Yeah, Democrats! You know I’m talking to you! It’s about time you donkeys got off your lazy asses and solved this border crisis! Yeah, I know Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court for two years and did bupkis! And I know that when you did negotiate with Republicans back in 2018 for a bipartisan bill, Trump wrecked it. And I know that this year Trump shut down the government after agreeing to legislation appropriating funds to keep it open, because he was humiliated when Ann Coulter called him a sissy, strongly suggesting that 1) Ann owns El Trumpo’s cojones and 2) Ann will remain arbiter de la lègislation for the remainder of the Trump administration.
Yeah, I know all that! So what? That’s no excuse! It’s your job to make the tough decisions, to make concrete, politically embarrassing proposals that will alienate your supporters and set you up for vicious, morally unscrupulous political attacks from the right, compromising your party’s chances in 2020! You have to do this, because, because because!
You have to do this because folks like Jonah “Both Sides Are Wrong About the Border Crisis” Goldberg and anonymous WashPost editors “Neither Trump nor Democrats have advanced a solution for the border. Here’s one.” need to show off how “even-handed” they are and to “keep the lines of communication open” (i.e., keep getting invited to cool parties and not piss off too many big-shots).
Everyone knows that Donald Trump is, first, last, and always, a liar and a cheater. Yet Democrats are supposed to not merely negotiate in good faith with a man who has none, but to unilaterally disarm and make all the tough decisions themselves, accepting all the blame for the unpopular decisions and letting Trump garner all the praise for the popular ones. Sorry, “grown-ups”. This is hypocrisy, not maturity.
Afterwords
I have railed against “even handedness” in the past. Back in 2012, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein explained why accuracy forbids even handedness in political journalism, because the Republicans are worse.1 And Donald Trump is the worst of the worst, endowed with all the powers of the presidency, the negation of God erected into a system of government,2 one might say.
1. In their article, Mann and Ornstein remark presciently that under both the Clinton and Obama administrations the Democrats were "a status quo party ... centrist protectors of government, reluctantly willing to revamp programs and trim retirement and health benefits to maintain its central commitments in the face of fiscal pressures." And so the pendulum has finally swung back.
2. William Gladstone’s rather extravagant—and rather extravagantly Protestant—assessment of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies back in 1851.
