Left Jabs

The last four years has produced a rich backlog of questionable conduct by public officials. Conduct that smelled foul at the time, but got lost in the blizzard of lies. Conduct that never got further than reporters reporting on it. Conduct that was never investigated. If a new administration were so inclined — and if a Justice Department were looking for payback after its recent existential trauma — investigations of Trump-era wrongdoing would be a target-rich environment. And it seems to me, you couldn’t find a better early target — after Trump and his entire family, that is — than a Supreme Court justice. Let’s never forget that three Supreme Court picks should have gone to Hillary Clinton. Let’s never forget that the first was snatched away, first by McConnell, then by Putin. Or that the third was stolen again by McConnell and his band of murderers. So let’s stipulate that ruthlessness is entirely appropriate. And with that in mind, let’s zero in on that ...

He doesn’t look well. I don’t mean the effects of the virus, or the drugs, though both surely have their role. Mostly, he just looks subdued. He looks like he’s starting to figure out that he’s the one thing he absolutely cannot, under any circumstances, allow himself to be: A loser. The label terrifies him so much, he projects it on other people literally every day. It’s embarrassing to watch that in a president. But if he loses this election, he stands to lose everything — his businesses, his money, his property, and quite likely his freedom. That’s a lot of losing for a guy so obsessed with it. This makes him dangerous, but he doesn’t look it. Not nearly as dangerous as he looked a month ago, when we were sure he would close the postal service, seize the ballots, and have Chad Wolf’s DHS troops march on Pittsburgh to start riots he could then quell. With over fifty million citizens having voted already, the antics — which keep on coming — look a lot less...

My younger son has identified an issue that, while tangential to our current political turmoil, is not without its political implications. Regardless, it’s a story worth telling, so I’ve asked him to tell it here. Let’s call it a Guest Jab, a phenomenon that may or may not reoccur, subject to my fickle whims. Enjoy. There’s a danger lurking in the shadows, pernicious and invasive. It came to the United States from Asia, first striking the Northeast, but now it’s spreading — faster than we’d ever imagined. And our efforts to control it have been spotty. No, I’m not talking about the coronavirus. Moving to New Jersey this fall, I was on a walk (masks on) with a friend when she stopped and pointed to the side of a building. There, a beautiful insect was perched on the brick: an inch in length, with gray spotted wings covering red under-wings. I was intrigued, almost charmed, but her voice seemed to break...

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that this election is quite literally a matter of life and death. It’s not even remotely about issues or policies. It’s about who dies from civil failure. From the abandonment of our people by our government. From the tearing up of a contract we took for granted, mistakenly assuming it was our government’s duty to protect us. There are aspects of this that we can change in November, though it won’t be an overnight thing — and who knows what damage these assholes might do on their way out the door. But barring some structural change in the system, the judicial disaster will be with us for a long time. Mitch McConnell’s vile remaking of the judiciary will see its crowning moment when Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed, which we have to assume is a done deal. So let’s think through what that means. What are the consequences of a six-three SCOTUS?   What happens if six of our nine justices are all unapologetic ideologues, happy to bend the law in ...

John James is running for Senate in Michigan. A Black Republican — one of the few — he is trying to unseat Gary Peters, a moderate Democrat with a reliable but low-profile record. The campaign James is running — or is being run for him —seems to say more about the current state of the Republican party than about the candidate himself. James is fighting ferocious headwinds, not least the determination of Michigan voters — embarrassed by their debacle of 2016 — to continue the all-out assault on Republicans they began in the 2018 midterms. In that election, James ran for our other Senate seat, against Debbie Stabenow, and was soundly thumped. If the polls are to be believed, he has little chance of winning this one either. He is also fighting the total intellectual and moral collapse of his party. The poverty of ideas, the disinterest in governing, the systemic corruption, the arrogant incompetence, the wanton abuse of power — all have been laid bare by the pande...

I’ve agreed to tell this story from 1968, not because it may or may not be instructive, but because I realized that many younger people have only the haziest impressions of that period, a time that indelibly marked an entire generation of Americans. Last week, I wrote that I’d been disappointed in the Democratic party for fifty years. Actually, it’s fifty-two. The presidential election of 1968 is a known pivot point in American history, the beginning of a shift in government power from left to right, a shift that might finally be reversing itself. For me, entering my freshman year of college, it was an exercise in holding my nose and voting for a candidate I didn’t want. It was about learning to live with second, third, or worse choices — a lesson I’ve since had ample occasion to relearn. History has been kind to the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, and rightly so. Through sheer force of will, he designed and pushed through the “Great Society” legislation that expanded civil right...

It seems we in Michigan have just narrowly averted a “civil war leading to societal collapse.” The idiots who are now looking at life in prison had this cool idea. Dude, let’s kidnap the governor, haul her off to Wisconsin somewhere, and put her on trial for treason.   We may never know how far these guys were prepared to go, or what crimes the governor is supposed to have committed — probably something about masks. What we do know is that they took it far enough to be swept up by the FBI, and their futures are now on hold indefinitely. Our Attorney General, Dana Nessel, is pissed off. She found herself on The Rachel Maddow Show for the second time in a week, having just busted Jacob Wohl on a variety of fraud charges stemming from a heinous scheme to scare Black people out of voting by mail. She was already busy. But this time she was there to tell us about the Wolverine Watchmen, one of the self-styled “militias” that attract the very best people to our...

It has come to my attention that many young progressives are angry at the Democratic party in general — and its choice of Joe Biden in particular — and that they’re considering either voting for a third party or not voting at all.  Is this you? If so, my two sons — both concerned progressives in their twenties — have asked me to talk to you. Both want me to urge you to reconsider, for the sake of the things we — they, you, and I — all want. I’ll start by saying that we’ve come to a unique moment. That the virus has changed everything, including the prospects for change. It’s a moment that presents more opportunity for progressive causes than we’re likely to see again for many years. Expanded healthcare. Livable minimum wage. Criminal justice reform. Action on the environment. These are all things we’ve always wanted, and now they’re all tantalizingly close. All of them are looking more possible than ever in my lifetime. Anyone can see that big ideas are on the table. Big ...

    Dear Donald, I just want to thank you. This has been the best year a young virus could have wished for. And it’s all because of you. You believed in me. Even back in the Wuhan days, when the death toll was climbing exponentially, you couldn’t hide your admiration. You told Bob Woodward I was one badass virus, high praise coming from you. But looking back, I think what you really admired was the death toll. That, and the marketing challenge. It was the start of a beautiful relationship. I fully expected you to stop me, or at least slow me down. Instead, you started doing me favors. Little things at first. Discouraging social distance. Making fun of masks. Hawking quack remedies. It was sweet of you to force open the meat-packing plants, but really, you shouldn’t have. I was doing fine without that, but you were proactive about it — you went out of your way to make it easy for me to meet people. What was that about? Were you bored with golf and grifting? Were you...

 Of all the atrocities a six-to-three Supreme Court could inflict on the world, the overturning of Roe v. Wade is, dare I say, among the least of them. Yes, reproductive rights are as important as ever. Yes, it’s obscene that any Western country should still be wasting time on something so stupid. But the implications of a Roe-less future needn’t be as bleak as popular imagination would have it. And it could end up blowing back on Republicans, big time. I’m not convinced the Republican party even wants Roe overturned. They’ve certainly said they do — and repeated it ad nauseum — but they say a lot of things they don’t mean. Roe has been the lynchpin of the scam they’ve been running on evangelicals for decades. Republicans promise to get rid of Roe, and evangelicals promise to vote for them forever, based on that one issue. The beauty of it is that they don’t even have to deliver on the promise. As long as Roe stays in place, they get to work the same scam over and over. Wh...