Matt Gaetz put on his grown-up clothes and tried to cut a brave figure at the meeting of the House Armed Services Committee. Had he any dignity, he’d have died of embarrassment, and had his Republicans any shame, they’d have shut down up long ago.

He, like so many of them, loves to scream “socialism!” though they do not really understand the term. They call people and things “woke,” a term of their own devising, that is no more nuanced than their “socialism.”

If others felt as free to fire off generalizations as Gaetz and the GOP, maybe some would apply the term “pedophile” to Mr. Gates and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s neologism, “pro-pedophile,” to his Republican coddlers.