Joe Did What? Abolishing ICE

This is very cool. Biden doing surprisingly awesome things and I'm here for it.

Making Chapo and Greenwald look like idiots is just icing on the cake. https://t.co/VK7tgAltET

— David Atkins (@DavidOAtkins) February 5, 2021

All respect to Atkins, but as I say keep saying I don't think we should be that surprised. It's the mistake of taking the ideological spectrum, left to right, as a literally existing phenomenon with an unambiguous place for every politician to inhabit, and then trying to predict what Biden is going to do on the basis of his place—as measured, say, by his DW-Nominate score as a senator, which put him well to the right of Senator Obama, who was well to the right of Senator Clinton, who was well to the right of Senator Warren, who is to the right of almost nobody—and it just isn't a smart way to look at Biden, because it's so distant, I believe, from the way he thinks.

As illustrated perhaps in one of my favorites so far in those "Joe did what?" moments, the rules he's imposing on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), requiring them to stop hounding basically harmless members of the undocumented community

For the Record: Serious Leftists and Debate-Club Rightists

 

Illustration via Joan Wong from The Atlantic, December 2018.

This thing I keep saying, but I like the form in which I said it this time:

You're not alone.

— Mark😷Mucci (@MLMucci) August 15, 2020

It really goes back to Bill Buckley and the dictum that conservatives should support the rightmost candidate who can get elected. Of course conservatives were most vitally interested in governments not doing anything (other than policing the underclass), so that made some sense.

— Yas, Semite! (@Yastreblyansky) August 15, 2020

When the Democratic party was at its historical best (at least in North and West) in 1932, it hitched itself to a relatively conservative plutocrat (ancient rich family, campaigned on proposal to balance budget) with that famous FDR "temperament". It was a good move!

— Yas, Semite! (@Yastreblyansky) August 15, 2020

In which I agree with Bari Weiss

Photo by Robert Cherny for The Frisc.

Sort of. "From the left," as you might say, with Weiss's views ("San Francisco Will Spend $600,000 to Erase History") on

the San Francisco school board’s unanimous decision on Tuesday night to spend at least $600,000 of taxpayer money not just to shroud a historic work of art but to destroy it.

By now stories of progressive Puritanism (or perhaps the better word is Philistinism) are so commonplace — snowflakes seek safe space! — that it can feel tedious to track the details of the latest outrage. But this case is so absurd that it’s worth reviewing the specifics.

It's about the 13 fresco murals painted in 1936 inside George Washington High School in San Francisco by Victor Arnautoff, a Communist student of Diego Rivera, under the auspices of the WPA, depicting a less sanitized version of the life of George Washington in which the Father of Our Country is shown managing the enslaved workers on his tobacco plantation at Mount Vernon (not cotton, as too many reports including Weiss's claim), and as a land speculator pushing the colonization of the frontier literally over the dead body of a murdered Native.

What part of anti-fascist didn't you understand?

Image via New York Times.

Not long after retweeting (and then untweetting) an image of the Trump train evidently emulating the automobile of that murdering Nazi in Charlottesville to mow down the CNN mascot, Emperor Trump showed up at Trump Tower to inform the press of a new executive order:

“I’ve just signed a new executive order to reform the nation’s badly broken infrastructure permitting process,” Trump announced, suggesting that his directive would streamline the process of approving constructions on highways.

But according to my source (the Mic Network), it was actually just rear-ending an order of 2015 from the Obama White House, revising the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard

Democracy

From some rightwing site.

In yesterday's post I tried to talk, maybe not too clearly, about some reasons why I hope the remaining BernieBots who haven't yet done so will follow their leader into supporting the Clinton candidacy—not for their votes, which I don't think she really needs (it looks like a pretty strong victory either way, and if I'm wrong, I don't think their numbers are enough to make a significant difference), but for their ideas, as I said, and the ferocity with which they advocate them.

I think they can be more effective in that debate, helping to move that Overton window to the left if you want to put it that way, if they're on the inside of it, the way the radical Republicans were in 1860 or the Popular Front leftists were in 1932. In both those crucial years, when the more progressive party nominated a relatively "moderate", compromise-loving presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln in the first place and Franklin Roosevelt in the second, radicals managed to make their voices heard among the noise of the business-as-usual politicians, created a much stronger message than the candidate left alone would have thought of, and left their mark in the most consequential administrations in American history. That was in part because some radicals recognized, in Lincoln and Roosevelt, some factor that was more important than how "left" the candidate was.

It's amusing, 160 or so years later, to note how suspicious some abolitionists were of Lincoln: