Congress knows how to orchestrate a performance. They don’t have the production budgets of Hollywood. They don’t need it. All they need is to know how to press your buttons. And, that they have down to a sweet science. They don’t have the pretty people that Hollywood boasts. Most of the current occupants of the D.C. ruling classes are haggard septuagenarians with EDC pill organizers locked and loaded in appendix carry, ready to forestall the next bout of arrhythmia or ischemic stroke.
Fortunately for them, politics isn’t about pretty, it’s about making the decrepit palatable — ossified modes of socialism, marxism, and all the basest perversions normalized by social justice or gender identity theory.
The formula is easy. All you need to engage the masses is a simple slogan delivered with a lot of negative emotion. Add in a mustachioed villain, and you’ve got everyone’s attention — at least until the opposition produces a different shiny object. Moreover, if you can deliver your invective with a smirk, you’re sure to be a political superstar.
The best venue for celebrating the severity of your ire or the constancy of your passion is the congressional hearing. We’ve been flooded with episodic spates, featuring aggressive acts of congressional listening. The bad guys talk, the good guys talk, and congress collectively squints under furrowed brows as if to emphasize the laboriousness of auditory processing and cognitive load. You can see wheels spinning behind those somber visages. They want you to understand that the residents of Mount Olympus have heard, and action is forthcoming. It’s always forthcoming.
It’s just show biz. The problem is, people think its real.
For every issue in production on the floor of the House or Senate, the leading men and women assume their marks while the supporting actors, jesters, and hopeful extras fill out the wings. The issues happen to be very real, it’s just that your representatives are more concerned about camera angles, social media clicks, and sound bites suitable for national news. After all, the base needs to receive enough rage bait to turn out.
All the strenuous listening is designed to give you the impression that your elected leaders are doing something. After all, isn’t that what they’re paid to do…something? Raw emotion, gesticulating, pandering, and pious sensationalization bordering on the beatific gives the allusion of forward motion. It won’t last forever and politicians know it. But, they don’t need forever, just until the next election cycle. You’ll be bamboozled with some other bit of performance art by then.
I’ll let you in on a secret. I’ve seen behind the curtain. During former AG Holder’s congressional contempt hearings, I witnessed leading conservative political figures, glad-handing and backslapping their political opponent behind closed doors. Moments later, enthroned behind mahogany and exalted to the gravity of the dais, the masked kabuki began — twisted faces, pointing fingers, jowls quivering with unctuous fervor, and loud voices. What a show! The cameras ate it up and so did the public.
If you haven’t watched the Netflix short series on Arnold Swartzenegger, called Arnold, you really should. If you don’t watch all of it, be sure to watch the last episode, Part 3: American, on his political career. It’s one of the most shockingly candid discussions of what Arnold calls “schmah” in politics. Schmah is a viennese colloquialism that means gimmick, trick, swindle, or falsehood. In Arnold’s vernacular it means B.S. And that is the secret sauce of politics.
Swartzenegger said in Arnold, “Sometimes you go and make a deal behind the scene and then you go out and attack each other in front of the press in order to satisfy your constituents…but that’s politics.” He references this technique in connection with his confrontation with then State Senator John Burton (CA-D). The scene in Arnold features Swartzenegger and Burton engaging in a raucous exchange that ends in grinning fraternity.
Like I said, it’s show biz.
What you see streaming on YouTube is often pure political theatre, an act of manipulation and fundamentally cynical. But, in order to placate you — the constituent — politicians routinely engage in this swindle to harvest your patronage and elicit your fidelity to their cause: reelection. If you’re not in power, you can’t exercise power.
As evidence mounts to alpine heights in the Hunter Biden influence peddling scandal, congress parades whistleblowers and listens. The IRS witnesses have provided reams of evidence describing suspicious activity reports that tally in excess of one hundred. Do you know anyone who’s received a single one? Not likely, since they’re exceedingly rare. IRS witnesses also provided evidence of payments to both Hunter and his father Joe Biden totaling ten million dollars from Russian companies.
Recently, Devon Archer, during a Tucker Carlson interview, enumerated at least twenty instances where Joe Biden participated in calls with his son Hunter while in the presence of foreign business clients. Archer described Hunter’s role as navigating the D.C. regulatory environment, and explained that as a well known industry euphemism for influence peddling. Archer also described Hunter’s access to his father, then Vice President, as the apex of power.
Additionally, the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) is implicated in both Hunter and Joe Biden’s actions, yet the Department of Justice is completely uninterested. This lack of investigative interest is even more shocking in light of DOJ’s bankrupting and attempt to bury General Mike Flynn arguably based on nothing more than FBI malfeasance and entrapment.
Meanwhile, our congressional leaders continue the theatre of the absurd. You’ll know they’re serious when a special counsel is appointed. Ignore the bloviating about impeachment or more fact finding. Presidents have been impeached by the House, while other cabinet level officials have been held in contempt. That’s all meaningless. The 2024 presidential election cycle will be critical. In my opinion, it’ll take former President Donald Trump to strip away the show biz and give congress the backbone necessary to bring the guilty to justice.