When you elect clowns, you really, really, really should expect a circus.
And that’s exactly what was on display at Jack Smith’s Senate hearing in what we still, with an increasingly heroic commitment to irony, call the world’s greatest deliberative body: the United States Senate.
What a dumpster-fire shitshow.
What a nine-layer dip of pathetic, performative, preening, principle-free, prostate-polishing political self-debasement.
Four hours of gutless congressional cosplay from a collection of quivering, kowtowing, credibility-castrated courtiers competing to see who could crawl the farthest up Donald Trump’s ass and come back out wearing his prostate as a party hat.
Former special counsel Jack Smith sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee, square-jawed and steady, staring down a firing squad of partisan fuckery after years of threats, investigations, intimidation, vilification and demands for his prosecution.
And he didn’t flinch.
Smith has spent decades as a public servant and prosecutor, and he walked straight into a room packed with people desperate to discredit him, raised his right hand, swore to tell the truth and stood behind his work while they hurled handfuls of rhetorical feces in his direction.
Facing him?
A senatorial skid mark. A bought-off, backbone-bereft, brownnosing bootlicker brigade and a panoply of pusillanimous, puckered, peacocking political lickspittles, craven courtiers and MAGA meat-riders conducting themselves with all the dignity of a bachelor party being escorted out of Medieval Times because one of them tried to reverse-cowgirl the jousting horse.
Senator Foghorn Liehorn Kennedy spent his time pecking away at Jack Smith about his WIFE. Her political views. Her opinions about Trump. Her opinions about the Obamas. Smith repeatedly told him he wasn’t there to discuss his family, but Kennedy kept gnawing on it, turning a Senate Judiciary hearing into the world’s shittiest couples-therapy intake form before asking a former federal prosecutor, with a completely straight face, whether he believed in the Tooth Fairy.
The Tooth Fairy.
In the United States Senate.
This Oxford-educated Rhodes Scholar, who perpetually talks like he left his dentures soaking in a jelly jar, cinched up his little aw-shucks verbal overalls, cranked the cornpone dial until the knob came off and started chewing his consonants into oatmeal like he’d moseyed in from the Louisiana swamp with a crawdad in his pocket and constitutional jurisprudence written on the back of a Piggly Wiggly receipt.
Give me a fucking break.
Kennedy has a law degree from the University of Virginia and studied at Oxford, but point a television camera at him and suddenly he’s three syllables away from telling us his meemaw always said you can’t prosecute a possum during crawfish season.
It’s not folksiness.
It’s intellectual drag.
And somehow, some fucking how, it got even more ridiculous when Ted “I Cream My Pants for the Guy Who Called My Wife Ugly” Cruz compared Jack Smith to Javert from Les Misérables, because nothing says grave Senate oversight quite like a set of sentient jowl merkins testing the outer limits of his scientifically punchable face while shoehorning French musical theater into congressional testimony.
Cruz fled freezing Texas for Cancún and initially explained that trip by saying his daughters wanted to go, and this is a senator whose reputation among his colleagues once inspired Lindsey Graham to joke that if somebody killed Cruz on the Senate floor, nobody there would convict them.
Bipartisanship lives!
But Cruz wasn’t even the most mortifying ambulatory sack of Senate stationery in the room.
By the time Eric Schmitt got rolling, and I’ll be honest, I had no idea this guy was even in the United States Senate until he cannonballed into this hearing, I was watching him make a serious run at the title of Most Willfully Ignorant Idiot in Congress.
And Tommy Tuberville exists.
If these people retained even a vestigial capacity for shame, Schmitt would’ve left the hearing disguised as a ficus and spent the remainder of his term communicating with Missouri exclusively through burner phones, because he tried to accuse Jack Smith of lying under oath over where he’d been on a particular day and came armed with documents, a prosecutorial erection and a giant visual aid that was supposed to blow the lid off Watergate II.
There was just one teensy problem with Senator Matlock’s big Perry Mason reveal: he had confused the Atlanta Hawks with the Iowa Hawkeyes.
Schmitt saw “Hawk,” slammed the emergency brake on his frontal lobe and decided the remaining syllables were decorative, leaving him in the wrong city, in the wrong state, at the wrong game, telling the wrong fucking story with the confidence of a detective who’d just found the Lindbergh baby in his glove compartment.
You could watch the realization crawl across the dais in real time, that exquisitely nauseating moment when everyone in the car knows they’ve gone over the cliff except the driver, who is still explaining the excellent brakes, and Katie Britt’s jaw dropped so spectacularly that her face may have become the meme of the century before Schmitt had finished stepping on his own dick.
Her expression said, Eric, what in the Kentucky-fried fuck have you done?
Republicans have become the stepping-on-rakes party. They step on a rake, get walloped in the face, stagger backward onto another rake, take another handle directly to the taint, fall forward onto the first rake again and then, while concussed and bleeding from the forehead, convene a congressional hearing called Who Put All These Rakes Here? The Weaponization of Lawn Care Against Conservatives.
And Eric Schmitt is out there barefoot in the fucking garden.
Amy Klobuchar eventually had to walk a United States senator through the conceptual distinction between professional basketball in Georgia and a university team from Iowa while his enormous accusation loomed behind him looking like a Denny’s placemat for people ordering the Grand Slam with a side of senatorial brain damage.
And we fucking paid for it.
Schmitt had the mistake enlarged and mounted. A computer was involved. Staffers presumably touched this thing. Fonts were selected. Dimensions were discussed. Somebody sent a file to a printer, somebody approved it, somebody hauled that magnificent monument to refusing to Google a goddamn thing into the hearing room, and at no point in this relay race of intellectual malpractice did anyone stop and say, “Hey, Eric, are we sure these are the same fucking birds?”
It’s one thing to shit your pants.
It’s another thing entirely to have them professionally printed.
Kennedy is rummaging around in children’s folklore, Cruz is staging an off-Broadway production inside his own skull, Schmitt just lost a cage match with two bird mascots, and sitting right there among them is Josh Hawley, a congressional Go-Gurt tube stuffed stem to stern with enough hypocrisy to stock the entire Republican caucus.
He saluted the January 6 crowd with that infamous fist outside the Capitol, only to have surveillance cameras later catch him hauling ass through the corridors after the building was breached like somebody had fired a starter pistol directly into his sphincter. This wasn’t a brisk evacuation. This was prairie flight, a Missouri gazelle discovering consequences at full gallop, knees writing checks his ideology had absolutely no intention of cashing.
Now this chest-puffing congressional hall monitor, who kisses his wife with all the erotic urgency of somebody checking a CPR dummy for residual body heat, is sitting safely behind a microphone calling Jack Smith’s work political “from day one” and demanding that he be disbarred.
And Hawley wants to puff himself up about Mar-a-Lago too? The FBI searched the place on August 8, 2022. Jack Smith wasn’t appointed special counsel until November 18, more than three months later, when Garland handed him investigations that were already underway.
So if we’re assigning Smith retroactive responsibility for everything that happened before he got the job, Hawley might as well demand to know why he didn’t stop the Hindenburg, subpoena him over Pearl Harbor and ask whether he has an alibi for the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.
And Jesus Christ, if Josh Hawley isn’t the whole fucking scam squeezed into a necktie: pounding the table about punishing Jack Smith after America watched him evacuate the Capitol at a speed previously associated with stolen catalytic converters.
Josh Hawley and the rest of the senators who were inside that building don’t need a history lesson about January 6. They heard that history smashing through the fucking doors. The roar outside breached the walls and came screaming down the hallways, glass breaking, alarms shrieking, bodies slamming against barricades, Capitol Police running toward the violence while lawmakers were being yanked away from it, human beings putting flesh and bone between elected officials and a mob as the building filled with shouting, smoke, chemical spray, shattered glass, blood and panic.
Those cops protected them.
But talk about any of that and suddenly these assholes develop the attention span of a Labrador in a tennis-ball factory. Wives. Broadway. Childhood mythology. Avian forensics. Phone records. Conspiracy confetti. Anything to keep the conversation pinballing around the room in a frantic little production of look-over-here kabuki theater instead of landing on the thing they cannot fucking explain away.
Jack Smith forced the hearing back onto the people who held the line that day: “It is inconceivable to me how you can pardon people who assault law enforcement officers and then vilify the officers who are trying to uphold the rule of law.”
They know he’s right.
They know because those were THEIR asses being hustled away while other people stayed behind to get crushed, struck, sprayed and dragged into the melee. They know exactly who stood between them and that mob.
Somewhere between running for their lives and crawling back to Donald Trump, terror became fealty, and now the same people who needed protection from his mob are attacking the prosecutor who tried to hold anyone accountable for putting them in danger.
Cowardice feels insufficient. Cravenness needs a protein shake. Spinelessness is standing in the corner begging not to be associated with whatever this is, so we may actually have to exhume the old vocabulary.
Skitterbrooks. Cringelings. Couchers. Fazarts. Fearties. Dunghills. Pudding-hearts.
Centuries of English-speaking people looked upon quivering, supplicant, boneless little specimens and kept inventing new words for them, and the United States Senate has assembled the fucking box set.
This is something wetter, smaller and more servile, a gelatinous, genuflecting, groveling kind of self-erasure from sniveling sycophants who have fed their vertebrae into a Vitamix and poured the resulting slurry directly into Donald Trump’s water bowl.
This isn’t disagreement. It isn’t partisanship.
It’s self-abasement.
They survived the fire and volunteered to carry gasoline for the person who started it.
So spare me the flag pins, the solemn baritone speeches about patriotism and every sanctimonious syllable about the Constitution from people willing to turn constitutional oversight into a publicly financed clown car because consequences might inconvenience their melon-hued meal ticket.
Patriotism isn’t a lapel accessory. Public service isn’t seasonal decor. And the Constitution isn’t the cocktail napkin underneath Donald Trump’s Diet Coke.
All the flag-fucking pageantry in the world can’t hide the choice they made. They chose ambition over country, obedience over truth and Donald Trump over whatever microscopic remnant of principle hadn’t already leaked out through their shoes.
History isn’t going to give a shit about their oversized props, their rehearsed indignation or whatever diversionary horseshit they managed to cram into five minutes of camera time.
It’s going to remember what they were when it counted.
Their fecklessness.
Their moral surrender.
Their complicity.
It will remember that they knew what happened, knew who was responsible, knew who kept them alive and still enlisted themselves as enablers in the machinery of our collective demise.
When their country demanded truth, they manufactured distraction.
When the moment demanded a spine, they produced an easel.
And when American democracy needed them to stand the fuck up, they got down on their knees.
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