Ann Telnaes lays out the governing principle for today’s blog. All over and in every direction.
In fact, last night Dear Leader had another of his pep rallies and Daniel Dale, the correspondent for the Toronto Star, tweeted updates but, at the end, couldn’t find any news or much of a theme, beyond a series of self-promoting lies that elicited cheers from his crowd.
There is a nothing to be had but exhaustion in trying to refute the nonsense he spouts, but, then again, you can’t simply let it pass unchallenged.
Though we seem to have fallen into an area of fighting folly with folly, as seen in this …
Juxtaposition of the Day
And let’s start by pointing out that Bagley and Beeler are only close to each other in the alphabet, and hardly in their politics.
However, the lack of focus among the loudest, if not the largest number, of Democrats is disheartening, and, while I wish Facebook, Twitter, et al, would add country-of-origin markers to postings, there seem to be plenty of Americans who would rather make a particular point during the election than win the damn thing.
Beeler makes the point with plenty of exaggeration, but it’s hard to go beyond the foolishness of people who genuinely, sincerely are willing to argue that we’ve got to stop looking at electability as a factor in choosing a candidate.
And I know there are people who get their knickers in a knot when you suggest a sports analogy, but Herm Edwards got it right.
As I’ve said before, we’ve tried running a candidate who was spiritually pure and politically dead in the water, and while it was just peachy to have George McGovern say all the things we’d like to hear a presidential candidate say, it would have been nicer to compromise with Ed Muskie and maybe win more than Massachusetts.
And that only gave us Nixon’s second term. His first victory is a little more complex, because Gene McCarthy could have been that year’s McGovern, but when Bobby Kennedy entered the race, we had a contender who — though he’d have never done all everybody on the left wanted — would have carried a reformist banner.
In the words of Abbie Hoffman, as Bobby closed in on the nomination, the Chicago protests were nearly called off, “but then Sirhan Sirhan stepped up, and it was a whole new ballgame.”
So we got Humphrey, who, over the past four years, had transformed himself from a mainstream liberal to a hauler of water and hewer of wood for LBJ and the war. People who wouldn’t have voted to give LBJ a second full term were equally reluctant to rubber stamp his boy Hubie.
And here’s another thought: When Obama was elected, he tried to work across the aisle, and the most obvious example, at least to those of us in the Granite State, was that he offered a cabinet position to Republican Senator Judd Gregg, who accepted until he apparently was advised that good Republicans don’t work across the aisle, whereupon he turned down both the post and his chance to run for another term in the Senate.
At which point McConnell & Company gave an eight-year demonstration of the strategy that, in Bagley’s cartoon, Democrats seem to reject: Controlling the Congress is as good as controlling the White House.
So the strategy at this point seems to be, rather than have all these good pure people fill in the halls of Congress, to have them all aim for the White House and tear each other to pieces until the Democrats settle on someone who can’t possibly win but will make everyone feel good about the nomination.
Futility, Point One
We can hope that Congress brings to light what Bill Bramhall depicts here, which is that Deutsche Bank is at the heart of a massive money laundering conspiracy.
But it’s sure to drag out past the next election, in large part because keeping investigators from investigating things is apparently not seen as being the same as obstructing justice. Or, at least, not to the extent that anyone is going to press the point.
Seems strange that the loudest voice seems to also be the loneliest, and Nick Anderson suggests that Amash won’t find a lot of traction on his own side of the aisle, which we knew, but it also seems that his other positions — he’s very socially conservative — will keep him from catching on with the other side, either.
And so here we are, as seen in this Adam Zyglis piece, in a strange world in which a billionaire makes everyone smile by canceling the student debt of 400 kids, but nobody seems motivated to step up, get practical and do anything about a well-connected, unqualified Junior League nitwit who is making sure not to allow other kids to handle their student debt.
What Robert Smith did was admirable, but applauding the grand gesture is utterly pointless if we aren’t willing to put in one-one-hundredth of the effort that let him make that gesture, and do the hard, occasionally discouraging gut work of putting aside idealism long enough to make some kind of practical difference.
In his words to those lucky graduates,
When Dr. King said that the ‘arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, he wasn’t saying it bends on its own accord. It bends because we choose to put our shoulders into it together and push.
Oh well, then, never mind.