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Item one: Abraham Lincoln, this is your party on dopamine.

Not long ago, a video surfaced of House Speaker Mike Johnson appearing before the National Association of Christian Lawmakers. He told a tale of how the Lord came to him in a series of visitations and "began to wake me up … in the middle of the night" to prepare him for a mighty role. The humble Johnson fancied himself an Aaron, Moses’s sidekick. But in time, in Johnson’s telling, the Lord made it clear to him that he was Moses, and He urged M.J. to be prepared, because "we’re coming to a Red Sea moment."

Well, Moses, it looks like the Red Sea just crashed down on your head.

If this blockhead has the Lord’s blessing, I’d sure hate to see where he’d be without it. Just three and a half months into the speakership, he’s making Kevin McCarthy look like Cicero. It was just hilarious to see him have to announce on the Alejandro Mayorkas impeachment vote that the "ayes" were 214 and the "nays" were 216 and "the resolution is not adopted." And minutes later, a stand-alone Israel aid bill failed, with 14 Republicans jumping the leaky Ship Johnson.

The week has been humiliating for Republicans on many fronts. Donald Trump had his preposterous immunity argument mercilessly shot down by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Mitch McConnell was forced to pull an embarrassing about-face on the border bill, voting against a bill that he’d been promoting for weeks. Even Nikki Haley found a new way to shame herself, losing 2-to-1 in the Nevada primary to "none of these candidates." Trump did seem to secure a coming win in the Fourteenth Amendment case, but that was largely expected, and it happened in spite of his lawyer’s awful performance.

These things aren’t accidents. They’re all part of the same pattern and are happening for the same reason.

Republicans today are consumed by this primal need for immediate gratification. They’re the party of the dopamine rush. Go read an article about the brain, and you’ll learn in five minutes that dopamine helps regulate pleasure, and pleasure is great, but too much dopamine leads to delusions, hallucinations, schizophrenia, psychosis. The entire party has a massive and collective mental disorder, a severe chemical imbalance in what remains of its collective brain, which explains why it kneels so slavishly before a psychotic man with the emotional regulation of a 5-year-old.

Like rutting ungulates, they are incapable of anything remotely resembling thought and respond only to the stimuli right in front of their noses. Deliberation, caution, calm reflection … these are the qualities that most of us have in more or less equal measure to the desire for gratification. These are the qualities that are most in harmony with the habits of democracy. To be small-d democratic is to deliberate; to think things through a little. This country’s Founders believed profoundly in this, which is why they built so many choke points into our democratic processes (too many, as it turns out). They wanted future generations to think stuff through.

But these people are stuck in the land of anti-thought. And because that’s where they live, it means that in many respects it’s where we all have to live, because that’s where a lot of our national debate plays out.

The border debate is a perfect example. There are a lot of problems with U.S. border policy. Undoubtedly some of them are the fault of Democrats. It’s reasonable that people should want more control over the border. But at the same time, it’s a complex problem, and any real solutions are complex too. Oklahoma Republican Senator James Lankford, to his credit, tried to acknowledge that reality. And what happened? He was brutally shut down. It was chiefly Donald Trump, but it wasn’t only Trump. One right-wing talk radio host threatened to "destroy" him.

But it’s not just the border. It’s everything. The Mayorkas impeachment. I suppose there are many grounds from a conservative point of view on which to think he’s doing a lousy job. That’s fine. But a high crime or a misdemeanor? Ridiculous. That doesn’t matter, though. The mere word impeachment makes the mules rut, and there ends the discussion.

James Comer and Jim Jordan are another primo example. They just go on Fox and Newsmax and say shit. It’s not about facts or methodically building a case. It’s all about the dopamine rush of being on national television and saying titillating things that rile people up and get the checks rolling in. When they have to walk it back two days later, nobody cares. In fact, they’ve accomplished what they wanted to accomplish, which is to add to the general picture of murkiness surrounding Hunter Biden or whatever. And they walk out of that studio feeling eight miles high.

And that’s where our political debate takes place now. It used to be that dopamine-rush politics was occasional. Both sides did it on issues that clearly worked to their advantage, as Democrats still do. But with the GOP today, that’s all politics is. The immediate gratification of having scored a point, trolled a lib, won a little wedge of Fox airtime—and most of all pleased Donald Trump.

No one could succeed in this degraded and juvenile context. Not even Moses. I hope the Lord levels with Johnson soon.

Item two: Joe Biden just got Comeyed.

Is it bad politically that Joe Biden reportedly didn’t remember which years he was vice president and couldn’t recall when his son died? Is it worse that in his press conference to rebut the idea that his memory was slipshod, he called Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi the president of Mexico?

Yeah. Those things are bad, no getting around it.

On the other hand, they may not end up being as terrible as some people think today. Politicians blow through these things all the time. The election is nine months away. That’s plenty of time for Donald Trump to prove to people he’s far more unstable than Biden. Remember, Trump thought a photo of E. Jean Carroll was a picture of his wife! But yesterday wasn’t good for Biden, that’s for sure.

Democrats, when will you ever learn your lesson? About a year ago, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to look into the Biden classified documents business. Why? And Garland appointed a Republican, former U.S. Attorney Robert Hur. Again: Why? This is an auto-goal Democratic administrations have been committing since the Clinton era, when Attorney General Janet Reno named Robert Ray special counsel to investigate Whitewater, an appointment that eventually gave way to the hideous Ken Starr. Why, Merrick Garland?

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And what is Hur doing emphasizing Biden’s age and faulty memory? It isn’t remotely his job to do this. It’s an exact replay of what James Comey did to Hillary Clinton in 2016: We don’t think a jury would convict, so we’re bringing no charges, but by the way, here’s a ton of material for the opposing campaign to put to use. As you’ve no doubt heard 30 people say on cable by now, assuming you’re not watching Fox, this is way out of bounds for a prosecutor, to be issuing these kinds of opinions. One of the reasons Hur decided not to prosecute Biden is that the president would likely succeed in presenting himself to the jury "as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory"? That’s law? It’s completely outrageous.

Chuck Rosenberg said on Morning Joe this morning that this may be more Garland’s fault than Hur’s. He explained that Hur is obliged under the law, in his confidential report to the attorney general, to lay out the rationale for why he’s not filing charges. It’s then up to Garland, he said, to decide what gets released publicly. We’re sure to see more reporting on this in the coming days.

But for now, we know what’s going to stick here. Here are The New York Times and The Washington Post today leading with the story. That’s fine. It’s news. But consider the Times headline: "Special Counsel’s Report Puts Biden’s Age and Memory in Spotlight." There are a hundred headlines they could have written. Interesting that they settled on that one.

Trump, meanwhile, who has (of course) boasted about having "the world’s greatest memory," has forgotten a lot of things himself over the years, when it’s been prosecutors doing the asking, as was the case with Biden. Now that was Trump lying, in all likelihood, not genuinely forgetting. But wait a second here. That’s better? Seriously? Lying is better than forgetting? Apparently, yes. And that is a good definition of the moral swamp into which Trump and the right wing have dragged us.

Quiz time!

Last week’s quiz: I hear a symphony. A quiz on the history of famous American symphony orchestras and conductors.

1. Going back to the 1950s, a quintet of leading orchestras was known as the "Big Five." Which city’s symphony was not part of the Big Five?

A. Philadelphia

B. Washington, D.C.

C. Cleveland

D. Boston

Answer: B, Washington, D.C. Back then, the National Symphony Orchestra borrowed musicians from other orchestras. It didn’t start getting great until the 1970s. Cleveland was one of the greats then and remains so. The Big Five, in addition to the three above, included New York and Chicago.

2. What midcentury conductor famously held the baton to conduct the score for Walt Disney’s Fantasia, at one point during the film accepting a certain mouse’s congratulations, responding, "Heh, heh, congratulations to you, Mickey"?

A. Leopold Stokowski

B. Arturo Toscanini

C. Thomas Beecham

D. Otto Klemperer

Answer: A, Stokowski. And have you ever seen Bugs Bunny’s hilarious Leopold segment?

3. Chicago and Cleveland’s symphonies, in their heydays, were both conducted by famous Georges (though they spelled the name differently, and they only briefly overlapped). Which George/Georg, Solti or Szell, conducted which orchestra?

Answer: George Szell, Cleveland; Georg Solti, Chicago

4. With what symphony was Michael Tilson Thomas’s first gig as musical director?

A. Miami

B. Minneapolis

C. Nashville

D. Buffalo

Answer: A, Buffalo. This was the 1970s, and MTT was a young superstar in the Bernstein mold.

5. What woman became the first musical director of a major American orchestra, in Baltimore in 2007?

A. Nancy D’Alesandro

B. Lydia Tár

C. Marin Alsop

D. Wendy Melvoin

Answer: C, Alsop. I hope you got a chuckle out of the other answers. Nancy D’Alesandro is Baltimore’s own Nancy Pelosi. Lydia Tár is the lead character in the 2022 film Tár, allegedly based at least to some extent on Alsop, who hated the picture. Wendy Melvoin? Prince’s lead guitarist during the "Purple Rain" era.

6. In a long scene toward the end of Maestro, Bradley Cooper, as Leonard Bernstein, is seen conducting the Second Symphony of this composer—a favorite of Bernstein’s, who conducted one of his works to mark the assassination of President Kennedy, and another after the Six-Day War.

A. Maurice Ravel

B. Felix Mendelssohn

C. Benjamin Britten

D. Gustav Mahler

Answer: D, Mahler. That scene was incredible, the heart of the movie, which I loved. It wasn’t about his sex life or Cooper’s prosthetic nose or any of that. It was about the burden of artistic genius, on both the artist and those who have to live with him.

This week’s quiz: A rilly, rilly, rilly big shew: Today, February 9, 2024, marks the sixtieth anniversary of The Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. The dual serendipity of (a) it being the exact date and (b) the fact that it’s a round-numbered anniversary year proves impossible for me to resist.

1. The group played five songs, three to open the show and two to close. What was the first song America heard The Beatles play?

A. "I Saw Her Standing There"

B. "A Hard Day’s Night"

C. "All My Loving"

D. "I Want to Hold Your Hand"

2. The group landed on February 7, greeted by thousands of fans at the recently renamed JFK airport. Throngs of fans also lined the streets around which famous hotel where they stayed?

A. The Waldorf Astoria

B. The Plaza

C. The Essex House

D. The Sherry-Netherland

3. How many people watched that first appearance, in a country of 190 million?

A. 38 million

B. 51 million

C. 64 million

D. 73 million

4. A lore of its own has risen up over the years regarding the other, and quite overshadowed, guests on the show. In 2005, This American Life ran a poignant episode on McCall and Brill, who’d waited years for their big break, finally getting it, only to find themselves booked the same week as The Beatles. They flopped horribly. What kind of act was McCall and Brill?

A. A husband-and-wife comedy duo

B. A male, Vaudevillian comedy duo

C. A brother-and-sister gymnastics act

D. A husband-and-wife magic act

5. The show represented the group’s first live performance in the United States, but it was not their first full-fledged concert. That wasn’t even held in New York. In which city did The Beatles play their first U.S. show?

A. Boston

B. Philadelphia

C. Washington, D.C.

D. Miami

6. As the group made its way around Manhattan, hitting the clubs and posing for photo-ops, a small gaggle of reporters was assigned to follow them wherever they went. One of these, a young New York Post reporter, later became quite famous as a writer and filmmaker. Who was this person?

A. Nora Ephron

B. Michael Crichton

C. David Mamet

D. Elaine May

I had the good fortune once to ask this person about this experience. S/he said that they were full of charm, and that you could clearly sense a cultural earthquake in the making. Answers next week. Feedback to [email protected].

—Michael Tomasky, editor

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