Trying To Stay Mellow

I was a Bernie Sanders supporter in 2020. I think he would have been a terrific and transformative president. It was not to be. It is obvious that the rank-and-file of the party--as well as the insiders--preferred Joe Biden. I was happy to vote for him in November and I am very glad he was elected.

So now what? It's obvious that Biden has reached out to the Bernie wing, which is a good thing. Whether that actually leads to progressive action remains to be seen. There have been both pluses and minuses.

Among the pluses include a few pretty good cabinet appointments and more empathy and transparency in the Covid response. And also just the general temperament of the White House.

As a leftie, I also see the negatives: disappointment at the timidity on issues like student debt and minimum wage. And now the bombing in Syria barely a month into his administration.

Having said that, my goal is to try to stay as mellow as I can about it. I knew going in that there would be plenty of disappointments with Biden, just as there were with Obama. But it's too easy to get sucked into the Twitter outrage at the latest disappointment (most recently the call for the blood of the Senate Parliamentarian).

Take a deep breath, choose your battles and your allies well. If you're a progressive you knew that Biden wasn't going be a savior or anything. For now, take some comfort in some of the smaller things and keep pushing, unashamedly, for the bigger things that we know are needed.

American Foreign Policy

This piece by Stephen Wertheim in yesterday's Times is pretty close to my take on where US foreign policy ought to be headed. Yeah it's behind a paywall but if you can get to it, it's worth a read.

"Investing military might with self-righteous moralism has not only produced one policy failure after another, it has also tarnished the very ideals conscripted into power politics. In crusading to spread American-style freedom, presidents have put the credibility of liberal democracy on the line. When their campaigns failed abroad, a segment of Americans turned to strongman rule at home. Possibly Mr. Trump, with his bottomless performances of cruelty, could become president only after previous leaders treated fundamental issues of power and justice with superficial moralizing and left others to pay the price."

 

Tweet of the Day

Tweeted by the Republican National Committee on Biden's 36th day in office. (As you'd expect, this tweet generated some mighty fine replies.)

On the campaign trial, Biden promised to reopen schools within his first 100 days in office.

But that is just another promise that President Biden hasn’t kept.

— GOP (@GOP) February 25, 2021

Cuomo and Other Things

• There are several Democratic governors who are worth admiring and even putting forth as presidential material. Andrew Cuomo is not one of them. I couldn't believe how many of my liberal friends in 2020 were putting him out there as an unbeatable Democratic presidential nominee. Please stop it. He never was or will be anything but a bad governor.

• Today is a good illustration of why I say Political Correctness (as well as wokeness, cancel culture, etc.) is not a thing. The unhinged Right finds and condemns PC-ness in every corner of America. But Rush Limbau dies and they are invoking it as a wonderful thing to be practiced with vigor.

• Wanted: A Republican officeholder who is willing to take responsibility for something. Anything at all.

• For a long time now, I have been having a hard time getting my head around why eliminating the filibuster is some sort of sinister evilness. Even without the filibuster, the Senate is an inherently undemocratic body.  It was at the country's founding and has become more so as new demographiics have evolved over the years. With the filibuster, the institution is even more obscenely undemocratic.
  
  In short, I can't see how making the Senate more democratic is a bad thing. And no one has been able to convince me otherwise so far.

Headline of the Day

 From Jennifer Rubin's op-ed in WaPo:

Opinion: Texas shows that when you cannot govern, you lie. A lot.

Ignoring the Vote

I wrote a blog post early this year about the idea that the real aim of all the bogus Trump lawsuits was to set up further voter suppression initiatives (with the Supreme Court's approval) for the next election. The idea was to create "doubts" which then require "reforms" with the true goal of keeping the wrong type of  person from voting.

While I still think they Republicans will do this, it is also somewhat true that minorites have found ways to come out and vote anyway (with some exceptions). So now I think we are starting to see movement by the Trumpies controlling the state parties of finding ways to gain control of the voting commissions and other state entities that could have the power to actually overturn the results. They were hoping to get the courts to do it but without success.  So instead, they will empower some of these canvassing boards or other groups to actually not certify the results and throw the election into the state legislatures.

The idea is to go ahead and let the people vote, but if we don't like the result, we now have the infrastructure in place to overturn it. "Suppressing" the vote didn't work (before and after the election) so we'll try "ignoring" the vote instead. They may not be successful, but there's no doubt in my mind that they will try to do exactly that.

Influence of Black Lives Matter

Centrist Democrats in Congress (Spanberger et al) can sputter all they want about how bad Black Lives Matter is, but one of today's most underreported stories is how much influence and inspiration the movement has had all over the world, including Europe and the Global South.

Personally, it serves as the reminder to me (of which I am constantly in need) that movements are the leaders and partisan politics is the follower. That was true of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, as well as Black Lives Matter and, say, Occupy Wall Street in this century.

This is not to pooh-pooh the importance of politics. I am encouraged more than I expected to be by some of President Biden's proposals. But he and the Democratic political class aren't pulling the people into these positions. Rather, they have been pushed there by the activists.

Jezebel?

As a little follow up to my recent post about the WELS, this article in HuffPost shows the sort of religious folks with whom the Wisconsin Synod has now allied itself. They would deny it but they're all in.

Today's Opinions

 

• Lowering the income phase-out from 75/150 to 50/100 on the current simulus package is terrible from both policy and political perspectives. This is how Democrats lose elections.

• Liz Cheney is her father's daughter. I am quite confident that it won't be long before she will do something that will make me not like her again.

• I agree with those who say we need no new "domestic terrorist" laws after January 6th. We have plenty of laws, just enforce them. If post-9/11 legilation is any indication (and why wouldn't it be?) any such laws would ultimately be used more against minorities and leftists than against the right-wing terrorists for whom they're be intended.

• Random observation: Sheriffs aren't inherently any sort of law-enforcement experts. Although I'm sure there are many decent and honorable shroffs around the country, it is a political office for which anyone can run. And beoing a political office, it will always attract the likes of Arpaio and Clarke who like the power.

Bret Stephens

I've gotten to the point where I actually like to read Bret Stephens' op-eds in the Times even if there are some areas (e.g., climate change) where he is full of crap. This piece, "A Letter to My Liberal Friends" has some valid points. The problem, though, is one that is common in many conservatives commentaries: it ascribes beliefs and motives to "liberals" that maybe aren't there. 

In this essay he implies that all of us people in the Left want the whole country to be like California. Then he proceeds with a litany of all the shitty things in California, and therefore proving that liberals are all wrong.

I am a lefty living in Chicago. There are a lot of good things happening in California. And people can find lots of bad things. But I can say unequivocally that I have no desire for Chicago to be, say, San Francisco. I would also tell Mr. Stephens that there are actually many days that go by when California doesn't even enter my mind, much less wishing I lived there, or that I want this place to be more like it.

So, I am actually more than happy to hear good-faith arguments about where I might be misguided. But this straw man doesn't measure up.