Kevin McCarthy's Penis Problem

McCarthy Has To Feed The Beast

Fox News Alert: Weiners incoming

The likely next Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, has a problem with an exposed male penis on the internet. Luckily for McCarthy, unlike so many other male politicians throughout the ages, the exposed member is not his own. Nonetheless, the genitalia is likely to haunt the gentleman from California for many years.

The unit in question belongs to Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son. And the reason why it is central to the fate of the Republican Party’s hopes and dreams for the next few years is that the photos of Biden’s member are the most notable set of documents found on the infamous “laptop from hell,” as one-term President Donald Trump named it.

The laptop is the central character in an ever-growing web of conservative conspiracy and attack, and has become sort of a shorthand for every sinister idea about President Biden’s time in office.

Republicans constantly invoke the laptop and they have made it crystal clear that the laptop and issues somehow connected to the laptop will be their main concern over the next few years, in lieu of producing any serious policy agenda with issues like inflation, gas prices, immigration or any of the things they have cared to pretend about — even abortion.

What that means on a practical level is that McCarthy is going to have spend an inordinate amount of his time in command of his razor-thin majority (far from the 60 votes he once dreamed of) concerning himself with the sexual organs of presidential offspring.

I’ve tried and tried and will continue to try to see how this could work in favor of the Republican Party. Especially after the roster of surprises over the last 20-plus years in American politics, I try not to write anything off. Predicting the future is tough. Thirty years ago it would have seemed impossible that a Black man would have served two terms as president, followed by the host of the Apprentice in the same job. Yet here we are.

But that said, I don’t see how the Biden laptop obsession works out well for Republicans.

The Laptop Repair Shop Guy Is Central To The Whole Thing, Whatever The Thing Happens to Be

As a practical matter, the laptop story is insanely complicated and twisted. From the oddball repair shop owner who turned over the laptop, to the decision to pass on reporting the laptop’s contents from the press, to the New York Post’s decision to publish the salacious content as part of Rupert Murdoch’s endless quest to destroy decency, to the decision by Twitter to ban the promotion of the pilfered images. And then somehow these issues are supposed to be connected to the governments of Ukraine and China and a reference to “the big guy,” which is allegedly Biden — when he had no power as a private citizen.

As right-wing conspiracy theories go, it makes you yearn for the good old fashioned days of Obama’s purportedly fraudulent citizenship (not really, but that racist smear was much easier to understand).

The problem that McCarthy has on his hands is that Republicans have spent from 2020 to present in part blaming their loss of the presidential election on the laptop. In their narrative the laptop contained smoking gun evidence that would have made the public turn a blind eye to Trump’s mishandling of COVID, skyrocketing unemployment, the trade war, his racist rants and policies, and the overall failure of his presidency.

If only more Americans had become intimate with photos of Hunter Biden’s member, Republicans argue, we would have another Trump term and more tax cuts for the super-wealthy. I guess?

The smart political tactic for McCarthy would be to attack Biden and Democrats on firmer ground. Even if there weren’t any real scandals, as they showed during President Obama’s time in office, the Republican Party is pretty good at making up things to be mad about (with able assistance from Fox News, later amplified by the mainstream media). But McCarthy and his allies, including the Shadow Speaker, Marjorie Taylor Greene, have laser-focused their sights on the laptop. They have primed their core supporters to obsess over the laptop.

You can see this in the recent dog-and-pony show put on by the clearly dumb Elon Musk along with writer Matt Taibbi, who has moved away from challenging powerful forces to doing the handiwork of the richest man in the world. Touted as an expose of Twitter’s suppresion of the Biden laptop during the election, what emerged is the Biden campaign asking Twitter to remove the stolen pictures of Hunter Biden’s penis.

Everywhere the right looks with this laptop issue, male genitalia is sure to emerge.

Voters in the most recent election made very clear they didn’t want a red wave or tsunami. Biden presided over one of the best midterm performances in 20 years, a worthy follow-up to his 7-million plus vote drubbing of Trump in the 2020 election.

The average American doesn’t buy the right’s caricature of Joe Biden

Regardless of what his faults may be, American voters generally are intimately familiar with who President Biden is. He fills the archetype of the older family member, who makes groanworthy and ill-timed statements but who is still viewed positively. That is a hard image to square with the Republican caricature of him as a corrupt beast who works through his children to enrich himself. Frankly the caricature more resembles the reality of Donald Trump and his corrupt kids Donald Jr., Eric, and Ivanka.

The right had this problem before with their failure to sell the public on the idea that the affable Barack Obama was a secret socialist with dreams of black supremacy beating beneath his heart. Voters didn’t buy it.

And unlike with Obama, the right can’t fall back on visceral racial hatred of Black people to fuel bad opinions of Biden.

So they end up with this laptop freak out, which pairs with their anti-transgender panic and campaigns against critical race theory to paint an accurate picture of a Republican Party in the grip of its lunatics. The most prominent and powerful Republican in America, Donald Trump, is a devotee of the most deranged conspiracies so there is no running away from all of this.

McCarthy is stuck. He has no choice but to talk about the laptop, which looks like a political party attempting to use the President’s son’s struggles with addiction as a political cudgel against him.

They tried this during the 2020 election.

Trump used an attack line about Hunter Biden’s addiction during the first debate, to which Biden responded, “My son, like a lot of people, like a lot of people you know at home, had a drug problem. He's overtaken it. He's fixed it. He's worked on it. And I'm proud of him.”

That’s a sentiment millions of people can agree with and sympathize with, even if they don’t have addiction issues in their families (and millions do). It makes the Biden family sympathetic, and the public has repeatedly shown they do not like drawing presidential families into crass political attacks, no matter the party.

The Republican Party doesn’t have much to really attack Biden on, and they have no serious policy ideas to offer the public. They have pictures of his son’s nude body, and they’re going to spend years talking about it. It looks bad. I don’t think it will work for them.

This will ultimately be Kevin McCarthy’s penis problem.

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— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on Twitter @owillis/Mastodon: @owillis@mastodon.online

Exclusive Kal-El Photo

I suppose I should feel guilty about waking Kal up in the mornings, but I DON’T. He sleeps so so so much. Before I got back into the habit of having a dog (I had C.K. from 1999-2012) after a 7-year lapse, I had forgotten how much dogs sleep. Consider me reminded by old lazy bones here. :P