State of the Union

I'm sure we're all looking forward to Our President's State of the Union address, wondering how he'll manage to put a positive spin on recent events, and ready to count how many standing ovations he gets from the Republican side of the aisle.  They'll do their best to look enthusiastic, I suppose, despite the damage he's done to their party — not to mention their country.

I confess that the shutdown lasted twice as long as I expected: it turned out that McConnell was more adroit at ducking the blame than anticipated.  Eventually, though, there were enough pointing fingers to poke him into action.  Plutocratic fingers, of course, are especially pointy — and McConnell's first and foremost goal as Leader has been to keep the dark money flowing (and dark.)  It's not unreasonable to suspect that some of those extra-pointy fingers started poking pretty hard.

I won't presume to predict what will happen when the temporary funding bill expires.  Will the Congressional conference committee toss Our President enough crumbs to save a smidgen of face?  Will Tr*mp decide a "state of emergency" will shore up his base and distract attention from the Mueller inquiry?  Will some brand new craziness emerge over the next three weeks?

I don't know about the first two options, but number three seems like a safe bet. The state of the union, as I'm sure you've noticed, is wack.

Who's to blame?

Our President was not happy to learn he had to cancel his $100,00 per couple party celebrating his first year in office.  He sincerely was looking forward to hearing a pack of fat cats tell him how great he is, but alas, that was not to be.  Just the same, I'm willing to bet he kept the money.

A major problem with using a partial government shutdown as a political bargaining tool is that most Americans don't notice it happening.  The current shutdown has distracted media attention from other matters, like payoffs to porn stars, for example, but given that chaos is what America has come to expect over the past year, a little thing like failure to fund the government for a while is unlikely to have much lasting political impact.

I suppose it's interesting to see the Democrats take a stand on something that resembles principle — even though saving DACA currently is more of an excuse for a fight than an ideological imperative to party leadership.  Most important is to demonstrate that Democrats can be just as obstructionist as Republicans were under Obama.  What we have now is a political power struggle, pure and simple.

Of course, this particular battle could have been averted had the President displayed any consistency in the positions he took regarding immigration policy over the past week — or any of his self-proclaimed genius for negotiation.  Sadly, Tr*mp's pathetic need to please empowers whoever last occupied his brief attention span — and Stephen Miller effectively ensures that those people always will be conservative extremists.