If you had asked me, six months ago, to come up with a name for right-wing K Street cowboy/honcho Ed Rogers, I might have chosen “Smarmy McSmarmface”, or something, well, equally smarmy. But today I think I’d have to go with “Sad Little Man”, which isn’t really a name but does capture the fact that I no longer resent Ed so much as pity him.
Ed writes a “column” for the Washington Post, which for the first months of the Trump Administration was an extended gloat-in as Ed walked, almost unbelieving, in the Promised Land–kick-ass Republican majorities in both houses and Donald “Kick Ass” Trump in the White House! We’re going to be so tired of winning!
Well, six months later, and Ed is tired, tired of living, almost, it seems. Here’s some text from a recent Ed “column”, which sounds more like a cry for help than the usual meretricious right-wing boiler-plate that used to be Ed’s stock in trade:
“Are we supposed to believe that all the noise and flames coming from Trump World are just a facade? And behind the facade, is there an effective process of policy development that can produce a meaningful — and passable — tax reform bill? Republicans everywhere are nervous.
"We all hope that despite the colossal cacophony of self-inflicted Twitter distractions and almost daily gaffes, the president can be part of successful negotiations on tax reform. Republicans in Washington are trying to convince each other that just because we don’t see the administration’s policy machinery in place, it doesn’t mean there is no one making it all come together. Maybe National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn is Dick Darman reincarnated and all the ducks are getting lined up. Maybe.”
“Colossal cacophony”, eh? That does not sound like the alliteration of a happy man. What is saddest about Ed’s hope against hope soliloquy is that he clings to this most slenderest of reeds: “No matter what is going on with this White House, I’m reassured by the fact that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is one of the few people in Washington who always has a plan.”
That Ed can write that after Mitch’s triple crash and burn regarding the repeal and replace of the Affordable Care Act, during which he never had a plan other than an eyes shut mouth open “plan” to shove something–some random sheet of paper with the words “Senate Bill” written on it–through the Senate hopper, well, it shows that Ed has not only stopped gloating, he’s stopped thinking.
House Speaker Paul Ryan sort of had some sort of only semi-fake tax reform plan, that relied on a “controversial” border tax adjustment proposal that won the support of Nobel Prize winner/hippie Paul Krugman to balance the books, but naturally that part of it got trashed, leaving Paulie with his same-old, same-old package of guaranteed cuts for the rich and window dressing for the middle-class, that, if it were passed, would blow up the budget beyond even Paulie’s remarkably “flexible” limits. Now, of course, the Republican proposals that are floating about are being stripped of any and all of the supposed loophole closings that were supposed to make cuts in the overall rates both “equitable” and fiscally feasible. The pressure on the Republicans to do “something” may seem overwhelming, but once that “something” actually emerges into the light of day, the pressure collapses.
Yeah, I have a good time chuckling at old Ed’s expense. If only I weren’t even more afraid of Trump than he is.
Afterwords
Over at the NYT, Peter Suderman has a nice column discussing the decline and fall of the Republican Party as a politically meaningful institution, fingering Donald Trump not as the cause of the party’s woes, but rather “an avatar of the party’s pathologies, the culmination of its cynical and shambolic trajectory over the last two decades.”
I agree with almost everything Pete says, but I would extend the time period back another eight years, to the stunned and hysterical outburst of rage with which both the party elders and the rank and file greeted the election of Bill Clinton, whom they were never willing to recognize as president and whom they sought to destroy at any and all costs, regardless of the damage both to themselves and the country.
