Well. You get what you vote for.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BZK35yCTD
****************************
And a reminder of his tragic homeland:
Trump loses, and the rest of us learn not to jump to conclusions about the Supreme Court.
******************
And permit me a nyah-nyah — I’ve been telling my political friends for years that all is not lost with the Supreme Court. I’ve told them that the Supreme Court will surprise them. They have laughed at me when I said that.
That’s one for UD.
*************************
UPDATE: ‘[W]e’ll find out [in subsequent rulings] whether the Supreme Court intends to serve as a bulwark against a president who is hell-bent on asserting the unilateral power to control federal spending. If not, yesterday’s order may come to look like a momentary, ephemeral reprieve in Trump’s ongoing assault on Congress’s power of the purse.‘
“What I have seen over the last six weeks is the United States behaving vilely, vilely to our friends in Canada and Mexico, vilely to our friends in Europe. And today was the bottom of the barrel, vilely to a man who is defending Western values, at great personal risk to him and his countrymen…
And I have — I first started thinking, is it — am I feeling grief? Am I feeling shock, like I’m in a hallucination? But I just think shame, moral shame. It’s a moral injury to see the country you love behave in this way.”
********************
David Brooks
At the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics last week, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was nearly apoplectic about the diversity spectacles at the recent Democratic National Committee meeting—where outgoing chair Jaime Harrison delivered a soliloquy about the party’s rules for nonbinary inclusion, and candidates for party roles spent the bulk of their time campaigning to identity-focused caucuses of DNC members.
Buttigieg said the meeting “was a caricature of everything that was wrong with our ability both to cohere as a party and to reach [out] to those who don’t always agree with us.” He went on to criticize diversity initiatives for too often “making people sit through a training that looks like something out of Portlandia.”
*******************************
Too right. But UD ain’t optimistic about things changing.
Germany’s new leader offers some introductory remarks.
A party whose base consists of culturally liberal, largely well-educated white Americans and a shrinking share of voters of color is almost by definition going to find it impossible to defend American democracy…
*******************************
[The future] requires a flexible Democratic Party platform that is willing to compromise on various social and economic issues (immigration, trans rights, tax policies) in the short run to protect democracy in the long run. It requires an ideological pivot toward more moderate voters who may not always agree with socially and culturally liberal whites.
*******************************
One theme that repeatedly emerges in the comments of political analysts is the need for the Democratic Party and its candidates to regain the center and to avoid the adoption of more extreme cultural and social policies that alienate the middle and working classes.
********************************
From the comments section on this opinion piece:
The problem now is Democrats never have found a successor to the New Deal policies to mitigate wealth inequality and, as a result, leaned into the more successful cultural element until it literally became self-parody, possibly cresting in 2020 with calls for free health care for illegal immigrants and taxpayer paid …. gender affirmation treatment for prison inmates.
Until the Democratic party recenters on cultural issues to a simple, non-strident goal of fair and equal treatment for all self-identifying groups and finds its voice, and policy prescriptions, addressing the growing economic disparity, they won’t have a viable philosophy of governance – just an amalgam consisting of a combination of radical cultural advocacy groups and lawmakers passively supporting the economic status quo with small tweaks that fall far short of what is needed.
Yup, and it’s what UD‘s always saying: Read Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country. It’s short. It’s a terrific elaboration on this comment, and, for UD‘s money, remains the best account of the suicidality of the left.
Some good news.
But this frees her up to be appointed Secretary of State.
No, you don’t have to react that strongly to an image of a woman in a hijab, and yes, hijabs obviously should be tolerated (UD‘s readers know she ain’t crazy about them); but the city of Montreal was kinda dumb to feature an image of a hijabi beetled over by two men in western garb in its WELCOME TO THE CITY sign in the town hall. The mayor has announced that it will be taken down — oodles of Montrealers have complained that this pic represents quite the opposite of the secularity near and dear to their hearts — and though there’s the usual insistence that acts of this sort will bring Montreal’s democratic values crashing down, everyone knows that this will not happen.
A small point also, but UD has noticed that, in discussions of the hijab, people tend to overlook the larger total body wrapping that often accompanies the headgear and certainly features in this image. It ain’t just that Montreal is boasting that it welcomes the hijab; it welcomes the total draping of the female body in a modesty gesture that tells the world the female body must be hidden. I wonder why it must be hidden.
Anyway, you’re welcome to traipse about Mont Royal all covered up except for your face and hands, but Montrealers have a right to object to that look for women being made a symbol of their city.
And UD will proceed on the assumption that a democratic system is in fact what the people continue to want.
For me, it’s a dark day. But an American majority has spoken, and respecting the will of the people lies at the heart, etc.
And so. We proceed.
*************************
LOLOLOL
[In a 2016 presidential run,] Sandu faced open discrimination during the race for being a single woman, and was openly attacked by former Moldovan president Vladimir Voronin who accused her of betraying “family values” and calling her the “laughingstock, the sin and the national disgrace of Moldova” in remarks widely regarded as profoundly misogynistic. She rejected the insults in an interview, replying that “I never thought being a single woman is a shame. Maybe it is a sin even to be a woman?”
UD voted awhile back, by mail, and would now rather ponder the cosmos than catastrophe. Catastrophic it would certainly be if my fellow Americans carry the clown show to victory, but meanwhile there are dolphins riding the waves, and there are meteor showers, and UD wants to see them.