist, could finally say "fuck it" and peel off and vote for Democratic speaker candidate Hakeem Jeffries, who has beaten McCarthy in every vote. But that would take a miracle and, as they say in "Casablanca," the Germans have outlawed miracles.
     I could offer up the reason I believe all this is happening, though I don't imagine it'll shed much light on the situation: it's because McCarthy moved his stuff into the speaker's office Tuesday morning. That's what my people call a kine hora — invoking the evil eye. Or as I tell my boys, in a rare lapse into sports lingo, "Don't spike the ball until you're in the end zone." (Charles Pierce, in Esquire, evoked another sports image: the Boston Red Sox trundling champagne into their locker room before the 1986 World Series was in fact won, offending the Great Karmic Wheel of Baseball and causing their downfall). McCarthy setting up shop in an office he hadn't quite achieved was so wrong it even evoked a rare moment of near wit from mouth-breathing Matt Gaetz, who dashed off a letter to the Capitol architect wondering why the move was permitted. "How long will he remain there before is considered a squatter?" Gaetz or, more likely, someone acting in his behalf, wondered.

     Premature celebration flips off the gods and demands retribution. Then again, so should lying and treason, so I guess you can pick your cosmos-crossing offense. Maybe it's just the zeitgeist. We are not the only country whose split electorate has amplified and empowered the fringe crazies – far right religious fundamentalists have grabbed the whip hand in Israel, and are in the process of alienating three-quarters of world Jewry, because that country doesn't have enough problems.

    In the United States, this has been coming for a long time, ever since Ronald Reagan convinced some people that the purpose of government is to destroy government. The problem is, nobody wants to live under a destroyed government. Well, most people don't. Some people think it's fun, and we're seeing them in their glory this week in the halls of Congress. But remember: the only thing worse than their failing to get their act together will be when they finally do.