Schadenfreude (taking enjoyment in the troubles of others) is not a quality to be admired but I have to admit that I am thoroughly enjoying the predicament that US Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell finds himself in. He is a truly awful person, a liar and a hypocrite, who would piously invoke the need to cut deficits in order to oppose spending to help poor people or to create jobs when the president was a Democrat, but then abandon that goal as soon as the president was a Republican, when he was willing to spend money like a drunken sailor to give tax cuts for the rich. He viciously opposed expanding health care to middle and lower income groups. And of course, he prevented president Obama from appointing a qualified middle-of-the-road Supreme Court justice in order to put a right-wing extremist on the bench.
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During Margaret Thatcher’s reign of terror in the UK, she and her allies condescendingly referred to those who opposed her hardline polices as ‘wets’. One of the features that so endears Donald Trump to his most ardent supporters is that he sticks to his guns and appears to them to never back down, i.e., that he is not a ‘wet’. This is because he simply denies that he has ever changed his mind or reversed himself on anything, whatever the facts are.
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The Republican party seems all over the place over what to do about their Alabama senate candidate Roy Moore. Leaders in the party have said that if the allegations are true, Moore should step aside. This is significant in that they are allowing for the possibility that the allegations may be true. I would have expected them to close ranks and decry the story as fake news and a fiendish Democratic plot aided by the fake news liberal media. Part of the reason may be that the avalanche of sex abuse revelations by prominent people has suddenly shifted the center of gravity of the discussions, so that women’s charges that they were abused are no longer summarily dismissed.
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Some reasons have been advanced by other residents of the gated community for the attack on US senator Rand Paul by his neighbor Rene Boucher. Though both Boucher’s lawyer and Paul’s spokespersons have said that the cause was not political but a ‘trivial’ dispute , it may have had an underlying political cause arising from Paul’s adherence to libertarian philosophy, especially when it comes to property rights.
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After Tuesday’s losses, some political commentators are wondering if Donald Trump is finally losing support among his base. Michael Kruse recently visited the town of coal and steel town of Johnstown, PA, a year after he and Trump visited it at a campaign stop where Trump promised to bring back the coal and steel industries. Kruse says that even though Trump has not delivered on any of the promises that he made to them in his campaign stop, the people he spoke to last year still back him, mainly because Trump attacks the people that they hate, and they take at face value Trump’s “insistent declarations of success no matter the reality” and his inveterate blame-shifting.
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