And therein lies the problem, because it is very clearly not the same thing. Kevin McCarthy is no moderate Republican. Kevin McCarthy is a shapeshifting jackwagon who will become whomever Kevin McCarthy needs to be at the moment to get Kevin McCarthy to wherever he ultimately wants to go. That's because Kevin McCarthy has neither core principles nor an ethical compass.

What we're presently reaping is the inevitable result of a half-century-long Republican effort to dumb down its own electorate with successive waves of base pandering to people's worst fears and visceral instincts, which Democrats have inexplicably continued to tolerate in the name of free speech.

Further, our mainstream news media has mostly dispensed with hardnosed reporting and information analysis for opinion and emotion, and even that's being eclipsed by so-called social media influencers, many of whom don't know their a$$es from their elbows.

Altogether, the politics of our governance has been reduced to a tawdry performance art and spectator sport, one in which everybody - participant and spectator alike - is likewise cheapened and diminished for the collective experience.

Former Vice President Al Gore warned us 15 years ago of the reckless direction we were headed in his book "The Assault on Reason." Far from listening to him and considering what he said, we doubled down on stupid instead.

And so here we are, dealing with the adverse consequences of a civically illiterate GOP electorate who have long since purged their party's more temperate and moderate elements from their ranks. They now see nothing wrong with electing far-right provocateurs like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz and shameless hucksters like Donald Trump and Kevin McCarthy, all of whom are openly contemptuous and hostile to the very concept of responsible stewardship.

This is not my grandfather's Republican Party. Democrats like me may have disagreed significantly with Republicans of yore on matters of socio-economic policy, but at least we could trust them to not just blow everything up into smithereens simply for its own sake.

You can't say the same of today's GOP, an increasingly vicious white nationalist cabal which is now far less the party of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant than it is of Jefferson Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest, and which currently presents an existential threat to both our domestic stability and our national security.

Two lawmakers nearly come to blows -- and other crazy moments from McCarthy's final speaker votes
Friday night on the House floor was a spectacle to behold.