John Cornyn is either incredibly dumb, incredibly craven, or incredibly both

I, personally, feel very sorry for Republican Sen. John Cornyn, of Texas. Yes, his politics put him somewhere to the right of Barry Goldwater, but even a craven ghoul like him deserves some sympathy for either being incredibly dumb, or simply being incredibly bad at pretending to be incredibly dumb to score meaningless clout on Twitter. Probably some combination of both. Either way, if you're wondering how badly the past four years of Donald Trump have broken people's brains, look no further than John.

Here are three tweets from the senator, all blasted out before 7 a.m. on Monday.

Okay, a wonky Politico article that can be spun as being mildly critical of the Biden administration. Nothing too crazy here.

Lifting a whole paragraph from the article, out of context, without citation? Kind of weird, kind of shady ...

Skrrrrrrrrt. Pardon moi? That's, uh, quite the leap there Johnny.

So what's really going on here? As I see it, there are two possible scenarios:

1) John Cornyn sincerely believes that because Joe Biden hasn't picked a public fight with a host from ABC's The View, or given a 90-minute press conference about how hydroelectric dams are killing our great American woodchuck population, or something, then clearly there must be a nefarious shadow government pulling his strings from behind the scenes. OooOoOooooo, spooky stuff.

Or:

2) John Cornyn knows this is all total bullshit, but is hoping he has enough Twitter followers who have been so brain-poisoned by the past four years of Donald Trump that they'll believe that anything less than a firehose of deranged presidential logorrhea is a sign of some insidious Dave-style conspiracy.

If I had to guess, I'd say it's probably something like a 20/80 combination of the two, with Cornyn mostly knowing exactly how to rile up a Trump-addled base whose sense of normalcy has been so warped that they won't — or can't — accept the idea that presidents aren't supposed to throw temper tantrums online. But considering this is a guy who wrote a whole advice column on the horrifying danger of people who enjoy techno music ("these crews have been known to take on many of the characteristics commonly associated with gangs — a group name, hand signs, rivals, and competition which often leads to criminal offenses"), it's not totally out of the realm of possibility that somewhere under that leathery Texas exterior, a piece of Cornyn's soft, squishy interior actually believes that no news is bad news when it comes to Biden.

For their part, the White House pushed back on Cornyn's conspiracy-mongering, with a not-so-subtle swipe at Biden's presidential predecessor.

So that's where things stand now. There's enough of a segment of the population so twisted into believing that being president just means "tweets a lot" that not shitposting 50 times a day is somehow a huge scandal now. Great. Just great.