Bon voyage Kevin McCarthy!
Everybody has their own time when they gaze out at the fork in the road and make decisions. Who am I? What choices do I want to make? Do I take the road less traveled or stick with the familiar?
For Kevin McCarthy, the choice was simple. McCarthy chose the fork in the road that led nowhere, that would ultimately take him down a path to his own downfall. He was warned. It’s not like he didn’t know what he was getting into. But power will do odd things to a man. For Kevin, the fork of hubris that he wound up choosing ultimately led to his political destruction.
There is more than a little irony in this. Kevin wanted to be all-powerful. Just being a member of Congress was not enough for him. So he gave away his soul. It did not leave of its own accord. Kevin willingly gave it up in search, like so many before him, of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the pot of gold King Midas found- and then rued the day he found it.
Kevin McCarthy, rather than lighting up his career, has failed. And he has announced he is leaving Congress – the place where he spent so much time agonizing, trying to make his piddling dreams come true.
“I’m leaving the House but not the fight,” Kevin said. Of course, that’s not true. Kevin is leaving the fight. One could argue he was never really there in the first place. Kevin wanted to take the easy path, the fork that came with the least amount of making waves. So he didn’t fight – not for truth or justice, not for the American people.
Perhaps it was never in him to recognize that the art of giving, the art of staying true to oneself, is worth a million times more than doing a Dorian Gray and turning one’s back on all that is truthful, all that is courageous.
So yes, the House is losing yet another member. Kevin McCarthy, the man who once brimmed over with enthusiasm for all things political, has given up. He will be leaving at the end of the year, leaving yet another House Republican seat empty for at least a short time.
And one can bet the House Republican dysfunction already present will only grow. Kevin’s tale should be a cautionary tale. It should be cautionary in that it shows how the thought of power, of arrogance, can distort a person.
It’s a similar song, one that’s been sung throughout centuries by others, and yet there are so many who never learned its lessons. I don’t know where Kevin McCarthy is going next, but I know it won’t be anywhere on Capitol Hill. And he only has himself to blame for all of it.
