Trump Has Stolen My Most Personal Political Pleasure. And I Blame “Brewski Brett” Kavanaugh For It

Nobody starts something knowing it all, all the pleasures. We learn it as we go along. You don’t pick up your first golf club knowing how to draw or fade your shots. You don’t pick up your first baseball knowing how to throw a bitchin’ slider, and you don’t score your first goal until you don’t sit down for a month cuz your ass is so sore from falling down.

But here’s the thing. The more you love something, and the longer you do it, the more you start to find the hidden treasures of playing the piano, or playing hockey, or carving ducks out of bars of soap. Whatever. And those become personal pleasures that nobody knows about, because they don’t experience them.

And so it has always been for me. From my mid 20’s, when I first discovered what a total sh*t show it was, I fell head-over-heels in love with the Senate confirmation for incoming cabinet members and Supreme Court justices. I loved it because it was an instant classic, The 3 Stooges meet The Marx Brothers One Night at the Opera.

Think of the concept alone to understand how absurd it is. Sitting in a chair facing a bunch of political tackling dummies is a particular subject matter savant who have more letters after their names than most of the tackling dummies have in their names.

The aforementioned political tackling dummies have all of the practical subject content knowledge and experience on the savant’s subject as I do on nuclear chemistry. And they’d sit there and take turns hitting the savant with stupid, ill-informed, pompous questions while the experts sat on their hands to keep from pulling their hair out, smiling and doing their best to make it look like this insane tripe was actually an intelligent conversation. Purely because they needed these morons votes in order to get confirmed!

It was a guaranteed laugh riot. It didn’t matter which political party was appointing them, or which was the opposing party. The friendly party primped the witness like a rock diva, lobbing softball questions between adoring compliments.

And the opposing tackling dummies spent their five minutes in foul tempered rants against their opponents, finish the rant with something like, Isn’t that true? to make it look like there was actually a question somewhere in that drivel. While the witness was looking around with glazed eyes, wondering who had spiked the Senators water bottles with all that peyote.

But if you watched any of the hearings for the latest crop of Trump appointed mental naval lint, you quickly realized that the fun is gone now. And it’s gone for two simple reasons.

The first is that for more than 200 years, whatever else the two sides might disagree on and fight about, they both agreed that expertise in running a federal department was actually a good thing. And while they gleefully went through the televised Teletubbies Kabuki of the hearings, when the occasional total f*ck up, like Harriet Miers, John Tower, or Robert Bork, the senate banded together and pulled a Dr Strangelove on them. While congress itself may be dysfunctional, the government needed to function properly.

Of course it was Traitor Tot that f*cked up that one-car-funeral. He used his radical, slobbering cult followers to instill a new edict in his slavish MAGA Senate, If Glorious Bleater says they’re qualified, then they’re qualified. The coin-of-the-realm in the MAGA Senate was no longer expertise, it was 51 votes. Nothing else mattered anymore.

And of course his poster child and mutant test tube lab experiment for this was the obscene drunkard and serial sexual assaulter Brewski Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh’s nomination was dead in the water, until His Lowness gave Brewski Brett his marching orders, Fight like hell, and make it dirty. I’ll take care of take care of the rest. Kavanaugh’s testimony was a nonstop fire hose of hatred, vitriol, and self-pitying whining, blatantly insulting the people who had to confirm him.

And it worked. El Pendejo Presidente Dos threatened primary fights and Trombie reprisals, and the GOP senate sheeple fell in line. Sadly, this is the new norm for GOP controlled Senate confirmation hearings, and the Democrats had better wise up most riki-tik. Look at each GOP nominee so far, from Hegseth to Mar-A-Lago Barbie to Kristi Noem.

Their testimony to Democratic questions is an unending wellspring of sarcasm, insults, and disrespect. But what else can you do when you have absolutely no qualifications except to shoot the referees?

Going forward, this is the new normal in Senate confirmations. But that doesn’t mean that all is lost if the Democrats just take the time and gird their loins and grow a pair. Fortunately there are two ways to combat this kind of thug politics.

The first is immediate. What did Sean Connery say in The Untouchables? They bring a brick, you bring a knife. They bring a knife, you bring a gun. That’s the Chicago way! Unleash your investigators on every dipsh*t GOP nominee, and make their confirmation such a living hell that nobody will want to take the damn job if it exposes all their dirty laundry.

And don’t worry about the base, they’ll love seeing the punching bag finally landing some shots. Make it as personal as you like. The second remedy is retribution. Let’s say that the Democrats win the White House in 2028 and either control or retake the Senate. F*ck bipartisanship.

Set the most aggressive agenda that the base will tolerate, and then nominate cabinet members who still work tirelessly to promote that agenda in an intelligent, effective way. And then ram them down the GOP’s throat. Nuke the filibuster, toss the Trump tax cuts, and finally enact your 90% rich sh*tpoke luxury tax on earnings over $100 million or whatever. 51 votes is the new coin-of-the-realm, remember?