Send In the Clowns

Don't you love farce?

One of Matt Taibbi’s best pieces for Rolling Stone Magazine during the 2016 presidential primary season was the equal parts scathing and hilarious takedown, Inside the GOP Clown Car. In the piece, Taibbi writes: 

In the modern Republican Party, making sense is a secondary consideration. Years of relentless propaganda combined with extreme frustration over the disastrous Bush years and two terms of a Kenyan Muslim terrorist president have cast the party’s right wing into a swirling suckhole of paranoia and conspiratorial craziness. There is nothing you can do to go too far, a fact proved, if not exactly understood, by the madman, Trump.

The Democrats didn’t seem to remember that Matt Taibbi when he and fellow Twitter Files journalist Michael Shellenberger faced clowns from the other side of our nation’s political circus Thursday as the two sat before the House Select Subcommittee on “Weaponization of the Federal Government” looking into both federal efforts as well as a number of non-governmental organizations’ influence over the policing of free speech on social media.

Florida congresswoman and former Democratic Party chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz began her five minutes attempting to smear Taibbi with red MAGA paint, deploying one of the most common tactical weapons used against anyone who dares offer a rationally honest take on the now very unfunny political struggles taking place in America at this time. Addressing Taibbi directly in her opening comments, Schultz scolded the decorated journalist. 

The Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics asserts that journalists should avoid political activities that can compromise the integrity of credibility. Being a Republican witness today certainly casts a cloud over your objectivity. 

In a wild and tense session that saw infighting between representatives of both parties on the panel and allegations of biased unprofessional so-called journalism leveled at the two witnesses, Wasserman-Schultz accused Taibbi of allowing himself to be “spoon-fed cherry-picked information” that is “designed to reach a foregone, easily disputed, or invalid conclusion.” When Taibbi attempted to explain himself—to testify, as the witness he was there to be—Wasserman-Schultz cut him off by reclaiming her time, a move that was used against the two journalists often by the Democrats on the panel.  

One of the most striking moments was when Wasserman-Schultz accused Taibbi of profiting off his role in reporting on the Twitter Files, saying that Taibbi “hit the jackpot on that Vegas slot machine.” Taibbi was able to quickly blurt out that whatever money he’s taken in has gone to the costs of doing the work he’s doing before, you guessed it, the Florida lawmaker quickly shut him off by reclaiming her time. 

In the lecturing rant that followed, Wasserman-Schultz suggested that the journalists were addicted to the “powerful drug” of attention and the journalistic prominence of being associated with the Twitter Files. She added that the social media companies in question were not, in fact, biased against conservative voices. She did not offer Taibbi an opportunity to respond. 

It was only later, when Democratic Representative Gerald Connolly of Virginia repeated Wasserman-Schultz’s assertion that the social media entities involved were not being weaponized against conservative voices, that Taibbi would remind the congressman that the purpose of the committee he himself was sitting on was to address the concern that forces within the US government as well as non-profit organizations funded by taxpayer dollars were being weaponized—not simply against conservative voices—but against the very concept of free speech itself. 

Wasserman-Schultz ended her attack on the two journalists with a stunningly strange and ironic diagnosis, apparently of a condition she believed them both to be currently suffering from.  

Hypocrisy is the hangover of an addiction to attention. 

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is certainly no stranger to the many flavors of hypocrisy as well as questions regarding her ethics. In 2016, after leaked emails showed she and the DNC she chaired unethically favored Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primaries, Wasserman-Schultz was forced to resign her chairperson’s position. 

But before that career gut punch, in the same year, the Florida congresswoman had earlier come under scrutiny due to her attempts to gut new pending Consumer Financial Protection Bureau regulations designed to reign in abuses by payday lenders. Payday lenders, as it turns out (and pardon the pun, Congresswoman) were well represented in Wasserman-Schultz’s congressional district. This from the Huffington Post:

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is expected to present a final set of payday lending regulations in the next few weeks. The idea is to prevent lenders from trapping borrowers in a vicious cycle of debt, in which borrowers take out a loan expecting to pay a one-time fee, but end up taking out several more loans when they are unable to make ends meet at the end of the loan period.

Wasserman Schultz is trying to gin up support on Capitol Hill for a bill that would nullify the CFPB's rules in states that adopt payday loan rules similar to those in her home state. The Florida law is supported by the payday loan industry and has not prevented lenders from preying on the poor. The CFPB's regulations would be stronger, but Wasserman Schultz is seeking to block them.

You can read more here. 

There was something about 2016 that allowed us to laugh at the clownish characters traveling together in Taibbi’s Republican clown car. Yes, they and their candidacies were dangerous, there’s no question about that. But they were, nevertheless, clowns that we could laugh at. Feckless boobs, each and every one of them, and each in their own unique ways. Taibbi captured them all perfectly in the piece I mention above and so many others. 

But there are funny clowns and there are the scary clowns. And there is nothing scarier than the American government—the government of the most powerful country in the history of the planet—slowly, but most assuredly, turning away from its founding principle of unfettered free speech and towards a concerted governmental effort to eliminate that fundamental American right. And what could be more terrifying than witnessing what was once the party of the people leading the effort to crush the rights of those same people to freely discuss amongst themselves the realities and issues of their times. 

Make no mistake. These are the scariest clowns ever. 

Viewer’s note: 

It wasn’t easy to watch the hearing yesterday. I’d set my DVR to record CSPAN’s coverage of the House of Representatives which begins at 7:00 AM Pacific and was scheduled to run in a single continuous block on my cable provider’s viewer guide until 1:00 PM my time.

I went about my morning knowing that I would be able to watch the hearings when my day settled down. But when I had a minute I decided to check on how things were going at the hearings and turned my set on and navigated to the list of recorded programs in order to watch the opening statements. 

So nothing was recorded. CSPAN had changed the name of the content that would appear in that time slot from NEW U.S House of Representatives to, incredibly, and inaccurately, CAMPAIGN 2024, a title that had absolutely nothing at all to do with the content of the programming on CSPAN at that time. But underneath that completely wrong programming title was also a correct subtitle: The House will complete work on legislation to protect free speech on social media.

Then suddenly, with a Democratic representative ramping up for a full-frontal attack on Taibbi and Schellenberger, CSPAN cut away from these dramatic and important hearings to go to the House floor coverage where the chaplain led the august body in prayer. It was at that moment that I found myself wishing that I was a believer.