John McCain Doesn't Know What He's Voting for, Either

[babylonsister]

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a56549/mccain-healthcare-vote/

John McCain Doesn't Know What He's Voting for, Either

This is crazier than anything we could have imagined, even in January.
By Charles P. Pierce
Jul 25, 2017


WASHINGTON—Prior to boarding The Shuttle of the Damned on Monday afternoon—the 1 p.m. shuttle left at 3 and didn't get to the gate at Reagan National until nearly six, but as I am not Ann Coulter, I will not make a national issue out of it—there were two senators and a congressman milling about in the departure area at Logan. The senators, anyway, were flying back from an event in Boston in order to vote on a healthcare bill, the contents of which none of them had the faintest clue about. The congressman was merely an interested spectator at this bonfire of democratic government.

The senators were genuinely baffled. They had not seen the bill. They did not know what was in it. All they knew was the sub rosa maneuvering that had been going on in order for Mitch McConnell to get the 50 votes he needed simply to open debate. The actual bill was as foreign to them as a clay tablet unearthed from the ruins of Ur. None of them were fluent in the congressional cuneiform in which the majority leader had chosen to pursue his object. And both of them were gobsmacked that it had gotten this far at all. Late Monday night, it was announced that John McCain, recently diagnosed with brain cancer, would fly back to Washington in order to vote on the issue. Thus up in flames went the last vestiges of the novelized John McCain, Country First maverick. He didn't know what he was voting on, either.

When Crazytown opened for business in January, not even cynics such as I anticipated a day in which a mortally ill senator would fly back to the Capitol to cast crucial votes on a healthcare law of which nobody knew anything, and that he would do so on the day after the president* of the United States profaned his office (again) by delivering a cheap, political harangue, laced with obscenity, to an audience…of Boy Scouts, who then booed on command the previous Democratic candidate for president and the previous president himself.

And all this was going on as the president* was said to be reconsidering his hand-picked attorney general because that AG had failed to cover the presidential hindquarters regarding the investigation of whether the 2016 Republican presidential campaign ran on a volatile mixture of vodka and borscht. This, it was said, would be to install a more compliant marionette, who then would fire the special counsel looking into the Russian ratfcking. This, it was said, would touch off A Constitutional Crisis, although the Republican congressional majorities have shown all the spine of an orchestra of crickets.

The level of fundamental absurdity began Tuesday in the red zone and promised only to climb higher, almost by the hour. All day, everyone was going to be five minutes behind.