Political musings

As if to say “anything you can argue, we can make dumber, my Junior Senator weighed in:

Sen. Mike Braun in a conference call Tuesday declined to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the Nov. 3 presidential election … “When you look at how close the election was, basically a tie vote in the popular vote if you take out the margin of difference in California.”

One of my two Senators, neither of whom, I predict, will ever measure up to Richard Lugar or even Dan Coats.

Yes, Mike, and if we had some eggs, we could have ham and eggs if we had any ham.

And “popular vote” talk is not very Republican, is it?

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From the most recent NRO “The Editors” podcast, an interesting sorta-defense of Trump’s baseless election fraud lawsuits from Charlie Cook: at least he’s taking them to court, where he’ll win or lose. Stacy Abrams pretended to be taking the high road by not going to court — but has never stopped claiming that the election was stolen from her, and stolen for racist motives.

Would that she had gone to court, where we’d have learned that she lost fair and square — or that she indeed was robbed. But by design or not, she’s given herself a perpetual grievance. I hope Biden doesn’t appoint an obsessive grievance-monger to some high office.

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Apparently, the two Georgia Republicans vying for U.S. Senate seats in a January runoff election cannot (yet) use their best argument:

If Democrats control Senate:
Leader Schumer
Budget Chair Bernie
Finance Chair Wyman
Judiciary Chair Feinstein
Deciding Vote Kamala Harris

They can’t use it because it is premised on Biden/Harris having won the election. In Donald Trump’s alternate reality, that is false and treacherous to assume. And what Orange Man believes, tens of millions profess with unseemly zeal.

(Note: While drafting this, I got an email from sometimes-maverick Rand Paul making the argument and asking me to chip in $15.)

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In a week of talking to Republican political leaders, all by nature competitive, most veterans of tough races, I haven’t found one who believes Donald Trump won. All believe that there was fraud in the vote, and that this year’s semicrazy pandemic rules made clear the need for some baseline national voting standards. But none believe, though some seemed hoping, there was enough fraud to change the result.

They expect this will become clear through failed lawsuits and the production by the states of final certified votes. Would it be better if Republican senators, say, came forward and asserted the obvious, that Joe Biden won? Yes, if only for the sake of honesty and to show the Biden half of the country that they can see and have eyes.

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The past few days I reached out to some wise people, accomplished individuals whose love of country has been expressed through their careers.

I told the former Indiana governor and current president of Purdue University that I was calling people I knew to be sane. “That won’t keep you busy,” Mitch Daniels said.

Peggy Noonan, Biden Knows What the Other Side Is Thinking – WSJ

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During the last year, major outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and NPR got into the habit of prominently featuring any news that could plausibly hurt President Trump while assiduously refusing to run stories that might have hurt Joe Biden. Thus it was that the story about Hunter Biden’s exploits in China was smothered without any good explanation other than that it might serve as a “distraction” (well, yes) and that it could possibly be a plot, while a relatively inexplosive New York Times story about President Trump’s taxes was blasted out with abandon.

Charles C.W. Cooke, Biden’s Media Campaign | National Review.

I have drunk no Kool-Aid, but I believe the gist of this is true. Yet part of the malignancy of the Trump Presidency is that

1. I can fully understand major outlets’ impulse to do this. I want Trump gone. He never struck me as plausible, as capable of governing well, “policies” aside.
2. Major outlets doing so justifies tit-for-tat imbalance at Fox (how many tens of millions of “Deplorables” must watch a network before it’s major outlet?), OAN, and the various Right cesspools on the web.

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Cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to [our country]. . . . Think and speak of it as the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts. For this you have every inducement of sympathy and interest. Citizens, by birth or choice, of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections.

Washington’s Farewell Address, via Towards a Conservatism of the Heart: A Roadmap for ISI’s Future – Intercollegiate Studies Institute

[Insert here your favorite Trump post-Election Tweets and ejaculations.]

Compare and contrast.

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Imagine a future presidential election in which the incumbent refuses to concede and enlists the full power of the federal government to overturn the apparent democratic outcome.

Now imagine that the election in question is actually run by a federal agency or by some nationwide quasigovernmental authority charged with collecting and aggregating the results from all 50 states.

I don’t know about you, but I might worry a bit about the pressure that could be brought to bear on that single authority. I might worry a bit about the objectivity of the attorney general and the federal election commissioners who would be in a position to ramp up that pressure.

… I might [get] so worked up that I’ll manage to forget why the Electoral College is a threat to democracy, and how its abolition—and the nationalization of presidential elections—would help make democracy function more smoothly.

Steven E. Landsburg, Want a Coup? Abolish the Electoral College – WSJ

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.

W.H. Auden

The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgements; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard.

G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here or join me and others on micro.blog. You won’t find me on Facebook any more, and I don’t post on Twitter (though I do have an account for occasional gawking).