The GOP's "Somebody Get a Sponge" Caucus
Republicans think somebody should do something about the party's increasingly extremist tilt ... just not them
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If someone sent you this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to subscribe: you can sign up here.
Someone Should Really Do Something About This Mess
One of my favorite bits on the HBO show “Curb Your Enthusiasm” comes in season 5 when at a dinner party, someone spills gravy on Larry David’s suit, and Larry’s mother-in-law yells out, “Somebody get a sponge.” Larry’s response is perfect, “I don't understand. Why don't you get a sponge?" (it comes at the end of the clip).
I thought of this clip (and h/t to the NYT’s Maggie Haberman for putting it in my head) when I saw this video of George W. Bush complaining about misinformation within the Republican Party.
“Asked on Tuesday how he would describe the Republican Party as he sees it today, Bush told NBC's Hoda Kotb on the ‘Today’ show, ‘I would describe it as isolationist, protectionist and, to a certain extent, nativist.’
When asked if he was disappointed by the party, the former President said, ‘Well, it is not exactly my vision but I am just an old guy they put out to pasture. Just a simple painter.’"
Bush also told Kotb this.
“'What's really troubling is how much misinformation there is — the capacity of the people to spread all kinds of untruth. I don't know what we're going to do about that. I know what I'm doing about it. I don't do Twitter or Facebook or any of that."
When asked if he’d ever been tempted to speak out against former President Trump, Bush chuckled and said, “The answer’s no. Not really. I mean, look, I’m out.”
I happen to share Bush’s view that the modern GOP is isolationist, protectionist, and nativist. And I, too, am troubled by the misinformation and untruths being propagated by the party’s leaders. However, I am a guy with a laptop and a newsletter. Bush was the 43rd president of the United States and a man with a huge platform that he could have used — and still can — to criticize Trump and urge Republicans to reject the hateful rhetoric of the former president.
So Bush wants “somebody” to get a sponge … just not him.
How about former Speaker of the House, John Boehner, who is doing multiple media appearances hawking his new memoir and blasting the GOP’s turn to political extremism. In the book, Boehner attacks Trump for having “incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons, perpetuated by the bullshit he’d been shoveling since he lost a fair election the previous November.”
According to Boehner, the GOP needs to “take back control from the faction that had grown to include everyone from garden-variety whack jobs to insurrectionists.”
Yet, when asked recently if he had voted for Trump in the 2020 election, Boehner said yes.
“I voted for Donald Trump. I thought that his policies, by and large, mirrored the policies that I believed in. I thought the choices for the Supreme Court were top notch. At the end of the day, who gets nominated to the federal courts is really the most important thing a President does.”
When asked if he regretted not speaking out earlier about the “bullshit” Trump “had been shoveling,” Boehner, like Bush, pleaded impotence. “I’m retired,” he said. “I try to stay out of the day-to-day rumble of politics. I really didn’t need to speak up. At some point [in 2018], somebody asked me about the state of the Republican Party, and I said, ‘The Republican Party’s taking a nap.’ I wrote to my staff several days after January 6, I said, ‘I called it a nap but now it’s become’… I might have said ‘crisis.’”
Boehner also had some thoughts on the recent spate of mass shootings in America. Asked by CNN’s Dana Bash whether he regretted not doing more when he was Speaker to pass tougher gun laws after the Sandy Hook shooting, Boehner complained that “we couldn't find common ground … And, hopefully, they will find some common ground, because this -- it's -- frankly, it's heartbreaking. I think it's embarrassing our country to the rest of the world. And we have got to find a way to deal with this problem.”
Yet, back in 2012, when pushed to allow a vote in the House on expanding background checks, Boehner refused.
John Boehner really thinks someone should get a sponge to deal with gun violence and rising extremism in the Republican Party … just not him.
Finally, there’s former House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor, who went on CNN Tuesday to complain that the “level of craziness” has increased in Washington, though he took great care to blame “both sides” for this situation and bizarrely highlight Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus package as a contributing factor. Cantor did note that “if you continue to try and traffic in half-truths, untruths and the rest there are consequences, and we saw that on January 6th.” But then, 10 seconds later said he would still likely vote for Donald Trump in 2024.
Eric Cantor thinks someone should get a sponge to deal with the craziness and consequences of misinformation … but someone else should do it.
This kind of Republican cowardice is not surprising. We’ve seen it over and over and over again during the nearly six years since Trump took over the party. Yet, it is incredibly striking that the same Republican politicians who correctly diagnosis the mounting problems within the GOP either refuse to do anything about it and embrace the politician who is largely responsible for it. How exactly does the GOP, to paraphrase Boehner, take back control of the party from the nutjobs if they are still willing to vote for the former Nutjob-in-Chief?
The question to Bush, Boehner, Cantor is a simple one: “Why don't you get a sponge?"