Call it a mixed bag. On one hand, Saturday marks Flag Day and the 250th anniversary of the founding of our Army. On the other hand, it marks the 79th birthday of the confounder-in-chief whose bout of “bone spurs” served to excuse him from serving. (Sad.)
Call it “J14.” And feel free to flashback to J6- and beyond. For instance, to 1860: even with civil war looming, no one licensed himself (let alone a whole seditious cult) to spew self-serving, fact-free dreck about vote counts.
Fast forward: the J6 juggernaut rolls on. Shades of its smash into our Capitol, on 5/28/25, sans warrants or probable cause, DHS “POLICE” barged into the constituency office of House judiciary committee ranking member Jerry Nadler. With his own ox gored, he now sees his way clear to blow back. “If,” he seethes, “this [partisan raid] can happen in a member of Congress’s office, it can happen to anyone…. the Trump administration is behaving like fascists.”
Alas, some Dems who should know better still opt to behave like decorous dweebs. Re the baseless, fraught intrusion on Nadler’s premises, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries honks “in a time, place, and manner of our choosing, we will respond…. the response will be continuous and it will meet the moment that is required.”
Not to wax heated. Or (God forbid) impatient. But half a century of such ‘manna manana’ claptrap has not served our country well. Let’s not mince words here, folks. The man who should be Speaker huffs and puffs as if wielding the clout Dems have lost while spouting such pap. (Fact is, it’s hard not to resolve him epitomizing the prescience of Steve Bannon’s 2017 chest thump that Dems no longer matter.)
In contrast, governor Tim Walz (D-MN) proffers no small candor (including some sorely needed mea culpa). Acknowledging his presence on last year’s ticket that lost to a lately convicted prolific felon (!), he admits he may not be an ideal parser of Dems’ longstanding ill fortune at the polls.
But he’ll do. And he welcomes help. Of all people, he points to a bastion of our blue base! Citing an unnamed rank-and-file Georgia Dem, Walz compares donkeys seeking office to headlight-frozen deer (facing onrushing grilles en route to the Roadkill Grill). “You can see the car coming at you,” he sighs, “but you stand there and get hit… anyway.”
You stand there. That is, as distinct from “stand[ing] for something” (as strategist/ neuroscientist/ pundit/ author Drew Westen repeatedly urges Dems to do in his 2007 masterwork, The Political Brain. (Whose subtitle, The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, now looms YUGE, ‘needless to say,’ and then some.)
Ten-hut. Even with such pap as Jeffries’ freezing us in mid-road, can we grasp the need to get a move on? As our fast-failing nation’s non-despotic major party, can we bring ourselves to call on our leaders to lead us out of the wreckage-in-progress foisted by onrushing, willfully unseen red bumpers, grilles, and hood ornaments?
