O my party! Oh, my party! Oy, my party! Quelle mess, n'est-ce pas? Yes, Iowa Democrats covered themselves in what I’m pretty sure is a shitload of obloquy, which they heartily deserve, in the biggest Democratic techno-mess since the ObamaCare roll-out. Democrats don’t do technology, it seems. They seem to confuse it with magic, and tech ain’t magic.
I don’t regard the way Democrats have handled impeachment as a mess, however. Republicans were never going to disobey their master, no matter what the evidence. Republican senators complained that there was “nothing new”, as if the “old” evidence that overwhelmingly established Trump’s stunningly gross abuse of power somehow didn’t count because it wasn’t “new”, and then refused to hear anything that was new, because for Donnie’s followers, ignorance is always bliss.
Still, Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who delivered the case against Trump to the Senate on behalf of the House of Representatives, couldn’t, or at least didn’t, resist going too far in letting the Republicans know just how bad Donald Trump and his minions were by telling them that “CBS News reported last night that a Trump confidant said that key senators were warned, ‘Vote against the president and your head will be on a pike,’” though then adding, like a left-wing Rush Limbaugh, “I don’t know if that’s true”—and, in fact, as Washington Post media guy Eric Wimple reports, it’s quite unlikely that anyone in the White House did say that.
I understand that to be elected to Congress one must cater to the conventional wisdom, and that the best way to do that is to embody the conventional wisdom, and the conventional wisdom is “the more shocking a story is, the more likely it is to be true, as long as it confirms my pre-existing biases.” Still, Schiff was chosen as a leader, as someone who wouldn’t say something stupid. Instead, given his big moment in the limelight, he compulsively put his foot in it. I don’t think Schiff lost a single vote because of this stupidity, but he gave Republicans an easy out, a respectable excuse for rejecting both him and his argument.
Someone who has always been a mess, a mess of pretension and pretentious virtue, in my opinion, is the senior senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, in the news recently, and not in a good way, for saying that any secretary of education she appointed would have to be vetted by a transgender teenager. The whole notion that “children speak truth” has become a bit of an obsession with liberals, thanks to first the passionate appeals of teenagers affected by gun violence for tighter controls on firearms, and then media sensation Greta Thunberg. The visceral emotional appeal of these kids is enormous, but actually irrelevant to consideration of the issues at hand, and letting children make significant policy decisions is idiotic. It’s a measure of Democrats’ inner uncertainty that they grasp at this attractive nonsense so compulsively.
Afterwords
You can find a list of all my many complaints about my party here. If length is a virtue, you might start with “Those Mean Old Disestablishment Blues: Why it’s so hard to put Humpty-Dumpty together again”
