All US Senators who are republicans are under orders to wear paper bags over their heads until inauguration day 2017.
That is to make sure that they can’t see Judge Garland.
It is not clear how they will navigate – being unable to see where they are going – or whatever else they may not be able to see.
But there is an accumulation of thought that the bags aren’t going to change anything – except symbolically – republicans are blind at birth and revel in the condition.
But serially, I thought ol’ Mitch did himself proud the other day creating “The Biden Rule”.
It was so much like most of the crap I learned in Catholic grade school and Catholic high school that I was quite comfortable with its synthetic nature: “this is true (asserted, not proved – often called begging the question) ergo that is true (angelic chorus rising)”.
Mitch has taken some thoughts by our current Vice President, uttered in 1992, when there wasn’t a nomination in the hopper, but when we were sliding down the ramp to a Presidential election and a Presidential Supreme Court Justice nomination could have been in the hopper; so what Joe said was nothing but his thoughts about something that hadn’t yet happened; and they were thoughts that never had any application – anywhere, or any time.
And ol’ Mitch has turned those thoughts into a “rule”.
Here is what actually happened.
This is a cut and paste from http://www.abcactionnews.com/news/national/did-joe-biden-argue-against-the-presidents-scotus-nomination-in-1992-1
Joe said:
"President Bush should consider following the practice of the majority of his predecessors and not, and not, name a nominee until after the November election is completed."
That was then-Sen. Joe Biden in 1992 speaking against George H.W. Bush nominating a Supreme Court justice in an election year.
But then we learn, if we read the rest of the story:
“Joe Biden was chairman of the senate judiciary committee and ensured that Justice Kennedy got both a fair hearing and a timely yes or no vote.”
Armed with the synthetically and farcically untrue historical “fact” that Joe Biden blocked the confirmation – notice that there actually is a Justice Kennedy on the Court – of a Supreme Court nominee in the latter days of a Presidential administration, the Republican-controlled Senate has so far said it will refuse to hold confirmation hearings for the new nominee.
Mitch McConnell is such an irritant.
But he has backers.
He has many of them.
They are all irritants as well.
There is a large cadre of angry white people who want to take their country back.
From whom do they want to take it back, I have wondered since I first heard that refrain in 2010.
But we all know from whom.
The stupidest part of the whole thing is that all the angry white people apparently are outraged at being unhorsed from riding the jackass of history: centuries of being at the top of the bottom of the totem pole.
They don’t want to have to face the fact that it might might be necessary to be smart and to know how to do something and to need to be flexible and to need to be able to roll with various unexpected punches – as opposed to being the fourth or fifth generation who has stood in the same place on the same floor on the same assembly line turning the same bolt.
They don’t want to need to embrace the fact that America is charging forward on the greased skids of the skills of people of various beliefs, sexual proclivities and ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
They consider that charging forward to be a loss of their righteous place as “decent god fearing white people”.
(I have actually heard that as justification for almost everything at various points in my life.)
But then, as Drumpf’s German hero once said “the big lie is what works”.
Or something to that effect.
And the “decent god fearing white people” are lapping it all up.
Or something sort of to that effect.
