Joe Biden tagged posts

We have lost—all of us. The whole country, everyone. Conservatives, liberals, libertarians, Tea Partiers, Antifa, you name it. No one has truly escaped the chaos, rivenness and rancor that abides after a relentless, four-year tsunami of invective and incompetence from on high.

All of us are dragged down and worse for the experience—even those who convince themselves otherwise, whose adoption of a near religious devotion to a cult leader defies rationality and the actual religion many of them claim to live by.

If they’re alive at all, that is. Upwards of 281,000 of us aren’t anymore, courtesy of a willfully, colossally mismanaged pandemic in which partisan politics was the sole consideration in the executive branch’s response.

We had heard incessantly that a swamp would be drained, and instead we are chest-high in mud, tangled in kelp, our breathing labored, our vision obscured, the horizon barely a...

Watching Robert Mueller’s halting, tentative, sometimes fumbling responses to being grilled for hours by highly charged (and much younger) congressmembers today, I was struck anew with my increasing conviction that past, say, age 70, people should no longer try to become leaders of their country.

Call me ageist if you will, but my reasoning is not that I don’t think elderly people have much to offer the world (so long as they keep their wits about them). It’s just that ideally, they move into a senior advisory role, a steadying hand, a source of wisdom and historical perspective in the ear of younger, more energetic leaders who benefit greatly from their senior confidantes.

Mueller, just short of 75, looked and sounded somewhat lost a good deal of the time yesterday over a grueling 6-hour stretch as he faced two different committees, half of their members hostile and yelling at him from the get-go, ...

So many candidates, so little time. That, I think, was the prevailing note of low expectations for the initial round of Democratic Party debates last week. Which made it all the more surprising that so much of substance seemed to be revealed—and then endlessly rehashed through the media thinkolator that saw pundits, academic debate experts, other politicians and your neighbors Sam and Myrtle weighing in on the event, often with wildly divergent views on what they had seen.

So much for anyone, at anytime, having the One True View of what happened and who “won.” 

Which makes it all the more fun and allowable for me, and you, and your crazy uncle in rural Mississippi if you dare ask him, to weigh in as we will. So that’s what I’ll do here, in a kind of impressionistic take on the major candidates and whatever else crosses my mind therefrom.

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The Guy’s Guy Who’s Gay, and No One Cares—Ma...