Republicans spent two years ruining everything, and now their God King won’t quit bombing the place where all the oil comes from, so gas and diesel prices are through the roof. Oh, no! What are they going to do? Cry to Politico, I guess:
Facing rising gas prices, an Iran war with no end in sight and increasingly dire midterm polling, Senate Republicans are facing a crucial choice this week: fight or flight.
Some GOP lawmakers are caught between their desire to use the rest of the scant preelection legislative calendar to improve their standing with voters and the likelihood there probably isn’t much they can do anyway.
Josh Marshall has a good review of the “do something!!!” mentality that’s gripped Republicans in the face of a probable shellacking in a few weeks if you want to have some more serious analysis that what’s going to follow here. That said, their “big idea” of limiting diesel exports would probably make prices go higher:
I get that Democrats get ribbed because we’re the try hards, the ones who sit at the front of the class, the ones who turn their assignments in early. Well, there’s a flip side to that: the fuckup frat boys who party until the day before the term paper is due, and then hurry up to unshit their bed. Well, my friends, they’re fucked, and there’s no simple unfuck. They touched the real “third rail” of politics — gas prices — not some made-up “third rail” based on something only the DC media fetishizes.
And Trump, Jesus Christ — he’s trying to find more places to name after himself while he consumes AI slop from a fawning sycophant nutcase, Natalie, who also changes his diapers.
My frank opinion is that the polls we’re seeing in this moment probably exaggerate what’s going to happen to Republicans in November, due to the many different issues with polls that we all know too well. That said, watching these clowns realize that they might, for once, actually experience the consequences of their actions is worth it even if their worst case scenario doesn’t happen.
Another interesting side-effect of all of this is that we’re going to see yet another real-world experiment about the power of late ad spending. Republicans are dumping $150 million into ads, but this isn’t a “who cares” election where low-information voters can be easily influenced by the last ad they saw. Gas prices, ICE, a stupidly ill-timed effort to throw 750,000 people off of Obamacare, and everything else that’s happened in the last two years has increased the involvement of the normally uninvolved.
Christ, if institutional Democrats could open their fucking mouths and pile on, at least we’d see a bunch of scared DC main characters whine and cry even more. But that’s not going to happen, so we’ll have to settle for a few Politico stories.
