Text by A.H. Scott, Copyright 2023
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What kind of game is this?
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It’s 2023 and welcome to Mystery Date[1]: GOP Speaker Edition!
Kevin is out. Steve is shunned, Jim is ejected, rejected and haplessly erected with his jacketless quest to hunt a Biden called Hunter. Then there’s a guy named Tom, who is a 60 second man.
Kevin McCarthy got tossed out on his butt, after a vote against him vacated the Speaker’s chair. Steve Scalise was next up, but the GOP crew didn’t want him in the big chair either. Jim Jordan couldn’t wrestle up the number of votes he needed to be elected either. Then along came Tom Emmer from Minnesota who didn’t even get enough moments in the Speaker’s post to warm the big chair.
Along the way, the GOP was in a scramble. Good ol’ Kevin McCarthy even had an idea he put forth as a gamble. Thinking he could get himself re-installed[2] as Speaker with Jim Jordan as a sturdy side-man was McCarthy’s wackiest idea to this present date.
Kev, you were voted out. So, stay out!! That gavel is gone with the wind, sir! Have no doubt, that wheel of speakership fortune ain’t coming your way again!
Beyond the ones who are racing to please, there is that 1 mean boy named Matt Gaetz that wants everything to freeze.
With Tom, Jim, Steve and Kevin out of the race, who will be the one for the role as House Speaker to take that place?
The winner is Mister Mellow Mike Johnson with a soft tone, outrageous overreach and insidious ideology. Mike is the TROJAN oops, maybe shouldn’t be using that word with such a righteous figure such as he. Two ways this situation can unfold with the new speaker; either there is harmony on the highway of humanity or an instinct of intolerance.
With newly minted House Speaker Mike Johnson, the knots are what he’s all about.
“He is a servant leader and he is going to bind us together” – Rep. Mark Alford, R-MO[3]
Speaking of bind – I think the American people are now truly in a bind of keeping our fingers crossed that the Democrats can maintain control of the United States Senate, because with Maga Mike in charge of the house, the thumping is going to be hard and harder from the right.
So, ladies and gentlemen, here he is: Maga Mike – The Super Thumper!
“Go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview. That’s what I believe, so I do not apologize for it.” – Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana[4]
Thumpin’ that bible hard as can be in one hand and thumpin’ somethin’ else with the other.
“There will be no legal basis to deny a bisexual the right to marry a partner of each sex, or a person to marry his pet.” – Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana[4]
So, no longer is the man from Louisiana just a stealth congressman, but now HE is House Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.
“All’ gay people were ‘capable of changing their abnormal lifestyles’ and there is ‘clearly no “right to sodomy” in the Constitution.” – House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana[4]
And, yet – there also isn’t any right to any form of any illusory descriptive positions or interplay between beings, be it from the docility of a faint peck of affection upon a rosy cheek in a stolen kiss during midnight’s missionary play to a backdoor bangin’ while hangin’ from chandeliers.
There is no paragraph, stanza, comma or colon within the United States Constitution that voices anything in the galaxy of sexuality. But, then again, I guess those that thump that Bible round’ the clock see those considered as sinners around every shadowy corner and every pot of Puritan porridge.
So, there Maga Mike sits atop the House[5], as third in line to the Presidency of the United States of America.
Those who uplifted him to this critical position see this specific moment in history as one of glory.
“The swamp is on the run, Maga is ascendant and if you don’t think that moving from Kevin McCarthy to Maga Mike Johnson shows the ascendance of this movement, and where the power of the Republican party truly lies, then you’re not paying attention” – Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-FL[4]
Representative Matt Gaetz is all in a tizzy of titillation in swooning over this man that is one of his own ideological ilks. But, more importantly, it is the head of the modern Republican Party who truly sees Mike’s elevation as an ultimate Trump card. Oops, I let the Donald out of the bag in noting that factor. Yes, it is former President and presidential candidate Donald Trump that walks with a bit more pep in his step in having an ally who is Speaker of the House to do his nefarious bidding when it comes to a possible repeat of actions Representative Johnson did on his behalf in authoring an amicus[4] brief to the United States Supreme Court to overturn election results in the subversive plot in the last Presidential election of 2020.
Trump is probably thinking the newly installed Speaker is bound to make things better for his electoral comeback in greasing the skids for anything that’s bound to come during the upcoming election of 2024.
Bound for glory?
Uh-uh. Only bound for having a sudden twang of amnesia is the game Maga Mike and all the rest of them are twisting themselves into knots for.
Speaking of games that people play, there’s a man with more knowledge of balls[6] than any of the others that has been listed in this article so far.
Does anybody honestly think that in over those 40 plus years of thousands of virile, young men being shepherded under the tutelage of Tommy Tuberville in the pursuit of athletic victory that there were not a singular ‘blip’ of less than virtuous decorum that would be better to be gone with the wind?
Anything that would dare endanger, tarnish or detour a championship title and all the collective glory for an institutions’ sports program’s sterling reputation and a glistening array of trophy in a finely polished case would just be the price of victory.
So, hey, I sit here and shrug as to what a person would do to be lauded as a champion in whatever field of vocation they have chosen to tackle. Pun intended. For me, it’s one of those things to ponder that make me go hmm.
Yet, for games that people play as being on the side of all that is pristine, pure and for the moral good; is in reality just the opposite for the tawdry power-grab for ascendancy towards adoration, adulation and ever expanding campaign coffers.
Being a game of pigskin to politics, to be in the winner’s circle is the end all be all.
Of course with his reputation, Tommy ain’t no fly by night type of character. Tommy Tuberville has coached varied champions of swiftness and speed from the University of Cincinnati in Ohio to Texas Tech University in Lubbock and Auburn University in Alabama.
And, finally of course in the Southern United States, there is the grandest of the granddaddies when it comes to a football program legacy – Ole’ Miss; otherwise known as the University of Mississippi, located in Oxford, Mississippi.
That allure of winning has its’ perks for the pigskin gladiators who score on and off the field on any given Sunday. With that reality, there are always accommodations to be made to keep the starting line and backup second string waiting in the wings on that field to win.
So, when Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville rails on and on about sanctity and sin while putting a hold on nominations for promotions in our government, it reeks to me as the height of hypocrisy.
I wonder if any of the media that come in contact with Senator Tuberville, be it on Capitol Hill or back in Alabama has ever asked him of any glint of knowledge of any young men under his wise guidance who has had a possibility of their ability to conquer in the field of sports over his 40 years plus has ever been endangered of being sidelined by an unwanted pregnancy and having its’ results swept away for convenience of furthering the march to victory.
As from the days of the then landmark Roe v. Wade ruling in the early 1970’s to now of the present day, data statistics[7] have documented on how many unplanned pregnancies have been terminated due to that once legally protected medical procedure across the United States of America.
No one should be under any illusion of reality that Ohio, Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi have been excised from all the other 46 states being affected.
When Senator Tuberville speaks with such a definitive deriding of any member of the United States military who has sought this medical procedure, as he is some kind of man of moral perfection that is trying to push his own stridency upon other citizens of equal standing; he probably figures no one would dare turn the spotlight of judgment back on him.
Senator Tommy Tuberville, as well as all the rest of these Republicans are betting that they can best the game of pulling one over on the American voting public. Well, maybe some can be bamboozled with such ease in hearing a stem-winding speech on virtue and the Godliness which some profess to be bathed in.
Yet, as in the results[8] elections in Ohio, Virginia and Kentucky of November 7th, 2023 showed the country and the world, sometimes even the best players fumble and their opponents experience the winner’s circle for once in a while. Lest anyone forget the overturning of Roe v. Wade by Trump’s trio of autonomy’s reversal in 2022, many an American woman and our allies clasp the torch of recrimination in the voting booths for many an unseen decade to come. No, no, GOP – you wrought this and us women of this nation is tossin’ you out on your rears in defeat is how you are gonna’ to be taught this!!
So, just keep on thumpin’, Maga Mike and keep on torturing logic, ‘Bama Tommy; while Democrats, Independents and even Republicans who are fed up with the grubby grab for self-aggrandizement and phony piety that encompasses the party which now has gleefully relinquished any façade of a political vision and platform under the stranglehold of a tiny thumbed tyrant in waiting, Donald J. Trump have flipped the script.
Game on!!
“Games People Play”
by
A.H. Scott
Games People Play; The Footnotes:
1.-Mystery Date – Mystery Date Board Game Milton Bradley
2.-Kevin McCarthy Floats Proposal To Return Him To Power And Make Jim Jordan Assistant House speaker – NBC
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/mccarthy-floats-partnership-jordan-assistant-house-speaker-rcna122037
3.-New Speaker Mike Johnson ‘Is Going To Bind Us Together’: GOP Rep. Mark Alford — ABC News
4.-Mike Johnson As Speaker Shows ‘Maga Is Ascendant’ In Congress, Matt Gaetz says – The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/26/mike-johnson-speaker-matt-gaetz-maga-ascendant
5.-Republicans Choose Election-Denying LGBTQ-Hating Psycho as House Speaker – The Humanist Report
6.-Tommy Tuberville Made $25m Off Black men. God Forbid They Get Anything Back – The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/oct/12/tommy-tuberville-us-senator-auburn-coach-reparations-speech-football
7.-Morbidity and Morality Weekly Report (MMWR) – Centers For Disease Control And Prevention
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/ss/ss7009a1.htm#T4_down
8.-The Supreme Court Dismantled Roe. States Are Restoring It One By One. – Politico
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/09/abortion-rights-elections-red-states-00126225
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A.H. Scott is a poet and essayist based in New York City and is a veteran contributor to this blog. To access additional articles by A.H. Scott, click here: https://tonyward.com/a-h-scott-its-all-in-the-game/