Left Jabs

I had a zoom call the other day with an old friend I’d neither seen nor communicated with in about five years. We schmoozed and caught up and trashed Republicans and shared our amazement over this whole pandemic thing, and then he said something I had to think about: “It’s not a bad time to be old.” Hmm. To be sure, it’s a great time to not struggle in the job market. It’s an excellent time to not worry where your next meal is coming from. It’s a sensational time to not be raising small children. More than that, being old puts us in Covid’s high-risk category. Which, besides sending us to the head of the line of any vaccine that comes calling, has given us about a year of staying home doing nothing.   If you’re prone that way to begin with, it can indeed be a brilliant time to be old. But for a lot of my generation, it’s not a good time at all. Covid aside, the economics of the past twenty years has been devastating. The Dotcom Bust of 2001, followed by the Great Recession ...

The words “Trump” and “master plan” have no business in the same sentence. There is no master plan. There’s probably no plan at all. This is Trump we’re talking about. Yes, he’s throwing up an amazing amount of smoke. But as always with Trump, there’s no reason to believe a word of it. Mostly I think he’s in a panic. He has to assume there’s a world of hurt coming for him the minute he leaves the White House. And he will leave. I don’t buy any of the grandiose and megalomaniacal ambitions people attribute to him. He won’t be bodily removed. He won’t start his own cable channel. He won’t be running for president in 2024. He won’t be a Republican kingmaker. Yes, I could be wrong, so let’s not call this prediction — more like speculation. But I think he’s too old, too lazy, and too politically inept to sustain any of this beyond January 20. More to the point, he’ll have his hands full fending off criminal and civil charges that could well consume the rest of his life. So he ne...

In the early days of the pandemic I convinced myself that when the virus hit the Midwest — when it colored in every county on the tracking maps — Trump’s base would finally understand how they’d been duped. They would see Trump’s denial of the virus and the science behind it for the lethal deception it was. That the Fox News bubble would be exposed as criminally negligent. That people would come to understand that masks are not a political statement. Wow, was I wrong. Of all the atrocities committed by Trump and his enablers this year, the propagation of “Covid denial” is easily the most heinous. And the most deadly. A few stories have really rocked me. The first is from South Dakota, where the worst governor in the country, Kristi Noem, has gone all in on Trump’s murderous politicization of the virus. A nurse in that state, Jodi Doering , recently went public with her frustration over the alarming number of patients she has watched dying, gasping for breath — literally momen...

We should’ve all gotten it in the nineties, when Hillary Clinton warned us of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that was intent on bringing down her husband on utterly specious grounds, and for deeply cynical reasons. We should’ve gotten it when they lied us into two wars that still aren’t over twenty years later. We should’ve gotten it with the “swift-boating” of John Kerry, that shameless smear of a stellar military record that probably cost him the presidency. We should’ve gotten it when they hauled Hillary into eleven Benghazi hearings, pursuing every baseless charge, sifting through every mundane record until they finally found those infamous emails — so apocalyptic then, so mindlessly quaint now. We should’ve gotten it when they stonewalled Obama, sabotaged his every initiative, blocked his every court appointment, and filibustered all legislation —including their own. We should’ve gotten it when they stole their first Supreme Court seat. We didn’t get it. We’ve won ...

I have no doubt Donald Trump did everything he could to steal this election. Which was, of course, not much. Stealing an election of this size and complexity is not some simple snatch-and-grab. It would require the sort of villain you see in a James Bond film — brilliant, diabolical, ruling his mercenary army with an iron hand. Does that sound like Trump? As we wait for the Republican caucus to reacquaint itself with reality — which might take a while — I thought I’d collect a few thoughts about this election which, by the way, Democrats don’t have the skill set to steal, either. Mailing it in In a recent Twitter post, @Shoq pointed out that Covid has finally done something positive, and no, I’m not talking about Zoom concerts. Thanks to Covid, mail-in ballots are now a thing. More than that, they just might be the best thing that ever happened to Democrats, who have too often failed to vote in sufficient numbers to save democracy — which now seems to need saving at least every t...

On Saturday, the day the election was finally called for Joe Biden, former senator Claire McCaskill was on TV, talking about the Republicans in the Senate, all of whom she served with for years, until Missouri got too red to re-elect her. It was an extraordinary moment, because she was caught between two strong emotions — joy and rage. Joy at the election results. Rage at those senators she had worked with and knows well. As does Biden. It’s not like they were all besties, but they were colleagues. And not one — I paraphrase her — not one of them had the decency to come out and say “Congratulations Joe.” She was practically in tears as she called them out — not by name, regrettably — and said they should be ashamed of themselves. She did not mince words.  Of course, we know their names. McConnell. Graham. Cruz. The 53 Stooges. Make no mistake. The country is still in grave danger. Not so much from Covid, though the Trump virus has many, many more lives to claim. Not so much...

By the time you read this, there may or may not be a declared winner. But Joe Biden is looking quite good as of this morning, so I’m going to tempt fate and assume he’ll win. If he subsequently loses, we’ll all have much more to worry about than the irrelevance of this post. For some reason, this presumed victory has been greeted with widespread depression and dread among the victors — including those in my own home. Why the prospect of winning the presidency and simultaneously losing Donald Trump should provoke anything but pure rapture seems odd, but I certainly understand where it’s coming from. We wanted an overwhelming repudiation not just of Trump, but of the Republican party. That didn’t happen, which is indeed distressing. We wanted to take over the Senate, so much we could taste it. And while we may yet win the Senate, it still feels like Lucy yanked the football away again. The thought of McConnell still in charge makes us physically sick. But more than that, we’re shoc...

I don’t know what the world will feel like tomorrow morning. Elation, despair, or somewhere in between. Whatever happens, I’m glad I post these rants on Tuesdays, not Wednesdays. Because regardless of the outcome, I don’t think I could write about it tomorrow. Today, if you haven’t noticed, we’re at the intersection of two existential emergencies — a worsening global pandemic, and what amounts to a Republican coup. The first we can’t do much about, mostly because of the second. The virus will be with us much longer than we ever thought. But the Republican attack on democracy could be reversed, or at least postponed, by tomorrow. Before 2016, I doubt I wrote the word “democracy” five times in my entire career. Now, I should probably assign it a smart key. Not that I really want to talk about it. In general, I don’t discuss philosophical constructs or lump-in-the-throat ideals, partly because it’s vaguely embarrassing, but mostly because they tend to be fuzzy abstractions, of limit...