Sen. Ron Johnson has become a caricature of a spoof of a pathological parody of himself. He's far from alone — let it never be said that Trumpian burlesque is, in clinical numbers, an insignificant disease; it's just that Ron, born under the stars of Minnesota nice, kind of went mean and crazy in Oshkosh.
Having already denied that the Capitol attack was an "armed insurrection," yesterday he consumed his Senate committee time not by asking any questions of law-enforcement officials, but by reading from one guy's lone letter published by a singular, far-right website which swore that Trump supporters' historic atrocity of 1/6 was, in fact, no doing of Trump supporters.
No, the riot was "festive," said Johnson; "a very few didn't share the jovial, friendly, earnest demeanor of the great majority"; the real villains were "Antifa or other leftist agitators," as the one dude attested; the Capitol Police misjudged the festive crowd and overreacted, and that's what caused the violence.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has observed that "Johnson’s grasp on reality has been tenuous for years." But his dissociative disorder is now complete. And, as noted, he's not alone. A right-wing media host has confirmed for other reality-trollers that "there’s no evidence that white supremacists were responsible for what happened on Jan. 6" — oh, "and contrary to what you've been hearing, there's also no evidence this was a, quote, 'armed insurrection.'"
The upcoming Conservative Political Action Conference has slated no less than seven seminars centering on a somewhat different tactic: Trump's election-fraud alerts contained a lot of truths, thus, implicitly, the 1/6 insurrection was inevitable, understandable, and forgivable.
Yesterday I wrote, "American politics has entered a new age" — one in which the preposterous and the most radically unbelievable are the coin of nearly half the electorate. Season-ticket holders to the GOP's theatre of the absurd are compelled by propaganda artists to nevertheless believe, or be banished. We have witnessed this sad, unmindful degeneracy among millions throughout history. It never ends well for the believers.