This morning was chilly.
And even as the sun burned away the clouds, it is still a bit cold.
So, maybe fall has finally come to my home town in New York.
But maybe not.
For the past three weeks, it's been unseasonably warm during the day but comfortably cool at night. We retired the air conditioner for the year but the heat, though on deck , has not yet had to bat. In New England, the colors have already turned and the "peaks" have begun to move south. But they are not here yet. The leaves are still fighting. Though some are down, others resist what is inevitable. They know they all have to die someday. But not necessarily this day.
In this season at war with itself, politics finds a companion.
It is now a schizoid mix of the normal and the existentially threatening.
As to the former, Biden is trying to hammer the Democrats into some unified approach to the infrastructure and Build Back Better bills. The first enjoys bipartisan support; the second the support of all Democrats but two and no Republicans. Hence those two Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, are more or less the ball game on that second bill. As are the progressives who will not vote for the first unless some version of the second moves as well. Since neither can have it all, both will have to compromise. In the meantime, each is wondering when the other will blink.
In this realm of "normal" politics, Biden's GOP opponents are claiming he is Jimmy Carter, the one-term Democrat who fell in 1980 amidst the twin peaks of roaring inflation and the Iran hostage crisis. Though neither exists today, Republicans have had to make due with some pandemic created supply chain bottlenecks that have temporarily increased prices and a messy departure from Afghanistan that they now lament but did nothing to avert.
In their world, we are back in the '70s.
Even though we aren't.
Inflation is running at about 5% annaually, not the 13.5% that helped put Reagan in the White House in 1980. It also has not been at that rate for any length of time, again contrary to the experience of the 1970s. Though the data on core (important) versus volatile (less so) inflation can be read to signal trouble, the pandemic radically changed buying patterns (from services to stuff) and created supply chain problems in today's world of just-in-time inventories that did not exist in the 1970s. Both the consumers (you and I) and the suppliers (all those tankers in the Los Angeles Harbor waiting to off-load their containers) will presumably revert to the norm, as will prices, once the pandemic abates. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve has its eyes on the data, as does the European Central Bank. Both are poised to tighten credit if they must.
And . . .
There are no hostages in Afghanistan.
Then, however, there is the existentially threatening.
The House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection just recommended that the entire House refer Trump henchman Steve Bannon to prosecutors for criminal contempt in view of his refusal to honor the committee's subpoena for relevant documents and testimony. The report accompanying the recommendation quotes extensively from insurrection participants specifically linking their attack to Trump's false election fraud claims. It also quotes from Bannon's own social media posts on the eve of the attack telling would be revolutionaries to be in DC the next day. "[W]e're on the point of attack tomorrow," he said, and joined others that night -- including Trump lawyers Giuliani and John Eastman, campaign spokesman Jason Miller and felony convict Roger Stone -- in meetings at the Willard Hotel.
Eastman has clearly usurped Giuliani as Trump's most dangerous -- and dangerously insane -- lawyer. Thanks to the Washington Post's super duo -- the aging but intrepid Bob Woodward and his young and never-exhausted sidekick Robert Costa -- we now know that Eastman wrote a memo literally laying out the coup Trump planned and attempted to implement this past January just as Congress was to meet to certify Biden's victory.
Step One was to declare that there were competing slates of electors in seven states, thus rendering uncertain the results in those states. Step Two involved either declaring Trump the winner based on the electoral vote count in the remaining states (where Trump would have won a Constitutional "majority of electors appointed") or sending the election to the House (where Trump would have won because each state delegation would cast one vote and twenty-six of those delegations were controlled by Republicans) on the theory that neither Biden nor Trump had won the required 270 electoral vote majority.
As Woodward and Costa recount in Peril, the plan was an absolute lie.
There were no competing slates. Just as there had been no election fraud.
Even then, however, neither Eastman nor Trump relented.
In an evening meeting on January 4, in Trump's presence and with his full support, Eastman told Vice President Pence that he, Pence, could unilaterally declare the results uncertain so that Republican legislatures could then hold special sessions and send alternate slates of electors to Washington.
Pence wouldn't do it.
And because he wouldn't, Trump's rioters threatened to hang him on January 6.
In the run-up to Biden's election and inauguration, and as also reported in Peril, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, thought Trump "crazy" and twice reached out to his Chinese counterpart to assure him that the United States was stable and, contrary to their belief that the US was secretly planning to attack them, would not initiate any kinetic action. The first call was made four days before the election and the second two days after the January 6 insurrection. After the insurrection, which he characterized as an attempted coup, Milley also summoned senior officers from the National Military Command Center to remind them of the procedures in place should Trump order a nuclear strike and literally exacted an oath from each of them that they understood they were required to and would report any such order to Milley, to the Secretary of Defense and to a set of attorneys before it could be carried out.
Trump doesn't care about any of this. He is still lying about the election. And he is demanding that all other Republicans lie with him. Last week, he announced that Republican voters should not vote in 2022 or 2024 unless his fictitious "fraud" claim is resolved in his favor. Roughly half the Republican voters believe his claims and even those that do not are willing to suppress Democratic turnout with new laws that limit mail-in, early and drop-box voting. Meanwhile, in Congress, voting rights legislation that would counter the GOP's suppression efforts is being held hostage to the filibuster.
This is how you lose a country.
Yeats said it best:
Gen. Colin Powell died this week.
The cause of death was complications from Covid-19.
But that wasn't the real cause.
The real cause was that . . .
Someone else refused to get a shot.
The worst.
Full of passionate intensity.
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