Red Ripple

 

Heh. I guess that last unpleasant fantasy I had, that GOP talking up the Red Tsunami was setting up for a Stop the Steal movement after Democrats won big, was way off base. Not that Democrats didn't win big, in this peculiar and ambiguous way where who actually won remains uncertain (I'm calling 51 Democratic senators when it all washes out and a Republican majority in the House so narrow that Speaker McCarthy will be effectively Gym Jordan's puppet), but that Republicans seem really kind of humbled, some of them reduced to whimpering about how long it's taking them them to count the votes in Arizona and Nevada, or holding their fire a bit even over the vote-counting system, like my little Margie here, who seems to think she hard at work counting them herself

Marge is enemies with jackbooted ducks pic.twitter.com/B2aOfLz2so

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) November 10, 2022

While others lend themselves to intraparty recriminations, like these Dolchstoss allegations from the house Nazi

Democrats in disarray https://t.co/D0Nldat29a

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) November 10, 2022

Stephen, who's been running what amounts to his own private Twitter operation against Mark Kelly in Arizona, as if holding him personally responsible for the ongoing destruction of his gulag for Central Americans.

It's sounding to me now as if they were really smoking their own stuff, encouraged by the stupid reporting from The New York Times and Axios (see Steve on The Times), which they uncritically believed, and now, shocked to the core, they're looking around for somebody to blame.

As for me, I'm looking back toward my original theory of the 2022 midterms, that it was going to be 1934 all over again, with a public recognizing how serious the government was in its response to the twin catastrophes of COVID and economic collapse after the passage of Biden's Build Back Better agenda flocking gratefully to increase the Democratic majorities. 

That's also not what happened, obviously, but what did happen kind of rhymes with it, as they say; Congress (really beginning with the Democratic House majority in 2019) did pass an unprecedented amount of legislation, including the American Rescue, the Bipartisan Infrastructure, and the Inflation Reduction (really climate infrastructure, efforts to lower drug prices, and a bit of the promised progressive tax reform) while the Federal Reserve Bank did its work to defeat the inflation, and Biden himself picked up on the two biggest voter issues, the cancelation of student debt for those who needed it most and the defense of abortion rights. The public as a whole wasn't so much moved by Republican hysteria over price rises, Putin's threat of nuclear war, the specter of rampant criminality, or even the dread transgender athlete. They didn't exactly reward the Democrats, but decided not to punish them in the usual fashion, leading to the present strange situation. (Turnout seemed so high, and was relatively high in some states and certain population sectors, but overall, at 46.8%, well shy of the 50% watermarks set in 2018.)

I think it's going to be OK, for now (if Democrats raise the debt ceiling by reconciliation during the lame duck session), but it's going to try our patience..