Nick Anderson (Tribune) salutes the 118th Congress, one of the least productive congresses in history, as it disbands to go home and run for office based on having done little but squabble and preen.
They’ll be gone until after the election, which won’t make much of a difference to the nation, since I’m quite sure they’ll continue to make newsworthy statements in place of laws.
There was this pleasant happening: Whatever I was reading about it said they would return for a lame duck session and I was surprised to see someone use the term correctly, at least as it applies to any of them who will not have won their races.
Writers have begun using “lame duck” to refer to any politician not up for re-election, such as a president in his second term, and that’s not what the term means.
It refers to a defeated politician serving out the remainder of a term and goes back to the days when we held elections in November and inaugurations in March, so that there was a substantial period in which people who had been turned out of office were still there making laws.
With a new congress sworn in on the first of the year and the new president inaugurated later that month, there’s not nearly as much of a lame duck session as there was in the past, but there’s still an opportunity for losing legislators to attempt mischief on their way out the door.
Though given how little the 118th managed to achieve so far, that doesn’t seem like much of a threat.
As long as I’m toting up annoying misuses, I’ll ding Bill Bramhall for misreading the Wicked Witch of the West’s message, which did not contain a comma and was directed towards the people of the Emerald City and not to Dorothy herself.
Note that I’m not criticizing his accusation: Trump is indeed a surrender monkey firmly in the pocket of Vladimir Putin, and after years of hearing rightwingers shout “Go back to Russia!” it’s bizarre to have a Moscow Mole running for president on the conservative side of the aisle.
What’s particularly bizarre is to hear the nitwit accuse Harris of being a socialist and communist at the same time he’s promoting Russian hegemony both in Eastern Europe and here, next to which I suppose a misplaced comma is trivial.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Trump’s refusal to have a second debate gets a heapin’ helping of mockery from Luckovich as well it might, and he plays on both Trump’s fear of sharks and on his ridiculous discursion about sharks and electric motorboats.
It’s not hard to see why Trump doesn’t want to take a second beating on national television, and I hope at least some voters are seeing it as cowardice, because every bully is a coward at heart and every picked-on kid deserves the satisfaction of seeing that play out in public.
However, Smith is hitting on the more important side of the matter, which is that, while the Republicans have somehow planted the idea that Harris has no policies, she’s spouting ideas constantly while Dear Leader is rambling, either insulting her or coming up with idiotic ideas about tariffs that should make his professors at Wharton bury their heads in shame.
He still obviously has no idea how they work and his latest nonsense was to claim that we had a great economy back in the 19th century when we funded the government on tariffs instead of an income tax.
As much as he may want to go back to the Gilded Age and the reign of robber barons, there’s a good reason we dropped the tariffs and went to an income tax: The tariffs were killing the people who paid them, particularly the farmers.
This isn’t as transparently stupid as his hostile, hateful lies about Haitians or his absurd wish to bring Johnny Carson back from the dead to host the Tonight Show or his bizarre theory that windmills cause cancer, but I wish he’d sit down for an interview with someone who would ask him serious questions about his spectacularly ignorant worldview.
Though it did happen and while Jonathan Swan won an Emmy for it, it was on HBO and so only political junkies paid attention to it.
Certainly, none of the media stars whining that Harris won’t sit down with them have shown they have the grit to similarly grill Trump themselves.
Trump is all over the map on the abortion issue, having been pro-choice before running for office and, as Rob Rogers notes, now mostly ducking the issue, and it’s hard to know which of his inconsistencies are part of a cunning plan and which ones are emblematic of a chaotic intellect.
In either case, his pledge to protect women has resulted in a torrent of mocking cartoons, but Pat Byrnes is more appalled than amused by a man found guilty of sexual assault, accused of marital rape by an ex-wife and so inconsiderate of his current wife — on whom he cheated with a porn star — that he allows himself to be seen in public standing way, way too close to a conservative influencer.
What few policies he proposes involve concentration camps and ruinous tariffs, so it’s a toss-up whether people vote for that or based on his character. Still, I remember when Gary Hart’s presidential campaign ended because of an affair, and when Tom Eagleton had to drop from the McGovern ticket because he’d been treated for depression.
However, I only barely remember refusing to believe Trump’s boast that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes.
I believe it now.
RJ Matson has it right: Trump and his cronies are more concerned with convincing America that the election is being stolen than they are in trying to actually win.
Dan Froomkin has an encouraging take on things, which is that the race is nowhere near as close as the media and pollsters claim, and that Harris is headed for an overwhelming victory. It’s a bit conspiratorial, but isn’t everything these days? He makes an interesting, if not entirely persuasive case.
In lieu of music, here’s the full Jonathan Swan/Axios interview.
And here’s a shorter, edited sample: