Amanda Marcotte, Salon

After being forced into submission by people like Donald Trump and Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., one would think Speaker Kevin McCarthy would have downgraded his own self-assessment as a master negotiator. But no, ever since he finally secured his seat after 15 humiliating rounds of his own caucus voting against him, McCarthy has forged ahead with what he clearly thinks is a genius plan to trick President Joe Biden into destroying Social Security and Medicare for him: Mobster tactics.

As I explained in the Standing Room Only newsletter, McCarthy's strategy seems to be to threaten to force the U.S. into debt default and simply let Biden intuit the ransom McCarthy would like paid, i.e. the destruction of Social Security and Medicare. That McCarthy really thought this would work suggests that he is not faking his very public admiration for Trump, who loves to use insinuation to communicate his desires that, usually for legal liability reasons, he can't speak out loud. McCarthy, not known to anyone to be a bright man, appears to have really thought he could somehow trick Biden into not just decimating these long-standing health care and retirement programs, but that he could do so in a way to force Democrats to take the fall.

Unsurprisingly, McCarthy's "clever" negotiation style of being silent about his demands backfired spectacularly....

As I explained in the Standing Room Only newsletter, McCarthy's strategy seems to be to threaten to force the U.S. into debt default and simply let Biden intuit the ransom McCarthy would like paid, i.e. the destruction of Social Security and Medicare. That McCarthy really thought this would work suggests that he is not faking his very public admiration for Trump, who loves to use insinuation to communicate his desires that, usually for legal liability reasons, he can't speak out loud. McCarthy, not known to anyone to be a bright man, appears to have really thought he could somehow trick Biden into not just decimating these long-standing health care and retirement programs, but that he could do so in a way to force Democrats to take the fall.

Unsurprisingly, McCarthy's "clever" negotiation style of being silent about his demands backfired spectacularly.

McCarthy allowed Biden the space during his State of the Union address to show the public that Republicans are gunning for these popular programs by provoking a defensive denial of yelling and heckling from Republicans that is so over-the-top that it ended up confirming the accusation. Now McCarthy is having to deal with the very thing he was trying to avoid: A news cycle dominated by talk about how Republicans want to steal away the money in accounts workers spend their lives paying into as security when they retire. ...

Oh yeah, and conservatives absolutely lost their minds in what may or may not be a sincere panic over a "Satanic ritual" performed by Sam Smith and Kim Petras, which was, in reality, a heavily stagecrafted performance of their hit song "Unholy."

Perhaps I'm overly cynical, but when people like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., tweet stuff like, "The Grammy's featured Sam Smith's demonic performance and was sponsored by Pfizer," I'm disinclined to think the motivation is literal fear of the Prince of Darkness. After all, she made sure to include a grammatical mistake to maximize retweets and dunks from liberals. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., was definitely trolling in bad faith when he tweeted, "This…is…evil," while amplifying some right-wing pundit disingenuously claiming that "demons are teaching your kids to worship Satan." (If only it was incest porn, Cruz would be popping a "like" on it instead.) That said, it was funny watching Daily Wire host Matt Walsh screeching about how "leftism is Satanism," before going down a weird rabbit hole about "theological Satanism" and his totally imaginary taxonomy of Satanism.

As an attention-getting device, performative panic about Satan is always a winner....

It's a truth that should be self-evident: If you are emasculated by a balloon, you weren't so tough to begin with. Last week, a balloon that U.S. officials believe to be a Chinese surveillance device was spotted floating over Montana, likely to take pictures of military assets. In the grown-up world where President Joe Biden and Democrats live, this was a situation that called for a thoughtful, careful response. While displeased with the predicament, adults recognized that freaking out was not the answer. Instead, they waited until the balloon wasn't a direct threat to people and property underneath and shot it down over the ocean.

Meanwhile, Republicans — many in elected office who could be doing something useful with their time — saw the Chinese balloon as an opportunity for cringeworthy tough guy cosplay. Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance was just one of many, many Republicans who spent the Days of the Chinese Balloon ping-ponging between performative hysterics and childish games of dress-up where they pretended they were somehow going to shoot the balloon down.

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The political media fascination with Rep. George Santos, the New York Republican who appears to have faked approximately 95% of his life, is such that it was inevitable that it would draw a "savvy" backlash piece scolding the press about their priorities. The wannabe party pooper finally emerged last week at the Washington Post in an opinion column headlined, "Real people don't care about George Santos." In it, self-assigned buzzkill David Byler argued "America doesn't seem to care" about Santos, which he can tell based on Google search traffic.

Our nation was founded by puritans, so as soon as people had a laugh over Santos, inevitably someone would shake their finger disapprovingly. But there were some flaws in Byler's argument, starting with his assumption that Santos' own embarrassed constituents are not "real" people. There's also the fact that Google Trends isn't a very exacting measure of interest in a subject, as it only measures if people are searching out information. It doesn't capture people who read articles they saw on social media or directly on a news website. Traffic to stories about Santos is plenty healthy on that front.

But perhaps most importantly, this narrow-minded focus on search traffic ignores what a lot of the sneered-at political observers saw coming a mile away: The imminent George Santos makeover into MAGA's Next Top Superstar. ...