Category Archives: current events

Incoherence is no longer a problem

If emotion is the only reliable indicator of what we should believe, incoherence is no longer a valid critique of anything. Facts are not only inconvenient in political debate, they are irrelevant to millions of Americans. Listen to any of Joe Manchin III’s recent statements for a potent example of willful blindness and easily demonstrable, bombastic, self-righteous incoherence.

With the fire hose of false fecal matter constantly streaming from the Trump machine it is easy to lose track of single details.  In fact, that’s by design of the fire hose of diarrhea, it just keeps coming, it’s revolting, maddening, and the latest burst instantly covers the disgusting stuff already on the ground.  It’s exhausting to be exposed to this kind of unyielding onslaught and in the end enough good, reasonable people tune out that it becomes easy for evil plans to flourish.

On New Year’s Eve 2021, a few days before Trump and his enablers made their final push to pressure Pence to resteal the Stolen Election, with the outlandish Eastman memo, days before the storming of the Capitol, the Washington Post ran an article with the curious title of 

Pence seeks rejection of lawsuit that aimed to expand his power to overturn the election

The lawsuit was brought on behalf of Trump’s bid to overturn the election by one of the most openly idiotic members of Congress, Trump die-hard Looey Gohmert of the great state of Texas.   Gohmert’s suit sued Pence to make him give Pence the power to overturn the election.   

You get the theory of the lawsuit?   Gohmert sued Mike Pence, as Vice President, to force him to give himself the power to overturn the election on January 6th, leaving it up to a willing House to vote Trump into office for another four years.

The Washington Post explains what was unusual about Gohmert’s moronic, frivolous lawsuit.

To win a lawsuit, a plaintiff must convince a judge that the interests of the person they are suing are opposed to their own — there must be some controversy or conflict between them that could be resolved through the litigation.

This baseless hail Mary lawsuit, which Pence and the DOJ urged the court to dismiss, did not present a genuine controversy that a court could decide.  Pence was the wrong guy to sue to make Pence the final arbiter of who won the 2020 election.   

Aside from John Eastman’s insane (but audacious) six point plan for how Pence could brazen it out on January 6th to keep himself and his boss in power, nobody has ever tried to argue that the VP effectively decides if he and his running mate lost the election that has just been certified. The notion that the loser could legally declare himself the winner of a democratic vote is classically incoherent. The DOJ, in urging the court to dismiss the frivolous lawsuit, was more circumspect than I can be.

“The Vice President is not the proper defendant to this lawsuit,” wrote Deputy Assistant Attorney General John V. Coghlan.

“The Vice President — the only defendant in this case — is ironically the very person whose power they seek to promote,” he added. “A suit to establish that the Vice President has discretion over the count, filed against the Vice President, is a walking legal contradiction.”

Pence followed the law, a crime for which a lynch mob was sent to administer justice. In the days after the riot, Pence and the rest of the GOP had their come to Jesus moment when they closed ranks behind the insane former president and amplified his Big Lie about Trump’s massive landslide victory snatched from him by bipartisan conspirators who upheld the validity of the Stolen Election.

Looking for the conspirators in the Seditious Conspiracy prosecution that should have begun months ago? Here is a partial list: Louie Gohmert, Jefferey Clark, Steve Bannon, John Eastman, Donald John Trump, Texas AG Ken Paxton, Lyin’ Ted, Madison Cawthorne, Mo Brooks, Rudy, Mike Flynn. The proof of their criminal conspiracy to overturn an election result they hated is already in the public record, Merrick.

The Lost Cause

After leaving the hated Abraham Lincoln off the 1860 presidential ballot in their states, eleven southern states seceded from the Union citing Lincoln’s tyrannical intention to restrict slavery from spreading across the new western territories. Each state declared, in their articles of secession, that slavery was protected by the Constitution and the Supreme Court (it was) and that, therefore nobody was going to restrict their rights to own as many damned slaves as they liked and work those slaves wherever they saw fit.

After the bloody civil war (The War of Northern Aggression, as it is called in the former Confederacy), after the surrender by those who had taken up arms against their country (generally called ‘traitors’) and the assassination of the hated Lincoln, the myth of the glorious Lost Cause sprung up across the south, and within decades across the entire country. The war, the Lost Cause narrative stated, had never been about slavery, it had been about protecting constitutional freedom and liberty. Secession and warfare had not been an act of bloody treason but an act of supreme patriotism, a small group of liberty lovers fighting a much larger force in the name of States’ rights, as guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution.

This propaganda campaign worked so well that the Lost Cause narrative is believed by millions of Americans to this day. We can see its present day analogue in the myth of the Stolen Election that Trump actually won in a LANDSLIDE, although proof of this huge conspiracy involving Democrats and Republicans engaging in widespread voter fraud and a coordinated cover-up of this fraud has never been produced.

Proof, friends, is not needed. What is needed is belief, passion, faith, hard work and the willingness to do things others might find horrible, in the name of the highest ideals. You can then fight a bloody war and blame the people you attacked for their aggression. You can erect monuments to traitors with blood on their hands and righteously argue that they are great local and national heroes.

Anyway, here is a very good short video on the pernicious myth of the Lost Cause, the one many textbooks still teach. Enemies of critical race theory, or any theory that makes America look like a deeply divided country with an ugly racist streak, have their issue for 2022. We’ll wait to see if Youngkin can unseat the Clintonite governor of Virginia, running on the myth that the only racism in this country is the racism of the damned angry colored people. If they can pull that one off, the South may rise again.

Chilling Halloween timeline of Dems heroic fight to save democracy

After Joe Biden won the 2020 election Trump and his closest allies went into maniacal overdrive to overturn the results. He had no reason to believe he couldn’t keep himself in power.

As president he’d used the powers of his office to obstruct justice for four years, and if he could obstruct it just a little more, he believed, he could remain president in spite of the sizable majority that voted against him. He had no reason to doubt this, based on his many triumphs over accountability during his long life. He has, literally, never been held accountable for any mistake, let alone crime, why should a lost election be any different?

Glenn Kirschner laid it out so clearly the other day when he was asked about Jeffery Clark, the DOJ bureaucrat who stepped forward to advance Trump’s fraudulent claim about a stolen election in the swing states where Trump hoped to disqualify electors so the House, where Republicans, the minority party, were winners in a straight majority count, two votes per state, under the weird system for deciding on a deadlocked election. Jeffery Clark (American Eichmann) wrote a letter to Georgia that Trump was trying to get the AG who took over after Barr fled to sign, days before the MAGA riot to stop the final certification of Biden’s win. The idea was to claim there was a dispute in the Electors in every swing state Trump lost and throw the decision to the House. Here’s Kirschner:

Jefferey Clark was a willing co-conspirator with Donald Trump when Donald Trump said “look, I know there was no fraud, just say there was fraud and leave the rest to me and my sycophants in Congress.” Jefferey Clark said “I got you, boss, let me draft a memo to the states like Georgia to try to corruptly overturn the election.”

There’s a conspiracy in the harsh light of day, give me three hours in front of a DC jury, I’ll prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.

source

The rest of the seditious conspiracy [1] funded by a group who kicked in $50,000,000 in dark money to promote the lie that Trump’s landslide victory had been stolen by a bipartisan, international cabal of radical Democrats, traitor GOP officials, traitor Trump-appointed judges, dead voters, cheating Blacks, Muslims, Socialists, Illegals, George Soros, the Clintons, the dead former president of Venezuela, and many, many other highly nefarious characters.

While fifty million was spent on advertising the lie about the stolen election, there was another 3.5 million dollars for the organizers of the January 6 Stop the Steal Event at the Ellipse. The date was chosen because it was the last possible moment to block Biden becoming the president. They had no permit for any kind of march that day. Some of these organizers are cooperating with the House January 6 Commission (and hopefully also the DOJ) and at least one contends she had no idea a march to the Capitol, let alone a forcible invasion to stop a joint session of Congress, was part of the plan. She was well-paid, presumably, to get the permit for the Stop the Steal gathering at the Ellipse, publicize it and organize things for the passionate, animated speakers, including one in body armor, to whip up the crowd before Trump stepped up to address his fans from behind bulletproof glass [2].

The Democrats, the party whose leadership decided during the primaries that in spite of the vast popularity of his ideas for fundamental reform, and his string of victories in Democratic primaries, Bernie Sanders would be replaced as the presidential candidate by moderate master of compromise Joe Biden. The party fell in behind this plan, Biden won by more than seven million votes.

Now Democrats, led by President Biden, are quickly and forcefully responding to a violent assault on American democracy, after Trump’s expensive ad campaign promoting a lie including the Communist plan to steal the 2020 election and the rest of Trump’s fight to the death against the hellish conspiracy revealed, with great coyness, by someone named Q (who has gone silent now for many months). They are planning to carefully think about many ways to combat the pugnacious real-time obstruction of the investigation into the MAGA riot on January 6..

Here is a snapshot of the bold actions being taken by the party of Biden, Harris, Pelosi, Schumer et al in the immediate defense of our democracy.

Makes you wonder if they’d all be acting the same way if the MAGA rioters had actually put violent hands on Leader Pelosi and others they taunted and threatened on that dark day in January 2021 when an insane president, not accepting the will of the voters, sent an enraged mob down to stop business in the Capitol, with a large contingent of GOP lawmakers fully embracing his Big Lie and voting to contest the certified election results in numerous states.

[1] Seditious Conspiracy

[2] from a January 5th news report

The president tweeted Tuesday evening that he would be speaking at the Save America Rally on the Ellipse at 11 a.m.

Several pre-event rallies took place Tuesday, and DC Police said two arrests were made during the first day of demonstrations (as of the afternoon). Charges included carrying a pistol and rifle without a license, possession of high capacity feeding device, unregistered ammunition and firearms, no permit while driving an unauthorized van and possession of illegal fireworks  

Attendees rallying on Wednesday are holding the first amendment rally, “to demand transparency and protect election integrity” on the same day Congress is set to officially approve the 2020 election results. This event comes after President Trump warned via Twitter that there would be a “very big” and “wild” protest on Jan. 6 after he refuses to concede due to unfounded allegations of election fraud. 

I will be speaking at the SAVE AMERICA RALLY tomorrow on the Ellipse at 11AM Eastern. Arrive early — doors open at 7AM Eastern. BIG CROWDS! pic.twitter.com/k4blXESc0c

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 5, 2021

Bullying bullies bullying

Speaking of bully politics , I watched Josh Hawley snarling at mild-mannered Attorney General Merrick Garland Wednesday, as did fellow insurrectionists Lyin’ Ted and Tom Cotton and, in a gentler way, the folksy, 88 year-old gentleman conservative from Iowa, ancient Chuck Grassley, laying on the lash as Garland sat for more than four hours being grilled in front of a senate committee.

The Trumpists were pummelling Garland about a memo he sent to local DOJ offices advising them to work closely with local law enforcement to protect school board members against threats of violence.

The Trumpists find this memo offensive and despicably partisan, as it clearly applies only to passionate Trump voters, who are styled “domestic terrorists” if they so much as express their First and Second Amendment rights at school board meetings and some scared little cucks feel threatened.   The partisan memo, they made clear, is grounds for Garland’s removal as A.G.  

The rightwing echo chamber contends, in one endlessly amplified voice, that this intolerable memo is as explosive an affront to America as the loathsome Hillary Clinton murders in Benghazi, something so threatening to American decency and democracy that Garland must answer for it, publicly and under oath.   The NY Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns FOX and the Wall Street Journal, chimed in: 

Today Merrick Garland’s thuggishness and partisanship show him to be unfit for the Supreme Court and he is not ethical and committed to justice as Biden’s attorney general. He should go.  


A website called welovetrump expressed a similar statement,which came up number three on the Duck Duck Go search engine about yesterday’s hearing:

Attorney General Garland Won’t Deny Under Oath that Federal Agents May Have Incited January 6th. Something interesting happened this past week. Attorney General Merrick Garland was questioned about January 6th. Representative Thomas Massie from Kentucky had a straightforward question. Were federal agents present at the January 6th protest at …


Once Garland took his seat the GOP members of the committee began lustily pounding him with angry sound bytes for the right-wing echo chamber.

Tom Cotton kept calling Garland “judge” and told him, toward the end of his dressing down, that he thanks God that Garland was kept off the Supreme Court and that he thinks Garland should resign in disgrace.  Hawley was more superficially respectful, addressing Garland as General Garland, but his angry aggressiveness — in  defense of innocent parents merely expressing their understandable frustration with libtard cucks and making perfectly justifiable threats, was apparent.  He pointedly challenged Garland to call the guy on the poster behind him, the distraught father whose daughter was raped in a bathroom by a fake trans boy dressed as a girl AND WAS DRAGGED OUT OF THE SCHOOL BOARD MEETING BY SECURITY!!! a domestic terrorist [1].   

Lyin’ Ted began “For eight years under Obama the Department of Justice was politicized and weaponized.  When you came before this body during your confirmation hearing, you promised things would be different.” The four years with four Trump A.G.’s personally loyal to Trumpie, enabling their boss’s seamless obstruction of justice? Never happened, irrelevant, immaterial. How dare you?!! We’re talking about what that hateful black devil did!

Then, using his genius as a collegiate debater, Cruz forced Garland to admit that a fed up parent simply giving the Nazi salute at a school board meeting, especially if the smug, Nazi bastard deserved it, was protected expression under the First Amendment.   

I watched a GOP senator take one word from a statute — “annoy”– and focus on it to make the rest of the law Garland is intent on enforcing (to protect school board members from the physical rage of infuriated mobs) seem like liberal scolding — pricelessly sickening. 

Garland, they all agreed, owed Trump nation an apology.  Garland, who had no reason to apologize about the memo Republicans were flogging him over, acquitted himself as an earnest, mild-mannered, judicious man.   The most respectful thug ever.

The geniuses of the GOP on the Committee were on a mission unrelated to law or justice, they were busy making Benghazi-style talking points for their base (al-Q’eada, in Arabic). Roll clip three:

“This is shameful. Judge, this is shameful. This testimony, your directive, your performance is shameful. Thank God you are not on the Supreme Court. You should resign in disgrace, judge.”

source

Come on, wrestling fans, thirty words, each one a direct knee in the nuts!  Hard to improve on that one by Cotton. 

Hawley tried hard, probably got the one about pretending Garland had called the father whose daughter had been raped by an alleged fake trans boy in the girl’s bathroom a domestic terrorist in a playable byte for OANN, Breitbart, Der Sturmer, FOX, etc.

Lyin’ Ted got in a killer shot by making the Jewish jurist admit that a disgruntled guy at a schoolboard meeting who gives some smug putz the Nazi salute is exercising his First Amendment right of free expression, something the Department of Justice is sworn to protect. Garland acknowledged that simply giving the Nazi salute is indeed expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment.

But what was your larger point, Lyin’ Ted, in making the Jewish A.G. tell America that he protects a Nazi’s absolute right to give his party’s heil Hitler salute anywhere and any place he so chooses?

All that poor guy did was give that smug school board the good old Nazi salute, no violence just a strong, constitutionally protected expression of his opinion.

What is America coming to, these senators wanted to know, when you can’t even give the Hitler salute or fly into an understandable rage after your daughter is raped in a school bathroom, by a rapist dressed as a girl?

Garland didn’t seem to have an answer beyond repeating that the DOJ is committed to making sure angry mobs don’t carry out threatened violence against school board members for things like insisting that American history courses include an accounting of slavery, segregation and violent mobs who attack and kill people they hate and never face justice.

The seething hostility of these Big Lie embracing partisans, one after another, is so reminiscent of Nazi judges and prosecutors barking dismissively at defendants during the Thousand Year Reich. They certainly deserve a big old Nazi salute!

Happy Halloween!

[1] Cotton also, inaccurately, said the high school girl

“was raped in a bathroom by a boy wearing girls’ clothes and the Loudoun County School Board covered it up because it would interfere with their transgender policy during pride month.”

The Right’s Big Lie About a Sexual Assault in Virginia https://nyti.ms/3nHQvqh

The true story of that girl’s rape in a school bathroom is more complicated and has nothing to do with gay pride or liberals on school boards.

How much of the $50,000,000 Stop the Steal ad buy did Zuckerberg keep?

As Facebook fights the increasing evidence that it prioritizes profit for its billionaire owner over everything else, I wonder why nobody is asking how much of Trump’s $50,000,000 mostly internet ad buy to promote his Big Lie about a stolen election went directly to Mr. Zuckerberg?   

How much did Facebook make, directly, from selling ads promoting Trump’s Big Lie?

It’s a wonder to me that the $50,000,000 ad buy is not more in the public mind. $50 000,000 is a mind blowing sum to spend selling any product.

Then, consider, it was $50,000,000 in dark money raised in the weeks leading up to Trump’s second impeachment, when it looked like the madman was poised to do something even more desperate than send a mob down to stop Congress and lynch his vice president after the VP was warned by conservatives with gravitss to stay away from open sedition.

They raised and spent $50,000,000 to promote a lie that fueled the rage of a mob that attacked and battled police, breached all fortifications and stormed the Capitol, forcing Congress to be evacuated, as it was certifying Biden’s victory.

How much did Mark, a man not yet forty, worth well north of $100,000,000,000, personally pocket off of Trump’s $50,000,000 mostly internet ad buy?

It’s a fair question, no?

Yer Confederate battle flag

Why do many of us, including virtually every Black American, regard the Confederate flag as a symbol of targeted hatred equivalent to Mr. Hitler’s swastika?

Historian Heather Cox Richardson:

In 1860, southern white elites declared the American concept of democracy based in equality, government based in the consent of the people, to be obsolete. They declared they were going to start a new country, based in a hierarchy of gender and race, that they believed reflected God’s will.


In a speech in March 1861, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, who would soon be the vice president of the Confederate States of America, explained to an audience that Jefferson’s belief that all men are created equal was “an error” and that anyone who still adhered to that idea was an insane “fanatic.” Stephens told listeners: “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” 

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-26-2021?r=74gv9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=

Mandate!

I feel like the former president, agitatedly tapping away at my phone… fucking depressing, but there it is, as I shop for a new computer to replace a mint condition macBook that has been rendered obsolete “to protect my privacy”…

When the candidate of White Nationalists, Militant pro-fetus Christian Conservatives, Climate Change Deniers, anti-government “Libertarian” billionaires, rich people who wanted a tax break and every fascist-leaning follower Steve Bannon could bring into the fold, narrowly became president in 2016, his party’s electoral mandate, as reflected in the Senate, was 51-49 [1].

It was no problem for this narrow Republican majority to give a $1,900,000,000,000 tax break to the wealthiest Americans and their favorite corporations. It was a simple matter for them to change the filibuster rules to ram a 6-3 Federalist Society Supreme Court down America’s throat, in perpetuity.

Now, with Democrats in the narrow majority, there is a sudden cry for “bipartisanship” in our deeply divided nation, a cry taken up by two suddenly supremely powerful cartoonishly corporate Democrats, oil baron Joe Manchin III and the narcissistic Sphinx of Arizona, a senator who only talks to big donors and the president.

I’ve got no news here, except that Americans will have to settle for a somewhat puny compromise Build Back Better Act that will leave prevention of climate catastrophe underfunded and several popular, long overdue programs cut entirely. Manchin (who appears quite vulnerable in Red West Virginia — GOP voters hate him for disloyalty to Trump, any other Democrat outpolls him as the “blue” candidate) announced he will go no higher than 1/4 of the bloated U.S. military budget, and won’t sign on to any Clean Energy initiative that threatens his coal business or those of his fossil fuel donors.

Biden has agreed to all of the right-wing moderate’s demands. It will still be great, Biden insists, his party’s chance to do anything dramatic rapidly slipping away, amidst routine, painless, phoned-in GOP filibusters of all legislation the majority party proposes.

After all, as McConnell points out, it’s not like the fucking Democrat [sic] party has a goddamned mandate in this deeply divided coin flip democracy , you snowflake cucks.

Lifting millions of American children out of poverty, keeping multitudes safe from the threat of homelessness, preventing the destruction of our planet? Not nearly as compelling, to corporate Free Market donors, as more profits for the greedy investor class that funds the whole shit show. Ask “centrists” Kyrsten and Joe III.

You know what I’m sayin’?

[1] from senate.gov

115th Congress (2017–2019)
Majority Party: Republicans (51 seats)
Minority Party: Democrats (47 seats)
Other Parties: 2 Independents (both caucused with the Democrats)
Total Seats: 100
Note: At the beginning of 115th Congress, there were 52 Republicans and 46 Democrats. Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) resigned on February 8, 2017, and was replaced by Luther Strange (R-AL). Doug Jones (D-AL) subsequently won the special election held on December 12, 2017, to replace Sessions and was sworn into office on January 3, 2018.

Fascism, anyone?

Short video by the author of How Fascism Works, beginning with the cult of personality that causes the political right and democratically elected conservative leaders to fall in line behind a dominating autocratic leader.

Note that Stanley never mentions the one plank 2020 GOP party platform: whatever the Big Guy wants.

Führerworte haben gesetzeskraft!

The Leader’s word is law!

Biden…

Here’s Charles M. Blow, writing in the New York Times, on Biden’s so far uninspiring defense of the most fundamental principles of democracy.

Biden, Tepid in the Face of Catastrophe

Oct. 24, 2021

Charles M. Blow

By Charles M. Blow

Opinion Columnist

After months of tiptoeing around the issue of altering or eliminating the Senate filibuster rules to protect voting rights — and therefore democracy itself — after an unprecedented year of Republican assaults, President Biden has finally said that he is open to changing the rules. And on Thursday, he said it in the most weak-tea, weak-kneed way possible.

At a CNN town hall, Anderson Cooper asked Biden: “On voting rights, if it is as important to you as you say, I think there’s a lot of Democrats who look at the filibuster and would like to see it changed, even if it’s just on this one case. Why do you oppose that?”

Biden basically said that trying too hard at this point to save democracy would endanger his ability to save his spending bill, telling Cooper: “Here’s the deal. If, in fact, I get myself into at this moment the debate on the filibuster, I lose at least three votes right now to get what I have to get done on the economic side of the equation, on the foreign policy side of the equation.”

Biden then proposed bringing back the talking filibuster “immediately.” “I also think we’re going to have to move to the point where we fundamentally alter the filibuster,” he said, framing the craziness of the Republican filibuster to prevent Democrats from raising the federal debt limit as a possible catalyst for reforms. He concluded: “But it still is difficult to end the filibuster beyond that. That’s another issue.”

Cooper pressed on: “But are you saying, once you get this current agenda passed on spending and social programs, that you would be open to fundamentally altering the filibuster or doing away with it?”

Biden said that he would be “open to fundamentally altering it,” but when Cooper again raised the idea of doing away with it, Biden responded, “Well, that remains to be seen exactly what that means, in terms of fundamentally altering it, and whether or not we just end the filibuster straight up.”

Cooper again pressed Biden on whether he would “entertain the notion of doing away with the filibuster” for voting rights, to which Biden answered, “and maybe more.”

Why was this like pulling teeth? Why is Biden so reticent to say unequivocally that we must protect voting rights at all costs, even if it means altering or eliminating the filibuster? (Being “open” to something or “entertaining” it is not the same as demanding it.) Why does deciphering what Biden is saying here feel like working through a riddle?

Furthermore, why is it that Biden believes that he will lose whatever momentum he currently has on the spending bill by entering the debate over filibuster reform now? Won’t he also be lost if he enters it later? Also, why did he keep bringing up the debt limit debate as the filibuster destroyer, even though Cooper kept directing him to voting rights?

Biden is talking out of both sides of a mealy mouth.

You can’t move in the course of one exchange from saying that we might soon have to fundamentally change the filibuster, to saying you’re “open” to fundamentally changing it, to saying “it remains to be seen” what that change would or should look like.

Defenders of the administration’s approach tell us that this is all part of the choreography of Washington. This is the dance that must be danced. And, in the end, it will all work out: Some version of the spending bill will be passed, which will free the president to defend voting rights more forcefully.

I hope that all of this is true. I think we need what’s in the spending bill. It’s just that we need voting more.

I hope that my panic and exasperation over the Biden administration’s lack of urgency on voting rights turns out not to have been warranted. I want to be wrong on this. Being right would be cataclysmic.

Biden and the Democratic leadership want us to trust, to trust them, to trust Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. They want us to trust a system that has not earned that trust and often betrays it.

I can imagine a moment after the social spending bill vote in which Biden cranks up the pressure on passing a voter protection bill, having public meetings with stakeholders, traveling the country to lobby for it and possibly even giving an address from the Oval Office in support of it.

He could do all of that. He should have done it already.

But responses like the ones he gave at the CNN town hall are more infuriating than instructive.

Consider someone feeling like he is drowning and you do nothing until the last minute, until that moment before the panic overtakes him and he loses consciousness, and only then do you snatch him from the water saying, “Why were you freaking out? I had this under control the whole time.” How would you expect him to feel? Happy that you finally saved him, at the last minute, or bitter that you first watched and waited while he felt like he was drowning?

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Charles M. Blow joined The Times in 1994 and became an Opinion columnist in 2008. He is also a television commentator and writes often about politics, social justice and vulnerable communities.