When I got to DC, I thought being called a moderate was a good thing, indicating balance & attitudes guided not by ideology but the merits of an argument. Neither left nor right wing. No more. The moderates in the news right now are just right wingers without the red hats.
They represent the 1% and corporate interests and racism dressed up in the empty, misleading pieties of "respect for markets" or "small government." They are the swing votes for inequality and the status quo, a bulwark of the few against the needs and aspirations of the many.
Today on issue after issue--from climate to the environment to education to health care to gun control to voter rights to a woman's right to choose--the view that aligns with the vast majority of Americans is not that of the so-called political "middle" but of progressives.
The United States, on each of these issues, is a country with a progressive majority and that is why the right with the aid of the inert and the poseurs in the middle are fighting so desperately to rig our democracy to deny the majority their rightful voice.
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The NYT does it again: "House Delays Vote on Infrastructure Bill as Democrats Feud." On the homepage they call it a "Big Setback for the Biden Agenda." Really? Really? A day? A couple of days? The media is getting this story 100% wrong. nytimes.com/2021/09/30/us/…
This is not Dems in disarray. Less than $3.5 trillion is not a defeat for Biden. The Democrats are working tirelessly to shape a massive bill that will transform the lives of millions of Americans for the better, strengthen the country, improve the environment. Is that disarray?
Biden laid out a big vision. Every sane, intellectually honest political professional knew it was an opening bid, an effort to initiate a conversation & get a Congress that exclusively served the needs of the rich under the GOP to actually do something big for the American people
I've been closely following, writing about and working on China policy for more than 30 years. (I was in Tiananmen Square in the weeks before the massacre.) I could fill a library with the "China's going to stumble" or "China can't keep it going" takes I've seen in that time.
All countries face challenges. Amazingly, China, despite a deeply flawed brutal government and an economy wracked by rampant corruption, has managed itself through most of the ones it has faced and turned predicted hard landings into soft ones over and over again.
Furthermore, it is worth remembering that China has been the largest economy on the planet for essentially all of human history except the period from the start of the industrial revolution until recently when it got caught up on that and in key areas has surpassed the west.
At stake in the current Washington haggling is not just the economic future of the American people (and our ability to lead the world) but, almost incredibly, something bigger than that.
If the Biden Build Back Better Agenda is defeated or watered down beyond recognition, will damage not only Democrats in 2022 but also the likelihood that the U.S. will remain a functioning democracy.
GOP wins in 2022 would almost certainly guarantee that future elections would be unfair--from further measures to support voter suppression to blocking all balance on the courts and more.
Milley said that the end game was a "logistical" success but a "strategic" failure. Many are arguing this criticism of the president's decision to exit. But the origins of the strategic failure were many years in the making.
Apropos of that point, Milley & the others suggest they argued to keep 2500 troops in place. But no one is asking how long that deployment would last, how the Taliban would react, whether that would require more troops, & whether it could produce a different outcome than we saw.
The reality is that post the Doha Agreement, the likelihood that the Taliban would not have mounted an offensive had the US broached its promise to leave is zero and that such an offensive would have required more troops (as Milley did acknowledge.)
AG Garland may some day be seen as more valuable to Trump's legacy than Bill Barr ever was. Should it continue, Garland's inertia & "institutionalism" may shield & validate Trump & set precedents that grant impunity to future presidents in ways Trump's bent puppet AG could not.
This admin is doing great work on many fronts. The week ahead may be transformative if Democrats stick together and advance President Biden's bold and essential agenda for American renewal. Even the DoJ is doing great work in advancing a diverse, qualified slate of new judges.
But failure to act on Trump's serial abuses of power--from the repeated obstruction of justice highlighted in the Mueller Report (but not limited to those instance) to the open effort to use his office to coerce election officials to pervert the course of the last election--
As a wise man once told me during the Clinton Administration, "we're really good at finding 1000 reasons to do something, but never just one." What he meant was Democrats like white papers, long lists of reasons to take action & complex arguments are impossible to communicate.
The problem with the $3.5 T reconciliation package (Build Back Better) is not its size, the boldness and sweeping nature of the initiative are just what's needed, it's that it's hard to translate why it's essential to average voters, hard to communicate how it'll help them.
It needs to be broken down to a few key points, an easy to frame and understand argument about the good it will do, how it will help right away, how it will transform lives for the better. It's a bill about creating jobs and restoring opportunity and fairness to American life.