Coop Scoop Nov 16: The Peak Gridlock Edition
The Coop Scoop: The Peak Gridlock Edition
Issue #47
November 16, 2020
Ok. Enough is enough. Enough playing along with this destructive and delusional game of letting the Big Baby slowly adjust to his new status as The Biggest Loser. Time to dump him out of the White House. Waiting till January 20 for him to go seems an unwise and perhaps naïve position.
Not that he won’t go. He will. But just how much death and damage are we going to allow him until then?
Trump and his cronies, including the putrefied Republican Party, have chosen to blockade the transition at what is precisely the most critical public safety crisis since the 1918 Spanish Flu.
Let’s be clear: The United States is currently subject to a deadly foreign invasion known as COVID-19. It has already killed five times the number of Americans who died in Vietnam. By inauguration day the death toll could easily be 400,000 – the same number of US troops killed in World War II.
There have been one million new cases in just the last 10 days. The daily death toll is quickly rising from about 1000 to twice that number.
Further complicating matters, we have the announcement from two different pharma giants that highly effective vaccinations seem to be only a month away. It will nonetheless take months, perhaps an entire year, to properly distribute the vaccine. Can we get it done correctly and quickly before we lose another half million people?
Biden has already named a new COVID commission of real scientists and doctors and they are itching to plug into the process but cannot because of the blocked transition. That means with every minute, quite literally, that goes by, another couple of Americans die from COVID with the federal government watching with arms folded.
There is no coordination or even serious contact permitted between Biden’s commission and that sorry thing called Trump’s COVID Task Force – that Trump himself has boycotted for the last 5 months.
Trump’s answer to the deepening crisis is to keep calm and carry-on golfing. His dumbass medical advisor, radiologist Scott Atlas, meanwhile, is tweeting out calls for citizens to resist the shutdowns that the embattled Governor of Michigan ordered this week. In other words, the White House is advocating sabotage of public health measures at a time when most needed.
So, just how long are we willing to let this very sick man remain in the White House and drag us down with him? I know the Biden-Pelosi-Schumer strategy is to play rope-a-dope. Keep the rhetoric at a low level, do not make loud calls to the President to concede, just let him exhaust himself and rely on public opinion to keep turning against him. His lawsuits are all being dismissed so just sit tight. He’ll be gone soon enough.
There’s a certain logic to this official Democratic position but it omits the downsides to lowering the bar for presidential behavior so close to the ground.
Not forcing concession allows Trump to keep his 70 million followers activated, agitated and brain washed. It permits the gelling and cohesion of a new political force, a massive white nationalist movement that has now eaten and shat out the old GOP and will keep Trump relevant as a political force for years to come.
The Democratic strategy is self-defeating. A majority of public opinion has already soundly rejected Trump. Allowing him to obstruct and linger only allows more time for millions of Americans to ingest and digest the “facts” that Biden won a rigged election and therefore is an illegitimate president from Day One. Biden is going to take office with somewhere between 25 and 40% of Americans not just disagreeing with him but conjuring his administration as criminal interlopers.
This stall permits accelerated fund raising by Republicans anxious to fleece the remaining pennies out of the pockets of angry Trumpsters. Under the phony rubric of paying bills for the legal challenge, the Trumpies are raising millions to basically pay off campaign debts and to hoard funding for future races.
Letting Trump dither on the transition in no way stops him from his making his own transition plans. It seems obvious that the next chapter of Trumpism will consist of one of four possibilities: Get a regular TV show on OANN, start his own streaming service – Trump TV—where he can easily soak millions of his supporters for 8 or 10 bucks a month. Do the math and you’re looking at a billion dollars a year if only 10% or so of his 80 million Twitter followers sign up. The third possibility, one which does not conflict with the first two, is that he immediately announces his candidacy for 2024 and starts campaigning right after Biden takes office. The fourth possibility is that he gets tied up in criminal lawsuits and perhaps stowed behind bars.
For any of these options, the more together, the more energized, the more engaged his base is, the better for him. And more lucrative for him when he goes onto the air. The Democrats are currently letting him maintain that base by not decapitating it – politically.
This is a terrible, frightening moment in American politics. Not because of a threatened coup (all of Trump’s thinly veiled threats turned out to be popcorn farts) but because of the generalized decay of the American political system.
As I write this on Saturday November 16, nearly two weeks after the election, a grand total of seven, yes, seven U.S. Republican senators have in some form or another recognized Biden’s victory. Without question, we are at a nadir in American political life. Even the specious election of George W. Bush never reached the depths of cynicism, corruption and indifference to democracy that this post-election period has dumped on us.
Don’t ask me what will become of the Republicans. If they don’t know, how am I supposed to? I do pay a lot of attention to the Lincoln Project and those former and apostate Republicans express literally no hope of rebuilding the GOP into a serious, respectable conservative party anytime in the next ten to twenty years.
The Democratic Party, in the meantime, is being held together with rubber bands and Scotch tape as the very deep divisions within it were ripped wide open publicly this week. A number of “centrist” Democrats (whom I more precisely call Conservative Democrats) trashed the progressives in the party for introducing the word “socialism” into the party lexicon, claiming this is why the Dems fared so poorly down ballot on November 3.
AOC led the counter-charge, calling out the “centrists” as being out of touch with a new generation of voters who really do want progressive change.
This division will only deepen as Democrats move into power and have to debate and enact or try to enact policy. Not to mention, I’m sorry to say, the 2022 mid-terms, for which jockeying and subtle campaigning will commence around January 21.
It’s an intriguing debate and one that should be taken seriously. For full disclosure I will clarify my position: I am not a Democrat and therefore give myself a partial flyer on this question. Only a partial one. My heart, my desires, my sentiments are with the progressives – though I take positions that often depart from liberal orthodoxy (both to the left and the right).
That doesn’t mean because I am “ready for socialism” (yet to be defined) I somehow don’t think it a stretch to assume the United States is. Sorry but true. AOC and other progressives can do quite well in large urban metro areas with a diverse population. But just how realistic is it to believe a social democrat can be elected senator, say, in the Dakotas, Idaho, and large parts of the Deep South (as opposed to the mid-Atlantic South)? That used to be possible, sorta. But no more.
I don’t have the answers, sorry. I will say this much: These next four years are going to be very tough on progressives – not to mention the American people in general.
With a Biden presidency and a Republican controlled Senate (barring a near miracle in Georgia in January), we are headed for Peak Gridlock. And by the way, even if Democrats squeeze out the two open seats in Georgia, the Senate will be 50-50 with Kamala Harris the deciding vote. That leaves ZERO margin for defections by conservative Democrats like Senator Joe Mancin of West Virginia, who can easily sink any progressive measure he pleases. And not just Mancin.
Worse, there are NO guarantees whatsoever that progressives can even get all or most of the legislation through the Democratic-controlled House. The Dem majority has been whittled down to a very anemic seven seats. And there are a whole lot more moderate and conservative Democrats in congress than there are progressives – the latter comprising only about 30% of the Democratic delegation.
So you can forget about big ticket progressive agenda items for the moment. Medicare for All, the Green New Deal and even serious Climate Change legislation are all headed for the back burner and are on indefinite hold.
Biden, at times, seems too far out of touch with reality to inspire much confidence. I got the heebie jeebies a few days ago when he was asked if he really believed what he was saying in terms of finding some Republican support for his programs. He gave a smug smile, looked down and said “They will. They will.”
Translation: I am an old hand in the Senate, I know these guys really well, and don’t worry, they will deal with me much better than they did with Obama.
Really? Is this before or after Mitch McConnell eviscerates him and puts his liver up for sale on eBay?
My big concern for the moment is if Biden will be able to get anything meaningful thru congress to abate the economic crash caused by COVID? Even this is an iffy proposition. With midterms still 2 years away, the Republicans have the luxury of not having to do a damn thing. As to the Democrats, some of the most logical and practical measures to support the unemployed and the under employed, to give relief to those who cannot make rent or mortgage payments, all of these measures have some degree of “socialist” coloring to them and that raises the question of what conservative House Democrats are going to do about them.
This brings me full circle to where I began this note. I am of the firm opinion that the anti-Trump forces need to MOBILIZE NOW and demand that he resign immediately. Trump’s obstruction of the transition has morally and politically disqualified him from overseeing this non-transition that is getting in the way of fighting the pandemic. Yes, I would rather have Mike Pence for the final 6 weeks.
I don’t think that we should be waiting around for Biden or Pelosi to give us some sort of signal to ratchet up the pressure. Remember, one of THEIR greatest fears is also a mobilized and activist base as they know they will also become its targets. The Democratic leadership only likes mobilization of voters at election time. Mobilization of pissed off citizens is a completely different story.
Sitting back now and calmly saying just let things run their course won’t fly. You get the government you bargained for. Personally, I would keep bargaining. +++
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