The Carpentariat

Democratic unity is good,, but we'll need more of it - to kill the filibuster

An AP lede: "President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress are jamming their agenda forward with a sense of urgency, an unapologetically partisan approach based on the calculation that it’s better to advance the giant COVID-19 rescue package and other priorities than waste time courting Republicans who may never compromise."

So much for 2020's lefter-left-of-center blather about this president's destiny of doom because of his quaint campaign vows to work with Republicans. Anyone more than scantily familiar with Mr. Biden's history understood he was no tabula rosa pushover or a useful idiot of the right.

His Democratic predecessor possessed a distressing defect: His enormous human decency and consequent proclivity to attribute something of that decency to all others prevented him from fully comprehending just what inhuman, ghastly creatures Republican politicians had become. President Obama in fact did what the left mistakenly claimed President Biden would do: he worked with the monsters. He shaved his healthcare plan, compromised on stimulus spending, bowed to the GOP's counterfeit dred of higher deficits and launched his second term with a pledge to accommodate Republicans on immigration. For all those extended hands, he got zip in return. Only unilateral, Democratic determination rescued much of Obama's historic accomplishments.

Biden & Allies now thank him for the preview and appreciate the history lesson. With those thanks and appreciation also come unceasing demands for killing the filibuster.

With those urgings, I could not agree more. What once substantially protected minority voices — though often for the wrong reasons — from a moblike majority has become nothing more than an instrument to strangle democracy and suffocate progress. It's past time to put this archaic invention out of our misery. The filibuster did not, as legend has it, originate from Jim Crow yearnings; it arose from an early 19th-century oversight in the rewriting of Senate rules. But whatever its accidental birth, it's high time to euthanize the godforsaken thing.

Regrettably, these compassionate demands lack even a simple majority to kill it. Hell, forget Joe Manchin. There are also Sens. Jon Tester, Kyrsten Sinema, Dianne Feinstein, Chris Coons, Sheldon Whitehouse, Tim Kaine and possibly others who are either flatly opposed to, or keenly skeptical of, annihilating the filibuster rule.

And so, just as regrettably, a lot more blindly aggressive Republican obstructionism will have to pass before 50 Democratic senators choose to put a stop to it. May their conversion be swift.

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Trump, Barr, Elaine Chao and Mitch McConnell: portraits in virtue

For two years Republican pols stuffed their speeches and television interviews with ominous tales about Hunter Biden and his dark, illegal doings with China. Now they delight in announcing the swamp is back, what with Hunter's sire being in the White House. Oh yes, POTUS B. & Son will make the Grant administration look like Salvation Army bell ringers, say corruption-averse Republicans. 

Last October, Politifact explained that "there is no evidence that Hunter Biden came close to breaking the law … [and] no evidence that Joe Biden was orchestrating [his son's] activities, or benefiting from them." Hunter had been an unpaid board member of an investment firm involved with Chinese companies; in 2019, Hunter resigned from the firm, "receiving [no] return on his investment or shareholder distributions."

Now this.

"While serving as transportation secretary during the Trump administration, Elaine Chao" — wife of then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — "repeatedly used her office staff to help family members who run a shipping business with extensive ties to China…. The [department's] inspector general referred the matter to the Justice Department in December for possible criminal investigation. But in the weeks before the end of Trump administration, two Justice Department divisions declined to do so."

The inspector general's report was inspired by a NY Times investigation — between firings of beastly reporters and refusing to publish critical columns by its own columnists, the paper still works in some valuable journalism, without which we wouldn't know of Ms. Chao's somewhat beastlier and possibly criminal behavior.

"[Investigators] detailed more than a dozen instances where her office took steps to handle matters related to her father, who built up a New York-based shipping company after immigrating to the United States from Taiwan in the late 1950s, and to her sister, who runs the company now."

Chao's government-payroll staff arranged "Chinese-language" TV interviews, coordinated travel, scheduled meetings with high Chinese muck-a-mucks, and carried out sundry public relations endeavors for her father, "Dr." James Chao (an honorary title).

What Joe never did is what Elaine has done: She has refused to answer questions and instead has "provided a memo that detailed the importance of promoting her family as part of her official duties." Well now, that's rather the same as saying anything goes, is it not?

Twice-impeached, indictable Donald Trump's United States attorney general put the kibosh on any criminal investigation of a fellow cabinet member and protected the husbandly "honor" of the president's leading contract killer.

But yeah, under President Biden, the swamp is back.

Govs. Abbott and Reeves, "Neanderthals"? No way.

President Biden has branded Texas and Mississippi governors Abbott and Reeves' decision to abolish mask mandates and free businesses from all coronavirus restrictions as "Neanderthal thinking."

Joe should brush up on his anthropology.

Nearly 20 years ago Smithsonian Magazine reported that anthropologists, quoting specifically one Fred Smith of Loyola University, once believed that Homo sapiens neanderthalensis "were the embodiment of primitive humans, subhumans if you will."

Further investigations into our cave-dwelling predecessors, however, now suggest that Neanderthals "were highly intelligent, able to adapt to a wide variety of ecological zones" — even Texas and Mississippi — "and capable of developing highly functional tools" — such as fabric-woven nose-and-mouth protectors from clan-obliterating pandemics.

In short, Neanderthals would have worn masks.

For Govs. Abbott and Reeves, I'd recommend the apter, alternative label of Australopithecus, the earliest known hominins, who resembled bonobos and whose brain size was about 35% of today's bipedals.

Where's the love? CPACers were rather chilly toward Trump's substitute teachers.

Oh, the terrible sorrows of CPAC's would-be, breakout luminaries. The Times has assembled a few vignettes of Trumpy-extremist disappointment — and they are delightfully heartbreaking.

"That’s not catch-and-release," railed Tom Cotton about President Biden's disgracefully humanitarian immigration revamp. "That’s recruit-and-release!" he wittily bellowed. "And then —" observed the Times, "nothing. Well, almost nothing. A few polite titters rippled through the ballroom" — a "half-second of awkward energy."

Rick Scott, once the stately lord of CPAC's local venue? He performed all the expected crowd-pleasing tricks of every Republican circus, blasting "gender pronouns and 'safe spaces'" and then bewailing China's "win-win" of further enriching Hunter Biden and dad's weakness in the face of the yellow horde. "[He] paused for a reaction that never came."

Govs. Ron DeSantis and Kristi Noem have, as all bewildered onlookers know, been widely applauded by the GOP rank and file for trying to kill as many constituents as possible. And while "both were the non-Trump favorites in the conference’s straw poll," their showings ranged from the underwhelming to the pitiful: 21 percent for DeSantis, 4 percent for Noem.

Ted Cruz's hilarious joke about foreswearing masks so as to murder one's fellow restaurant-goers received only "dutiful laughter," and Josh Hawley "distinguished himself" only through spouting Trumplike self-praise for having battled the "woke mob" that is trying to "cancel me, censor me, expel me, shut me down." I'd be content with his just shutting the hell up for one day.

Doubtless the funniest reaction was that pertaining to He Who Did Not Journey to CPAC's rather dour extravaganza. "I do think [Mike Pence] should’ve stood up for Trump," said one attendee. "It would’ve been nice," she added, "for him to give his views on what life was like being vice president of our country." Also doubtless is that his view is one of incontrovertible gratitude for having escaped his president's attempt to assassinate him.

What is somewhat puzzling is that CPACers voted a mere 55 percent in favor of a Trump rerun in 2024, even though "almost all [attendees] were quick to clarify their preference for the man himself." I suppose even these fools appreciate that Trump's 15 minutes are up, electorally. But let's give his aspiring doppelgängers some time. I'm sure at least one of them will someday warm the icy hearts of grassrooted fawning.

Lover boy Gov. Cuomo and his pitiable passes

Is impeachment of Gov. Andrew Cuomo for his rather pathetic, bumbling passes at female staffers a sensible way to go? Impeaching him for cooking the covid books and making stupid, lethal decisions about nursing home admissions might indeed be sensible, but the vocal musing of an aging alpha male's hankering for a fling is scarcely the stuff of outrageous fortune.

I get it, all the #MeToo HadEnough. I'm sympathetic. Really. But enfolded in all the "Cuomo Canceling" is the retrograde opinion among both genders that women are too delicate, too dainty, too utterly self-defenseless that they're inherently incapable of giving Andrew a swift kick in the balls, figuratively speaking — or, on a better day, literally.

I also possess no little appreciation of the charge of power imbalance, which is far from negligible. Yet for an aggressive, truculent, self-adulating ape like Cuomo — he's no tea-partying, crumpets-crunching, Spinoza-quoting Adlai Stevenson — it's hardly a shock that he wished not to keep his oh-so piously Catholic dick in his pants. Applicants beware.

The New York governor has now plodded the humiliating path of public shaming, apologizing, sincerely or not, for his masculine toxicity. That, however, should be the least of his troubles. See: data, nursing homes. And those women who only figuratively kicked him in the balls should schedule a meeting to carry out that long-honored tradition of doing the real thing. Women are not defenseless.

And for my opinion I most sincerely do not apologize.

You have got to watch this short video, starring Alex Jones

… wherein he summons his vast vocabulary to fuckin' express his fuckin' dislike of fuckin' Donald Trump, a brief soliloquy on his deepest "time-space continuum reflections" — whatever that fuckin' gibberish means. Yet underneath Jones' baffling philosophical patois lies the earthy epicenter of his discontent: "I'm so sick of fuckin' Donald Trump, man." For once, Alex Jones has sputtered the sentiment of a nation.

A confounding scheme to lose the Democratic Senate majority

Never let it be said that progressives are loath to refashion a sumptuous victory into a hangdog defeat, whilst clamoring for procedural renovations which are both impossibly unachievable and otherwise self-destructive.

Bipartisan supermajorities share a glowing fondness for the Biden administration's nearly $2 trillion relief package, a magnificent legislative triumph over jobless despair, child poverty, small-business collapses, pandemic agony, the erasure of state and local services and other deliverances from grave misfortune. In this awful age of one nation and two warring publics, bipartisan agreement on anything is a gem in the unsavory rough, one to be celebrated.

But, say progressives, to hell with that. Stop all the clocks, call out the dogs, pound the pianos and hammer the drums: A higher minimum wage was ruled out of bounds by the Senate parliamentarian; the time is now, then, to mourn, wail, protest the bill and demand the unachievable and destructive.

"The loudest progressive voices" in Congress — namely Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Ro Khanna, Bernie's national co-chair for his presidential run — are demanding that their Democratic colleagues and President Biden fight fight fight to kill the filibuster and disregard the Senate parliamentarian.

Says Khanna: "I think that there’s the opportunity to really be the hero to millions of Americans who are looking to us to deliver." Says Warren: "If we would get rid of the filibuster, then we wouldn’t have to keep trying to force the camel through an eye of a needle." Says Sanders: "The Senate should ignore the parliamentarian’s advice." Then came Bernie's shazam! of understatement: "I am not sure, however, that my view at this point is the majority view in the Democratic caucus."

Already noted, here and plentiful elsewheres, is that these loudest progressive voices grieve the intelligence of all but the regressively thickheaded among the hypnotized faithful. Obliterating the filibuster cannot be accomplished with less than 50 + 1 Democratic votes, which is what they have — plus, even in the filibuster's absence, they would still lack a majority to overrule the parliamentarian. This is not advanced math, the pitiful groans of feckless defeatism, or the skulduggery of liberal brutes wanting to horsewhip the ill paid. It is, rather, immovable reality.

What's less noted is that leading progressive voices are laboring assiduously to remake Mitch MCcConnell as the Senate majority leader. Through their stentorian cries of Traitor! they're pushing Joe Manchin into the Republican column; they're heaping more vituperations against this Democratic senator from a rock-ribbed red state than they are against all 50 Republican senators who really do enjoy horsewhipping the ill paid. No doubt he'll protest some other progressive measures, but he'll be an ally on most Democratic bills. To embitter, alienate and force Joe Manchin out of the party would be to tank all Democratic legislation.

God help us, for so many progressives are ideological mirrors of far-right purity enforcers.

Nikki Haley or Tom Cotton - who's worse? My vote.

Max Boot asks: "Is there a more pathetic politician in America than Nikki Haley?" She has careened, he notes, from a Trump-disdaining voice of inclusion to a Trump-curtsying embarrassment to a near-disdainful redux and now to a "recalibrating," full-throated Debbie Does Mar-a-Lago.

OK, Boot doesn't quite portray her as the latter, but c'mon, man, let's get real. She's a whore.

In answer to Mr. Boot's question, though, yes, I nominate Arkansas' avatar of Trumpism-adulating smarm, Senator Tom Cotton. Granted, he oscillates not as Nikki does, dodging and trimming and gyrating from day to day, topic to topic. At least Ms. Haley's plates-spinning Ed Sullivan appearances offer some spectator amusement. But Cotton's unswerving, absolute certitude renders fingernails on a blackboard a comparative pleasure. 

As with his Manhattan forerunner, Twitter is Tom's primary instrument of base ingratiation. Every few minutes, like clockwork, there seethes spasmodically from his personal or Senate account a sadass, woe-are-we, 60-characters screed about President Biden: He is pampering "illegal aliens," he's causing "crises," he's keeping schools closed, he's "assaulting" America, he wants a nuns-hater as HHS secretary, he promotes "cancel culture." That's Tom's story and he's stickin' to it.

Sheer, grinding repetition is Sen. Cotton's presidential strategy; Twitter, his tactic. I've thought of cancelling this cultural vulture from my birdy hit parade, but then I'd just go back to cringing over fingernails on blackboards.

A civics lesson in civics lessons' foreseeable doom

The Washington Post has an intriguing piece titled "Massive investment in social studies and civics education proposed to address eroding trust in democratic institutions." Given our recent motif of violence, bloated lies, squalid social media and an insurrection more Latin American than North American, K-12 overseers have landed on the idea that "a direct line can be drawn from today’s civics crises to a long-standing failure to adequately teach American government, history and civic responsibility.

Hence, a report. To be released today. It calls for "an overhaul of the way civics and history are taught to American K-12 students," noting that "civics and history education has eroded in the U.S. over the past fifty years…. Dangerously low proportions of the public understand and trust our democratic institutions. Majorities are functionally illiterate on our constitutional principles and forms." The overseers wish to change all that.

A noble, necessary cause. But, as the inverted saying goes, for every solution there is a problem.

Civics, government and political history have been engulfed less by their inherent rudiments than by the pedagogic hegemony of cultural studies. If our past is taught in a conceptual bubble of 400 years of nothing but racism, misogyny, colonialism and imperialism, we run headfirst into the anti-intellectual mousetrap of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing." Under that clanging swing of an educational bar is where we are, and woe to the traditional bestower of knowledge who resists the ahistorical, polemical arrogance of, say, the NYT's error-riddled 1619 Project.

The problem is unwittingly embedded in the Post's reporting: "With the new social studies standards, classes can build critical thinking skills that teach students 'how to raise your voice in your community and advocate for your needs." Such can only be responsibly done, however, after an adequate grounding in the fundamentals of civics and history.

Read recently fired NYT health reporter Donald McNeil's account of his "controversial" chats with students from a swanky, private high school, saturated as they were in the latest of curricular righteousness. McNeil's contextual use of the n-word was the least weighty thump in his downfall; the motherlode came in his attempts to balance their inexperienced outrage with world-traveled views acquired over decades.

Today's report on revamping "social studies and civics education" is actually behind the times. K-12 students are already learning how to raise their voices and advocate needs. Problem is, they don't yet really know what they're talking about.

I just scheduled a surgical consult for this Friday with a Dr. Oliphant. I was offered a choice of surgeons from three names, none of which did I know. I choose the surgeon "Oliphant" because I've always admired the work of cartoonist Pat Oliphant. How's that for informed, medical consumerism? 

Abe Lincoln and Eastwick's witches?

I'm kind of glad I was physically down yesterday. It allowed me to spend the day reading John Updike's The Witches of Eastwick and Michael Green's small volume, Lincoln and the Election of 1860. Only afterward did I see a playful, fanciful connection. Lincoln was as cunning, subtle and almost as sorcerous in his pursuit of the Republican nomination and then presidency as were Updike's witches in attaining their final objective.

Green's recounting offers no new thesis, nor is it meant to. Still, as we read, striking is how we perceive the rural, somewhat obscure, one-term congressman's triumph over a bevy of long-distinguished, crafty politicos — and that perception is not misplaced. Lincoln's political artistry was striking. Yet his opponents had been too crafty for their own good, having boxed themselves in with certain factions. Against this, Lincoln's success can be encapsulated in one short sentence: "[He] followed his instincts and staked out the middle," writes Green. (See: obscure Obama, B.; written-off Biden, J.)

Underlying and stabilizing Lincoln's moderation was a philosophy he had articulated as far back as 1838: "Passion has helped us; but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense."

Lincoln's cold calculations ultimately hurled him to what may fairly be called the radicalism of emancipation and the South's complete military submission. But, again, his radicalism was undergirded by the uncluttered ideology of reason, not passion. And in that history, both philosophical and personal, there are two giants of a lesson.

A CPAC spark of Good News, Brother!

From Trump's party "dominance" to a persistent GOP civil war, the Times lists six takeaways from the charnel-house rumblings of CPAC. (This wrap-up I needed to read, since I couldn't bring myself to watch more than 30 seconds of the awful thing.) The itemizing must have been a grueling task for the two reporters assigned to summarize the four-day wake, since any real news — the customary object of reporters' attention — was scarce; just another Republican graveyard, more whistling.

Yet one tidbit, nestled in the tail end of the third takeaway ("A 'rigged' 2020 is now a G.O.P. article of faith"), was noteworthy, if not exactly news. And it was this:

"Pamela Roehl, 55, who traveled to the conference from Illinois, said some of her pro-Trump friends had written off civic engagement for good. 'They voted for Trump, and they said they’re not going to vote again, because they just feel like it’s so tainted,' she said. 'And that is just so sad.'"

Sad? Oh happy days — assuming Pamela's anecdote is more than just the confined rumblings of one Illinois hamlet, or an impermanent sniffle of Trumpian victimhood. For would it not be loverly if large, democracy-disillusioned chunks of the Republican base have indeed decided to withdraw from the unkind political world and go rattle their ghostly chains elsewhere? As did 1920s science-denying, tent-revivaling, W.J. Bryan idolizers?

Staying home on election days, majestically turning up their noses at this cruel world, is their best path forward. And God knows it would be bliss for us.

Under the weather, so the above post will be my last for today. See you soon.

A firestorm of bile

Only last year did we marvel as the extraordinary nastiness of Bernie Bros and Biden-bashers from inside the tent. For months we endured progressive insults hurled at liberalism's inevitable presidential nominee — defamations of ageism, creeping dementia and stuttering syntax, as well as, of course, that historically predestined assault on the candidate's inadequate devotion to idealistic purity.

In 2020 the hardcore left underscored, once again, that rhetorical ugliness is no monopolistic subsidiary of the right. But, once again, we must now remind ourselves of Orwell's maxim that "to see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." And this time, the visible ugliness crept beyond the previous boundaries of Bernie Bro hideousness and progressive grotesquerie. Some mix of unknown but definite proportions of liberal, progressive and even usually moderate-Democratic bile spilled into view.

What horrific crime had been committed in urgent need of public revilement?

A reporter had done her job.

The Washington Post's Seung Min Kim had asked Lisa Murkowski about Neera Tanden's 2017 tweet — which Murkowski said she had not seen — in which the now-OMB nominee framed the senator as being "high on [her] own supply" of corporate tax-cutting "garbage." Pretty mild stuff in the thunderdome of politics. Anyway, Ms. Kim thereupon showed the tweet to the unalerted senator, whose reaction was underwhelming.

The resultant fury, however, was immense. In the minds of Tanden supporters — the above mix, that is — Kim became another among Trump's enemies of the people; she had further poisoned, you see, the nominee's chances of confirmation via Murkowski-enlightenment. What she had actually done was her job.

"Racist, sexist, and misogynist abuse quickly began overwhelming Kim’s social media feeds and email," observed the Daily Beast — abuse such as, "What a coonish thing to do to fuck up another POC nomination on behalf of whites. Dumbass snitch."

What a dumbass response. "What she did was basic journalism," replied the Post's national editor. "The racist and sexist attacks have been vicious — and typical," he continued, and "no one should have to deal with [them]."

After all the progressive slander of Joe Biden, we swiftly reposed in the comfortable, reassuring knowledge of the right as the typically vicious ones. But the non-right can be miserably human, too, awash in racism, sexism and groundless hate. Many of them are the very ones who hound other violators of contemporary sensibilities out of their jobs, so add hypocrisy to the list. When confronting vileness, we truly are in a both-sides world.