A Poem

And you may find yourself
On the floor of the House
With your horrible bill
And your horrible press
And you may say to yourself
Well
How did I get here?

Golly, it seems like only yesterday when the Republican Party finished writing their thank you cards to Comey and Putin and gleefully proclaimed they’d have an Obamacare repeal bill waiting on the Marmalade Shartcannon’s desk right after his sparsely-attended inauguration.

Before moving on, let’s take a moment to just celebrate the demise of the Hey We’ll Never Find the Next Steinbeck or Dickens Unless We Explode a Giant Poverty Bomb Act, excuse me, the AHCA. It was a shit bill written by shit people, it would have killed thousands and hurt millions and its demise is worth celebrating so hard that it’s a goddamn miracle I stayed sober long enough to write this.

Moreover the massive nationwide pushback from the Resistance has been a huge factor in the AHCA’s failure, so let’s double-fist that celebration. Viva la US, we fucked these assholes up good, didn’t we?

Anyway.

It’s difficult to state all the ways this is bad for the Shart and the GOP.
Wait, did I say “difficult?” I mean “gut-bustingly hilarious and fun for the whole family.” Let’s state them.

Obviously the best part is Mr. Shart of the Deal himself…couldn’t get the deal done! In his entire presidency, he has been called on to make exactly one deal. One. And he fucked it up like a champ. Remember Spicey and Ryan and Kellyanne earlier in the week? All doe-eyed, reverently calling him “The Closer?” Well, KYRA SEDGWICK IS THE CLOSER, YOU FUCKS, AND YOUR BOY AIN’T SHIT. He is 0-for-1 at making deals as President. If he had a dime for every deal he’s closed, he would have ZERO DIMES. He has closed as many deals as I have won fistfights with Mike Tyson. He is batting below the Mendoza line at presidential deal-making. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA.

The damage to his central brand is incalculable and frankly, mightily goddamn funny. It runs a bit deeper though. Biggest takeaway is that the feral dingos of the Freedom Caucus aren’t afraid of him, or Ryan, at all. They will continue to sit in their filth-encrusted cave in the corner of the House floor, gnawing on rat carcasses, demanding that everyone else in the country give them everything want OR ELSE, and periodically screaming CUCK at any passerby who wanders too close. They’re safe in districts gerrymandered to include more firearms than human beings, and they’ll merrily keep fucking things up for everybody else until the fucking sun dies. Fortunately, they’ve never been smart enough to realize their fanaticism does more harm than good to their goals, and Friday, god love ’em, they saved Obamacare. Somebody toss Mark Meadows some fresh roadkill; he earned it.

Meanwhile, the more rational members of the GOP House team (and yes, I use that word cautiously) are starting to be very afraid Il Douche, sure…they’re afraid he’ll drag their whole party down in the midterms. It’s no coincidence the first centrists to jump ship came from districts Hilldawg won last November. It doesn’t take a genius to see the writing on the wall; he’s got a 37% approval rating, the bill has 17%, neither of those numbers are going up. A historically unpopular president pursuing an unpopular agenda with a massive scandal hanging over his head like a balloon being slowly inflated with raw sewage? It’s becoming apparent that you don’t wanna stand next to that guy.

If the center starts earnestly and consistently running away from him, and the far right continues to dig in and demand total capitulation, it may be functionally impossible for this administration to accomplish anything bigger than letting coal companies dump sludge into our drinking water.

One extra amusing sidebar to all of this; when you literally wrote a book about your negotiating style, any dumbfuck who can read can learn how you’re going to behave in a negotiation and counter accordingly. Now, that doesn’t cover quite everybody in the GOP caucus, but fortunately Grinning Turdweasel Rand Paul was happy to lead a seminar in the Shart’s tactics (yes, this really happened, there are photos.)

In the end, Shart Garfunkel decided to employ the tried-and-true threaten-to-walk-away technique. This is actually a fantastic example of why Running Government Like a Business is a dipshit idea and how he doesn’t understand one fucking thing about the job he has. See, maybe in the world of business you can walk away. There’s always another gaudy skyscraper or shitty wine to splash your name across, right? Cool. But you don’t get another congress. You fucked this up, you totally sold your most important partners out…and when you show up for work on Monday, these are still the only motherfuckers you have to work with to get anything done. You didn’t just poison the well, you fucked Paul Ryan’s mom in the well, then you shit on her, and THEN you poisoned it, probably with that weird hair growth drug you take. The message you just sent to congress is “The minute things look rough, I’m cutting you loose and using my Klansman Sidekick’s website to blame you for everything.” And he’ll do it if he doesn’t get what he wants in THREE WEEKS. That’s how long he’ll fight before he completely gives up.

And we’re TWO MONTHS IN.

And then there’s Speaker Ryan.

God, how am I gonna get through a few paragraphs about Paul Ryan’s role in this clusterfuck without laughing myself to death? Pray for me.

Paul Ryan, who found himself carrying the mantle of Great Conservative Intellectual because…fuck, I never have figured that one out…maybe he’s the guy who volunteers to keep score when Republicans go bowling? Maybe he wipes the drool off Louie Gohmert’s chin?

Anyway, tasked with the admittedly-impossible goal of crafting a bill that could pass the Community Theatre Production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest known as the House Republican Caucus, he huddled in a back room with a handful of like minded Bond villains and a box of crayons, and emerged a week later with…the worst bill anyone could have imagined. The Batman Versus Superman: Dawn of Justice of healthcare legislation, a hot smelly mess that, in its zeal to do a little bit to please everyone, instead made the whole world recoil in horror and disgust. Stealing health insurance from millions of Americans only to pass the savings directly to people with multiple butlers, how the fuck did he think people would respond? Insufficiently cruel for the far right, too murderous for anyone with a human soul. To this day, I have yet to see a single assessment of the AHCA, right, left, or center, that praised it. Even the bill’s backers failed to mount anything more rousing than “This is as good as we can get.” He planted his flag in what he honestly evaluated to be the sensible middle, when any fool could have told him he’d crafted a monstrosity that could only crash and burn while dragging anyone who backed it down along with it.

Anyhow, he drops this turd in the middle of the table, tells everybody it’s a delicious black forest torte made by the finest chef in all the land, and demands everybody dig in. The Shart, who knows fuckall about health care and cares even less, hungry for a win especially if sticks it to that black guy who made everybody laugh at him at the Correspondent’s Dinner a few years back, says “that’s very nice work Paul, let’s do your bill.” And from that moment on, the whole thing and everybody associated it was good and righteously fucked. Like, Ned-Beatty-in-Deliverance fucked. The CBO score dropped, public opinion bottomed out, and anyone with a brain in their head would’ve run away screaming but not the Intellectual Leader of Conservatism and the Greatest Businessman Alive! No, faced with an angry charging bear, they chose to run towards it brandishing two fistfuls of raw hamburger. And my God, it has been pure joy to watch.

Let’s also laugh at the entirely unnecessary timetable he set up that played such a large part in this debacle. Paulie Boy, y’see, got a little micro-hard-on for the idea of getting his repeal vote on the seventh anniversary of the day Barack Obama signed the ACA into law. So enraptured was he by the vision of such a delicious symbolic victory that he didn’t work to get his bill RIGHT, he didn’t work got make his bill POPULAR, he just tried to get it done QUICKLY. And so he scheduled two different floor votes without first finding out whether or not he had the votes to pass his bill which is Speakership 101, bro. Count first, call the cameras in later. The whole world watched you fuck up your life’s work on CSPAN because you’re a trigger-happy idiot. And there was never any need for it. It’s like you woke up, rolled out of bed, bashed yourself in the face with a brick a few times for no reason, and then went about your day. And you walked away with a heapin’ helpin’ of JACK SHIT for your trouble.

This, more than anything, means the GOP simply can’t govern. Give them the White House and both halves of the Legislature, and they Just. Can’t. Govern. To their base, they’ve just said “We can’t fulfill the loudest promise we’ve spent seven years making over and over.” To the country they’ve said “Well, we tried like hell to kill a whole bunch of you, and only our own blistering incompetence saved you.”

And the idea now is to move on to “tax reform,” i.e. “Giving as much money to our donors as we can figure out how to get away with.” Good luck with that. Don’t forget, we have a year of the Shart’s taxes now, and every plan you propose leads to somebody working out how much money he’s scheming to save himself. Especially since he’s jonesing to do away with the alternative minimum tax.

Besides, you aren’t moving on to tax reform. You’re moving on to more shit on the Russia scandal. Sorry.

And of course there’s all the finger pointing and blame throwing and grudge building. We’ve already seen Ryan’s PAC vow to cut off funding for members who bucked him, and Bannon wants a “Shit List” and everybody’s threatening everybody else with primary challenges. Underneath all this don’t forget it’s the House that holds the power of impeachment.

And yes, the executive branch can still do a lot to fuck with the ACA. Expect them to do so, and for that to change the terms of this debate heading into the midterms.

But for today, let’s just have a good sturdy laugh at these fuckwads.