It's Always Darkest Before It Goes Totally Black
Also, Joe Biden crushes an empty Red Bull can on his forehead and gets out there
If Hope Comes Near You, Kick Its Backside
The first dog I had as an adult, who was objectively the best dog to ever live, developed cancer later in his life. Through a series of [shockingly expensive] treatments, we were able to get him into remission pretty much immediately after the diagnosis and he was more or less himself from that point on. But he was already 10 years old, and while the cancer that he had was treatable, my now-wife and I had to grapple with the fact that we had, in effect, met the boatman who was going to ferry him into the great beyond. So over the next [what ended up being] six months, I began trying to mentally and emotionally preparing for him to shuffle off this mortal coil. When the day eventually arrived, however, I realized I’d been harboring more hope than I thought. Because as long as he was breathing, there was a chance for…I dunno, something. A miracle? A medical breakthrough? But once he was gone there was nothing left to even hope for. There’s something tragic in a final end like that, even if it was inevitable. It’s the hope, as they say, that kills you.
That’s a morbid and overly dramatic metaphor, I think, for the end of the Republican primary. While I knew that Donald Trump was almost certainly inevitable, as long as there was someone else in the race, I could hope against hope for…something. But alas it was not to be, as Nikki Haley suspending her campaign earlier this week, leaving Trump unobstructed to the Republican nomination.
To Haley’s credit, she has not [yet] endorsed Donald Trump, saying instead “it is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond it who did not support him, and I hope he does that.” It’s an almost comical idea to me. I mean, Donald Trump is so clearly not going to change a single thing to earn the vote of a Haley supporter. In fact, he routinely sets out to do the opposite. He campaigns like Michael Bolton from Office Space — “Why should I have to change? You’re the one who sucks.” But at the same time, I’m curious what Donald Trump could even say at this point to earn my vote. The only thing I can come up with, I think I’ve said before, would be if he came out and revealed he had a brain tumor that had been responsible for his behavior over the last, well, his entire life; and that he apologized and realized the error of his ways, and renounces his previous platform and whole-heartedly embraces a much more Reaganesque platform. …y’know, a total fantasy. Barring that, however, I imagine I’m going to remain where I’ve always been.
Again, to beat the deadest of horses, it’s not that Trump is less fit to be president than Joe Biden, it’s that he’s unfit, period [and is, in fact, even less fit than he was in 2016 or 2020, given his behavior in the intervening years]. In 2016, when conservative politics first started feeling like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, my fellow travelers that were turning Trump-curious were saying at least facially reasonable things, like “we need a president who isn’t a career politician,” or “Hillary Clinton is the literal devil.” But now, eight years later, they’re just nuts. Whatever else you think of Donald Trump’s presidency, his conspiracy mongering after the election culminating in an attempted autogolpe [which is still an insane thing to have to write about America!] should be utterly disqualifying. And we’re being asked to overlook all of that because…Joe Biden is old and a Democrat? I just can’t get that worked up about it.
Nikki Haley was not my first choice in the Republican primary — Ronald Reagan is both term-limited and dead, Calvin Coolidge is also dead, Mitt Romney didn’t run, and anyone else I used to support is now a pod person — but she was a perfectly acceptable choice which gave me feelings toward politics I haven’t felt since early 2016 [when I thought Scott Walker and Marco Rubio had integrity]. I never had any illusions about it, obviously; it seemed pretty clear from the beginning that the majority of Republican voters would rather go with the twice-impeached, four times-indicted, pandemic-mismanaging, porn star-banging, serially dishonest, adjudicated sexual abuser, who — lest we forget — fomented an attack on the Capitol in an effort to stay in power in contravention of the law and the will of the people. That’s…despairing.
There’s a debate going on about despair, and not just in the Catholic sense of despair being a sin, but about how much despair we should actually be feeling about the possible [and at the moment even likely] reelection of Donald Trump. Now, I’m not one of those who thinks that electing Donald Trump would be the end of American democracy or whatever. Electing Donald Trump wouldn’t mean the end of America in any literal sense; we would still live our lives, have elections [at least for a while…ha, haha…], etc. But I think it would be the end — or at least a hiatus — of something rather important about America. About our, uh, maturity [?] for self-governance. It would certainly mean something untoward about the American people, or at least 45% of them. It’s one thing to take a flyer on Donald Trump when he was something of an unknown quantity. It’s quite another to have witnessed his term as president and the iniquities that followed and then affirmatively choose him again.
I also struggle with the idea that this — caring about democracy and responsible self-governance, etc. — is a luxury belief. I mean, opposing Donald Trump costs me nothing, really, but I’d like to think that even if it did I’d be willing to make such a sacrifice for the sake of the country. It also helps that I have a nuanced enough view of politics that I can compartmentalize the things that most people dislike about the Biden administration — e.g., inflation — as things that aren’t his fault. Which is to say, I don’t accept the premise that electing Trump equals lower inflation or a better economy. But even if it did, is electing Trump [literally] worth it? Personally I’m willing to accept a suboptimal policy slate and/or economic conditions in the short term to avoid the possibly disastrous effects of a second [and by all measures worse] Trump administration. So it’s sort of unnerving to me when people are willing to be such cheap dates as to accept Trump’s myriad deficiencies merely for the sake of [largely imagined] lower inflation. I mean, history does not lack for examples of electorates making bad choices in times of high inflation and political turmoil. I’m not sayin’…I’m just sayin’.
The cliché campaign slogan that many Trump supporters have dusted off recently is “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Personally, that answer is yes. And given that next week is the four year anniversary of the beginnings of the COVID disruptions, I would imagine it becomes true for most Americans that they are better off now than they were four years ago. But tribal political considerations force people to pretend otherwise.
At a recent speech in Florida, former Attorney General Bill Barr told a crowd “Trump is Russian roulette, Biden is national suicide.” That is verbatim an argument that was made about Hillary Clinton, and I didn’t find it convincing then, but also — we’re talking about Joe Biden, right? This Joe Biden? Frail, elderly, whispery Joe Biden? What planet do you live on where that guy is “national suicide” but the raving lunatic spreading internet conspiracy theories and who attempted to stay in office against the law and will of the people is a 1/6 chance? Nikki Haley made a similar statement recently when she said “Of course I have concerns about Donald Trump. I have more concerns about Joe Biden.” And I just…I know she doesn’t actually believe that. I don’t think Bill Barr believes it, either. And I think our politics would be improved if people simply said what they actually believed.
This is set to be, statistically, the longest general election campaign in American history. It already feels like that to me. The popular analysis is that this is the election rematch that no one wants — but that’s not true. Both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are the rightful standard bearers for their respective parties. I do think, however, that there’s an important difference: Many Democrats would prefer someone other than Joe Biden was their nominee, but through various forces of incumbency and political inertia, Joe Biden is, though imperfect [to comically understate it], still the best-available option. Republicans, meanwhile, had several options aside from Donald Trump and quite conspicuously rejected all of them. They’re basically shouting “give us Barabbas!” It’s a conscious decision. For the last few months it was fun to pretend there was a chance we might avoid this rematch, but now we face the harsh reality that, no, we’re really doing this. It’s the hope that kills you.
Ol’ Red Bull Joe
Watching Joe Biden give a speech is always a white-knuckle event for me. I feel a little guilty — one of my speech-related childhood traumas was going to the school speech pathologist and having to read aloud while she sat there with one of those clicker-counter things [like they use to track capacity at a concert venue], counting all of my dysfluencies as if I wasn’t aware of them. But I nevertheless subconsciously do the same thing to Joe Biden whenever he gives a speech; not to track his dysfluencies for their own sake, but more to have an idea of how badly my nose is going to bleed listening to analysis about it. I have a friend who also stutters who can’t even watch Biden give a speech for similar reasons; it’s just too anxiety-producing. But I strapped in anyway because I’m apparently some sort of a political masochist.
Before the speech, I was daydreaming of ways the president could do right by the country and, y’know, make way for a candidate more people felt good about. “My fellow Americans, discretion is the better part of valor, and sometimes discretion is knowing when your time is up. And so, to give the rest of this speech, is Pennsylvania governor Joshua Shapiro…” Failing that, I thought maybe he could pull a Willy Wonka and come out theatrically hobbling before doing a somersault and springing up to the podium. [Which, now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure was a Saturday Night Live gag.]
But while he didn’t literally do a somersault down the aisle, he was definitely all jacked up on Mountain Dew. He came out as what I call Red Bull Biden, like he’d spent all afternoon crushing energy drinks. And you could tell that Republicans weren’t prepared for that development because they suddenly started caring about the sanctity of the State of the Union. It turns out there can be a downside to painting your opponent as a doddering dementia patient that wandered out of the memory wing of the assisted living facility. As long as Joe Biden could speak in coherent sentences without his jaw rotting off and bouncing on his lectern, he was going to sail over the expectations that Republicans had set for him.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t pay much attention to the content of the speech; one, because the content of the State of the Union so rarely matters anyway, but two, because I think the vibe [as the kids say] is much more important. And I’m not even sure if I’d classify the vibe as “partisan.” Maybe I’m just jaded from the last [checks calendar] 14 years of fairly partisan States of the Union. There was the sporadic heckling, as we’ve come to expect, particularly from the Pride of Northwest Georgia, Marjorie Taylor-Greene [who for some reason can’t seem to find a balance for her SOTU attire between Disney Villain and Cheer Mom]:
It still baffles me that anyone finds that woman anything but tedious. I don’t even have a joke for it at this point. Her defining characteristic is being a braying jackass with no manners or sense of decency, but she wins 65% of the vote in her district, so that must be what her constituents want in a legislator.
Anyway, the content doesn’t matter and since the president didn’t disintegrate like the Crypt Keeper, most people think it was a resounding success. Donald Trump [and others] accused him of being on drugs, if you’re curious how well they think he did. I did find myself thinking “if Biden can keep this up for the next eight months, he should be fine.” But man, eight months is a long time to walk that tightrope.
Not For Nothin’
Alabama Senator Katie Britt provided the Republican response to the State of the Union, and it truly has to be seen to be believed. To paraphrase another prominent Republican, we need a total and complete shutdown of responses to the State of the Union until we can figure out what the hell is going on. It’s like the Madden Curse of American politics. You want to take a promising young politician and utterly embarrass them to a national audience? Have them do the State of the Union response. Senator Britt now joins the likes of Bobby Jindal and Marco Rubio in having political observers involuntarily blurt out “What the hell was that?!” She was too breathy, she frequently spoke from the back of her throat like she was about to cry, she maladroitly bounced back and forth between emotions while maintaining a fake smile, her cadence was unsettling and…full of…weird..un…even pauses. It’s weird, the Senate Republicans Twitter account is posting graphics with quptes from the speech rather than video clips, presumably because…yikes. I don’t know why anyone still agrees to do these. It’s theoretically a great opportunity, at least on paper — but it never works out.
Occasional Trivia
Answer from last time:
Category: Classic Albums
Clue: This 1976 Eagles album was the first to feature Joe Walsh, who replaced Bernie Leadon.
Hotel California
Today’s clue:
Category: Kangaroos belong to the taxonomical family macropodidae, which include marsupials with this body feature.
Dispatches from the Homefront
I learned the other day that my wife and I have quite different bedtime routines for our youngest. Theoretically we both read her a book, sing her a song, and put her to bed. But it turns out by “song” my wife just means Twinkle Twinkle Little Star or Wheels on the Bus. I’ve been playing her soothing songs from a special playlist I created with songs from musicians like Van Morrison, John Prine, Ben Harper, etc. If nothing else this kid is going to have a well-rounded musical education.