I know, a lot of people are very excited about the primary defeat of U.S. Republican Thomas Massie (KY-4). I’m just not one of them. Not because I liked him, I honestly couldn’t care less about any politician and found him particularly annoying on quite a few issues, but because his defeat won’t make a single bit of difference in the grand scheme of things. No individual politician, especially in Congress, will. They are all temporary and don’t deserve your loyalty, ideas and ideals do.
Massie was a reliable vote on most things for Republicans, but he started to get high on his own supply – seduced by the media coverage of his obsession with Jeffrey Epstein and the idea that there is a network of pervert monsters out there somewhere that he could help put away. Well, along with his liberal buddy U.S. Democrat Rep. Ro Khanna (CA-17), he got the “Epstein files” released and they exposed…exactly nothing.
Think about it, those files were Al Capone’s Vault of the political world. But unlike the vault debacle, the files were simply ignored and/or used in ways they did not back up because, well, they could be. The vault was empty on live TV. The files are long and boring, so no normal person is going to read them for themselves.
This frees up anyone, especially the unscrupulous, to characterize what’s in it in any way they see fit. “Trump is mentioned X number of times!” That means literally nothing. U.S. Democrat Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (NY-8) is mentioned in them. The difference between him and Trump is that the mentions of Trump are in news stories and Epstein and friends b******g about him because Jeff hated him. The mentions of Hakeem are his staffers desperately trying to get a meeting with him so he can get a campaign donation from him. See the difference?
Massie never bothered to draw that distinction or make that case, lest it lead to fewer bookings on MS Now and CNN.
Massie ultimately lost because he lost touch with the majority of his constituents. While the Epstein story is interesting, most people really don’t care about it. They don’t know anyone involved or impacted, and while all good people would love to see sicko kid-touchers tossed into a wood chipper, there isn’t anything in those files that shows anyone not already dead or in prison did anything. And if there is some smoking gun hidden in the redacted files, Massie and Khanna could have easily announced that on the House floor without any consequences. They haven’t.
Sometimes, no matter how much hype there is, drilling a well will never produce anything. If there’s no “there” there, move on. Massie didn’t because what else did he have?
A 90 percent vote can easily be replaced with another 90 percent vote, and this time with fewer headaches attached to it – a different body doing basically the same thing is good enough.
That last bit is what I’d like to stress, and why I say you shouldn’t be loyal to politicians. They are interchangeable, therefore individually irrelevant. Presidents are term-limited, Members of Congress lose, retire or die, principles are eternal.
I’m not expecting anyone to cry over Massie’s loss, but dancing about it like it was somehow the last domino to fall before we find a cure for cancer is just as pointless. No legislation that wasn’t passed before will pass now, and nothing that was waiting will now be resolved. Massie wasn’t THE obstacle for anything, he was an annoyance.
I get that the President couldn’t stand him, but I’d like to see this kind of effort and money spent trying to defeat Democrats rather than wasting it on party discipline, no matter how annoying the person is.
If Republicans don’t have a majority in the House and/or Senate in January of next year, even less will get done than we’ve seen in the last two years. The President has made only sporadic pushes for bills and Congress has done even less. Honestly, the only benefit of having those three institutions is that they’ve stopped or slowed bad things from happening, not that they’ve reversed anything bad. That minor victory is on the chopping block this fall and that’s all I really care about.
Who the physical human beings are doing the good things in Washington does not matter to me; that they get done (or stop getting worse) is all that does. I don’t care who the Republicans are who do it. Be happy Thomas Massie will be out of a job at the end of the year, if that floats your boat, but don’t think any actual problems have been solved, or good legislation has been advanced because of it. Anyone pushing that is sucking up to the President or selling you something.
Derek Hunter is the host of the Derek Hunter Show on WMAL in Washington, DC, and has a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses, and host of the weekly “Week in F*cking Review” podcast where the news is spoken about the way it deserves to be. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.
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