Eight years ago Will Saletan said, “The GOP is a failed state. Donald Trump is its warlord.” There’s probably no short summary, phrase or aphorism I’ve repeated more times on TPM. Because it’s that good. Today we’re seeing another permutation and illustration of that enduring reality.

Yesterday and today the GOP went back to the well to find a completely new set of Speaker candidates and, they hoped, a new Speaker designee. After multiple rounds, Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota was elected as the caucus’s choice. He then asked for a roll call of who would actually vote for him on the House floor. He came up more than twenty votes short.

Was there a writers’ strike on this new episode of the Caucus series? Because this sounds like a crib from an episode that ran the weekend before last when just the same thing happened to Steve Scalise. Sure enough within an hour or so we’re now hearing chatter that only Rep. Mike Johnson (LA), the guy who lost in the final vote, could get to 217. So only the guy who just lost can hope to win. Got it? Again, it’s a script cribbed from ten days ago.

I want to note several interconnected developments in the news coming out of the Middle East today.

Already battered by his ongoing criminal prosecution and attempted judicial coup, Benjamin Netanyahu’s standing with the Israeli public appears to have been shattered by the October 7th massacres in southern Israel. In such a perilous position, Netanyahu’s allies in and out of government have been spreading various stab-in-the-back type storylines seeking to evade responsibility for the events of October 7th.

The best way I can describe this is that Israel has its own version of the Fox News-rooted right wing big lie machine that Americans are familiar with here. That has been in overdrive for the last three weeks. It has included the government briefing reporters against the country’s security establishment, placing the blame for the massacres squarely on the IDF and Shin Bet, the country’s domestic intelligence and security service.

There’s an aspect of the Jim Jordan Speaker Drama that hasn’t gotten enough attention. It’s really the central element of the story. Over the years I’ve argued that the post-2010 GOP caucus operates by a consistent set of informal rules. What looks like drama and dysfunction is actually in its own way a very stable and functional system.

The congressional party is controlled and run by the hard right minority variously called the Tea Party or Freedom Caucus. But they are a bit too hot for national public consumption. They also rely on the idea that their far right policy agenda has broad public support but is held back by a corrupt/bureaucratic establishment. For both of these reasons a system was developed in which this far right group runs the caucus, but from the background, while it is nominally run by a mainstreamish Republican leader. Under John Boehner, Paul Ryan or Kevin McCarthy this basic dynamic remained more or less the same. It works for everybody because the Freedom Party calls the shots while the party maintains broad electoral viability via figureheadish leadership.

I have no ability to evaluate grainy videos or make sense of what different blast patterns look like. But I’ve spent several years developing lists of open source intelligence and forensics analysts who are consistently credible. You’ve seen some of this in the various Twitter lists I sometimes post here. Credible doesn’t mean always right, of course. By credible in this case I mean analysts who are highly knowledgeable in one relevant domain, use an empirical framework for analyzing videos, open source data, etc., and have a proven track record of the appropriate level of caution and skepticism in drawing conclusions. Many of these people come out of the Bellingcat world, others got started (at least publicly) analyzing the Syrian and Ukraine conflicts. It’s actually remarkable what people not drawing on any state or property “intelligence” can demonstrate with overlapping provenance-proven video evidence, geolocation, satellite photography, open source weapons information, tracking data and more.

I watched this group very closely overnight (even at the expense of not getting much sleep) as more videos and data emerged about the hospital blast in Gaza and from what I can tell none of these people think the evidence points to an Israeli bomb as the source of the blast.