If You Got Bad News, You Wanna Kick Them Blues
I have a bit of a confession to make: I’ve always had a strange affinity for Mitch McConnell.
He was basically designed in a lab to be the Republican leader in the Senate. He’s boring, he’s pretty much the only senator who doesn’t fantasize about being president, and I don’t know that he’s ever raised his voice. But at the same time, he’s a ruthless tactician and strategist. Someone, I don’t remember who, once said that whenever a political fight begins in the Senate, Mitch McConnell sets up a lawn chair at the proper Republican position and just waits for the rest of his caucus to join him.
He’s slow and methodical, like a turtle. He’s also cold-blooded, and now he’s ornery, like…like a turtle.
See, Mitch McConnell doesn’t have an easy job. The House is well to the left of the Senate, so the ideological gap in legislation that comes over the transom is already an obstacle. Then he has a narrow majority, and within his majority he has some rather unreasonable and unruly characters. So any bipartisan legislation is quite a delicate, elaborate undertaking.
Mitch also doesn’t like to be embarrassed. So when he spends months trying to herd the cats that are his House counterparts and his roguish caucus, only to have the end result dumped on by the president of his own party — a result that the president himself agreed to! — ol’ Cocaine Mitch gets a little perturbed. As he should!
I made no secret last week that I thought the COVID relief package was subpar, but it nevertheless passed Congress. Which, again, was a delicate and elaborate undertaking. For the president to only bash it after the fact — and thereby provide the opposition party a cudgel with which to hit Republicans — is, to use an obscure political science term, bush league.
After a five-day tantrum, the president agreed to sign the bill; but in so doing, made three, uh, “demands.” The president wanted votes on increasing direct payments to $2,000 (a Democrat position), as well as a repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (a Trumpian position), and the establishment of a commission on voter fraud (also a Trumpian position).
Democrats sought to seize on Trump’s support for increased direct payments by submitting such a bill for unanimous consent, to which McConnell himself objected.
McConnell then proposed his own bill, which combined all three of the presidents “demands.” He knows full well that such a bill will never pass, but he’s doing it as a parting gift to Trump. He’s essentially saying “You wanted a vote on this, you son of a bitch, well here it is.”
To paraphrase H.L. Menken, the president has said what he wants, and now he’s gonna get it good and hard.
The president took a dump on Mitch’s work, and so Mitch is rubbing the president’s nose in it.
Sen. Bernie Sanders has floated the idea of filibustering the veto override vote on the NDAA unless McConnell calls a vote on the increased direct payments; but that just might be a deal Mitch is willing to take. A two-week lapse in the NDAA could just be the price of admission for not rewarding Trump’s shenanigans.
The moral of the story is you don’t embarrass the turtle. They didn’t hang around this long by accident.
COVID Update
Added to the list of websites I check obsessively has been Bloomberg’s vaccine tracker.
As of now, a shade over two million people have received the first dose of the vaccine, about 10% of projections. So we’re a little behind schedule. But hopefully things will ramp up after the holidays and we can get more in line with the modeling. It’ll be late January before we start seeing the effects of the vaccine in the data (it takes 2-3 weeks to complete the vaccine process, and then another 2-3 weeks to build immunity), but obviously the sooner we can get people vaccinated the better.
Speaking of data: reporting for tests, cases, and deaths have fallen off of a cliff over Christmas:
This is not an indicate that things are improving, it’s merely an indication that the people responsible for reporting the data are taking time off. Expect the numbers to get much worse next week as people return to work and the backlog is cleared.
One metric that has not improved at all, even superficially, is the number of hospitalized COVID patients. The number has doubled over the last two months to over 120,000. We continue to set daily records in that regard, with only the slightest slowdown in daily additions.
These Friggin’ People
Recently-pardoned felon and erstwhile Trump campaign “coffee boy” George Papadopoulos is apparently all aboard the Coup Coup Express:
It’s always a little funny to me that these cosplaying wannabe revolutionaries think they have the wherewithal to pull off their little plot.
These clowns couldn’t wear a mask in the grocery store and order takeout for a month without publicly losing their minds. But they would have us believe that they can take the necessary actions required to overturn a federal election? Mmmk, Scooter.
That’d be a pretty rough 10 minutes. Red Dawn wasn’t a documentary, you putz.
Should Probably Come Up With a New Name for This Section
Calling this part “Quibbles and Bits” was like Homer Simpson calling his barbershop quartet “The Be Sharps”: “Witty at first, but seems less funny each time you hear it.”
Plus it was harder than I realized to find something to nitpick every day. But I still like sharing funny standup bits, so:
Dispatches from the Homefront
With my wife being home for winter break, we now have to find ways to entertain our daughter for roughly 12 hours a day. She’s right in that sweetspot age where requires constant supervision, but has the attention span of a monkey in a cocaine study.
So the other day we made homemade Play Doh, which is a very labor-intensive way to make a bunch of dirty dishes while entertaining your child for 10 minutes; plus another thirty seconds of actually playing with the Play Doh.
On the bright side, it shaved the 12 hours down to 11 hours, 49 minutes, and 30 seconds.