Over at the New York Times, Peter Beinart has a column, “Why Are There So Few Courageous Senators?”, which takes as its text—well, in its first half, anyway—John F. Kennedy’s “famous” book, Profiles in Courage, citing two profiles, “two legendary Southerners, Thomas Hart Benton and Sam Houston, who a century earlier had become pariahs for opposing the drive toward secession.”
Here’s the thing: John F. Kennedy did not write Profiles in Courage; Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorenson did. Kennedy “wrote” it in 1956 with an eye for attracting national attention to himself and went out of his way to praise generally conservative figures. Furthermore, his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, then one of the richest men in the country, strongarmed the Pulitzer Prize folks into giving Johnnie a Pulitzer for what was little more than a shrewd cut and paste job. Further furthermore, wishing that politicians would be “brave” doesn’t butter many parsnips.
“Moderate” Republicans most likely argue to themselves, “if I’m ‘brave’ I’ll be defeated in the next primary and be replaced by a Neanderthal. Why is that better?”
The answer is “By staying in your party you give it a respectability it doesn’t deserve, and, since when it’s crunch time you always surrender to the existing Neanderthals, you make them stronger rather than weaker.”
The “Moderates” might answer “I don’t want to join the ‘looting = reparations’ party.” Democrats might answer “Joe Biden is not woke (in any sense of the word). But we do need to get less woke. Maybe you could help?”
Afterwords
The crunch time of all crunch times for the Trump administration came, not during Trump’s first impeachment—though that was a profile in cowardice all in itself—but in the Trump administration’s first year, when every Republican senator, including “Mr. Principles” himself, John McCain, voted for the atrocious Donald Trump/Paul Ryan/Mitch McConnell tax “reform” package, which was an utter farce and utter sellout to the undeserving rich, and which almost all “conservatives” still see as a great triumph. This is utter bullshit, as I’ve said many times, most recently here.
Anti-Trump senators like Jeff Flake did not vote against the tax package, when their anti-Trump vote would have had a real impact, even though, if they didn’t know it was a total crock, they surely could and should have, and they surely did know that it was passed in violation of all traditional senatorial procedures, those hallowed procedures that Mitch McConnell so hollowly promised to follow, as long as Republicans were in the minority. Flake was out of the Senate in 2019, when only one senator, Mitt Romney, had the nerve to vote even to hear testimony during Trump’s impeachment trial.
UPDATE: Oklahoma Senator James Lankford “apologizes” for trying to overturn constitutional government in the United States
Hey, I’ll take it. According to Morgan Gstalter, writing in the Hill,
Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) on Thursday wrote a letter apologizing to Black constituents for opposing the Electoral College results, saying he didn’t realize the attempt would cast doubt “on the validity of votes coming out of predominantly Black communities.”
Full text of Jimmy’s apology is here. Lankford had signed the letter proposed by Sen. Ted Cruz to challenge the Electoral College results certifying Joe Biden’s election, though the events of January 6 caused him not to vote in favor of the challenge.
As far as “honest” apologies go, this has got to rank as one of the worst ever. But he made it, which is something.
CORRECTION
Sen. Susan Collins (ME) also voted to hear testimony. Sorry, Suzie. Though not a whole lot.
