Biden and The Birds
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It's getting scary out here.
The cost of everything is rising. Gas, rent, and utilities can wipe out most paychecks all by themselves. Despite oil prices dropping, the numbers at the pump keep rising, which is the very definition of price gouging....but everybody seems content to blame everybody but the oil companies that are making record profits. Americans do love us some billionaires. (See “Musk, Elon”)
Home prices are insane. With the right real estate agent you could stick a sleeping bag and a bucket inside a garden shed and sell it for $250k, and probably get dueling all-cash offers for it.
And we still have to eat. Young Mothers all over the nation are facing the terror of a baby formula shortage. According to the New York Times one mother in Alabama was finally able to track down 4 small cans....in New York. The cost? $245
This is third world shit. The most powerful nation on earth can't feed its own babies. We can't afford to live here anymore. We can't afford to drive our own cars or pay our own utility bills. But one of us can afford to buy Twitter for $44 billion.
Ah the joys of capitalism!
I get it. It was the perfect storm. A crippling pandemic and a European war and a nation already so divided against itself that it had forgotten how to stand. Trump and his enablers pissed on democracy for so long that a sort of creeping, grievance-addled fascism sounded swell to nearly 70 million voters. But still, enough voters had not lost their minds, and Trump was sent back to the golf course, screeching that he'd been robbed because 7 million dead ANTIFA ghosts managed to get their mail-in votes counted in the basement of a pizza parlor run by Tom Hanks. Or something like that. The details kept changing but the song remained the same.
Enter Joe Biden. By all accounts a good, decent man. But an old one. And left with an unspeakable mess, requiring the assistance of an opposition party that would try passing a law making the sun illegal if Biden was seen basking in it. But thanks to the state of Georgia Biden had a razor-thin majority in the Senate. He assumed he'd get his stuff through.....but forgot that Joe Manchin is a DINO, and surely didn't count on Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema falling in love with her own headlines and turning into the democratic Rand Paul. Both Manchin and Sinema are completely untroubled by offering their services to the highest bidder, and sometimes Democrats need to be reminded that grifting is the only thing left in DC that is non-partisan.
Anyway, there's no nuance in politics. Nor much common sense. It's next man up, and fair or not, Biden now owns the entire shit show.
He seems overwhelmed by it all. Exhausted. Baffled. He may have a plan, but nobody seems to know what it is. If it can’t be articulated, then it doesn’t exist. That’s how all this works.
And let's be honest. Democrats never really stay on message. They sort of flail away at this or that, like cats being throw balls of twine by the latest republican outrage. Democrats ask for dimes but leave all the nickels uncollected on the floor. They spend as much time eating their own as they do the other side, and thus we have things like Al Franken out of the Senate but Matt Gaetz still in Congress. Despite vibrant, young, progressive lawmakers like Corey Booker and California's Katie Porter, the face of the machine remains Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, two old Daley-esque ward-heelers who just happen to be multi-millionaires. Porter, a single mother of 3, recently lectured her own party on how expensive her trips to the grocery store have become. And how they'd better take notice to avoid a mid-term bloodbath. "We're not seeing it (food prices) in the polls" one of her clueless colleagues said to her afterwards. "You don't know what to ask" was her icy response.
Ah yes, The mid-terms.
Initially I thought Alito's leaked draft referring to "a domestic supply of infants" that footnoted a 17th century jurist who supported marital rape and had women executed as witches to bolster his case might just be enough to stop our descent into a dystopian hellscape, but a well-meaning friend quickly reminded me that "nobody gives a shit about abortion if they can't afford to drive to work".....which is just another way of saying "it's the economy, stupid".
And it is and always will be, and without some miraculous market turnaround be prepared for even loonier MAGA lawmakers whose only ambition seems to be to out-crazy each other and get invited to Mar-a-Lago for a belly-rub. As long as Biden is President, anything they break he’s forced to buy on credit.
Which means Biden is already a lame duck.....and will be pecked to death over the next 2 years like an extra in Hitchcock's The Birds.
And that will bring us to 2024, and it really doesn’t matter if Trump runs or not. His stench is like patchouli now…..it permeates the entire party and won’t go away. A Desantis or a Cruz or any other fascist cyborg who crawls from the mire will be an instant front-runner. There’s no such thing as “moderates” anymore, unless you’re the type that thinks Mike Pence is fucking normal.
In a bit…
—tf