Remember Kevin McCarthy?  He was about to become speaker of the House.  Then he put his foot in his mouth and said his party's own Benghazi committee was a political effort to get Hillary.  Then he was also accused of caucusing a little too  closely with fellow congresswoman Renee Ellmers (which he denied).

But Politico reassures us that Kevin McCarthy is stronger than ever.  In fact, he never even ran for speaker.  You just imagined it!

In an interview with POLITICO this week, McCarthy asserted that his decision to drop his speaker campaign actually strengthened his position within the conference, a view his allies share.

Well, if his allies agree with his view, there's no need to ask anyone else's opinion!

He said the move allowed Republicans, already reeling from John Boehner’s resignation, to avoid an ugly fight between mainstream members and hard-liners, and to coalesce around Ryan. "If you go back and look at my decision not to run [for speaker], I think we'll look at history and say that's the time we were able to come back together," McCarthy said in his first floor office in the Capitol. "We had to face the challenges of where we are and where we're gonna go. And it gave us that moment."

McCarthy is so self-sacrificing!

McCarthy's aides and allies believe he could have gotten the 218 votes he needed to become speaker, although it would have been an ugly, grind-it-out victory.

He could have won, but didn't want an ugly victory.  He wanted a pretty one, a coronation.  Isn't he the kind of person who should lead the GOP?  He should change his last name to Bush!

"I actually believe at the end of the day, we've got a stronger leadership team now than we would before," McCarthy insisted.

Wait a minute.  Did McCarthy just say the new team is stronger than the one he would have headed?

Now, according to his allies, McCarthy has time to recover from the Benghazi blunder, in which he undermined the special committee investigating the 2012 attacks by publicly declaring the panel was created to hurt Hillary Clinton politically. The remarks raised questions about whether McCarthy had the verbal acumen to serve as a face of the GOP.

Time should also allow talk of a relationship with Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-N.C.) — fueled in part by Ellmers' own comments to the Republican Conference over those same rumors — to die down.

So McCarthy can become speaker someday, once we forget about his most recent messes.

Without passing judgment on the Ellmers rumor, I agree with Mark Levin that McCarthy is like Eric Cantor but with 10 fewer IQ points.  When he was on the point of running for speaker, he was like a deer mesmerized by headlights, inarticulate and self-destructive.  This puff piece in Politico is about as effective as trying to paint a mural of a swan on a hippopotamus and telling us all it can fly.  If he is re-elected majority leader next year, it will only confirm that the House GOP has learned nothing and that it is all business as usual.

This article was written by Ed Straker, senior writer of NewsMachete.com, the conservative news site.