WASHINGTON—You may have missed it, but two of the government’s most influential eunuchs came out in public on Tuesday. They sang their songs in a lovely soprano voice. There was hardly a dollop of spittle left to lick when they were done. First up was Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin who had a bit of a meltdown at his daily press conference when the subject of the president*’s attempt to demolish the FBI came up. From The Hill:

“Let it all out, get it all out there. Cleanse the organization,” Ryan said, according to Fox. “I think we should disclose all this stuff. It’s the best disinfectant. Accountability, transparency — for the sake of the reputation of our institutions,” he added. Ryan reportedly made the remarks at a largely off-the-record session with anchors and reporters ahead of President Trump's State of the Union address on Tuesday night. Ryan went on the record to address the release of the House Intelligence Committee memo.

“Cleanse”? Is he out of his mind? Does he have any idea what that word means in the history of the last century? And “cleanse” the FBI of what, precisely? Agents who know the truth about the corrupt old man who has Ryan’s balls on the mantelpiece at Mar-A-Lago? Agents who can draw into sharp relief all the damage that Ryan is willing to force the republic to endure so his donor class can suck up even more the nation’s wealth? You can put Paul Ryan’s essential patriotism in a shotglass and have more than enough room for the whiskey. He’s the biggest fake in the history of the Congress, and that’s saying something.

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Elsewhere in the Capitol, a Senate committee got a chance to ask questions of Scott Pruitt, the energy-industry sublet now in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency. Most of the questions involved Pruitt’s campaign to put oil wells and open-pit mines on every half-acre of public land. But there also was some curiosity about what Pruitt said concerning the current president* back when Pruitt was working with Jeb Bush’s expiring campaign. From CNN:

"I believe that Donald Trump in the White House will be more abusive to the Constitution than Barack Obama and that's saying a lot," Pruitt said during a February 4, 2016, interview on Tulsa radio station KFAQ.

It got better.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island, read Pruitt's remarks and asked him, "Do you recall saying that?"

"I don't, senator," Pruitt said. "I don't echo that today at all.

Later, of course, Pruitt’s office turned the fulsome up to 11, just in case Russian hitmen were hanging about.

"After meeting him, and now having the honor of working for him, it is abundantly clear that President Trump is the most consequential leader of our time," he said in a statement released by the EPA. "No one has done more to advance the rule of law than President Trump. The President has liberated our country from the political class and given America back to the people."

I expect that, during tonight’s State of the Union, a lot of the Republicans in Congress, as well as key figures in the administration*, will pass the time by playing a little solitaire.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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