This just in: mediocre white man wins again!

By Nellie Bly
Washington Correspondent

After a week of performative futility, marked by only one fistfight, House Republicans finally managed to install Bakersfield insurrectionist Kevin McCarthy (R – No-tell Motel, New York Ave. NE) as the Speaker of the US House of Representatives.

We'll let others describe how McCarthy eked out his win by handing out slices of his testicles to the lunatic hatemongers that make up the Republican caucus.  But we were struck by McCarthy's bottomless confidence, based on nothing, that he had somehow “earned” the second most powerful job in American government.

Who is Kevin McCarthy anyway?  

The new Speaker, shown here with his "assistant"

He was born and raised in Bakersfield, a s**thole at the anal ligature of California's Central Valley.  He ran a deli for a couple of years and then sold it, using the proceeds to attend Cal State Bakersfield.  He served as a staffer to a notoriously nasty Republican Congressman, Bill Thomas, and then started climbing the Republican greasy pole, first in Sacramento, and then succeeding Thomas, who to this day doesn't have a good word to say for his, um, protegé:

“I can’t recall a time when he came into the office to talk about a substantive political issue,” [Former Rep. Bill] Thomas told me. “The political goal as he moved up the district structure” was “to build up” relationships. “He’s the guy in the college fraternity that everybody liked and winds up selling life insurance, convincing people they need it.” ...In his view, the business of legislating is foreign to McCarthy. “He’s already said, ‘As soon as I become Speaker, I’m going after the Attorney General,’ ” Thomas told me. “Why would you want to spend your whole life trying to be Speaker to go after somebody? What are you for?”

This may not sound like much.  Indeed, it seems, like Bakersfield itself, to embody mediocrity.  But lack of talent or principle didn't cause Kevin to doubt his entitlement to fame and power:

From the start of his career, in the late nineteen-eighties, as a congressional staffer at a district office in the Central Valley of California, his ambition was to reach the House; once he arrived in Washington, it was to become Speaker. The House is where he’s most himself. He likens spending time there to “having breakfast at a truck stop.”

The continued undeserved success of Mediocre White Men, which somehow eludes the mediocre white gasbags and pundits, is glaringly evident to one group that has suffered the most at their hands: Black women

White supremacy looks like a less than mediocre shell of a white man with no soul, vision or purpose beyond faux power ascend to speaker after 14 failed votes and hearing chants of USA following their display of utter incompetence… #WokeAF

— Danielle Moodie (@DeeTwoCents) January 7, 2023

It's so obvious to Black women. Why can't anyone else see it?

Let's look at the parade of Republican Presidents and other worthies since say 1968: Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Dan Quayle, Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, Denny “Wrestling Room” Hastert, Eric Cantor, Wilfred M. Romney.

That's a veritable Murderer's Row of Mediocre White Men.  In fairness, some of these white men were much worse than mediocre, and Romney was at least thought to be a smart and effective finagler who made a handsome fortune stripping and flipping America's great industrial heritage.  But anyone as clueless as Wilfred or as stupid as Trump deserves the sobriquet of mediocrity, whatever else can be said about them. 

You don't have to be a Black woman to recognize the phenomenon of entitled MWM.  You could be a Black man pushed out of his congressional district by a Mediocre White Man, who proceeded to go down in flames:

Nancy Pelosi is right. Mediocre men like Kevin McCarthy are allowed to fail spectacularly on the world stage day after day, and nevertheless receive chance after chance as though entitled to power. https://t.co/Xv7ybZdU5e

— Mondaire Jones (@MondaireJones) January 5, 2023

But the phenomenon is hardly limited to politics.

You can't swing a cat or a cliché without hitting a Mediocre White Man in a position of undeserved power, wealth, and fame.  The op-ed pages of America's two remaining newspapers are clotted with MWM's blathering on about nothing very much: Soprassata Dave Brooks, Six-Months Tom Friedman, Community College Adjunct Prof. George Will, and, at least once a year, the brother of retired Times columnist Maureen Dowd, Kevin.

Turn on cable TV news, and there's Impeachment Joe Scarborough, Sean Hannity, Wolf Blitzer, Lawrence O'Donnell, Chuck Todd, and somewhere around Channel 24,546 Chris Cuomo.

The unearned dominance of MWM is a facet of every aspect of American life where money or power is at stake.  In your daily life, everyone has met, to use David Letterman's lethal description of Wilfred M. Romney, “the man who looks like he turned your dad down for a loan.”  The guy who blackballed you at the country club.  The guy who was promoted over you because he was better at “managing up.”  The guy who sent Larry and Kent to sit on the sofa next to the freshman in the wheelchair.

L to R: MWM

The Halls of Mammon are crowded with Mediocre White Men.  Some started with a fortune and now are engaged in destroying once-prominent social media companies.  Others so lacked management skills that they caused a major airline to collapse at Christmas, but still have a job and long-term incentive compensation package.  You can hardly pick up ae proxy statement without reading about a CEO who gets $20 million a year either for not wrecking his company or engaging in ridiculous mergers that make it impossible to know if he has any idea of what he's doing.  Just walk down any beachfront on Nantucket or Osterville or drive around Deer Valley and you'll meet them in their native habitat.

And of course if you work your way down the list of Republican House and Senate members you'll run the gamut from Mediocre White Men to truly frightening bigots and lunatics.   One thing unites them though: the bedrock belief that they deserve to be there, which is usually accompanied by the equally firm belief that minorities and women don't.

Actually, what really infuriates Black women is that the MWM who have achieved success at the expense of less favored groups is that the MWM's don't even notice that they have succeeded due to undeserved privilege.  In fact, it infuriates them when that obvious truth in pointed out to them.  In Florida, Ron #DeathSantis (an exemplar of a Mediocre White Man right down to his slammin' white go-go boots) has actually outlawed saying as much:

...staffers for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) were asked an interesting question: What does “woke” mean?....Ryan Newman, DeSantis’s general counsel, said the term referred to “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”

Taryn Fenske, DeSantis’s communications director, said that “woke” was “a slang term for … progressive activism,” adding that the term also referred to a belief that there were systemic injustices in the United States.

The question came up because Florida was being sued for trying to outlaw teaching wokeosity in its institutions of public education.  Both of them.

Why do Mediocre White Men have a hammerlock on all the goodies that America has to offer?

Two reasons (actually, the clever reader may discern a single common thread):

1.  White Men.  The election of the worst human being in America as President confirmed what we had long suspected: mediocre white men want other mediocre white men to succeed.  It gives them hope, and they imagine it angers people they suspect of being non-mediocre: educated progressives with their fancy degrees and insufferable intellectual superiority.  They may be right about the insufferable bit, but what a price mediocre white men pay for venerating mediocrity: broken unions, bad health care, and a melting Earth to bequeath to their children, mediocre or not.

This is not a new phenomenon: when mediocre President and even worse criminal Dick Nixon tried to shoehorn a mediocre judge onto the Supreme Court (setting a path that later mediocre Republican Presidents have emulated), Sen. Roman Hruska, a mediocre Republican from the mediocre state of Nebraska weighed in:

As the Senate is in the process of debating the nomination of Judge G. Harrold Carswell as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court -- to fill the seat vacated by Abe Fortas -- Nebraska Republican Roman Hruska says in a TV interview, "Even if he [Carswell] were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they? We can't have all Brandeises and Frankfurters and Cardozos."

Imagine how thrilled Sen. Hruska would be to see the current Republican Supreme Court sextet!

Which brings us to

2.  White Women.  The support that mediocre white men give to other MWM's is understandable.  The decades of support given by white women is harder to grasp.  Why do they support MWM?  Maybe it's like asking fish what water is like.  They don't know anything else.

But that can't really be it.  We've never met a woman, no matter her politics, who was unable to distinguish mediocre (or worse) men from the others.  They may not have been right, but they grasped the distinction.  

Why won't they save us from MWM?

So is it simply a matter of bad judgment?  If women will marry a MWM, they'll certainly vote for one, or all of them.  Is it a lack of self-esteem, justified or otherwise, that make women think they don't deserve anything better than a mediocre white man as a husband, an adulterous lover, or a Speaker (and Kev has been all three!)?

Then there's the white bit.  If your greatest fear is loss of white privilege, maybe voting for generations of oppressive sexist mediocre white men is a small price to pay for your own (and your children's) loss of rights and benefits.  Hell, if you can fly to Midway for $79 on Southwest, your access to abortion is assured.  As for those who can't afford the ticket, well, that's their problem.

The solution to the domination of American politics and society by Mediocre White Men, like our new Speaker, is in the hands of white women.  But they're not willing to act, according to sources close to Hillary Clinton.  And that's why Mediocre White Men, like Kevin McCarthy, think they are entitled to anything they can get, even if their success requires 15 ballots, endless humiliation, betraying their country, and the loss of their privy parts.