Well, I hope so, and I hope Joe Biden or his “people” will take the hint, if not from Charlie himself then the myriad of excellent sources Charlie collects in his recent piece for “The Bulwark”, Joe Biden Needs Four Sister Souljah Moments, explaining why Joe needs to “get tough” with the Democratic Party’s newly super-charged woke folk, who combine the old paleolib’s blind devotion to “generous” social spending as an end in itself—because “more” is always “better”—with the tyranny of modern political correctness/thought control.
Charlie, an ex Straight Arrow “respectable Republican”, whom I have sometimes roughed up a bit in the past, explains in a long, cogent piece why Uncle Joe needs to stand up to the Left on four issues, crime, schools, voting, and language. I probably can’t endorse every jot and tittle of every argument Charlie puts forth, but, since I’ve worn my fingers to the bone bemoaning my party’s multitudinous flaws, and since Charlie gets most of it right, I’ll just leave it to you to pick up on where Charlie goes wrong, if he ever does.
My own feeling is that when Joe came in, he and his advisors recognized that, if it hadn’t been for conservative black voters in the south, who generally do not decide presidential elections, Bernie Sanders, not Joe Biden, would have been the party’s nominee. The Democrats’ newly resurgent paleolib wing, exiled from power really since Hubert Humphrey’s defeat waaaay back in 1968, their hour come round at last, demanded to be fed, and it seemed possible that a good-old fashioned New Deal/Great Society spending program might be enough to satisfy just about everyone. And, by making the package aggressively “union friendly”, albeit far more wasteful and inefficient, Democrats could hope to shore up their support in the Mid-Western Rust Belt “Battle Ground” states. One could even believe, a little bit, that Republicans, who had given ample proof under Trump that they had in fact no objections whatsoever to massive spending programs, despite lying about it for decades, might offer some support, particularly since, in the immediate aftermath of January 6, they (very briefly) seemed to be backing away from their abject surrender to Trumpism
Well, fat chance to that last one, right? And then, lots and lots of “bad luck” with the COVID, which continues to kick our ass, along with “unfortunate” statements regarding our withdrawal from Afghanistan,1 a disaster that was 95% the responsibility of our lying, utterly incompetent military— who, naturally, accepted absolutely none of the blame—not to mention “surging inflation”, Uncle Joe is looking pretty wobbly. It’s time for him to realize that his strategy of finessing the Left with massive domestic spending (which I, of course, was not too crazy about in the first place, just isn’t going to cut it. It’s time to listen to Charlie.
Afterwords
If you don’t know what a “Sister Souljah moment” is, Charlie will explain it for you. If you don’t know who Dick Morris is, I will explain it for you.
In the past, I gave Charlie several “measured beatdowns” here and here, particularly disgusted by his long-running fealty to Lyin’ Paulie Ryan. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Charlie still can’t believe that, well, that Paul Ryan was a goddamn fraud from the get-go, but these days Paulie is nothing more than another soulless DC lawyer, and thus an irrelevancy. I like a good many of the articles appearing in The Bulwark and its near-sister The Dispatch, but unfortunately both cling blindly to Bush-Cheney interventionism—cause this time, it’s gonna work! For sure!—which makes me deeply ill.
1. I have, naturally, moaned and groaned about Afghanistan for a loooong time. Daniel Drezner had some excellent words of wisdom on the withdrawal, as did Chris Murphy.
