Given the utterly pathetic performance by everyone in the Republican party—from their inability to get to a nominee for Speaker even in a secret vote, to the superseding indictment of George Santos on 23 federal felony counts, to Ron DeSantis’ loser campaign, to the incessant whining by Cadet Bonespurs in and out of the courts—I think today’s earworm just has to be Warren Zevon’s “Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me.”
Crank up the volume.
Got my annual flu shot yesterday. Last week it was the COVID booster, which clearly will also become an annual affair.
And on Monday the heating guy came to check out
the furnace.
I am ready for Winter.
I voted yesterday in the Virginia state and local election.
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On my way in, the local Democrats handed me a “sample
ballot”, on blue paper, with their list of whom to check off in each category,
from soil and water conservation board to Delegate and State Senator. The
volunteer could have got less up my nose if he hadn’t mansplained the
blindingly obvious as though I’d driven up on a turnip truck on my way to a
matinée of Barbie, but that’s the Old Dominion for you.
(The Republicans were there, too, but since I
was wearing my Force for Science tee shirt from the 2017 March for Science,
they might have judged me not worth the effort. Interestingly, their “sample
ballot” was also printed on blue paper.)
What I find interesting about the process is that the sidewalk to the polling place is chockablock with campaign signs; multiple signs for each candidate.
This makes me wonder—does anyone coming to
vote in an election find themselves deciding on the candidate for them based on
one of those signs? Like, “I was really unclear about whom to pick for Sheriff,
but now that I’ve seen his signs, I am totally behind Foghorn P. Leghorn. Yep—he’s
the man for the job!”
Well—that’s the Old Dominion for you.
Lawd-a-mercy, after declaring definitively last Tuesday that, having been ousted as Speaker of the House (a historic first), he would not run again for the job…yesterday Kevin McCarthy announced a few times that he’s available for his old job, if his (Republican) colleagues want to put him back in it.
It’s absolutely true what they say: you can’t
believe a single thing Kev says.
I don’t know how this would work, or how he
imagines it would work. If you recall, back in January (having already moved
his crap into the Speaker’s office the weekend before Congress was in session),
McCarthy suffered through 15 ballot (another first!), successively giving up
more and more power to the RWNJ caucus run by Matt “Rapey McForehead” Gaetz
before he finally achieved the apotheosis of his ambitions. That was with
McCarthy actively campaigning, actively begging for votes, actively
surrendering swathes of the speakership just to hold the gavel.
He lasted 23.7 Scaramuccis.
How does he imagine it would go with two rabid
cons (Gym Jordan and Steve Scalise) already in contention and not one voice
saying, “Hey—what about Kevin?” Is he hoping they’ll cancel each other out and
an exhausted Republican caucus will turn to him to save the day? Is he thinking
they might actually kill each other and he’ll be there to pick up the pieces?
I’m not seeing it. Since his very hard-won
election, he hasn’t been able to get much of anything done in the House,
because—despite holding a numeric majority—those RWNJs don’t play well with
anyone and it’s strenglich verboten that any R work with Democrats to
actually, you know, legislate. Every bill was laden with Tea Party appeasement crap
to the point that anything that made it through the House was nixed in the
Senate.
This no-Dems-allowed thing is a policy McCarthy
is actually down with. The problem is that he doesn’t have enough Rs who are not
RWNJs to pass anything without Democratic help. But any whiff of him talking
across the aisle gets him beaten up and losing his lunch money on the way to
school.
That situation, by the way, has not changed. If
the Archangel Gabriel descended to the House floor and scattered pixie dust
upon its denizens long enough to get a majority to cast their votes for the
fro-yo mogul from Bakersfield, he’d still be faced with the Gaetz gang’s antics
and he still wouldn’t be able to govern.
But obviously, Kev just can’t stop the
yearning. He’s like the spotty dweeb in high school who nonetheless dreams of
showing up at the prom with the hot blonde cheerleader and basking in the resplendent
glory of showing everyone up.
It’s like he’s a political incel, which would
be pathetic if the consequences of his incompetence weren’t so staggering.
I think the word I'm looking for, actually, is...pathetic.
What to be grateful for today—two days after the assault by the Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist group, Hamas, on Israel; that’s the question.
We’ve had two and a half years of Vladimir
Putin’s three-day “military exercise” in Ukraine, with the arrogant atrocities
and war crimes by Russian forces. I’d just digested reports on the village of
Hroza, where a missile strike deliberately targeted a funeral service, killing
52 civilians and requiring that they use excavators to enlarge their small
cemetery to accommodate the new burials. And then, Saturday morning, I woke up
to video of the coordinated attack from Gaza into Israel, with the invaders
murdering civilians and taking hostages.
Honestly—do the rules of war mean nothing
anymore? /s
Naturally, according to Republicans (who never
met a crisis they couldn’t spin into a bizarre, utterly false, talking point),
Biden is somehow responsible for this.
Israel has retaliated, as was probably the
point of the Hamas exercise, and we’re in for quite the shitshow. It will be
ugly—metastatic ugly. I can’t stop thinking of something Gandhi said: an eye
for an eye will make the whole world blind.
And it feels to me like we’re getting there at
a rate of knots.
So, for gratitude today, I’m reaching out to nature. I’m grateful that—unlike millions in Ukraine, Israel, Gaza and Lebanon (at time of writing)—I can turn off the images and sounds of war, step out into my (so-far) peaceful neighborhood and see on an entirely different kind of show, where the fire is in the leaves and in the sunrise on the clouds.
