Eric the Blue

Asked today–unless it was yesterday–about the charming chats of the Young Republicans, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said that he doesn’t know any of these people, has never even heard of them, but if the details of their jests are true, he condemns them. He said that any picture of him with them was taken at the Inauguration, and he had no idea who they were.

Not sure this is the top-level defense he thinks it is. They were at the Inauguration? Great! To be fair, “I condemn what they said, if they said it” (they in fact said it, all of it) is marginally better than the vice-president’s “Oh those boys and their edgy jokes!” As has been pointed out, the edgy texts of college-aged critics of Israel can get the authors investigated by the FBI and booted from the country. And some of these Young Republicans are well beyond college-aged. Have you seen their pictures? They tend to confirm my theory that men who are repulsive to heterosexual women comprise a key bloc of Republican voters.

It’s not surprising that Johnson doesn’t know these losers. His generalized lack of awareness is an evergreen defense. When asked if he was “comfortable” with large cuts to special education services, he said: “I haven’t seen the specifics of that and I don’t know.” Trump said that the Chicago mayor as well as the governor of Illinois should be imprisoned. Asked whether he agrees, Johnson said he “wasn’t following the day-to-day” on that. Cory Mills is a Republican congressman from Florida. His ex-girlfriend just got a restraining order against him after satisfying a judge that the congressman had, among other things, threatened to publish sexually explicit pics he had of her. Asked for comment, Johnson said he had “not heard or looked into the details of that.” When a different reporter noted that this wasn’t the first woman to get a restraining order against Mills, Johnson said: “Let’s talk about things that are really serious.”

Sort of surprising, therefore, that Johnson knows about Bad Bunny and doesn’t think he should be performing at the Super Bowl.