The Republican Party's descent into madness now appears to be complete. At this point their moral compass hasn't just broken down, they've thrown it overboard. The Republican Party is now completely morally bankrupt. The only thing that is even left to debate about this sad state of affairs is whether they had reached the bottom of the barrel months (or even years) ago, or whether they have only more recently arrived there.

This goes beyond the fact that the party is essentially now a personality cult devoted to one very flawed man, and it will likely last long beyond when Donald Trump exits the scene for good. Not only has the swamp fever which has gripped the GOP not broken, it's not about to any time soon -- for many years to come, most likely.

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President Joe Biden's job approval ratings with the public have slipped over the past few months, from above 50 percent in July down to the low 40s now. In August and September, Biden's average rating in public opinion polls took a dive, although it has since somewhat stabilized. This was caused in large part by a few bad patches which he hit almost simultaneously (the rise of the Delta variant in the pandemic and the obviously-inadequate withdrawal from Afghanistan), and now the increase in inflation is playing a large role as well. Biden just got a big legislative win (and could have another one before the end of the year), but it remains to be seen whether this will boost his standing with the public much or not. One thing he might do to help himself, though, is to make a lot better use of the bully pulpit.

Biden has long said the biggest mistake Barack Obama (and, by extension, Biden himself) made while in office was to do a substandard job of salesmanship for Obamacare. Obama never really saw the need to "sell" the idea to the public; he either thought the good it would do was self-evident or he thought it was beneath him to hawk his politics like a used car salesman. Obviously, he was wrong, no matter what he was actually thinking.

So far, though, Biden himself hasn't been a whole lot more effective selling his own agenda. He does try, but he seems to be using a playbook that is decades old instead one for today's plugged-in reality. But even just considering Biden's old-school approach, he still could be doing a better job.

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Today President Joe Biden got the bill-signing ceremony he has wanted all along. Surrounded by both Democrats and Republicans, Biden signed the bipartisan infrastructure bill he had been requesting from Congress since the spring. He got 19 Republican senators and 13 GOP House members to vote for it -- which is impressive these days, but also a reflection of the hyperpartisan nature of politics today, since in years gone by such a basic bill would likely have been passed with near-unanimous votes in both houses. But even getting 32 Republicans on board was a major achievement for President Biden.

It's also one he campaigned heavily on -- the idea that "the fever would break" after the departure of Donald Trump from the scene, and then Republicans would go back to being reasonable politicians who might be open to a compromise on all sorts of important issues. Biden spent a long time in the Senate and personally remembers when things like that happened on a regular basis. But he's also been gone from the Senate for over a decade now, and so his wish to return to bipartisan legislating had to be tempered with the reality of the tribalism that defines American politics today.

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This was a rather strange week in Washington politics because the biggest story actually happened almost an entire week ago. The lack of big news since then isn't really all that surprising, though, considering Congress is (once again) off for a week -- meaning little-to-no news from Capitol Hill. But before they scarpered off on vacation last weekend, the House managed to actually pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill late Friday night. This is an enormous legislative victory for President Joe Biden and overshadowed all the other events of the week.

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[With apologies to Samuel Beckett, of course...] We all now seem to be waiting for the C.B.O. Or perhaps this is just another chapter in our long and drawn out struggle with Senator Manchin of West Virginia... in other words: more waiting for Joe. Whatever you want to call it, so far it definitely belongs in the category of "tragicomedy."

Not-so-amusing literary wordplay aside, however, we seem to be in an interim period here. Let's try a sports metaphor instead: It's halftime in Joe Biden's legislative football game. Right at the end of the first half, the Democrats put a big score on the board by passing the bipartisan infrastructure bill and sending it to Biden's desk for his signature.

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President Joe Biden is in the midst of a blitz of salesmanship. He's got every right to do so, after Congress finally moved the bipartisan infrastructure bill to his desk after months of delays. And Biden has long been aware that one of the biggest mistakes Barack Obama ever made as president was failing to properly whip up public support for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which would have been easy to do since Republicans were already (derisively) calling it "Obamacare." Biden saw the dynamics of this failure play out, as Obama's veep. So he has long said he's not going to repeat the same mistake during his presidency. Which is why seeing him out in the country selling the various parts of his infrastructure plan was entirely predictable.

Still, it is nice to see it happen. Biden's not just "spiking the football" -- that will happen when Congress returns to Washington next week, when the expectation is that Biden will have at least a few Republicans standing behind him while he ceremoniously signs the bill. What Biden is doing now is more education of the public -- which is an absolute necessity.

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We are currently in the midst of yet another Democratic failure to properly frame a political issue. This time President Joe Biden and his administration are largely to blame, although other Democrats should really be pushing back on the media's lazy acceptance of a false Republican narrative as well. When the Biden administration announced a new OSHA rule for all private businesses with 100 or more employees, it should have -- from the very start -- pointedly called it a "testing mandate." Because that is what it is, plain and simple. It is a requirement that all employees get tested once a week for the COVID-19 virus. And that's all it is -- that is the only thing it actually mandates.

Republicans, of course, went ballistic. It's what they're best at, these days. But in doing so, they have (so far) successfully painted the testing mandate as something it is not -- a vaccination mandate. They do this by either conspicuously failing to mention the testing at all, or just flat-out lying about it:

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Republicans have never been particularly scrupulous about the fantastical political narratives they adapt in order to bamboozle the voters -- and that was even before the champion and master of lies came along and hijacked their party. Donald Trump may have driven the GOP to Crazytown, but it wasn't that far of a journey for them to take (to put this another way). Now conservatives in the media are attempting to do this again, and it really deserves some pushback.

Here is the emerging narrative, which has been fed by Republican resistance to both of President Joe Biden's big economic bills, and which got even more acute after the election returns came in last week: "Joe Biden ran as a moderate. He ran on bringing the country together and meeting in the middle. He didn't run to dramatically change the federal government or be F.D.R. or anything -- that's not what his voters were voting for." Instead, they'll tell you, Biden's voters were voting for an end to the chaos and destructiveness of the Trump era, but also merely to install a sort of caretaker president who would do nothing more than repair all the damage to our institutions of government that the Trump administration left in its wake. That's it. Nothing more -- just fix all the problems Trump left behind, get us back to where we were before, and the entire country could just move on and begin to heal.

The big problem with this narrative is that it is just not true. Not in the slightest. Joe Biden's two big bills -- the infrastructure bill now on his desk awaiting his signature and the Build Back Better bill still stuck in the congressional sausage-making -- were exactly what he ran on. In fact, they are now just a smaller subset of what he ran on. He was actually much more ambitious as a candidate.

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You'll have to excuse us, but even with all the other political shocks this week, the one that shocked us the most was reading that Congress is going to take the next week off. For Veterans' Day. No, seriously. It's not like they have any pressing business or anything, right? They probably need the whole week to lie back and relax and rest up -- so they'll be in real good shape for the extended Thanksgiving Day break, later this month.

Sorry, too snarky? You'll have to forgive us, but please everyone let's remember this moment when all the politicians whine on television, a few weeks hence: "But there's just no time to get everything done! We've got all these deadlines staring us in the face! Waaah! Poor us!" Please, let's all remember at that point that they all thought they deserved an entire week off at the beginning of November. For Veterans' Day -- a holiday that most workers don't even get a single day off for.

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James Carville is getting a lot of online grief today because of an interview he did with the PBS NewsHour last night. He was one of three political experts who were asked by Judy Woodruff about what the off-off-year elections meant for politics moving forward. But while Carville was (as usual) rather blunt and insensitive in what he said, he does have a point worth defending.

This isn't even the first time I have defended Carville for making almost exactly the same point, in fact. Earlier in the year, Carville got some heat for an interview he did with Vox. Here was my summation of the three points Carville made:

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