Growing up, you learn in public school that, more or less, the representatives of The People in Congress — at least the Democrat ones by subtext — are exceptional individuals who have risen to the highest echelon of elected office based on their outstanding personal achievements and character.
Surely, that’s right?
How could it not be the case that the good men and women we send to Washington to do The People’s business, that sacred public duty, subjected to rigorous vetting by the guardian of Democracy™, the media, are the cream of the crop?
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Then you grow up, watch a few dozen Congressional hearings, and discover the unsettling truth: these people are mouth-breathing morons.
And not just one or two who slip through the cracks and get by on their charm — almost all of them.
They have only the most tenuous, surface-level understanding of the topics about which they have the authority to legislate.
Not only are they ignorant, but they’re also incurious.
Not only are they incurious by nature, but they’re also financially incentivized to be incurious. In a practical sense, it’s their job to be incurious, because incuriosity keeps the cash flowing from the special interests that really run things.
Asking uncouth questions of the special interests that sponsor them isn’t good for business.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, the stridently Anti-MAHA Head of the Senate Health Committee — who, despite being a Republican, voted to impeach Donald Trump in 2021 and now only panders to the MAGA/MAHA base because he’s up for a primary challenge — devoted, yet again, his questioning of the nominee for Surgeon General, Casey Means, to shilling for the hepatitis B vaccine for infants, which is seemingly his raison d'être as a politician.
Here is Bernie Sanders, nominally from the other side of the aisle, doing more of the same, using his precious time to, once more, parrot vaccine industry talking points disguised as sincere questioning of the Surgeon General nominee.Related: Elizabeth Warren DESTROYED by X Community Notes Over Pharma Corruption
You would think Casey Means were being vetted to be vaccine czar, because that’s 90% of what these people talked about in the hearing; indeed, it’s 90% of all they ever talk about in Health Committee hearings.
She’s actually going to be the Surgeon General, whose purview, believe it or not, extends far beyond vaccines for infants, for a disease that is almost exclusively transmitted via intravenous drug use and unprotected sex.
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The only thing the Democrats possibly hold more sacrosanct than vaccines, of course, is abortion.
Here is Sen. Patty Murray — looking, as always, like the androgynous dungeon-keeper from The Princess Bride — indignant that anyone might claim that abortion pills or birth control pills, which significantly alter women’s hormones, might be more dangerous than the pharmaceutical industry and its tools in Congress would have the American public believe.
In surveying these spectacles, consider: these are ostensibly the most informed members of Congress, in that they were selected to serve on the Senate Health Committee.What happens is their handlers prepare questions for them beforehand, written by lobbyists for whatever industry the hearing pertains to — in this case, the pharmaceutical industry. If the nominee is a member of the opposition party, they also sprinkle in some personal attacks procured via opposition research that they commission in order to smear the character of the nominee.
Armed with these talking points, the Congress creature then dutifully reads its script. The DEI Congress creatures often struggle to successfully pull off even that.
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You will note that none of this whatsoever is in the service of arriving at truth through fact-finding.
The unfortunate thing for Casey Means is that she’s clearly not comfortable in the political arena, as evidenced by her performance, which, speaking objectively even as someone largely supportive of her, wasn’t as sharp as it could have been; she seems far too earnest, having not spent a lot of time in Washington, to have expected the deluge of propaganda headed her way.
The people who occupy D.C. are snakes, and you have to be prepared going into one of these hearings to deftly deal with all the wariness that snake-handling warrants.
This is why RFK Jr., who has spent his entire life around these people and is as close to American political royalty as one could possibly be, is so uniquely skilled at navigating this stuff.
