Stephan: Every day, as I scan through the journals, papers, websites, and news media that I look at in preparation for SR, I find what is happening with the Republican Party ever more alarming. Our governmental design for the last two centuries has been basically a two-party system and now that fundamental is breaking down, by any reasonable measurement. As I watched the way the Republicans behaved in the Brown Jackson hearings I was left with the realization that the Republican Party isn't even interested in democracy anymore. They want power for their cult nothing more. How democracy survives under those circumstances depends entirely on us, our friends and families. For all its flaws, and they are many, I think we have to vote Democrat, because they are the only political organization that believes in democracy, and has some semblance of understanding why fostering wellbeing is the path to take. Charles Pierce thinks similarly, given the facts.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Credit: Alex Wong/Getty
Over the past six or seven years, I’ve had one line of Elvis Costello’s that keeps banging around in my head. It was there as I sat through the amazing confirmation hearings of the collection of unemployables that the previous president* installed in his Cabinet. It was there during the hearing on Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court. It sounded like the genuine trumpet of doom during Brett Kavanaugh’s extended manic episode before the Senate Judiciary Committee. And it was back this week as I watched the rancid flotsam of the Republican senatorial caucus treat Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as though she’d been caught stealing silverware from the Harvard Club. And this is what I’ve kept hearing through most of this wretched decade.
I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused.
I try, but I can’t do it. I can’t look at what’s going on and find any of it clever or funny. I can’t use, “but it works” as an excuse for dangerous political foolishness […]
“I used to be disgusted, but now I try to be amused.” – a healthy way to view the theatre that passes for politics in this country.
When are we going to “Ditch MItch” ?