DEBT CEILING DEAL: IT'S AWFULLY QUIET ON THE RIGHT

We have a debt ceiling deal that didn't give angry right-wingers everything they want, yet Politico's Playbook tells us that Kevin McCarthy's job appears safe, at least at the moment:

... while many conservatives are hopping mad about the deal, they have not yet publicly threatened McCarthy — even as they rail against what they’re calling a “surrender” of the GOP majority.

Case in point: In an interview with Playbook yesterday, conservative Rep. BOB GOOD (R-Va.) blasted the agreement as being not “much different than what we could have gotten with a Democrat majority in the House.” Yet when asked about booting McCarthy, he held his fire: “I don’t know of anyone that’s talking about that. Honestly, I only hear about it when reporters ask me about it,” he said.

We heard something similar a few days ago, before the deal was unveiled, from Rep. ANDY BIGGS (R-Ariz.), a former Freedom Caucus chair: “Nobody is going to bring a motion to vacate the chair. I just can’t see that happening.”

But why isn't it happening? One reason, we're told is that "the GOP base simply isn’t up in arms opposing" McCarthy.

[John] Boehner and his successor, PAUL RYAN, saw GOP voters turn against them, which in turn put pressure on rank-and-file GOP members. That, however, isn’t happening right now.

In fact, McCarthy’s approval rating has jumped by 10 points among Republicans since he took the gavel, hovering at 66%, according to a recent YouGov/Economist poll.

Yes, but that poll was conducted in mid-May, before this base-betraying deal. So why isn't the base upset?

I'm looking at right-wing media sites right now, and there's no effort being made to stir up the base's anger because of this deal. The base is being riled up about other subjects -- on the Fox News site, two of the lead stories are about the shooting in Hollywood, Florida, and other top stories involve pronoun usage at Johns Hopkins Hospital and a furry convention in Florida that's gone adults-only in response to recently passed laws. At Breitbart, the lead headline is "Pride Month Preview: Queer Activists on Defense, Scrambling to Quash Grassroots Boycotts." (Yesterday, a story that briefly led Breitbart said the deal was very bad for Democrats.) Even Gateway Pundit is mostly ignoring the deal -- lead stories focus on Ashli Babbitt's mom (Babbitt is a holy figure at GP) and conspiracy theories about the guy who recently rammed a White House security barrier with a Nazi flag in his truck.

I assume that the Murdoch family and the billionaires who keep the other sites financially viable don't want McCarthy deposed or the deal seriously challenged, and the word has gone out that the right-wing media should keep quiet, focus on the culture war, and let the deal slide. So the rubes aren't angry about the deal because they haven't been told to be angry about it.

Maybe this moment would be different if Tucker Carlson were still on the air. In any case, what's going on seems like enforced quiet.

It seems obvious that right-wing billionaires think the rabble-rousing of the right-wing media is still a net plus for them: Ordinary people who have no economic reason to vote for pro-plutocrat Republicans just keep voting for them anyway because those Republicans agree with them on guns and trans people and CRT. As the billionaires undoubtedly see it, a few trans kids might be killed, a few red-state women with difficult pregnancies might be pushed to the brink of death before they can get medical treatment, and a few unwitting ex-cons in Florida might be sent back to prison because they were told they were entitled to vote and really weren't, but the messaging of conservative media won't cause anything really badto happen, like a serious disruption of corporate profits. If the debt deal goes through while the culture war distracts the GOP base, the plutes can say that everything is still working for them -- no matter what happens to the rest of us.