Pandemic, Texas Cruz, Impeach Done, Bum Rush, Trump Riot, Mirror Image

Shamelessly stolen from Political Irony.
With a proviso: please watch it until the end.
 

• @momwino98 goes back in TikTokTime to explain to her 2019 self what 2020 will be like. A bit of Wait, what? combined with Wait, what the HELL!
   
• Reductress covers one of the admittedly lesser tragedies of isolated living as one person is disgusted to discover she enjoys egg salad.
   
• Political Irony captures the whole embarrassing saga of Ted Cruz responding to Texans freezing in the dark with no water by flying to Cancun. Iron Knee goes into the damaging lies and excuses that simply made it worse for the good Senator.
   
  I’ve seen some efforts to excuse Cruz. After all, what could he have done? Except, perhaps, follow the example of the single political figure Texas Republicans are taught especially to hate. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, having no constituency in Texas, has nonetheless asked her supporters to donate, so far raising over 2 million dollars for Texas relief. While Texas Senator Cruz was still in Cancun, the New York Congressional Representative traveled to Houston to raise national awareness of opportunities to help. Somehow compassion for some transcends congressional borders.
   
  I find some of this a little familiar. When I was a kid, I read about a sea change in Newark politics. I wrote about that a few years ago and how, more recently, weather conditions changed the fortunes of now ex-Governor Chris Christie and now Senator Cory Booker because of their very different responses to crisis.
   
  Ted has an additional disadvantage, his widely known personality wraps around him as an anchor might be chained around the neck of an an unlucky ocean swimmer. Years ago, when Al Franken was Senator Franken, he remarked: I like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz.
   
• Hackwhackers goes cartoonish about Texas misery, tragedy, Cruz, and Cancun, then surveys reaction to the Cruz cruise from around the tweeternet. One question:
   

  Are we angrier that Ted Cruz went to Cancun or that he came back?

  — Travis Allen 🇺🇸 (@TravisAllen02) February 18, 2021

• Andy Borowitz reports as Ted Cruz describes his heroic mission to Cancun, investigating the theft by Mexico of Texas sun and heat.
   
• In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson quotes the now suddenly retired Mayor Tim Boyd of Colorado City, Texas, as he scolds his constituents for wanting life saving necessities like water and heat. …quit crying and looking for a handout, he says, Only the strong will survive and the weak will parish. I note the semi-religious misspelling. Perhaps he thought he was quoting Jesus? Stomp the least of these, I think it goes.

• In the wake of Texas hardship, we think of waves of tragedy. At The Moderate Voice, grief counselor Kim Mooney talks about the exponential hardship of multiple loss when too many things happen too fast to process. Grief itself gets complicated. We look for ways to stay constructively compassionate in what seems a perfect storm of tragedy.
   
• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit thumbnails the real story of Texas freeze failures.
   
• Max’s Dad reviews his experiences listening, and reacting to, Rush Limbaugh. He doesn’t gloat, but he doesn’t go into the false neutrality that tempts some in my own ideological corner of the political universe.
   
• driftglass learns from conservative mourners that Limbaugh may have been a bit harsh at times, but – dammit – he made conservatism fun, inserting humor into dry ideology. driftglass examines that idea, and discovers the Rush humor that appealed to conservatives depended on his choice of targets.
   
• My long-time conservative friend Darrell Michaels generously invited me to present evidence that the late Rush Limbaugh was a bigot, to which I felt the obligation to respond. Vixen Strangely, at Strangely Blogged, provides video of Limbaugh himself with some of his greatest hits.
   
• At Unabashedly American, Darrell goes both-siderism on the Trump-riot, with what he fantasizes as equivalent examples. A couple of Puerto Rican Nationalists with machine guns in 1954 representing, he thinks, liberals at the time, and a couple of late night structurally damaging bombings by the radical Weather Underground half a century ago. None of that involved cheerleading by a US President or, really, any prominent political figure at the time. The Trump riot was, well, a Trump riot: an attempt to overthrow the government, the attempted assassination of legislators, the successful injury of over a hundred police officers, and the murder of several.
   
• I heard the argument a few times before it was formalized in the National Review. Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick collapsed and died a day or so after a Trump rioter clobbered him with a fire extinguisher. So can anyone prove it was a direct result? Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, pretty much demolishes the argument in a couple of sentences by simply restating it with accuracy.
   
• No, I’m not old enough to remember the Al Smith campaign for President in 1928. I was born more than 20 years later, during the Truman administration. I did hear old recordings of his proposal to repeal Prohibition: The cure for the evils of democracy… pause for a heartbeat …is more democracy.
   
  nojo looked to the impeachment trial, as did many of us, for an airing out of the core-rot of much of the lets-get-violent lynch mob ideology afflicting some of our fellow citizens: An airing with flesh-and-blood testimony from real live human beings, not just written documentation that academics can, one day, dig out of the written historical record. Then, suddenly, it all disappeared with a behind-the-scenes handshake.
   
• M. Bouffant at Web of Evil has a mental image of the Senate vote acquitting the obviously guilty Trump.
   
• Half a century ago, conservative Kevin Phillips wrote The Emerging Republican Majority. His thesis was that increasing migration to Republican leaning states would result in an insurmountable lead in aggregate popular vote in elections.
   
  Did it happen that way? I dunno. Carter won one election. Reagan and Bush won three. Since then Republicans have won a majority of votes one time out of eight elections. Once in 32 years.
   
  During the Reagan terms, Kevin Phillips did notice one other trend. He wrote that income inequality was a result of developing federal policies. He predicted that the greater concentration of wealth into the hands of a smaller group would grow from a problem into a crisis.
   
  Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger provides documentation that income inequality is bad and growing worse.
   
• Some Republicans would like to change the image of the party. MadMikesAmerica helps out, as a cartoon focus group decides whether the elephant should be replaced as a mascot.
   
• I’m pretty old, a boomer born during the Truman administration. So I remember the great 1964 debate in New York. The brazen maneuver backfired on Senator Ken Keating. Voters watched a split screen. On one side of the screen, Keating debated an empty chair labeled Robert Kennedy, scorching Kennedy for cowardice as he avoided a face-to-face debate. On the other side of the screen, we saw Bobby Kennedy forced back by Keating security guards outside a locked studio door trying to get into that same debate.
   
  News Corpse presents the Fox network, studiously refusing to cover Biden appearances, statements, legislative activity, very public announcements, proposals, and executive accomplishments. At the same time, Sean Hannity scornfully mocks President Biden for remaining hidden away from cameras. News Corpse suggests Sean would see much more of Biden if he watched much less of the Fox network.
   
• I love a good, clever, colorful phrase, even when it burns my point of view. I still recall fondly a friend mocking my excuses for Bill Clinton way back when, paraphrasing Christopher Hitchens. None of our business, my friend mimicked me, what Bill and Monica might have done in the privacy of their own Oval Office.
   
  North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz remembers his youth, listening to the finger-wagging sermons of sweaty, red-faced televangelists in their daily thunderous diatribes against the evildoers. That brings back my own memories as well. One recurring phrase was God will not be mocked.
   
  He applies that phrase to the ways today’s Christian conservatives, my brothers and sisters in Christ, mock our God.
   
• PZ Myers remembers a one-time celebrated right wing personality who has found himself banned from extreme right wing social platform Parler. Hard to believe it possible. He became too violent for extremists to tolerate.
   
• Just got a positive pregnancy test? Thinking of terminating? Live in Texas? Imani Gandy at Rewire News Group tells us about a bill, now winding its way through the Texas legislature, that will require your fertilized egg to have its own lawyer.
   
• Green Eagle celebrates the life and mourns the death of someone who touched more lives in a wonderful way than anyone else who died this week: technologist Rupert Neve.
   
• The Journal of Improbable Research finds an academic presentation by a Washington University computer scientist Blake Hannaford on what can go wrong with remote robotic surgery by internet. I like idea of remote and robotic and I find the tie-in with internet appealing. I confess I’m going to spend the rest of the weekend not thinking about actual surgery going way wrong.
   
• Nan’s Notebook goes to the movies. One quirk Nan notices is that those under stress in films often examine themselves in mirrors. If this bit of art mimics life, what are we looking for in the glass?
   
• Infidel753 thinks about thought, exploring the difference between blind follower and thinking human. Interesting and contemplative, as always.
   
• In Scotties Toy Box, things are looking up. Find out why.

– Podcasts –