WELCOME TO PMCARPENTER.COM

It's true

Democrats might try blaming Republicans, not themselves, for a change

This morning I read two congruous quotes from two incongruous voices. Said the co-founder of the moderate think tank Third Way, Matt Bennett: "[Democrats] need to begin to move back to talking about the things that people do care about." And said Sen. Bernie Sanders: “I think millions of Americans have become very demoralized — they’re asking, what do the Democrats stand for?"

It was the Times that quoted both men — both of them struggling, in their own way, to comprehend the Democratic Party's, and by extension, America's, devastation of late: Sen. Kyrsten Sinema's quick-gun blasting of even minor filibuster reform, which also lethally sabotaged election reform; inflation running at 7 percent, which, even though inflation is a global phenomenon, the White House is taking blame for, mostly at the hands of the you-know-who party; the pandemic's persistence as, somehow, a Biden blunder; the final, final, final failure of the massive Build Back Better plan; the end of the child tax credit, on which millions of American families relied ... one could go on. But who among us would care to?

So far, the cardinal topic of conversation among Democrats, especially about the failures of filibuster/election reform and BBB, seems to be, Who's to blame? The progressives blame the moderates for this or that and the moderates blame the progressives for that and this and everyone in the party blames either Sen. Joe Manchin for deep-sixing BBB or Sinema for slaughtering a filibuster fix.

What I don't hear with any consistency and animated wrath is Democratic blame of the true culprits of America's wretched and teetering-further-by-the-day circumstances: Republicans, whose unethical squalor now defies even the most comprehensive of English-language descriptions.

It's Republicans who have brought the nation to such a low state. It's Republicans who refuse to aid American families. It's Republicans encouraging all the rage, the pandemic.  And, above all, it's Republicans who are reducing American democracy to Belarusian degradation.

Third Way's moderate co-founder says Democrats must speak of "things that people do care about," and progressive Sanders asks, "what do the Democrats stand for," adding, "clearly, the current strategy is failing and we need a major course correction."

To which I can only observe, or rather myself ask: If the American electorate cares little about protecting American democracy — which Republicans and Republicans alone are killing — what else is there to really care about?

Admittedly, organizing and executing entire midterm and presidential campaigns solely around the issue of defending American democracy would be a tough job. It would wear on people. But that's all that matters now. I cannot conceive of any equal or higher priority.

Thus it further seems to me that that's what is left for Democrats to campaign on. And if American voters tune it out, then they'll the get the America they deserve.

(I'm writing this on the fly, so please forgive any crudeness of coherence, style, thoroughness and developed logic. Meanwhile, my daughter and I are trying our best to temporarily ignore America's devastation — I offer just this one little interruption in uninterrupted non-writing — and to just enjoy our Seattle visit.)

A bit of a pause, the 13th through the 19th

Thursday early a.m. — way too early a.m. — I'm heading out to visit my daughter, Ellie, in Seattle, where we'll have "Christmas in January."

We planned this trip two months ago to avoid crowded holiday-season airports and planes (as well as astronomical fares), not knowing this trip would come right at the Omicron peak. But I won't again postpone the visit, since who knows what may come after this surge, this variant. And I shall be well fortified, with KN95s and outer surgical masks for further protection, plus, of course, that of others.  

I have resolved to refuse even sips of bad coffee on the plane, for fear of inhospitable molecules creeping about in the cabin air. Which leads me to wonder: Of what value are required, in-air masks when everyone is welcome strip them off for a half-hour or so?

I hope to get some posts out while in The Great Northwest, while my 22-year-old is sleeping in, as 22-year-olds are fortunately wont to do. I'll be back on the 20th.

Be safe, everyone.  

***

Friday: You know what? As long as you're with someone you love, there's not a whit of difference between Christmas in January and Christmas in December.

On Biden's call for election reform yesterday, let's also call it "Day One" of the battle

​​​​​President Biden delivered a forceful speech yesterday on the urgency of election reform, which must begin with filibuster reform — and in that, his speech was delivered to but a handful of Senate Democrats. Assuming progress on the filibuster score, itself a nearly insurmountable hurdle, both congressional chambers could then, it is to be hoped, pass a full restoration of the 1965 Voting Rights Act as well as pass the Freedom to Vote Act, which, as the Brennan Center for Justice summarizes it, would "protect our elections from voter suppression, partisan sabotage (a provision that needs further strengthening), gerrymandering, and dark money."

Biden's address was robust — and tardy. On that, we can all agree.

Yet this was no one-man delay. Congressional Democrats, especially the progressive wing, joined the administration in neurotically chewing up the calendar over the unredeemable Build Back Better plan, while ground zero of America's future lay elsewhere: in hellish, swing-state Trumpian enclaves, diabolically bent on stealing local, state and federal elections. Of course it must be acknowledged that had BBB negotiations been dropped sooner, Biden and his congressional allies would have then suffered deafening, torturous condemnations for having neglected that particular ground zero of America's future. Here was a classic, political squeeze.

Whatever the manifold causes — for there was more than one; again, see: the Senate — of President Biden's tardiness on the supremely pivotal issue of election reform, we can also agree that such tardiness is to be regretted. Of much higher criticality, though, is that that is now history, properly left to tomorrow's historians. Today's political urgency lies in a wholly united and altogether single-minded Democratic offensive against the authoritarian, antidemocratic forces of Trumpism.

Which is what made this NYT report of yesterday so distressing. "Several leading voting rights and civil rights groups are pointedly skipping [Biden's Atlanta] speech," related the Times, "protesting what they denounced as months of frustrating inaction by the White House — which they said showed that Mr. Biden did not view Republican attacks on voting rights with sufficient urgency."

Bellowed James Woodall, Georgia's former NAACP president: "We do not need any more speeches, we don’t need any more platitudes." Groused Ian Bassin, executive director of Protect Democracy: “When you’re diagnosed with cancer, you don’t wait a year to start treatment." (Georgia's Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams also excused herself from attendance, citing a "scheduling conflict." When one's own party president comes to town, there is no such thing as a superseding, absence-requiring appointment. Abrams did "[express] support for the event on Twitter," which is like sending a condolences card to your mother's funeral gathering.)

Woodall's thermodynamic objection to an historic presidential speech on voting rights and fair elections is merely baffling; hence, being baffled, I can offer no coherent counter-objection. But as for Bassin's thumping complaint — leading to his, and Woodall's, dramatic refusal to show up — about Biden so belatedly seeking treatment for a political cancer, I can only observe that seeking no treatment, whatever the timetable, would be the quintessential act of reckless indifference. (Let's face it, though: To some folks, self-righteous preening always trumps pragmatic action. Always has, always will. And for folks who raise money on self-righteousness, well ...)

Indeed, even the belligerent Mr. Bassin came around to agreement on that. Said he in addition: "The White House and Senate are starting to act with greater urgency, and there’s still time, but the president better be bringing a plan for chemo and radiation to Atlanta, because time is running out."

Still, in sum, my gentle advice to Bassin, Woodall et al. would be to knock it the fuck off — all the bitching about those yesterdays and what wasn't. This isn't the time for that. In fact it's the worst time. What's now needed, as noted, is a full-scale, full-throated, intensely unified Democratic & Allied attack on the Trumpian contract killers of America democracy.

Damn not only the torpedoes; damn the hindsight as well.

Trump says Sen. Rounds is "crazy or stupid." Could be, given the senator's high-risk, Democratic strategy.

​​​​​Donald Trump is asking if Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota is "crazy, or just stupid?"

The senator's mental state could be either, or it could be seminally strategic. The answer to Trump's question, however, can't really be known until later this year and the electoral wrap-up of 2024. Until then, Rounds will languish in crimson-lathered South Dakota's purgatorial limbo, at best. (According to Ballotpedia, the state has no recall provision for U.S. senators.)

As you undoubtedly know by now, Sen. Rounds said on Sunday's "This Week" that the 2020 election was "fair, as fair as we've seen," notwithstanding the thundering malarkey — known as the Hitlerian Big Lie — coming from Team Trump. "We simply did not win the election, as Republicans, for the presidency," said Rounds to host George Stephanopoulos.

“As a part of our due diligence, we looked at over 60 different accusations made in multiple states…The election was fair, as fair as we've seen. We simply did not win the election, as Republicans, for the presidency,” GOP Sen. Mike Rounds says. https://t.co/RWOXLxux1e pic.twitter.com/nk7mE8xVsc

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) January 10, 2022

He added that Trump Inc.'s staged crucifixion of our election system's integrity will only discourage Republicans from voting in future elections, which may be true. Then again, it may not. There appears to have been some element of GOP discouragement-cum-apathy in Georgia's 2020 senatorial elections, but by this November and two years hence, who's to say.

As for Rounds' presidential-vote intentions in 2024, he told Stephanopoulos that he will "take a hard look" — will have to take a hard look? — at supporting the Big Liar, although he has also said he will "support the Republican nominee." So there, Rounds is gymnastically balancing himself on politics' single bar. Definitely strategic. (My guess is that he's praying for a preemptive, D.O.J. criminal prosecution of Trump, which could resolve the senator's decision-making torment, what with the Donald being tied up, presumably, in depositions and courtroom dramatics.)

But back to Trump's rage-filled statement of yesterday, the one in which he presupposed two Roundian possibilities: either an unhinged leave of situational awareness or unquestionable political stupidity. In straining to amplify his psychological analysis of Rounds, Trump, being Trump, also chose more comprehensive clichés.

The South Dakota senator is a "RINO," charged the former Republican president who embraced virtually no traditional Republican principles; that, and he's gone wackily "woke" on the whole fair 2020 election thing. (Naturally, Trump threw in that "the only reason he did this is because he got my endorsement and easily won his state in 2020," allowing him, perhaps, years to recover politically. Then, just to confirm that he himself is the superior human being and a model of political rectitude, Trump elegantly added that "I will never endorse this jerk again.")

Although it's not impossible that Sen. Rounds has lost his mind, and accepting that his "This Week" appearance revealed a man still of some reasonable intelligence, what we're left with is a political gambler, of nearly the highest stakes.

His senatorial strategy is based on an assumption, really no more than a hunch — which always makes for stratospheric odds of being wrong — that Trump and Trumpism will somehow collapse by 2024, and will remain demolished into his own reelection year of 2026. Rounds's strategy dismisses, or overlooks, all the Trumpian labors in place to rig future elections and leave American voters with no out. Which is to say, his strategy assumes a sizable deflation of Trumpian enthusiasm nationwide, even though such widespread exuberance would be unnecessary within the anaconda-like confines of election subversion.

But most of all, Rounds is counting on congressional Democrats. They could make a hash of electoral Trumpism this year by coalescing around filibuster reform and then passing substantial anti-subversion legislation. In short, the strategy of Republican Sen. Mike Rounds and any of his likeminded colleagues relies on Democratic unity and partywide competence.

And that's one helluva gamble.

***

Rounds told CNN today that "what we are looking for is to be ... seen as being responsible and being honest." Fine. Then support both election-reform bills. 

Dr. Robert Malone, quack extraordinaire, is nonetheless half right

I encountered this latest online phenomenon only yesterday, in the Associated Press. And there's an interesting, if somewhat bewildering, twist to it.

To wit, "it" is the concept of "mass formation psychosis," propagated by one Dr. Robert Malone, a Twitter-banned, vaccine-skeptical scientist who, reports PolitiFact, "has billed himself as the 'inventor' of mRNA vaccines" — a claim as valid as his vaccine skepticism. Malone credits his idea to a Belgian professor of something or other, a certain Mattias Desmet, who wisely declined any comment to the AP.

Integral to Malone's theory is that Americans are being "hypnotized" by sinister powers — hypnotized "into believing mainstream ideas about COVID-19, including steps to combat it such as testing and vaccination." The thrust of the AP story is that Malone's "mass formation psychosis" was but one of an anti-vax thousand floating around the internet until Dec. 31, when he appeared on a podcast by the name of "The Joe Rogan Experience."

(That name rang only a vague bell upon reading it. Then I recalled once asking in response to some harebrained Rogan tweet that had amassed enormous fealty, "Who the hell is Joe Rogan?" A Rogan fan quickly let me know that I was, sadly, out of step with internet profundity.)

Anyway, after Malone's appearance on Rogan's podcast, it seems millions of dupes have lined up online, eager to purchase a ticket to the mad scientist's singalong hootenanny. The AP notes that merely one follow-up tweet — "I’m not a scientist but I’m pretty sure healthy people spending hours in line to get a virus test is mass formation psychosis in action" — reaped more than 22,000 "likes."

No doubt adding to the sexiness of Malone's on-air message was that he compared today's sinister powers of national hypnosis and mass psychosis to those of Nazi Germany:

"When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don’t make sense, we can’t understand it," said the, ahem, scientist, "and then their attention gets focused by a leader or a series of events on one small point, just like hypnosis, they literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere." As in, to Hitlerism. Take note, President Biden — you fascist cad.

Yet here's the twist that leads to yet another twist, which, I confess, I'm struggling to comprehend.

The AP sought professional advice on Malone's "mass formation psychosis," and what the AP got is this. "To my knowledge, there’s no evidence whatsoever for this concept," said an assistant professor of psychology and neural science. Said a social psychologist, “The concept has no academic credibility."

Expounded another social psychologist: Malone's "mass formation psychosis" suggests that "when people form part of a psychological crowd they lose their identities and their self-control; they become suggestible, and primitive instinctive impulses predominate," adding that "no respectable psychologist agrees with these ideas now." 

Summing it all up, the AP writes that "psychology experts say there is no support for the 'psychosis' theory described by Malone," with "psychosis" meaning, of course, a loss of touch with reality. More striking in the AP report is that also "discredited" are theories involving "mob mentality" and "group mind," say the experts. 

Let us remind ourselves, however, that the "people" Malone was referring to are those who accept the science of vaccination; i.e., personally responsible, socially considerate persons. He's saying that they are the ones who have lost their identify and self-control and reverted to a "primitive instinct." Which, clearly, is bunk.

Yet the particular sociopsychological description in question would seem to perfectly fit the Trumpian element among the anti-vax crowd, a group as out of touch with reality as any group can be. And what of Hannah Arendt and her universally embraced emphasis on mass "gullibility"? What of Hoffer's still-essentially valid The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements? What of widely accepted theories centering on "the authoritarian personality" (which ultimately congeals into a "group mind"), first rather crudely yet fundamentally authentically promulgated in the postwar era? Are they all to be tossed? 

To reject in toto the concept of "mass formation psychosis" would, then, be a mistake, would it not?

So it seems to this layman. Malone's concept of literal "hypnosis" is certainly nuts, but if you want a group doused neck-deep in reality-loss, look no farther than Big Lie Trumpers and their anti-vax contingent.

"Mass formation psychosis" indeed.

But in one instance, Tucker was in full accord with Ted

Contrary to press reports, Tucker didn't entirely disagree with Ted on his reputation-blundering deployment of the word "terrorist." This hostly accommodation — which begins at around 6 minutes into the interview — is what I find most interesting in the Carlson-Cruz debate, if one can call the sophistic cackling of two absurdist boneheads a "debate."

For six minutes, Tucker unrelentingly assaulted Ted for having said, in the Senate, that the events of Jan. 6 exemplified a "violent terrorist attack." Insisted the hee-hawing, primetime jackass, "By no definition was it a terror attack." There were instances of physical aggression against police officers, conceded Tucker, but in no way should such acts be described as "terrorism." 

Tucker persisted in belaboring this semantically settled point — already settled, that is, in terms vastly unfavorable to CarlsonThink — until Ted said, in what seemed to be a self-striking moment of rescuing remembrance, that he has always used the word "terrorist" in relation to violent acts against police officers committed by Antifa and BLM sorts.

In a flash, Tucker then appeared to be in definitional harmony with Ted. Oh yes, right, check — when Antifa and BLM adherents physically assault members of law enforcement, they're terrorists, no question about it. Not so, however, when your ordinary, everyday cop-thumper from the Trump camp does so.

It's a rather amusing example of bubbled righteousness. Same acts, different labels.

Hannity's legitimate rebuff of the Jan. 6 panel

The Speech of the Century

Can there be any rational debate about this post's title? ​​​​​

President Biden's address to the nation was the 21st-century barnburner of all rhetorical barns. For a year he kept mostly mute on the personified "dagger at the throat of America," but yesterday Biden got mad. Really mad — and he let it rip. The country not only remains in that other person's pressure cooker, the pressure is escalating, which few observers, a year ago, anticipated. And it has escalated solely by means of history's misuse.

Biden, then, delivered a speech on history as it actually was, not on history as it has been "twisted," as he put it. The time for being mute, tactful and gracious expired none too soon, for as 17-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes also put it, "Hell is truth seen too late."

Biden's sort-of "live in infamy" soundbite undoubtedly will be that which was first quoted: that Trump and Trumpism were and remain "a dagger at the throat of America." Given that the singular object of that phrase is a sociopathic narcissist, also doubtless is that much enjoyment was had by same. To rise from two-bit con artistry to being the sharpest blade of national decay and destruction is, in Trump's mind, a rewarding and magnificent achievement.

Another of Biden's passages, however, surely transfigured the Orange Blight into a frothing dervish: "He's not just a former president. He's a defeated former president."

There it was, as nakedly truthful and personally traumatic as any Trump characterization could be. He's a loser — to Trump, the most ignominious of all personal histories. What's more, he had to hear that he's a loser from his vanquisher, which in itself was a kind of Trumpian dagger plunged deep.

Yet Biden took on more than just Trump; he also took on the bedraggled but oddly powerful GOP at large: “While some courageous men and women in the Republican Party are standing against [Trumpism], trying to uphold the principles of that party, too many others are transforming that party into something else."

"Too many others" translated means virtually all of them; the courageous, scarce as can be. Look no farther than the House floor yesterday, where lawmakers gathered in historic sorrow. One — count 'em — one Republican representative joined the conscientious party's members: Liz Cheney, the one brought lowest by ensiform retribution, from Dante's Paradiso, then, for the briefest of moments, Purgatorio, and finally to the cavernous Inferno.

The Cheneylike Karl Rove had, the day before, fingered the "too many others" in their democracy-shattering hypocrisy. "If Democrats had done [in 2017] what some Trump supporters did on that violent Jan. 6, Republicans would have criticized them mercilessly and been right to do so," he wrote in a Wall Street Street Journal op-ed. He added they also "would have torched any high official who encouraged violence."

To "torch" has two meanings, of course — the literal and the figurative. Is there any doubt as well that Republicans would have chosen the former? Not in my mind, and likely not in yours either. Which begs the question: What should Democrats do now against what Republicans are gearing up to do in 2024 and '25? That is, steal the election — as national arsonists, if needed.

Rick Hasen, the prominent elections-specializing law professor at the University of California, suggests three actions, the first two of which can be dispatched with reasonable haste. First, "Democrats should not try to go it alone in preserving free and fair elections," as though they could find any significant number of Republican allies, which they couldn't. Second, "all sectors of society need to be mobilized in support of free and fair elections," including "business groups, civic and professional organizations, labor unions and religious organizations." Business groups lead the list because business groups are where the money is. But they're already back to subsidizing the terrorist Trump Party.

"Finally," writes Hasen, "mass, peaceful organizing and protests may be necessary in 2024 and 2025." Now, perhaps, we're getting somewhere. "Gerrymandered legislators may not respond to entreaties from Democrats," he continues, "but they are more likely to respond to widespread public protests made up of people of good faith.... If the officially announced vote totals do not reflect the results of a fair election process, that should lead to nationwide peaceful protests and even general strikes."

Still, having gotten somewhere with that, what next? What if "nationwide peaceful protests" and the improbable spectre of general strikes fail to persuade the election-riggers? This seems more likely than not. As does the prospect of un-peaceable protests of any, shall we say, persuasive size.

No, it's Democratic Party leaders — specifically one — who must now begin waging the war, through, as Hasen notes, "anti-subversion legislation," which, curiously, Hasen buries in his first recommendation. And here it's the future, not history, that will rise as the greatest challenge of Biden's presidency.

I can imagine no keener horror than sitting across a negotiating table from Sen. Joe Manchin, in all his menacing, self-interested conceit. That, however, will be the president's necessary drudgery. He's to give a speech next Tuesday on the understated pressing issue of electoral legislation, which, as you know, shall first require some serious finessing of the filibuster, Manchin's baby. It's the "serious" part that worries — not only about the filibuster, but the legislation's potency.

Yet maybe, just maybe, Biden's speech next week will replace yesterday's as the moving, most critical Speech of the Century. 

A Webb of wonder

​​​​​On this grim anniversary of Trumpian insanity come to a pinhead, I have chosen to instead feature something uplifting — literally.

That being the Christmas Day launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, a joint project between the United States, Canada and Europe. Then, at 7:20 a.m. ET, this magnificent beast of astrophysical splendor hurled its 13,000 pounds from Earth's obstinate gravity, heading out on a one-month, one-million mile odyssey to an orbit around our little planet's heat lamp. (So far, traveling at one-third of a mile per second, it has completed more than 68% of its flight path, with less than 300,000 miles to go.)

In its five-to-10-year lifespan, Webb will look to the universe's cradle — the Big Bang — with much better eyesight than Hubble's. Its 1990 launch enabled astrophysicists to witness the cosmos' birth after some 400 million years, while Webb will cut the postnatal timespan to 100 million — within Creation's 14-billion-year expanse, less time than a baby's burp.

Along the way, Webb will vastly improve our knowledge of black holes, stars' parturition, the universe's infant galaxies, signs of distant life, and Nature only knows what else. To accomplish all this, astro-engineers had to come up with 10 fresh technologies, much like Issac Newton's on-the-fly conception of calculus as a mathematical steppingstone to comprehending gravity. Webb's mirror, for instance, possesses six-times the image-collecting size of Hubble's, and is 100 times more discerning in its imagery.

Says one of the project's scientists, "Some of the deep field work that Hubble has done, they would look in a particular field for a couple of weeks. Webb can reach that kind of sensitivity limit in seven or eight hours." Thus astrophysicists can come to work in the morning and be done with their cosmic gazing before dinner.

That's just ... awesome — indeed a trifle more "awesome" than a new Taylor Swift recording or Panera's latest soup. It's refreshing to use the adjective in its truest meaning of awe-inspiring reverence. Webb's creation to discover Creation — whose explosive, stellar elements now constitute our physical bodies and your front lawn's geraniums — is a phenomenal testament to humankind's ingenuity, resourcefulness, and childlike sense of wonder. May we never lose it.

We damn near did, when 2011's Tea-Partying U.S. House of Representatives attempted to cancel the Webb Telescope project. Republicans' Commerce, Justice, and Science Subcommittee proposed slashing NASA’s budget to a pre-2008 amount, which a Yale astrophysicist attacked as "kill[ing] U.S. space science for decades." As for Webb's murder, the House committee justified it because of the project's cost overruns, ultimately coming to $10 billion. Contemporaneously, the Defense Department was spending an inclusive $20 billion a year to air-condition its Iraq and Afghanistan tents.

Of course Webb survived the onslaught of anti-scientific Republican puddin' heads. And in a little less than three months from now, it will disgorge its first celestial images. To state that that's exhilarating is a proud understatement.

2022 & '24 should be loaded with Dem messaging of anti-authoritarianism and pro-"conservatism"

“We are losing our democracy day by day, and journalists are individually aware of this, but media outlets are not centering this as the story it should be.” Those critical words — "critical" in both senses — were spoken by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an academic specializing in the history of authoritarianism.

Her words were quoted by Margaret Sullivan, media correspondent for the Washington Post, who framed her last report on precisely what Prof. Ben-Ghiat had encouraged. "[A] new pro-democracy emphasis should be articulated clearly — and fearlessly — to readers and viewers," urged Sullivan, while advocating that such pro-democracy articles on Republicans' anti-democratic intentions should be un-paywalled, the same as many press organs have done with their pandemic coverage.

Yesterday, Sullivan's Post colleague, E.J. Dionne, noted the wider media's woeful responsibility for diluting factual, straightforward coverage of politics. We have a "media ecosystem [that's] divided between a mainstream that takes pride in nonpartisan toughness on incumbents," he wrote, "and a powerful right-wing communications network."

While I agree that too many political journalists still enjoy casting a watertight image of "tough" nonpartisanship, on whole their mainstream keepers have improved on projecting forthrightness about America's vilest enemy: Trumpism. Only five years ago the words "lie" and "lies" lounged unused in that context. Now they're commonplace.

Nevertheless, Dionne rightly, if implicitly, joins Ben-Ghiat and Sullivan on the inescapable importance of more thoroughgoing coverage of the aforementioned hellish goings on. He lays the task at Democrats' feet as well: "Attacking Trump is not enough. Biden and his party need to make democracy itself a central issue, starting now."

I should think that rescuing American democracy from the vulturous talons of Trumpist fascists would essentially define "central issue" as a singular one. Yet Dionne — misguidedly, I think — then shifts his argument to one of everyday politics. Given that the media will do whatever the media will do, "Democrats themselves," he implores, must "shift the broader conversation," And by that he means spend on time on things such as re-rigging the filibuster and re-haggling over Build Back Better, culminating in some sort of amicable resolution. As one bill, fat chance.

Now, to be realistic about this, President Biden and his party cannot consume this year and the two following with unflagging disquisitions on only the raging pro-democracy vs. anti-democracy conflict. Commonsensical it is that focused messaging is always preferable to the scattershot kind, but one and only one campaign importunity would be exactly what importunity means: "persistence, especially to the point of annoyance." Hence Democrats "broader conversation" must include — now this would be novel — a few felicitous remarks on their legislative, economic and pandemic achievements. Just not to the extent Dionne advises.

This plus nearly incessant, podium-pounding warnings about imminent autocracy should attract the very voters Dionne is worried about — a vexation derived from some polling and a study conducted for the Democratic Governors Association. There are "signs that a potentially decisive bloc of middle-of-the-road voters who backed Biden over Trump is drifting away," reported one poll in Dionne's words, while the study, in its own words, found that Glenn Youngkin's swing-state victory came largely from voters who were “disproportionately male, politically independent, middle of the road ideologically, and more likely than average to be college educated."

Those are key, indispensable findings. And, not to beat a dead equine — well, perchance to nag at least once more — where those findings lead me is to what I have counseled for some time now: Democrats, in shifting their "broader conversation," must include in that shift certain intimations that they are the truly conservative party, mostly in the definitional sense of upholding America's proudest traditions. Democracy. Sober governance. Pragmatic progress. 

The target audience for this message could not be more ideal: men who aren't ravingly pro-Trump; middle-of-the-road folks (who engulf both centrists and those who fancy themselves old-fashioned conservatives); and the educated, which suggests they just might listen, and act accordingly on Election Days.

"If democracy isn’t worth fighting for, what is?" asks Dionne. I would add, however, that this bizarre, democratic fight-to-the-death must necessarily envelop some rather radical re-positioning on the Democrats' part. Something very fundamental must change in their campaigning substance. And my money is on the bellowed message of Democrats-cum-Burkean conservatives. Risky, for sure, but so was Inchon.

Assessing Biden's performance to date - and what may lie ahead

I have always admired the writings of Susan Glasser, a vastly experienced, widely traveled journalist now at The New Yorker. She's insightful, engrossing, and fair. I believe her latest piece, however — "Joe Biden’s Year of Hoping Dangerously" — failed in that last quality.

Much of her column is devoted to Biden's promise of Harding's normalcy; a "restoration—of sanity to our national politics, of competence to our governance, and of civility to our public life." Glasser acknowledges that President Biden "has lived up to his personal part of the bargain." He has re-dignified the White House, mostly by slaying his predecessor's indefatigable lying — Trump's average of 21 lies a day for a four-year total of 30,573 "untruths," with 492 of them coming in his first 100 days, and a staggering 503 lies told in just one day.

As for this president's wider-reaching promise to restore sanity, competence and civility to the nation, Glasser writes that "Biden, it is now clear, promised what he couldn’t deliver in a nation divided against itself." That much is a fair, objectively grounded observation. Nearly half of this Christianist nation would reject civility if Jesus himself were in the White House preaching the virtues of human decency.

But here is the Glasser line that sorely aggravated my sphincter: "[Biden] trafficked in hope that was arguably as misleading in its own way as Trump’s lies."

And that, I submit, is as unfair as any line could be. Satan himself couldn't match Trump in the telling of falsehoods; the latter has created his own little hell, since the Devil abhors competition. To then suggest that Biden is in any way comparable to Trump is simply inadmissible.

It should also be remembered that the bulk of Biden's hopes and promises came during his presidential candidacy. What, as a candidate, was he supposed to say? "I promise to keep America as uncivil and divided as Trump had done"?

Add to that the then-unimaginable reality that Trump's demonic influence would persist — even accelerate — after the 6th and 20th of last January. Its miasmic fog needn't be reiterated here; its familiarity is already engrained in much of the nation's aching consciousness. Let it suffice that Trump's malevolent influence is more of a danger now to American democracy than it was when he still gripped his sinister scepter — and that, as said, was once unimaginable. (Glasser's incisive encapsulation: "Did you imagine [on Jan. 7th] a world where it was even possible that Liz Cheney, not Donald Trump, would be the Republican leader purged as a result of the insurrection at the Capitol?")

Glasser does concede that under Biden "more than seventy per cent of American adults are vaccinated; there are promising new treatments for covid; unemployment has fallen, wages have risen, the economy has rebounded, and the stock markets have hit record highs that would have had Trump beating his chest." In addition he saw through to passage a $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill, a long-belated infrastructure bill, and the confirmations of federal judges aplenty. That unemployment rate? It's down to almost 4 percent. As for the booming stock market, 401(k)s are thriving.

Nevertheless, Glasser asserts that Biden words about "a time to repair, restore, heal, and build" were "stirring" but "impossible words." Let the record show that, in many important ways, they were not. They just weren't.

She goes on write that "the overheated declarations last spring that this President was the progressive reincarnation of F.D.R. or L.B.J. now seem ... dated." I agree, and I preemptively agreed last spring, in that much of what Biden envisioned was less visionary than agonizingly overdue. Especially cringeworthy was that premature "declarations" of political sainthood have an uncanny way of boomeranging on the declarants. Never boast till the game is over. (I learned that lesson in the most painful way — my easy, abundantly written assumptions of a Clinton 2016 victory.)

Still, there have indeed been many a Biden success story, as noted above. His biggest snag, though, may be his own party. Democrats have always been amazingly crappy at messaging. "Have you heard the good word, Brother?" Such words appear to be missing from the Democratic lexicon. To Republicans messaging is a cherished art, performed daily and with the greatest of skill. 

For the Democratic Party, that may be an impossible challenge, given so many of its divergent voices. But with that I'll place some Bidenesque "hope" in the implication of another of Glasser's lines — the implication being, President Biden is on his own: "The oldest President ever elected, Biden at age seventy-nine is not the doddering caricature that Republicans have sought to make him. But he has not yet figured out how to make an effective case for himself and his Presidency."

Hey, he has three years to go.

A little present for you

I little late, but here's my Christmas, Hanukkah, pagan and New Year's gift to you: ThriftBooks.com. Simple as that, a website.

It's a marvelous source for buying used books. Its offerings are massive (I'm rarely unable to find a desired volume) and the books' condition is almost always pristine. Good as new. There are usually several selections of the book you can choose from, with varying illustrated covers, if you're into that artsy sort of thing. Hardbacks and paperbacks, prices will range. 

And get this: With every order of a mere $10 or more, ThiftBooks has free shipping. 

I couldn't begin to calculate the hundreds of dollars I've saved over the years, ordering from this site. Check it out. You won't be sorry. 

(Note: This is not a paid announcement.) 

Political violence and the partisan divide

​​​​​As shocking as the Washington Post's poll results are on the question of whether violence against the government is ever justified, even more shocking is the probability of the results' statistical insignificance — their antique irrelevance — by the years 2024 and 2025.

As recently as 2010, only 16% of Americans endorsed such violence, and no doubt most of them were Tea Partying, chest-beating simians who favored violence in general; the tyrannical imposition of more accessible, more affordable healthcare was but an excuse to lock and load. Today's pro-violence flock — that is, those of the Guy Fawkes mentality of last January — has more than doubled in size, to 34%.

That one of every three Americans you pass on the unmasked streets embraces the now-realistic concept of swarming the Capital Building, murdering policy officers, hunting U.S. legislators and hanging the vice president is, shall we say, a rather dispiriting civic development.

It comes with partisan asymmetry, of course: Nearly twice as many Republicans versus Democrats are somewhat giddy at the prospect of a bloody coup: 40% of "Grand" Old Party members against Democrats' 23%. (Forty-one percent of independents are as violently boisterous as the wool-coated Republican housewife and her tricorned husband, but independents are a curiously schizophrenic group who can never seem to distinguish white hats from black ones.)

As would be expected, the partisan asymmetry is also "gendered," racial, and certifiably nuts. Men (as always) are more prone to beat a D.C. cop half to death with an American flagpole, and while 40% of all red-White-and-blue Americans defend such barbarity, only 18% of the African-American population does. In the poll's follow-up interviews with respondents, among the reasons given for justifiable murder or attempted murder is opposition to mask mandates. Mask mandates!

This swelling, generalized insanity is due to only one human being, so to speak — that singular centrality of voice and incubator of mass dementia. Nearly two-thirds of Republicans are still smitten by Trump's bunco humbuggery about rampant voter fraud, and more than that — 69% — say that President Biden's title is illegitimate. For Christ's sake, even three-fourths of those schizophrenic independents don't swallow the Mar-a-Lago magpie's blatherskite about the 2020 election's "irregularities."

The Post quizzically notes that "Republicans’ rejection of Biden’s victory is not novel. [In its 2017 poll], 67 percent of Democrats and 69 percent of Hillary Clinton voters said Trump was not legitimately elected president." In the story's context, however, the citing of those statistics is without relevance or comparability, for there is no subsequent report on January 2017's total absence of Democrats trying to hang Vice President Biden.

One quote from a 39-year-old Michigan mother of two reveals the extent of Trump's once-unthinkable poisoning of so many minds: Said the woman to the Post: "It’s no longer a war against Democrats and Republicans. It’s a war between good and evil." (In her case, the "evil" arose from her suspicion that Biden might someday kick in her door and force a vaccine needle in her arm, although that is somewhat beside the point. The point is that she now envisions the propriety of physical, political violence.)

The woman, one Anthea Ward, was nonetheless partially correct. The intensifying war in which we're engaged entails battles against Trumpian evil, for sure. Yet the war is much less one of good vs. evil than one of merely standard, everyday politics, as practiced by Democrats, vs. the evils of governing indifference, voter suppression and, above all, Republicans' election subversion.

The pros and cons of, say, Build Back Better can be rationally debated. But there can be no rational debate about the pros and cons of Republicans reversing the will of voters. That's just straight-out fascism, as far from any American "good" as any political objective could be.

In that very possible event, political violence against actual usurpers would be justified. But now for the Big Partisan Difference: Democrats, by nature, wouldn't revolt much as Trumpian Republicans did. At least I'm reasonably, depressingly confident they wouldn't. Hence America would simply slip into illegitimate authoritarianism and go on about its business, one of mostly just trying to pay the cable bill.

After all, what's a murdered democracy compared to the frisson of a "Cheers" rerun?

Before Hollywood became unreal

Ginger Rogers, pre-code (roughly 1929 to mid-1934). Gee, I wonder what the big flowery button was supposed to symbolize?