What a week. Whoooooo boy. Yowza. I’m tellin’ ya.
WINNERS:
John McCain: Put his money where his mouth was for once in his political life. I mean, at least metaphorically. He didn’t really stand to lose any money either way that I know of
Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski: Upheld, despite consistent and ever-mounting pressure from their own party, the interests of their constituents and a basic modicum of human decency by voting no on every version of the GOP’s healthcare bill, the sort of principled and admirable action far too serious for a column such as this
Democrats: Saw their party vote as a bloc, despite the pressure on members in red states, to reject the GOP’s healthcare shenanigans, and also debuted a new slogan this week which, for all the criticism surrounding it, now sounds a hell of a lot better than the GOP’s “we have control of the entire government and we still can’t even find a way to repeal the thing we’ve vowed to repeal for the past seven years”
The eager American political audience, hungry for fresh dirt: Oh boy oh boy oh boy
Anthony Scaramucci: The Mooch passed his first test as White House communications director with flying colors, cleverly distracting America from the GOP’s successful repeal of Obamacare while simultaneously preserving and restoring the dignity of the Trump White House
Women: Gosh, it’s almost like excluding an entire gender from your high-stakes, tenuously perched bid to reform healthcare in America is a bad idea that will come back to bite you in the ass
Reince Priebus: Finally lost his White House job, but that it’s amazing that this extraordinary con job went on as long as it did. I mean, come on. There’s no way the man actually exists. What parent would voluntarily name their child Reinhold. What child would voluntarily accept the nickname Reince in its stead
Kim Jong-Un: If I can come back from lunch, see “North Korea” trending on Twitter with over 300,000 people talking about it, and almost have a heart attack as a result, the dictator must be doing something right
LOSERS:
Paul Ryan: Just including him here because it’s an excuse to link “RyanErr“, my once-again-relevant account of when the House fucked up the Obamacare repeal back in March
Dr. #Content: Dammit, I should’ve written my piece about the Scaramucci thing the night it came out
Transgender Americans: Managed to be forgotten first by the Trump administration, in overlooking their contributions in order to bar them from military service, and then by the American people, who got distracted by everything that went down in the subsequent days
Bernie Sanders: His vote against Russian sanctions this week lost him the support of Twitter’s most insane Russian-collusion conspiracy theorists, permanently discrediting him and sinking both his personal political aspirations and the future of the entire American progressive movement
Ted Cruz: Voted for the failed “skinny repeal” bill, which gave me an excuse to list him, but let’s be honest: every time I get to list him as a Loser makes me rock hard
Democrats, again: Last night’s drama and Mitch McConnell’s “It’ll be interesting to see what they suggest as the way forward” line opens the door for them to push something clearly better than both the current healthcare system and the GOP’s replacement options—like, say, universal healthcare—but they have yet to prove that they won’t just squander that goodwill with some incredibly weaksauce move
Mitch McConnell: Ahahahahahah fuck you Mitch
Dr. #Content, part 2: Dammit, I thought I’d have more time to finish Priebus Lost, my Paradise Lost parody
Donald J. Trump: Normally I include him in these columns with some sort of “he’s going to somehow emerge as a winner from this” qualifier, but let’s review his past week: he appointed a new White House communications director, who instantly prompted the firing of Trump’s ferociously loyal press secretary and possibly the departure of his chief of staff in addition to alienating another of his top aides, and then garnered national headlines with a profanity-laden rant to a journalist; he tried, without much subtlety, to force out his own Attorney General, prompting a backlash from members of his own party; his speech at the Boy Scouts Jamboree was so widely reviled that the Boy Scouts of America had to apologize for it; he decided, possibly unilaterally, to bar transgender Americans from military service, prompting widespread backlash from both the public and the Department of Defense as well as reminders that it takes more than Tweets to establish military protocols; he will have to either sign or (fruitlessly) veto a set of sanctions against Russia after they passed the House and Senate by a combined vote of 517-5; and the GOP healthcare bill, the principal legislative goal of his first year in office, once again collapsed in embarrassing fashion on his watch
Normal service: Will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever resume
The Desk of Dr. #Content 