It's not often one encounters a politician so universally reviled, who so widely inspires a feeling of ick, whose pompadoured profile so much resembles a kind of Johnny Bravo-like cartoon, and it's rarer still to find that person elevated to a position of grave import: Yet such is the case with one U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz. What more can be said that hasn't been said before? Gaetz is a miscreant who better resembles a barking Pensacola used car salesman than he does the figure singularly responsible for the sober and fair administration of justice in the United States.

Donald J. Trump announced on Wednesday that he was nominating the impish Gaetz as U.S. attorney general, a stunning choice even in this funhouse timeline that reflects how truly unrestrained the former-and-incoming president will be, his choices of purportedly more normal or moderate allies for other roles notwithstanding. That Republicans in Congress find Gaetz as repulsive as their Democratic colleagues is evidence enough of the absurdity of this choice. That those Republicans — each more eager than the last to become Trump's most favored supplicant — were almost immediately voicing concerns about the nomination Wednesday afternoon is proof-positive we've flown over the cuckoo's nest.

But those concerns are hardly a meaningful indication Senate Republicans will buck their new master.

The list of Gaetz's disqualifying traits and past controversies would be impractical to list to exhaustion, but at nearly every turn in his public life he has disgraced himself and inspired feelings of nausea in those around him. He owes much of his early rise to his father, a wealthy former president of the state Senate from Okaloosa.