I love malapropisms. I thought the now little remembered comedian Norm Crosby was one of the funniest people on the planet. What’s funnier than a Jew with a gentile surname? Very little.He slayed me with malaprops such as: 

• To walk out and have an ovulation like that, it just means so much.
• It’s as easy as falling off a bike.
•  We learned all about idiots (idioms) in English today.

While researching this post, I was delighted to learn that Norm is still alive and butchering the mother tongue. Speaking of which, it’s time to follow-up Michael F’s post by piling on the  putative Speaker of the House. Kevin McCarthy is not quite Crosbyian in his malapropery, but he’s got game, y’all:

“I have visited Poland, Hungria, Estonia,” he said, and also “visited in our, uh, the allies in the Arab Gulf.”

He has, furthermore, been informed that we “live on the greatest nation that’s ever been on the face of the Earth.”

McCarthy called for “an effective politically strategy to match the military strategy,” and he lamented that “we have isolated Israel while bolding places like Iran.” He blamed President Obama’s White House for “putting us in tough decisions for the future,” but he voiced hope that a “safe zone would create a stem the flow of refugees.” And he scolded the Department of Veterans Affairs for failing to assist returning servicemen “who fought to the death in Ramadi.”

Hungria? If he knew anything about history and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, I’d write it off as a slip of the Hapsburg lip but he’s a total nimrod so that’s not it. The only historical figure I’m certain McCarthy has heard of is the great country singer-songwriter, Buck Owens. They’re both from Bakersfield, CA and the only bill Congresscritter McCarthy has ever passed renamed a post office after Buck. It’s a pity that this marvelous artist is best known as the co-star of Hee Haw but nobody ever said life was fair. Fellow country legend Dwight Yokam has been instrumental in exposing Buck’s music to contemporary audiences:

The title of that tune is Streets of Bakersfield, plural, not singular. It almost makes me wonder if Kevin McCarthy uploaded the video to the YouTube. Before I take any flack from my fellow music geeks, the band included the great accordionist Flaco Jiminez. That’s the skinny on that…

Where the hell was I? Oh yeah, Kevin McCarthy who might be the first Speaker of the House who sounds like he just graduated from a bad ESL immersion course. Bolding? Oy, just oy.

On a more serious, one might even say mala-improper, note, McCarthy revealed the political world’s worst kept secret to Fox News meathead, Sean Hannity:

“We put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable.”

I wonder if Team Hillary has sent McCarthy a thank you note yet. That would not only be the polite thing to do, it would be trustable…

I had an online conversation with my old friend Liprap about which McCarthy the wannabe Speaker reminded us of. She threw Tailgunner Joe’s name into the hopper and the following colloquy ensued:

@Adrastosno I was wondering when you'd get 'round to it. From Orange Boehner to a potential Red Scare, perhaps?

— liprap@awscommunity.social (@liprap) October 1, 2015

I haughtily dismissed this notion because an orange boner is nothing to laugh about…

The Clown Crown Prince of the House definitely does NOT remind me of former Minnesota Senator and perennial Presidential candidate Gene McCarthy. That McCarthy was an erudite poet who inspired hippies to:

Kevin McCarthy does have good hair. It is so thoroughly blow dried that he looks like the weekend anchorman at a small market teevee station.

Back to our McCarthy quest. There *was* another well-known Kevin McCarthy who was an actor and Monty Clift’s best friend. How’s that for trivial trivia? Actor Kevin McCarthy was best known for this sci-fi classic:

This analogy is a bit better than either the Joe or Gene one. Majority Leader Kevin deals with mindless pod people every day in Congress and is definitely running for or from something. It breaks down with the whole gay best friend thing. I doubt Louis Gohmert Pyle would stand for it.

The best McCarthy analog I came up with was, like Kevin, a dummy albeit an articulate one.

That’s right folks, it’s Candice Bergen’s wooden (woody?) brother Charlie McCarthy. I’m unsure as to who Kevin McCarthy’s ventriloquist is, but it’s more likely than not a mouth-breathing right-wing billionaire like the Ned Beatty character in Network:

It will be interesting to see how long an empty suit who cannot speak the language and believes in nothing can survive as king of the GOP hill. They’re used to empty suits who cannot speak the language and are fanatical ideologues, after all.

I’ll give the the last word to Buck Owens. This classic song offers sage advice to anyone seeking to climb what Disraeli called the “greasy pole” of politics: