Oh, Noes, Politics!

      The President made a speech last night and there was predictable outrage in predictable corners, expressed in predictable ways, with an overtone of, "He's being so mean to us!"  Yes, so sad and unfair when someone else is doing the name-calling?  C'mon, that's politics.

      I disagree with the Democrats about a lot of things, especially their frequent assumption, taken as a given, that the best way to solve any problem is to throw more and more government -- and tax dollars -- at it.  But that's something you can actually have a debate over and possibly even reach some kind of compromise about.  And eventually, they do run out of other people's money.

      Claiming the deck is stacked against you by cheaters sooooo nefarious and sneaky that nobody can find any evidence about 'em that will stand up in court, and changing the story every time some part of it gets debunked?  That's not a debate.  It's a delusion, even before digging down far enough to get to the insane notions about secret conspiracies involving dead South American autocrats, Italian spy satellites, lizard people, the Rothschilds wielding Jewish space lasers, secret bamboo-paper fake ballots and state-level election workers doing fairly dull and routine jobs.  When your party's loudest adherents keep saying the stupid part out loud, keeping a seat at the grown-up table may prove difficult.

      In the 2016 Presidential contest, the late P. J. O'Rourke observed that Secretary Clinton was "...wrong about absolutely everything, but she's wrong within normal parameters."  His judgement was that she was "...the second-worst thing that can happen to this country, but she's way behind in second place."

      President Biden hasn't got a lot of flash; no one is going to mistake him for Theodore Roosevelt or FDR, for Kennedy or even Eisenhower.  Nevertheless, Republicans don't have a leg to stand on when they gripe about how badly he has slandered a blatantly authoritarianism-inclined group within their party by labeling it as such, not after the GOP has spent years -- evidence-free -- accusing the Democrats of cheating at elections, being under the power of Red China, abusing the economy and, for all I know, conspiring to induce anti-magnetism for immoral purposes.

      Biden was the second-worst choice in 2020 -- but he was an extremely distant second to the very worst choice.  Voters knew it.  They still do.  Whining cannot change that fact.

      (P.S.: "43 empty folders with 'CLASSIFIED' markings?" What the hell?)