Ed Hall leads off with a grim but reasonable look at the Grand Old Party, which isn’t looking so grand but sure looks old under the guidance of the MAGA contingent.
It’s not that the Republican Party has ceased to exist, but, rather, that it has ceased to be what it was, despite continuing to call itself “The Party of Lincoln,” which has an almost sad Sunset Boulevard sense of Norma Desmond expectantly waiting for a close-up nobody wants to take anymore.
As Drew Sheneman suggests, Chris Christie is big; it’s the voters who got small.
That’s not a fat joke. Christie’s candidacy has been welcomed in some quarters for just the element Sheneman suggests: He has no chance of winning the nomination, but he could bring the GOP back down to Earth and restore the old atmosphere of sensible conservative leadership that once defined it.
But, as the Q-Anon MAGAt says, the current party base echoes a quote from a different old movie: “We don’t got no reality. We don’t need no reality. We don’t got to show you no stinking reality.”
And even if they did, the fact that Christie is a good debater is irrelevant, given that Trump is unlikely to show up for any debates.
Meanwhile, as Ann Telnaes explains, the other new entrant, Mike Pence, has even less chance than Christie. He, too, could represent the old school GOP, albeit with a touch of evangelistic intolerance, but his association with Trump is a double burden: Moderate conservatives associate him with the authoritarian fringe he served, while fringe dwellers consider him a sell-out.
They did offer to support him, you’ll remember, but it was from a gallows and by his neck. That’s not the kind of ringing endorsement he should be looking for.
Meanwhile, Keith Knight seems excited by Cornell West’s third party challenge, and it’s hard to argue with his selection of quotes or with West’s opinion that we need to shake up the two-party system.
But it’s even harder to argue with the odds that West would strip far more votes from the Democratic candidate than from the Republican, and, given the slim electoral majority by which Biden took the 2020 race, would all but guarantee four more years of Donald Trump.
Not to say West is not a nice guy with some good ideas.
So was Ralph Nader.
Tell it to 4,000 American soldiers and a half million Iraqis.
Juxtaposition of the Incumbent
Meanwhile, back at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Zyglis is right that Biden ran circles around the GOP’s negotiator on the debt ceiling issue, and McCarthy is just now feeling the serious injuries he suffered in that fall.
But, as he suggests, the public was more transfixed by an odd moment where Biden tripped over an ill-placed sandbag on a stage, a momentary embarrassment at the conclusion of a solid commencement speech.
And, as Ramirez says, it was medically inconsequential but fresh meat for Biden’s opponents, given their wish to emphasize his age despite his being apparently in better physical shape than his likely opponent in 2024, who is just under four years younger.
It makes little sense, but this is politics: It doesn’t have to make sense (The comments providing a contrast with the article.)
Elsewhere in the News
There are any number of bone saw cartoons and memes floating around to comment on the PGA’s merger with Saudi Arabia’s LIV golf league, but Nick Anderson makes the most penetrating claim about what happens when a bloody attempt at sportswashing is endorsed by a previously upright league.
It’s tricky business to try to understate the overall impact of the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi, given the horror of the crime itself, but, taken alongside Saudi Arabia’s record of human rights horrors and its overall treatment of women, the killing primarily stands out because we know him better than the other victims.
And, for that matter, the publicity around his murder means that the golfers who had already signed with LIV, and the PGA leadership who decided on the merger, have far less excuse than if they had only to not know about the frequent beheadings inside the country and the way certain rights have been dangled in front of women and then snatched away.
Not that an honest, decent person would not question the source of millions of dollars.
He who lies down with the dogs gets up with the fleas, and dipping your hands into the same bowl of water spreads the blood. It doesn’t erase it.
Speaking of human rights horrors, Martyn Turner notes the condition of Vladimir Putin’s soul, with a hope expressed that his failures in Ukraine might bring an end to his leadership. It could happen, but, in the meantime, it takes a particularly naive person to swallow Moscow’s contention that the Ukrainians blew up their own dam, flooding villages and destroying hectares of agricultural land.
But such mooncalves exist. No-chance presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy outlined his peace plan on This Week, saying “(W)hat I think we need to do is end the Ukraine war on peaceful terms that, yes, do make some major concessions to Russia.”
He was offering Ukrainian land to Putin, but, of course, even as US President, that wouldn’t be his to give.
But, hey, Vivek, how about this? They get out of Ukraine and you give them back Alaska!
They’re Just Wild About Harry
It seems you have to be a monarchist to draw cartoons in Britain, or at least, if you’re not passionately loyal to the Crown, you must at least be passionately loyal to your fellow journalists.
I’d suggest the former, given that the hatred for Harry and Meghan goes back before his current lawsuit, and it does make me wonder if things might be different had they quietly scarpered off with some sort of settlement and established a small farm somewhere nobody would even recognize them.
If nothing else, not writing an autobiography would have stopped Baron and Morland depicting Harry taking an oath on it, as would not bothering to seek vengeance on the tabloids that made their lives, and his mother’s life, miserable.
But forgetting all that brutal coverage seems like asking a lot.
It’s hard to know who to blame for the mess, but it’s not hard to know what to do about it.
Most of pro-sports seems to be intentionally amoral. I am compelled to think of it as Prostitute Golfers of Arabia.
Also, I see all the british royals posturing and can’t help but think of them as bad rewrites of Monty Python Scripts.
The political scene reminds me of a bunch of kids screaming at each other. Up until they grow up and act more mature, let us stop listening to them ?. As to the British farce, it’s becoming a similar diatribe! Enough already!