YOU LACK DISCIPLINE

I think it's quite possible that I'll spend my declining years under the Caligula-esque rule of President Marjorie Taylor Greene, but I'm suddenly less worried about one of her ideological soul mates, Madison Cawthorn. You know the story:

Controversial Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) is making headlines again after he told host John Lovell on the Warrior Poet Society podcast last week that Washington, D.C. is rife with “sexual perversion” and drug use....

Cawthorn [dished] the dirt about D.C. with Lovell. “The sexual perversion that goes on in Washington, I mean, being kind of a young guy in Washington, the average age is probably 60 or 70,” Cawthorn said, adding, “I look at a lot of these people, a lot of them that I’ve looked up to through my life—I’ve always paid attention to politics—then all of a sudden you get invited to, ‘Oh hey we’re going to have a sexual get together at one of our homes, you should come.'”

“‘What did you just ask me to come to?’ And then you realize they’re asking you to come to an orgy,” Cawthorn continued....

“Some of the people leading on the movement to try and remove addiction in our country, and then you watch them do a key bump of cocaine right in front of you,” Cawthorn said. “And it’s like, this is wild.”

Cawthorn's fellow Republicans, who barely bat an eyelash when party-mates attend a conference run by neo-Nazis -- or, for that matter, try to overturn an election -- freaked when this story broke.

Kevin McCarthy isn’t the only senior Republican who wants to have a talk with Rep. Madison Cawthorn about his claim that some of his colleagues invited him to orgies and used cocaine.

Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), who chairs the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus to which Cawthorn belongs, said he plans to speak to the North Carolina Republican one-on-one about the incendiary comment....

When asked whether they would reconsider Cawthorn’s membership in the group if he didn’t make clear whom he has evidence of taking part in group sex and drug use, Perry wouldn’t say either way: “We will discuss that when we get to it,” he replied....

One Freedom Caucus member, ... addressing Cawthorn on condition of anonymity, described responses from “across the political spectrum ... saying ‘what the hell?’”

Of course this upset them. Cawthorn broke the unwritten law of Republicanism: He suggested that the other side doesn't have a monopoly on evil.

If you're a Republican, you can say all kinds of crazy things. You can say that Anthony Fauci and Hunter Biden collaborated on bioweapons labs in Ukraine in an effort to harm Donald Trump. You can say that Xi Jinping printed counterfeit bamboo-paper ballots in order to throw the 2020 election to the Democrats. None of this makes you a bad Republican. None of this violates the core principle of Republicanism: that every bad thing in the world is the work of the enemy -- liberal Democrats, the media, the Deep State, evil globalists, RINO sellouts.

But here's Cawthorn saying that people he's admired do drugs and have orgies, which, on the right, are seen as terrible things only the adrenochrome-sucking decadent Democrats engage in. This is wrong! Politics is a simple morality tale -- our side is good, while the libs embody all the plagues and pestilences in the universe!

Cawthorn is not with the program. Cawthorn doesn't understand that he's supposed to say his allies have a monopoly on goodness. He'll never be an effective Republican cadre that way.