If any of you have ever seen the cult classic Supertroopers, you might remember the character known as Farva.
If you haven't seen it, I'm not going to take the time to explain everything I'm going to talk about here, go see it for yourself first. If you have seen it, come take a trip with me down movie nostalgia lane.
Throughout the movie, the highway patrol squad are on the brink of getting shut down. At one point of the movie, the Supertroopers are supposed to be on their best behavior. Any mistake could ruin any chance of keeping their unit together.
Cue Farva, the obnoxious and incompetent lackey, who has already been punished several times for his abhorrent behavior. Despite orders from the Captain to be on their best behavior, what does he do?
Farva attacks a fast food worker and gets arrested.
Granted, the little punk may have deserved it a little bit. Granted, the rest of the Supertroop bunch probably would not have been able to keep to the orders to be on their best behavior themselves. Granted, we are just talking about a fictional movie.
But I can't help but feel there is a striking similarity between this fictional movie character called Rod Farva, and our very non-fictional Republican members of Congress.
Throughout the movie Farva is a constant agitator, supposedly on the side of good, yet seemingly everything he does serves to undermine any good that might arise. Ultimately, he betrays his longtime-friends and partners to secure a spot with the corrupt local police department, though he even manages to screw that up. Even leading up to the climax, when it seems like Farva has redeemed himself, and teams up with the Supertroopers once again, he is pretty much worthless.
I do not think anyone could think up a more illustrative and fitting character to embody the GOP.
For me, the Republican Senators who sent that letter to Iran trying to undermine the Obama administration's peaceful negotiations is the burger joint scene. I wouldn't go so far as others to call it seditious or treasonous, but it was idiotic, embarrassing, pointless and a striking sign of their incapability to behave, and it came at seemingly the worst possible time.
Thanks to the similarities of those scenes, I then couldn't help but extend the extremely fitting analogy that Farva throughout that movie makes of Congressional Republicans throughout Obama's Presidency.
Like Farva, they can't seem to do anything right, constantly making fools of themselves and all others by association, would rather act immature and churlish rather than live up to the standards they are supposed to set, and yet they remain obstinately outspoken, claiming to be one of the good guys, in spite of all the contrary evidence.
The Iran letter is just one of the more egregious examples of a long history of repugnant behavior. There is seemingly no end to the terrible decisions and actions of the Congressional Republicans as a group when compared to the few good things they have done. The Iran letter is just one example of past hevaior, and if nothing else, a great predictor of future behavior.
At least the other troopers, while also constantly immature and behaving inappropriately, still understand the need for doing their jobs once in awhile. So even if we want to extend the analogy to Reid and Congressional Democrats being the rest of the Supertrooper group, I would gladly take that over Republicans and their endless Farva-esque behavior.
The reason for the inclusion of characters like Farva in a movie that is already understood to be a fictional absurdity, is to take our notions of what is inappropriate to an extreme level. One could include Uncle Ruckus from the Boondocks and Cartman from South Park in this category of tropes.
So when we have real-life people that can make their actions equal to those of a fictional absurdity, it speaks volumes of just how bad things are.