Joe Did What? Trafalgar Edition

The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805 by Clarkson Frederick Stanfield, via Wikipedia.

 Well, I guess this certainly does change everything, and that's refreshing. 

I'm going to stay angry for a long time at The Times and Politico and other big media and the "liberal" tech billionaires for the dishonest backdoor trick they pulled, when they couldn't succeed in turning the public against Biden and shifted instead to convincing us that we had turned against Biden by ourselves, or rather that our neighbors had, through the bogus "age issue", warning us not that Biden was a bad president, but that he'd lose because other people thought he was too old, and our punishment for supporting Biden would be another Trump term (on the basis of a polling model that has consistently failed by underestimating the Democratic vote for six years now). They recognized our deep fear of the consequences of another Trump term and exploited it, in a way that actually made Trump's reelection more likely, using the debate disaster as evidence of a permanent degeneration (which it obviously wasn't—Biden had never showed up in that condition before and never has since). It was irresponsible and disgusting.

I'm not too angry with the congressional party leaders, or the "centrist" representatives in their precarious suburban seats, or even the bedwetter commentariat. The fear is real, and it's justified. What could be lost in another four years of Trumpery is almost incalculable; I'm thinking especially of the backsliding in the elimination of fossil fuels, but the "deconstruction of the administrative state" as prefigured in the Project 2025 document turns the entire civil service into an easily corrupted tool for tearing down regulations, and reduces the Justice Department into the president's personal police agency. It really is the end of the republic, alongside plans for a federal ban on abortion, vigilante takeovers of school libraries, the insane powers for evil conceded to the presidency by the Supreme Court even as it strips the office of its power to do good. The thing is, fear is a lousy counselor, and their Fantasy Politics League plan to get rid of Biden by obliterating the primary results with some kind of pantomime competition, before or during the Democratic convention, as somebody leaked the plan to the abominable Mark Halperin (now working for Newsmax), was a terrible, senseless plan that would have flung us into even worse uncertainty than we already had. Don't panic.

Fantasy Politics League

 

Rembrandt van Rijn, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632, via Wikipedia.

Monsignor Douthat, treating a dumb but harmless political metaphor they way Jack the Ripper used to treat young women, says that "Ron DeSantis Is the Republican Autopsy". Ew, right? 

What he means to say starts from the sensible observation that Republicans can't perform an "autopsy" on their 2020 election loss the way they did after the loss of 2012, because that would force them to say negative things about The Former Guy, and we can't have that! So it's not that DeSantis is an autopsy, whatever that would mean, or the corpse on the gurney—that's the Trump party—but that Ross is the coroner cutting it up, standing in for the party officials who can't be seen doing it, and what he finds is that DeSantis is the lecture you get after he's done; an incarnated Douthat column:

the party’s autopsy for 2020, and its not-Trump hopes for 2024, are made flesh in the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis.

Ew again.

Another reason to impeach

T-shirt (apparently no longer available) by The Beehive. 

Now that the impeachment proceeding in House Judiciary has really taken off its mask at last—although there are people outside the committee (*cough* Steny Hoyer *cough*) continuing to deny it, and others (78-year-old freshman Donna Shalala) complaining that it's distracting from all the great work the House has done passing bills that Mitch McConnell will never allow the Senate to consider (you know, I'm a bit of a Shalala fan from 25 or so years ago when she was HHS secretary, but somebody needs to intervene to explain to her that your constituents don't get all that excited by bills that don't become law)—another possibility for how it could game itself out is occurring to me with more urgency, related to the fact that it's going on during a presidential election campaign, which has bothered me from the start.

What has bothered me being not so much that I object to it as that I don't know what it means: for example, how exactly does an incumbent president campaign during the impeachment process? This has never happened before, in the very short history of presidential impeachments.

There's a partly obvious answer, in that Trump will love telling the rallies about the victimization he's enduring from the Judiciary Committee, and they'll surely respond with perfervid passion, but is that really a good idea? Or will it attract more attention from the normal and not fully engaged to notice that he's accused of quite a lot of crimes, some of which he clearly committed?

The Shuffleboard Lane

Happy Juneteenth, but this is too much:

Joseph R. Biden Jr., defending himself on Tuesday night against suggestions that he is too “old fashioned” for today’s Democratic Party, invoked two Southern segregationist senators by name as he fondly recalled the “civility” of the Senate in the 1970s and 1980s....

“I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” Mr. Biden said, slipping briefly into a Southern accent, according to a pool report from the fund-raiser. “He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son.’”

This is not a good way to defend yourself against suggestions that you are too old-fashioned for today's Democratic party. It suggests you're too old-fashioned to have been alive in 1966, when 14-year-old Janis Ian's song "Society's Child"  was released ("I could understand your tears and your shame—she calls you 'boy' instead of  your name").

So what kind of moment is it?

New York Daily News, via Business Insider. May 2016.

A justified complaint from Steve:

If you write a news lede with a transparently false assertion like this, just quit your journalism job and go into PR. You're transmitting talking points, not the facts.https://t.co/DzlYnUxS5I pic.twitter.com/Yz50CMIfJ0

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) February 27, 2018

"Post-partisan moment" indeed!

But it's kind of interesting all the same, if it's anything at all. This new "Unite America" centrist-nonpartisan-unlabeled concoction is seemingly less oriented to getting itself onto the op-ed pages and more to getting onto the ballot than the usual run of such experiments, and there's something interesting about where it's active, in the first place: states where the Republican Party has been failing in some especially peculiar way, and who they're choosing to do something about it:

Fantasy politics league

I've been wondering for the past couple of years if it would be possible for somebody in the House of Representatives to function as a kind of prime minister pro tem, running an ad hoc "non-ideological" coalition to get various essential business done while Boehner postures and Cantor conspires. Even though Congress's approval ratings are down around those of wood termites, they keep getting reelected, but one of these days people are going to start figuring out that there's a connection between the voting and the results, and when that happens members are going to want to be able to claim that they did something during their term beyond getting funding for the West Butternuts Museum of Miniature Golf.

Sheep and goats. Karel Dujardin, 1673, London National Gallery.

The stumbling block would be that the person in question would have to come from among the Republican members, and not just any Republican but one of the ones who are theoretically not nuts, and those guys are really keeping their heads down (assuming generously that they exist at all outside of the rumors of Republicans so pusillanimous that they actually will vote the way Boehner demands).

But here comes an alternative in the form of Nancy Pelosi, proposing to push that old Obama tax bill onto the floor, the one that revokes the Bush tax cuts for income up to $250,000, which has already passed through the Senate; because it's old business from the Senate that has languished in the House for more than 30 days, she can make it the subject of a discharge petition, and, if she can get 20 Republicans to sign on to the petition, bring it to a vote.

I don't know whether the program is to embarrass the Republicans by making them vote against a tax cut or actually to pass it. The latter would be a development along the lines I'm imagining. It wouldn't make her prime minister, of course: she'd need a different strategy for passing appropriations bills, which must originate in the House.

However, one of the consequences of passing the tax bill would be its effective drawing of a line between the congressional sheep of the people and the goats of Grover Norquist—the former being plausible members of the Pelosi coalition and the latter comprising the Cantorial rump, you should excuse the expression. One of the temporary Pelosistas could surely be Representative Hal Rogers of Somerset, KY ("Prince of Pork" and a sometime target of Tea Party spite), who was perhaps the first Republican member to give voice to the possibility of breaking up with Grover, just a year ago, when he suggested that your Unbreakable Vow to Norquist is only Unbreakable during the term you make it in.

They're a sleazy bunch of old cusses, that Haley Barbour generation of Southern Republicans, but fond of spending and arguably less racist than their fathers or their sons. I'd way rather be in a coalition with them than with a bunch of your cork-in-the-ass sourpuss Blue Dogs, even though the latter call themselves Democrats. With Rogers as—ah—Chancellor of the Exchequer, you could pass just about any kind of stimulus bill you liked, as long as there was something in it for the Old Kentucky Home and the Harold Rogers Expressway. And doesn't fun count for something?

So I'm like, I wouldn't touch that sheep with a ten-foot pole, and she's like, well, Jesus would. Artist unidentified. From biblestudents.net.