[ Posted Wednesday, February 17th, 2021 – 17:44 UTC ]
Donald Trump changed a lot of things in American politics, including one that's likely to be around for some time to come -- normalizing the practice of a politician not using any "code words" or "dog whistles," but instead just boldly telling you what he really feels. The unvarnished truth, as he sees it, in other words. Why pussyfoot around? Just tell it like it is, and anyone who complains is obviously some sort of liberal weenie, so you can ignore all of them and their complaints as being too "woke," or something.
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[ Posted Tuesday, February 16th, 2021 – 16:58 UTC ]
I had a choice of topics for today's column, one of which was weighing in on the debate over the possibility of earmarks returning to Congress. I say this to make a point -- American politics may not be back to normal by a long shot (since the Republican Party obviously hasn't quite returned from their Looney Tunes vacation yet), but in his four weeks in office, President Joe Biden has moved us all a significant way down the road to normalcy once again.
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[ Posted Friday, February 5th, 2021 – 18:59 UTC ]
This week we were treated to the spectacle of the Republican Party largely voting in support of an advocate of using deadly violence towards her political opponents. How the mighty have fallen -- since this used to be the party that dearly loved to sanctimoniously lecture everyone on how high morals were an absolute necessity in politics, and that even the concept of "moral relativism" was evil. That all went out the window when they nominated the most amoral man imaginable for president, of course, but it's still rather shocking to see this once-publicly-righteous party wallow in the filth of QAnon and flirt with ideas like advocacy for assassinating political opponents.
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[ Posted Tuesday, February 2nd, 2021 – 17:19 UTC ]
One of the concerns many Democratic voters (especially progressives) have had about President Joe Biden was that he has had a propensity to compromise too much when dealing with congressional Republicans (as he did as vice president on several Obama initiatives) and that he just wasn't bold enough (too incremental), and would therefore prove to be a rather wishy-washy president. Well, the jury's still largely out (after all, it hasn't even been a full two weeks yet), but I have to say that the earliest indications are surprisingly good. Biden is holding firm in his first big legislative push, and he's refusing to get sidetracked into some miasmic swamp of some promised bipartisan compromise that never actually materializes.
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[ Posted Friday, January 29th, 2021 – 18:29 UTC ]
President Joe Biden has now spent his first 10 days in office. All told, it's been fairly boring. Which is exactly what millions of Americans voted him into office to achieve. Journalists everywhere are writing absolute paeans to boredom. Throughout the land, a joyous cry is raised: "Let boredom ring!" Well, OK, that may be overstating it a tiny bit. But not by much.
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[ Posted Thursday, January 28th, 2021 – 16:14 UTC ]
President Joe Biden has been in office a little over a week, and so far he has exceeded expectations. Now, to be fair, these are still the earliest of days. Biden is still enjoying his "honeymoon" period with the public, with the press, and (largely) with Congress. That will fade, undoubtedly. Also, Donald Trump left so many egregious messes lying around that cleaning up the worst of them was pretty low-hanging fruit indeed. But, so far, Biden has not disappointed in a big way once.
None of his cabinet choices raised any huge alarm with even the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and they've been getting steadily confirmed with huge bipartisan votes. There will be a few later on that will be more contentious, no doubt, but so far Biden's track record on putting together his administration is a pretty admirable one.
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[ Posted Tuesday, January 26th, 2021 – 16:45 UTC ]
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer won his first big political battle against Minority Leader Mitch McConnell last night. McConnell, in a fit of petulance, had dug in his heels and was refusing to agree to the new Senate rules proposed by Schumer which will dictate the chamber's power structure for the next two years. This is normally a routine vote, even with an evenly-balanced 50-50 Senate -- there wasn't much drama the last time this happened, when Tom Daschle and Trent Lott worked out an agreement. Essentially, Senate committees will be evenly divided between Democratic seats and Republican seats, but Democrats will still control what gets out of committee and (more importantly) what makes it to the Senate floor for a vote. After all, even though the Senate is evenly-divided, Vice President Kamala Harris is the deciding vote for the Democrats. But that's been true since last Wednesday, and yet McConnell blocked the new rules until today, which had left Republicans still chairing all the committees -- even though they're now in the minority.
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[ Posted Monday, January 25th, 2021 – 16:35 UTC ]
The Washington political press corps have returned to some semblance of normalcy. One of the things this means is that President Joe Biden is getting scrutiny and criticism for the actual reality on the ground versus what he had promised. This follows a four-year period of being so cowed by Trump's firehose of lies and bluster that the press corps mostly didn't even bother, other than a few half-hearted attempts here and there.
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[ Posted Thursday, January 21st, 2021 – 17:50 UTC ]
I woke up this morning feeling good. The big reason was that for the first time in a long time I knew I wouldn't discover in the morning news that the president of the United States had done, said, or tweeted something overnight that was embarrassing, cringe-worthy, mean-spirited, or just downright evil. I knew nobody in the federal government would have been fired at 3:00 in the morning via Twitter. I knew no foreign country would be seriously annoyed at America for no reason other than one man-child's insufferable ego.
That's all a really good feeling to wake up to, I have to say, and I look forward to having that same confident feeling every single morning for the next four years. As do tens of millions of others, I'm sure.
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[ Posted Wednesday, January 20th, 2021 – 17:26 UTC ]
It is morning in America again.
Ronald Reagan famously made a lot of political hay out of that slogan. The phrase worked so well because Americans generally favor optimism and a bright future over the gloomier alternatives. All modern presidential candidates since Reagan have struck optimistic themes while campaigning. Except one.
Donald Trump actually did campaign on optimism, but only during his first run. He borrowed the language of populism and painted a rather rosy worldview for the forgotten blue-collar Midwestern worker, back in 2016. By doing so, he flipped the "Big Blue Wall" that Democrats had previously relied upon to give them the necessary Electoral College votes, and he thus won the presidency.
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