This is not the time to be depressed

There's too much to do, and we're getting it done

Our guy is in the White House, people!  We control the House!  We control the Senate!  Yeah, I know:  just barely and just barely.  But Joe Biden won the presidency by 7 million votes!  He won the Electoral College 306 to 232!

Yeah, I know:  Trump is out there holding Nuremberg rallies reminding his cheering crowds that he never conceded and claiming he won the election.  He’s flying to those rallies, as far as we know, on biz-jets borrowed from campaign donors because his gold-plated 757 Air Gaudy One hasn’t been flown since 2019 and is currently parked at Stewart International Airport outside Newburgh, New York, awaiting replacement of one of its two Rolls Royce engines.

We’ve been treated to story after story about how Trump controls the Republican Party.  You can count on your fingers the number of Republican office holders who will come out and admit that Biden won the election.  The latest to decline the opportunity to admit that the current occupant of the White House is indeed Joe Biden was Republican House whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana, who went on Chris Wallace’s Fox News show on Sunday and refused to answer when asked, “So you think the election was stolen?”  

The sound of pearls being frantically clutched by liberal pundits is so loud you could mistake it for a late appearance by cicadas.  Biden is down in the polls! They cry in unison.  The infrastructure deal is in jeopardy!  We’ll never get Build Back Better passed! 

Here’s the problem with all of that down-talking, folks.  There’s something to whine about because Democrats have an agenda and are working at passing some bills that will actually improve people’s lives.  Republicans don’t have that problem because they don’t care about policies and don’t give a damn about passing laws that accomplish things.  Recall that for the first time in the history of the party, the Republican platform at the 2020 convention was…are you ready…whatever Trump says.  They didn’t bother proposing a single policy or program.

Think back to the four years Trump was in power.  What did they pass?  A fucking tax cut, that’s what.  Oh, I know he did a lot of damage to EPA pollution rules and reversing Obama’s auto emission standards and the like.  But the Biden administration is in the process of reversing all that stuff because Trump didn’t pass any laws, he just issued executive orders that can be undone.  And it’s worth noting that the reconciliation bill being debated in the House completely undoes some of the tax cuts Trump passed and at least partially improves on others, like the corporate tax rate.  The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that the bill raises taxes on corporations and high-income households by about $2 trillion, while reducing taxes on low and middle-income households by about $835 billion.  The bill proposes raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 26.5 percent, not exactly a progressive dream provision, but it’s something.

The simple fact is, when you propose to do things and then go about the hard work of actually doing them, you run the risk of giving people something to complain about.  Oh, these Democrats!  All they do is squabble and don’t get anything done!

That’s because they’re actually trying.

New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow was out this week with a column entitled “Democrats, you’re in danger.”  He flaps his hands about the “crisis at the border” (when has there ever not been a crisis at the border?) and that COVID is “killing too many Americans.”  Gee, the last time I looked, fewer Americans have been killed since Biden took office than were killed by the virus during Trump’s run of madness and lies.  But here’s his best one: “They (Democrats) just aren’t getting enough done. They aren’t moving quickly enough on President Biden’s major campaign promises.”

Biden hasn’t been in office for 10 months, and this is what we’re hearing from people who are supposed to be on our side.

Then there are the headlines about the polls, because while they’re complaining about everything else, they may as well complain about polls, too.  “Frustration is at an all-time high:  Behind Biden’s falling poll numbers” screams the Washington Post on the front page.  Politico, which has apparently been completely taken over by pearl-clutchers, was out with this yesterday: “The President’s decline is alarming:  Biden trapped in coronavirus malaise.”  The Politico screamer was based on a nine-person focus group conducted by “Sarah Longwell, a moderate Republican strategist who became a vocal supporter of Biden in 2020.” 

Just between you and me, I’ve always wondered what the hell a “Republican strategist” is and how they make their money, and now we have an example!  At least one of them gets out there among the voters and rounds up…count ‘em…nine of them and holds a “focus group” which leads her to conclude, “People don’t feel like their lives have been improved. They did sort of feel that promises aren’t being kept.”

She’s talking for all nine of them in her focus group, folks, so according to Politico, we should listen.

While it is true that Biden’s poll numbers have dipped below 50 percent, it’s not exactly time to start running up a white flag.  The polling aggregator 538 has Biden with 44.5 approval and 49.2 disapproval.  That’s based on two recent Rasmussen polls with 41 percent and 43 percent approval, a Morning Consult poll with 49 percent, YouGov poll with 50 percent, and Reuters/Ipsos poll with 48 percent. 

Meanwhile, the few times Trump got above 45 percent or so, his numbers were celebrated as a great victory.

Not one of the stories about Biden’s polls mentioned that at least two of the factors apparently driving his numbers down are out of his control:  COVID and the crisis of Haitian refugees flooding the border because of yet another hurricane and the political unrest brought on by the murder of their president.

I read this morning that in the past week, Texas, the second most populous state in the Union with nearly 30 million residents, has been losing 77 people a day to COVID and 91 percent of their intensive care beds are occupied.  Meanwhile, its governor, Gregg Abbot, just issued an executive order banning any “entity” including businesses from requiring vaccinations of either employees or customers, which would seem to be a recipe for COVID disaster in the state.  If some of Biden’s lower poll numbers are attributable to the continuing COVID pandemic, he’s certainly not getting much help in Texas or any of the other red states that are suffering under similar anti-vaccine policies.  The last time I looked, every poll mentioned in the negative coverage of Biden’s “cratering” numbers includes all those red states along with the blue ones.

Reading the coverage of the first 10 months of Joe Biden’s presidency, you would think that Donald Trump’s disastrous four years never happened:  the firings and resignations of one member of the cabinet after another, all the indictments and convictions of nearly his entire top campaign staff, and his nightmarish handling of the COVID epidemic with the months of insanity about shots of bleach and recommendations of hydroxychloroquine as a cure.  Just for fun, I googled “Trump’s phony COVID cures” and right there at the top was an AP story from July of last year entitled, “Trump defends disproven COVID-19 treatment.”  The story included mention of Donald Trump Jr. and others sharing gibberish about hydroxychloroquine on Twitter and Facebook, and then claims of “censorship” when the social media platforms finally got around to taking the garbage down.  Trump, meanwhile, according to AP, was busy retweeting stories attacking Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, the top epidemiologist in his own administration.

How soon we forget, huh?

Well, stop forgetting and being depressed about Joe Biden.  Step by step, one thing at a time, we’re going to get things done and make this fractured country of ours a little bit better in the process.  We’re Democrats, damnit.  It’s what we do and who we are.

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