GOP is hard to be ashamed of. Then to Madison Cawthorn.

This week is a revelation – we’ve finally discovered that Republican leaders really have a limit to their shamelessness.

Even after six consecutive years of enabling a racist vulgar man to brag about grabbing women, paying a porn star to cover up an extramarital affair, and inciting a violent uprising to overturn our election — there was a strange remark by freshman Congressman Madison Cawthorn that forced the GOP leadership to show us their shameful faces.

Cawthorn got a little too laid-back on a podcast last week, about Republican orgies — aka “sex together.”[s]”—Joining an interest in the “major bumps of cocaine” at an elderly coworker’s home. What should have been a gripping story about DC’s sex politics (and part of me is a middle-aged man lamenting why I wasn’t invited to such great events) was becomes a lively GOP family drama.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and other senior GOP leaders met with Cawthorn, the youngest Republican in Congress, at the Capitol on Wednesday. They asked him to name those involved in the alleged melee.

According to McCarthy, Cawthorn says his allegations were exaggeration, and has also completely changed his story — now accusing him “Thought he might have seen an employee in the garage 100 meters away. ”

“This is unacceptable,” McCarthy told reporters after the meeting, in which he reminded Cawthorn and told the young lawmaker (who once posted a video of himself hitting a tree) that he had beaten him up. lose his trust. But wait, we’re not done yet!

Longtime GOP filthy swindler Roger Stone, who has a friendly history with organizations, came out with a plot twist to the last second. Stone wrote on the right-wing social networking platform Gab, “Congressman Madison Cawthorn just told me [he] did NOT retract its statement about drug use organizations among DC elites”.

Who should we trust? Who cares? It was an episode that tortured the Republican Party, but unlike so many other outrageous crimes the GOP members have committed, the real leaders were mortified this time!

Drug and illegal sex allegations are not the main reason Cawthorn has received the ire of his Republican colleagues — such as Senator Richard Burr, who has called Cawthorn a “embarrassment at times” and Senator Thom Tillis, who said the youngster had “not done much for his Home district. As if to show their disdain, Burr and Tillis, two of North Carolina’s most powerful Republicans, appeared at a fundraiser for the state of Cawthorn’s main rival, Senator Chuck Edwards, this week. prior to.

Leader McCarthy concludes Cawthorn’s recent statements are “Do not become a congressman. Curiously, McCarthy has been silent on most other instances of Cawthorn’s inappropriate behavior, which could only mean that he found them, at least, tolerable. This included Cawthorn driving with his license revoked for a second time earlier this month, labeling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a “thug”, describing Ukraine as “extremely evil”, bringing knives to his life. school board meeting, carrying a gun through the airport. security, alleged sexual assault, ads falsely claiming election fraud and “bloodshed” warnings for future elections, advocating Big Lies, and posting photos of visit to Hitler’s motel in 2017 — in which he said the site was his “group list”. (I mean, that’s a perfectly normal desire for 21-year-old American men, isn’t it?) All of this falls within the limits of acceptable behavior for leaders. Republican Party, but talking about the organization is simply a bridge too far.

In fact, more Republicans talked about Cawthorn’s extravagant accusations than the terrifying revelations about Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who sent 29 silly text messages to Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows revealed QAnon’s plot and urged him to help Trump overturn the 2020 election. According to Politico, even the House Liberal Conference, including the GOP Justice Coalition, includes freaks, lunatics and racists, seem to have “spoiled” Cawthorn.

However, the Freedom Caucus is completely fine with member Matt Gaetz, who has been accused of having sex with a minor and is also actively promoting Big Lie. Given the current conservative obsessions with the “groomed” and fictionalized Democratic-run international child sex trafficking rings, it’s odd that GOP leadership has been silent about speaking out against Gaetz. . Instead, they devoted all their bad faith outrage and on-stage sympathies to Supreme Court-nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson last week, when they toasted her ahead of her sentencing in child pornography cases.

Yet another Freedom Caucus member, Congressman Paul Gosar, appeared essentially unscathed after speaking at a white supremacist conference and posting a violent anime series depicting the murder of Congressman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. There was no familial sit-down with him or public lashing out of Republican leaders, only some grumbling from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. He joined Congressman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a walk-a-fazed, who also defended her attendance at the same convention in which crowds of white nationalists were budding cheering for Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin.

If you’re keeping the scores at home: promoting deranged conspiracy theories, supporting a coup, participating in a coup, spreading the Big Lie, appearing at democratic conventions white ethnicity, encouraging violence against congressional colleagues, and being accused of sexual assault and sex with a minor are all perfect fit for the GOP leadership — no love requires public criticism, punishment or condemnation.

But in telling some famous stories, Leader McCarthy believes you are setting a bad example and harming the nation. “You can’t make statements like that as a member of Congress, it affects everybody else and the country at large,” McCarthy said.

Cawthorn and other Republicans promote racism, violent conspiracy theories, and the Big Lie, and the GOP leadership sees it as just part of the business. The message to other Republicans is clear: Do your part to help ignite America’s democracy, but keep your mouth shut about the “cocaine major bumps.”