The big news on Monday was that Scott Pruitt, the extraction industry sublet and current second-place grifter in the Misuse Of Government Airplanes sweepstakes, took a jaunt down to Hazard, Kentucky to announce that "the war on coal" was over and that he would be rolling back the Obama Administration's Clean Power Plant. This is because Pruitt is as complete a tool as one can find at Home Depot and because he no more belongs as head of the EPA than an elephant does performing at the Bolshoi.

Bob Corker thought that Scott Pruitt was just the man for the job.

Bob Corker also voted in favor of making a discreet racist the Attorney General, for putting a grifter at the head of Health and Human Services, and for putting unqualified buffoons at the head of the Departments of Education and Housing And Urban Development. Bob Corker was altogether fine with stiffing Merrick Garland for a year in order to hijack a Supreme Court seat for Neil Gorsuch who, apparently, even John Roberts can't stand. It was cool with Bob Corker, several times, if millions of Americans lost their healthcare and if even the surviving restrictions on Wall Street brigandage and campaign finance went up in smoke. Bob Corker voted with the administration 88 percent of the time. And as Alec MacGillis pointed out on the electric Twitter machine, Bob Corker stepped in and monkeywrenched a union drive at an automobile plant in Tennessee.

In short, fckabuncha Bob Corker.

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Habitues of the shebeen better get used to this right now because I have a feeling we're going to be seeing a lot of this. Desperate conservative Republicans trying to get out from under this president* by pretending they weren't complicit in the entire decades-long accommodation with unreason and fanaticism that made a president* like him not only possible, but inevitable. We're going to see a lot of people claiming immunity from the prion disease with bits of the monkeybrains still visible on their chins. We will not be buying this here in this establishment, nor will we be buying the argument that "reasonable conservatives" will save us from the catastrophe in which they all are wholly complicit, and that certainly includes Bob Corker, who thought Scott Pruitt was aces for the EPA job, and who thought Merrick Garland unfit for the Supreme Court because a Democratic president had nominated him, and who is now crawling from the wreckage he helped create.

Over the weekend, you may have noticed, Corker got rave reviews for an interview he gave to the NYT. In it, he pretty much measured the president* for a straitjacket.

Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, charged in an interview on Sunday that President Trump was treating his office like “a reality show,” with reckless threats toward other countries that could set the nation “on the path to World War III.” In an extraordinary rebuke of a president of his own party, Mr. Corker said he was alarmed about a president who acts “like he’s doing ‘The Apprentice’ or something...He concerns me,” Mr. Corker added. “He would have to concern anyone who cares about our nation.”

Glorioski, said the elite political press. What a man of principle we have here. This is all bollocks. Corker is so concerned about this madman and the existential crisis the madman has brought upon the nation that Corker's response is going to be ... to quit his job. What a Profile In Poltroon this fellow is, and how sadly typical.

(Inside Baseball Tip: one of the reasons why Corker is getting the praise he's getting is that he's one of the senators who always stops to chat in the hallways of the Capitol with scrounging reporters. By contrast, Senator Professor Warren doesn't do that and has put some noses permanently out of joint, especially at The Boston Globe. Washington is one weird town.)

The free ride is over.

The free ride is over. Conservative Republicans don't get to disavow Breitbart without first acknowledging that they've been playing footsie with neo-Confederates in the South, and with seditious lunatics in the West, since everything got rolling in the 1970s. Conservative Republicans don't get to disavow Steve Bannon—assuming any of them have—without acknowledging the importance of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove to their ascendancy. They don't get to call this president* unqualified or crazy without acknowledging the science behind the climate crisis and abandoning the crackpot magical thinking of supply-side economics.

They need to clean their whole house instead of simply railing at the maniac they invited into the front parlor. Once, at a presidential debate, a third of the Republican field admitted publicly that they didn't believe in evolution. And that was 13 years ago. The prion disease has been running wild ever since. There's no strategy for triage anymore. All are infected. All must be quarantined.

And one of the prime contenders to replace Corker is another Republican, and she's a party-sized bag of nuts.

So, no. I don't have to "give credit" to Bob Corker for anything. He owes his career to the same unreason and extremism of which this president* is a perfect end product. There are no mavericks here; even John McCain is, in the long view, more talk than action. As to anything else, I associate myself, as always, with the remarks of my learned colleague from Brooklyn.

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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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