FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Two shots in, seems like good late-pandemic music.

•  OK, non-subscribers to Roy Edroso Breaks It Down -- and what's keeping you, it's the only Substack newsletter not crammed with cancelculture crybaby bullshit, plus it's cheap! -- here's a freebie: a scene at The Rectory where our tradcath favorites hang out, drinking benedictine, soiling the antimacassars, and talking the latest moral majority crap. Special guest appearance by an old alicublog favorite! 

•  The main thing about the Matt Gaetz story for me is Dennis Hastert. You'd think an honest-to-God pedophile predator would have thought, at some point in his rapid rise through the ranks of the Republican Party, hmmm maybe I'm flying too close to the sun. But his predecessor in the Speakership was Newt Gingrich, a lying scumbucket of the highest order who brassed out his own scandals during the Clinton impeachment because he realized none of it mattered -- a hearty handshake, a pretense of statesmanship, and above all total, chicken-hypnotizing shamelessness were all it took to mesmerize GOP rubes, and if you could pull that off you could get away with nearly anything. At Hastert found out, fucking children was on the wrong side of "nearly everything." But now, who knows -- the QAnon constituency is busy painting all Democrats as pedophiles, so maybe a Republican Congressman who's actually paying for sex with underage girls can expect his rubes to think, "My Rep a pedo? Unpossible, pedos are Dems!" and walk away blinking. That's what goes through my mind when I see Gaetz's vapid, unbothered face on TV now. Time was you could expect an eventual Dan Crane* shift to egregious contrition, but in the modern GOP the malefactors simply keep going until the jig is truly up, and then vanish entirely to be replaced by new ones. (*I remember Crane's Democrat counterpart in that scandal, gay Provincetown Rep Garry Studds, who acted like he couldn't give a shit and got reelected. Boy, how times have changed!)