The Carpentariat

Another entry from the investigative Borowitz Report

Oh please, you gods in heaven or hell, push Tuberville into objecting

Mitch McConnell is desperately beseeching his fellow Senate obstructionists of fame to, ironically enough, forswear the obstruction of certifying on 6 Jan. the Electoral College's votes. The plucky, pixilated Rep. Mo Brooks, perhaps along with other GOP House members, needs just one of McConnell's troops to make a national ass of himself by so objecting, as well as of his party.

Alabama's newly elected Sen. Tommy Tuberville seems to be the leading candidate for this cause and in the GOP's protracted self-demolition. A video taped as he was tubthumping in Georgia for Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler reappeared last week in which Tuberville said, "You'll see what's coming. You've been reading about it in the House. We're going to have to do it in the Senate." As Forbes has reported, other possible but undecided demolitionists include Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley.

Tuberville et al.'s deployment of a wrecking ball would be unavailing as to any electoral-count changes, since it would only "kick the results back to the states, where the governors would in all likelihood recertify the results," relates The Hill.

Still, I am imploring every god in religio-history books — from Anath and Arianrod to Molech and Morrigu to Zaraqu and Zagaga — to compel Tuberville and maybe others to raise their hands on the Senate floor and proceed to even further lower the Republican Party's reputation. I say, and I do hope Zagaga & Playmates agree, You go, Tommy.

OAN - competing with Newsmax to warp reality

pic.twitter.com/mVOIboynpb

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 20, 2020

The very first allegation made by One America News — that Wisconsin illegally permitted early voting — is far less than, shall we say, journalistically authoritative. I, for one, could not proceed past the "reporter's" initial remark. 

To wit, for the second time in December, the conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court last week rejected the Trump campaign's plea to toss more than 200,000 ballots of "voters … who cast [them] at in-person early-voting sites." OAN's mouthpiece insists this was a grave injustice, yet the losers could not be bothered to file with the court within the legally allowed time — but, what the hell, I suppose, what's the law to Trump and his disappearing pettifoggers?

Especially farcical is that the network omitted that the Trump campaign's complaint applied only to the heavily Democratic cities of Milwaukee and Madison (the former, especially, contains many of those people, you know). "The suit did not seek to invalidate ballots cast anywhere else in the state — where voters are far more likely to have supported Mr. Trump," noted the Times on the day of the state's Supreme Court ruling.

Trumpian integrity. OAN is there to extol it, and, like Newsmax, with the greatest sincerity.

The relief package: a bittersweet something or other

The at-last negotiated congressional relief package may prevent a winter of stark discontent leading to a springtime economic calamity if covid vaccines are competently distributed. The country's chief fabulist says they are: "The Moderna vaccine," he tweeted this morning, "has already started rolling out. Very smooth distribution!" In reality, it's been little but chaos and confusion.

Meanwhile, $900 billion in macroeconomic and household aid is a few trillion dollars short of what's needed. The cap is arbitrary, ungrounded in serious, contextual analysis, but good for Republican symbolism to be flashed before the base: We held it below a trillion.

Sure, it's better than nothing, as virtually everyone has acknowledged — though where were congressional Republicans when yet more thousands upon thousands of small businesses were collapsing and many families were in a sustained grip of panic? The GOP was off dithering, ducking and cynically prevaricating.

But, as noted, at last — an insulting, one-time $600 check for embattled Americans as a further slap in the face, while millions have plunged into poverty and state and local budgets continue to suffer.

Once President-elect Biden takes the oath of office, Republicans can and will say the US government has already spent more than $3 trillion on aid, and enough is enough. They'll sabotage every Democratic attempt to heal the wretched Trump economy, just as they did to President Obama upon inheriting George Bush's. Politics and party over country, now and perhaps always.

I honestly don't know how these scuzzball scoundrels sleep at night. They could easily forego their $174,000 odious guv'ment salaries and take a much nobler, more lucrative jump to ambulance-chasing, talk radio-hosting or pesticides-hawking. Then again, any one of those might actually require some actual labor.

Newsmax, the relatively new, monster voice of all things Trumpian

Somehow I overlooked this piece from ​​​​​Ben Smith late last month, "The King of Trump TV Thinks You’re Dumb Enough to Buy It."

The king is Christopher Ruddy, majority owner and chief executive of Newsmax. And the king "has capitalized on the anger of Mr. Trump’s supporters at Fox News for delivering … unwelcome news," wrote Smith, although watching primetime Fox, with Tucker, Sean and Laura, the network's troika of Trumpian propagation, might disabuse a viewer of any such assessment. Newsmax, however, provides a machine-gunning stream of political buffoonery around the clock. Better silly than sorry, you might say.

"Ruddy … is not the sort of true-believing ideologue his viewers may imagine in the foxhole alongside them," observed Smith. "Nobody I’ve ever covered treats an audience with the blithe disdain of Mr. Ruddy. He has them watching a great story — a thriller, a whodunit — about a stolen election. He thinks they’re stupid enough to fall for it, dumb enough to keep watching even after the fantasy inevitably dissolves, buying the supplements and the books and, crucially, tuning in to channel 1115 in large enough numbers that, eventually, the cable companies will pay him … or maybe he just needs [his audience] to stick around long enough for him to find someone just as cynical, but with more cash on hand, to buy him out."

Ruddy is unimpeachably correct that his dedicated viewers are stupid enough to fall for his thrilling whodunit, a bottomless grab bag of conspiracy theories, a massive assemblage of evildoers, valiant truth-tellers, misdirections and lies. The king's cynicism and scamming are subordinate only to this nation's other chief executive, who is padding his ex-presidential nest of unparalleled grift.

Fox News still outweighs Newsmax in its class, but by November's end, the latter had more than 1 million viewers and on 7 December it sneak-attacked Fox in the much-sought-by-advertisers 25- to 54-year-old demographic at 7 p.m. Eastern ("Greg Kelly Reports"). Thus it's not only geezers watching; viewership expands to the young as well, yet another generation of shrill paranoids.

I admit I have a difficult time with comprehending how so many Americans can be so susceptible to far-right cable news' wholly discredited propaganda, though there's no question that much of it springs from years of twisted mind-training by extremist, Christian fundamentalism. That, and inherently unpleasant personalities. Yet what I fail to grasp is the wholesale inability of adults to break free of the brainwashing chains of religio-political fanaticism or the unrelenting urge to be nasty.

Rehabilitation, or deprogramming, can be an effective weapon in battling these grave defects of humanity, as psychotherapists of grossly abnormal behavior and even the penal system, on occasion, have demonstrated. The resources are there, but so many minds are closed to the liberating benefits of acknowledging the real world. And I just cannot fathom why anyone would wish to live in a provably preposterous, aggressively belligerent bubble.

I appreciate that the bubble is also known as an echo chamber, which enlightenment is theoretically incapable of penetrating, but surely even its more indulgent inhabitants catch bits of countervailing reality from outside, assorted news organs, family members and co-workers unsnatched by the maw of willful imbecility.

This scourge of the body politic extends to some or many on the left as well, however the right's magnitude of blind malevolence is incomparable. And unlike those on the ideological left, somewhere deep within the grotesque confederacy of authoritarian personalities is a seemingly unshakable hatred of the United States. One would need to time-transport back to the 1850s and 60s to visit its origins — which never vanished; and given that 25-year-olds are absorbing cynical Newsmax, it also seems today's hatreds, however perplexing, won't either.

A physician's (and my) thoughts on death

What proceeds are a few words of reflection on death, by Dr. B.J. Miller, a palliative medicine physician and author. This godawful pandemic most recently inspired him to write these words, though a professional life of study preceded his thoughts presented here in his book, A Beginner’s Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death.

Maybe our fear of death has more to do with our perceptions of reality than with reality itself, and that is good news. Even if we can’t change what we’re looking at, we can change how we look at it….

Who doubts that imagination and intuition and love hold power and capacity beyond what language can describe? You are a person with consciousness and emotions and ties. You live on in those you’ve touched, in hearts and minds. You affect people. Just remember those who’ve died before you. There’s your immortality. There, in you, they live…. [And] your very genes, little packets of stuff, will live indefinitely as long as they found someone new to host them….

And then there’s consciousness — spirit, if you like — and of this, who can say? You may have your own answer to this question, but we do not get to fall back on empiricism. Whatever this mystery is, it blurs all the lines that seem at first glance to separate death from life….

You might have to loosen your need to know what lies ahead. Rather than spend so much energy keeping pain at bay, you might want to suspend your judgment and let your body do what a body does…. [Perhaps] death is a process of becoming.

So … what is death? If you’re reading this, you still have time to respond. Since there’s no known right answer, you can’t get it wrong.

I confess I'm a bit like Woody Allen in that I think about death every day, although fear I indulge not. I just wonder about the mysteries of "the moment." Pace Dr. Miller, I do often fall back on empiricism. As atheist Christopher Hitchens and others have concluded: We can easily imagine our nonexistence by recalling that before we were born, we were oblivious to it, and so we'll return to obliviousness; the obliteration of consciousness is of no concern to an absent mind. Besides, I "will live indefinitely" since a trifle more than 21 years ago I assisted in the procreation of another to host my genes.

As for pondering some sort of afterlife? I can in fact loosen any need — need, I stress — "to know what lies ahead" by recollecting an interview, which I read years ago, with a plainspoken Buddhist priest. Asked about his thoughts on whether an eternal afterlife is some manner of reality, he retorted, "Why would you ask such a question? It makes one's head hurt." Or, as also simply put by Dr. Miller, "Who can say?"

I should add that I'm not a Hitchens atheist but an agnostic, a characteristic of my habitual Montaignean skepticism; I find atheism as dogmatic as theism. So when it comes to "Who can say?" — unquestionably, no one, not a soul, if you will.

Moreover, I'm fascinated — who wouldn't be? — by the wide gap between particle physics and "spooky," as Einstein said of it, quantum mechanics, which physicists are attempting to narrow and then eliminate, thus arriving at a grand unified theory of universal workings. I mention this because quantum mechanics gets spookier nearly every day, revealing vastly different kinds of reality then we had ever imagined. If in actuality we are not living in the Newtonian-Einsteinian physical universe we once believed we were, then additionally, what might that imply as to the enigmas of human consciousness?

But, I slightly digress. I'll depart by merely suggesting that you read B.J. Miller's full op-ed. He offers much to think about, including, as quoted, that on which I somewhat digressed: "Maybe our fear of death has more to do with our perceptions of reality than with reality itself."

Peter Navarro insists on one final humiliation

Peter Navarro, the muddle-headed international trade advisor to the ultimate in muddle-headedness, Donald Trump, today released a 36-page "report" on how nefarious forces of Democrats' underworld set out to either just plain steal the presidential election — while graciously permitting huge bundles of congressional Republican votes — or to "strategically game the election process." He's not sure which.

Nonetheless, he identifies "six dimensions of voting irregularities … includ[ing]: outright voter fraud, ballot mishandling, contestable process fouls, equal protection clause violations, voting machine irregularities, and significant statistical anomalies."

Good boy, Peter. Your keeper is proud of you. There's just one problem. You and your fellow Schutzstaffel officials have been unable to present even one iota of actual evidence that any such underhandedness occurred.

What does Peter as "evidence"? "50 [failed] lawsuits and [hostile] judicial rulings, thousands of [worthless] affidavits and declarations, [unhinged] testimony in a variety of state venues, published analyses by [partisan] think tanks and legal centers, videos and photos [which can mean anything you want], public comments [of Navarro-agreeable humbug], and extensive press coverage [from screeching, profitably deranged outlets]." As for material evidence? Nuttin.

Navarro's conclusion: "The ballots in question because of the identified election irregularities are more than sufficient to swing the outcome in favor of President Trump."

This fawning, lickspittle garbage Peter believed he needed to squeeze in before the monumentally unAmerican, anti-democratic, authoritarian and monomaniacal gasbag in the White House gets a similarly monumental kick in the ass, come 20 Jan.

As noted, who's a good boy?

Congressional Republicans have state and local governments - and Biden - in their gun sights

By all accounts, state and local governments — the ones that directly deliver the most services to the public — are about to be shafted by our Republican overlords in Congress.

Because of the widely devastating human and economic effects of the TrumpVirus, eponymously neglected, tax revenues for many states and smaller polities have dropped by roughly a half-trillion dollars, thus causing immense revenue shortfalls, constrained by balanced-budget requirements.

State and local job losses since March have already exceeded Great Recession losses by 500,000. Economists other than dead-ender trickle-down wingnuts have tried to enlighten Republican spendthrifts, that is, when it comes to heaping government largess on the superwealthy, that money spent now on rescuing the jobs of teachers, police officers, firefighters and higher education and healthcare workers will be money that furthers an economic recovery.

A hair-pulling gaggle of congressional Republicans argue that such aid would only pamper financially reckless Democratic states. For instance Sen. Rick Scott, who once pleaded the Fifth Amendment 75 times in a Medicare fraud case and was forced to resign his executive position with, poor thing, a departing package of $360 million, says: "What Democrats really want is for Congress to just send money to liberal politicians who have already shown they can’t be trusted with it." The budget of his trusted Republican home of Florida, by the way, is short $2.7 billion.

For state and local governments confronting Republicans' skulduggery there are only two ways out, neither of which is palatable: more painful cuts to services and jobs, or tax increases, which would be a desperate act of counterproductivity during a looming depression.

Who will be blamed for the fallout? Who will be blamed for not shoring up nearby governments we all depend on? Who will be blamed for a protracted, economic slowdown? The blameless President Joe Biden. And that, of course, is the entire point of Republicans' skulduggery.

Russian hackings and Republican hacks

Thomas Bossert, the assertive and thus sacked homeland security adviser to tweedledum Trump, writes:

"The Russians have had access to a considerable number of important and sensitive networks for six to nine months…. The actual and perceived control of so many important networks could easily be used to undermine public and consumer trust in data, written communications and services. In the networks that the Russians control, they have the power to destroy or alter data, and impersonate legitimate people."

And just yesterday, Politico was the first to report that the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration, "which maintains the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, [has] evidence that [presumably Russian] hackers accessed their networks."

In a nevertheless quaint effort to mute his appropriately harsh criticism of Trump, for the faint-hearted Bossert adds, "Trump is on the verge of leaving behind a federal government, and perhaps a large number of major industries, compromised by the Russian government;… [He] must get past his grievances about the election and govern for the remainder of his term."

Trump is, as we know, well beyond "the verge" of leaving a shambolic, slapdash, hijacked federal government. He quit governing some time ago, if one wishes to call his ad-hoc hysterics "governing." And should he live so long, he'll unquestionably spend the next 10 years indulging his childish grievances. For now, he is acting his usual, Putin-pal self, doing absolutely nothing in responding to Russia's egregious hacking.

As a side issue, I'd like to refute the Trumpian right's yo-mama piffle about President Obama having done nothing in responding to Russia's counterintelligence operations. Last year, a Yahoo News article pointed out in a somewhat secondary but objective, nonpartisan manner that Obama's response was the seizing of two Russian diplomatic compounds in the U.S. and expulsion of "nearly three dozen Russian diplomats" — "the harshest U.S. diplomatic reprisals taken against Russia in several decades."

What's more, it wasn't until Obama's last year in office that Putin's U.S. operations "achieved what a former senior intelligence official called a 'stunning' technical breakthrough," observed the article's reporters. In brief, the breakthrough was bound for dumping in Trump's indifferent lap. And there Russia's threats to U.S. national security have remained — with the still-sitting president of the United States saying nothing, doing nothing. 

Republicans' famed whataboutism just doesn't hold water, and Trump has faithfully carried Vladimir Putin's.

Cranky progressivists "can persist only as [their] particular lack of understanding persists"

Upon reading Alexandria Ocassi-Cortez's remarks to The Intercept, recently a nestle of the Democratic-boogeymen-everywhere Glenn Greenwald — "We need new leadership in the Democratic Party," her ahistorical "an individual member has far less power than they did 30, 40, 50 years ago," and other kvetching — I was reminded of a book I read as but a wee teenager: by Kansas City, Missouri's (my hometown) long-serving representative, from the late 1940s to early 1980s, Richard Bolling. His written work came well before my maturity, but it became a kind of popular classic in Kansas City's political circles. Thus I had to plow in.

I haven't the vaguest idea where my copy might be today, so I googled reviews: this one led the small pack, from David Bazelon, a social critic and professor of politics who died in 2005. Writing for the (then) influential conservative Commentary magazine, he said of Bolling's 1965 House Out of Order:

"As Bolling goes over the now-familiar facts concerning the committee system, seniority, the delicate cohesion of the Democratic party, and so on, we become more and more aware that we are hearing the especially authoritative voice of [Sam] Rayburn’s representative for many years on the Rules Committee, the man who moved sensitively between the Democratic Study Group and the hierarchy — and the hierarchy means the Great Broker, Rayburn himself, who trained our current President [Lyndon Johnson] in the realities of American politics….

"One species of House liberal" — today, read: progressive — "is totalitarian in temperament and occasionally seized with fits of voodooism. [The authentically liberal Bolling] sees the [progressive] program as a holy tablet to which [progressives] all must give unswerving allegiance — or else risk being read out of the [progressive] ranks."

Further observed Bazelon: "Bolling is — in a rather modern, agonized way - trying to tell the 'voodoo [progressives]' in the House that they live in a kitchen in which 'pure' thought has no more and just about as much relevance as a timely pinch of oregano. Purity will not bring us through; and after we get through anyway, it will not lead us anywhere…. It can persist only as that particular lack of understanding persists."

Rep. Bolling's book was formative to my youthful appreciation of political pragmatism, of which I've yet to dispose, and hope I never will. Nasty as it often is, the complicated, difficult, real world is the one I still prefer to reside in.

I remain profoundly bewildered and rather distressed that so many progressives just can't let go of their otherworldly, political fantasizing. I can think of not one, knowledgeable, experienced politician who would encourage the impossible, egg on the unworkably idealistic, and promote the jackhammer bitching of contemporary progressivism. As with presidents FDR and Barack Obama, in-office Joe Biden will soon be swarmed by such clamorous, purity high-mindedness. And I feel for him. For nothing — no amount of reason — can temper it.

The flip side of ultraprogressivism's roguery is that the other side is uproariously engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that crackpot party, or any party so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. Hurrah! 

The horrible, horrible leaders of the Republican Party

I must say I'm rather surprised that, at long last, Congress appears to be moving on another relief package, although, I suppose, I shouldn't be.

Even in the best of times, nothing becomes more urgently realizable than that which gets between congressdwellers and a holiday vacation. In this instance, however, a deal seems imminent largely because of Mitch McConnell's cold-blooded fixation on only the politics of any given issue: In this relief package go-around, he informed his caucus' partisans yesterday that because Georgia Sens. Perdue and Loeffler are "getting hammered" as a result of Republican obstructionism of more needed aid, the GOP's Senate majority — his majority — could be gutted.

In short, McConnell still gives not a damn about suffering Americans; of the utmost vital importance is that he retain power.

Most unsurprising is that always politically motivated and macroeconomically challenged congressional Republicans have decimated the almost infinite needs of any thoughtful relief. Trillions of dollars in federal aid are called for, if we are to right our creaky, capsizing ship of national affairs and genuinely relieve such pervasive hardship, inflicted by Trump's negligence and prolonged by McConnell's obduracy.

About $900 billion? Pshaw — though it's better than nothing. Republicans have been suddenly re-gripped by their theatrical dread of deficit spending, hence they've insisted on an arbitrary, merely symbolic, extortionary cap of less than $1 trillion for relief. They demand a drop-dead date on unemployment benefits, which they already cut in half, as early as March's end — when, under the Biden administration, they can get really nasty. Stimulus, or rather relief checks, of $600 — not $1,200 — are another gratuitous cap. And state and municipal aid is out.

Fed Chairman Jerome Powell warns that "now that we can kind of see the light at the end of the tunnel, it would be bad to see people losing their business, their life’s work, even generations’ worth of work." Yet the better-than-nothing bad is precisely what Republicans are visiting upon us. Though retail sales dropped by more than 1 percent in November, and hiring has slackened, and unemployment benefit applications have soared, and almost 8 million Americans have descended into poverty since summer, congressional Republicans wish to help themselves politically with the base, of course, while sticking President Biden with a ballooning mess and recurrent, endemic misery.

That's the modern Republican Party, soon to be officially renamed, Trumpism Über Alles. Meanwhile, its namesake is uselessly tweeting "All-time Stock Market high" but otherwise erupting in infantile rages and weeping about his foul, fraudulent treatment. What pandemic? Mitch is brooding only about his Senate majority, and House minority leader Kevin McCarthy remains the pathetic nonentity he has always been.

Jesus H. Christ, these ghastly creatures were elected.

The generalized geographics of the good vs. the bad

With some adjustments, such as adding a few piously all-American western and midwestern states to H.L. Mencken's South, excepting Georgia's demographically changing uplift, his assessment of the "The Anglo-Saxon," in 1923, remains essentially valid:

Civilization is at its lowest mark in the United States precisely in those areas where the Anglo-Saxon still presumes to rule. He runs the whole South--and in the whole South there are not as many first-rate men as in many a single city of the mongrel North. Wherever he is still firmly in the saddle, there we look for such pathological phenomena as Fundamentalism, Prohibition and Ku Kluxery, and there they flourish. It is not in the northern cities, with their mixed population, that the death rate is highest, and politics most corrupt, and religion nearest to voodooism, and every decent human aspiration suspect; it is in the areas that the recent immigrations have not penetrated, where "the purest Anglo-Saxon blood in the world" still flows.

Mine is certainly not to dishonor all "Anglo-Saxons," many of whom have stepped up to battle the evil of Trumpism and oppose the backward, racist, falsely all-American types who are "still firmly in the saddle" — and in state legislatures, the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate. But where Anglo-Saxons reign strongest, itemized above, they're the "leading cause of … cultural, intellectual and economic degeneration [where] the Iron Curtains of racial purity and ideological filtering" flourish — see: Trumpism — as I wrote in 2012, before the Trumpian plague descended. They're "terrified of the 'foreign' and unfamiliar..., so they shut [themselves] off from the bustling, chaotic competition of ideas occurring" elsewhere.

It's curious. A state such as Wyoming enacted women's suffrage in 1869, and more than one western state led Progressive causes in the early 1900s. Yet most of their populations have since joined the reductionist South in mindless reactionaryism, struggling against the unstoppable, justice-centered arc of history — a comment, I grant you, that contains a somewhat Marxist tone. A further comment on the preceding comment: I dearly hope I'm right.

A few moments with Ron Johnson, Rand Paul, and Ken Starr

A 10-minute video segment from frenetic Ron Johnson's Senate committee hearing on election fraud — in which the good senator demonstrates he is quite incapable of staying on topic — posted online by our beloved, deeply intellectual and scheming felon Dinesh D'Souza.

After Johnson's tantrum and screams at Democratic senator Gary Peters about the wickedly political Russia investigation, which in fact found 10 valid, indictable instances of Trump's obstruction of justice, the unrehabilitated J'accuse Ken Starr agrees with Sen. Rand Paul that courts looked only at "procedural reasons" in dismissing election-fraud cases, rather than delving into Trump & Lawyers' "substantive-based evaluations," of which there have been none.

Physician Sen. Paul expounds at length on the ins and outs of complex legal procedures and the exercise of common intelligence followed by the courts. Ken follows him along like a wet puppy. "What we've heard about what happened in Wisconsin and happened in Nevada," asserts Rand, "I think is absolutely true." The courts "never looked at the facts," he adds, and we Republicans should have yet "more hearings" in 2021.

And they will, should Georgia voters fail to elect Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.

Will the "bold" Katrina vanden Heuvals of politics ever grow up?

As a brain-preserving measure, I generally avoid reading Katrina vanden Heuvel, since my mind can handle only so much ideological mush, miscomprehensions and misinformation. But this morning, for reasons unknown to me, I was attracted to her "Progressives have a bold agenda. Biden should act on their priorities in his first 100 days." I can handle rubbish from right-wing ideologues, in that virtually everything they write is amusing. Katrina is anything but; indeed she's downright depressing in her outsized voice.

President-elect Biden, she concedes, "embraced a remarkably progressive agenda during the campaign, but many of his early appointments — lacking vision or new ideas — and his skittishness about his executive powers [?] augur poorly. It will likely fall to progressive leaders and movements to force Biden to step up to that Roosevelt moment. Unlike the early days of the Obama administration, they are rising to the occasion. Thanks to growing electoral strength [?] and successful protests, progressives enter 2021 with a growing consensus around a bold reform agenda."

I suppose I must remind Ms. vanden Heuvel that "Roosevelt's moment" came with a 1933 House of 313 Democrats to Republicans' 117. In the Senate, Republicans lost twelve seats and their majority, when Democrats, in 1932, won 28 of 34 races. In 1934, the House's composition became 322 Democratic and 103 Republican; in 1936, 334 Democratic to 88 Republicans. The Senate? Democrats added 10 more seats in 1934, for a caucus of 69; in 1936, Democratic control rose to 76, leaving 16 Republican senators and the completion of a wholesale realignment.

For Pete's sake, Biden takes these vast electoral differences seriously, even though he has striven to compare his hugely burdened "position … to that of Franklin Roosevelt" — and "he was not comparing himself to Roosevelt, he hastened to add," noted the New Yorker from a Biden interview last summer.

Although "Biden has committed to returning to the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organization, reviving the New START accord, ending the travel ban on Muslims, and extending protections for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals residents," writes vanden Heuvel, "progressives — led by Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Jeff Merkley, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus in the House — argue that Biden could go further and jump-start the reform era."

Progressives believe that through executive orders and departmental re-regulations, she continues, "raising the minimum wage on federal contractors to $15 per hour, expanding workers’ rights to organize, forgiving billions in student loan debt, issuing mandatory Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards for workplaces, declaring climate change a national emergency and drastically lowering the price on selected essential drugs by using compulsory licensing authority" are all possible — and all of which, Biden's transition team is already planning.

But, like the right's ideologues, many progressives also believe in dismissing reality. Once Biden does what he can through premeditated executive orders and re-regulation, progressives — and in my heart, I'm more to the left than many of them are — will hooray! that only their political pressure was what made him do it. Afterward, they'll demand that Democrats shove through more progressive measures in an impossibly divided Congress. And they'll blame Biden, at the executive helm, for not fighting and not just doing it.

Were this a left of center-left nation, most of which Katrina vanden Heuvel writes about the progressive project would make sense. But it's not, and she doesn't.

Please God, let them object

Yesterday, Senate warlord Mitch McConnell begged his Trump-terrorized commandos to refuse cooperation with those House knuckleheads, led by Alabama's brain-damaged Mo Brooks, in disputing the presidential election results from five battleground states, come 6 January.

There's no hope even in hell that Brooks' troops can prevail. Yet should just one senator decide to enlist in House Republicans' lost cause, and thus effect a similar vote in the upper chamber, we could see some of the world's most beautiful fireworks throwing light like a military flare on the Senate's pathologically cowed.

"So far," notes the Times, "no senator has committed to joining them." Still, as Forbes reports, it's no better than "unclear whether a Republican senator will provide Brooks the vote needed to make a challenge."

For sure, Wisconsin's shifty senator Ron Johnson, for instance, hasn't "committed" to aligning with Brooks et al., but neither has he said he won't. He's a sly worm, that Ron. Although he told the Milwaukee Journal yesterday that "I haven't seen anything that would convince me that … the overall national result would be overturned," today he's proceeding with a committee hearing meant to further the march of unconditionally discredited conspiracy theories.

Oh how I hope he "discovers" that some of them are true. Perhaps then he will join Brooks, and light the fuses. Subsequently, nearly all of McConnell's garrison will be required to vote either for or against Trump — and any which way they go, their own electoral prospects in 2022 and 2024 could be joyously injured.