So Far

December 31, 2021

Cathedral City, California

     Fast away the old year passes, as they say.  Amid all the news about the omicron COVID variant, there is still a little something to talk about other than the pandemic.  If it doesn't kill us all before it runs its course, there will be something going on in the country afterwards.  (Hell, even if it does kill us all there will still be plenty of things going on, except that we won't know or care about them, because we'll be dead.  Such is life--and death.)

     What I'm thinking about is how Joseph R. Biden, the duly elected president of the U.S., is doing after almost a year in office.  Opinion polls are far too fickle in this regard, because when people feel generally good about things, their opinions of their leaders go up, and when they're bummed out (as most people are now, although that's largely their own fault), those opinion numbers go down.  So President Biden's numbers are, predictably, and according to the newspapers at least, down, as if he can help the fact that the virus continues to mutate and people continue to ignore his advice to get vaccinated and wear masks in public.  Actually in that regard he's done quite a bit, forcing the military to get vaccinated, mandating vaccinations for federal employees, and also mandating vaccinations for most employees in the private sector.  That latter mandates have still to be given the final go-ahead by the Supreme Court, and I think that's due to be heard by them in early January.

     Here I must interject that it's surprising yet encouraging to me that this stiff-necked ultraconservative Supreme Court continues to uphold vaccine mandates, but they do, at least those imposed by  governments on government employees.  This is for the most part based, I think, on a long line of Supreme Court decisions in connection with the executive's emergency powers, going back to past epidemics, wars, and various other national disasters.  It's a solid chunk of jurisprudence that is pretty much unassailable, even by the troglodytes who anchor the right wing of the court to the shallow end of human compassion in most other regards.  Also, I imagine that the fact that most Supreme Court members are pretty old, and probably fairly concerned with their own health, outweighs their urge to side with the idiot demagogues who put them on the bench in the first place.  It goes to show you, anyway, that when it comes to the Supreme Court, nothing is an absolute given, regardless of the overall political leanings of the court at any particular time.  It doesn't hurt that the Supreme Court sits atop a vast pyramid of federal judges and court systems throughout the country, and as the leaders of their own co-equal branch of the government, they're inclined, as would the heads of either of the other two branches of government, to cozy up to the idea that heads of governmental units (local, state, and federal) get to do what they feel like doing.

     But back to Joe Biden, and how he's done in his first year.  It's been an eventful year, to be sure, and I say that he's done a pretty damned good job, especially for someone without strong backing in Congress, and very little at the Supreme Court.  He's had to put up with a bare majority in the Senate that really isn't a majority at all, but a pretend majority containing a ringer from the other side, in the person of Joe Manchin, or the Insidious Doctor Fu Man-chin, as I like to call him.  (He really is a doctor of sorts, having received at least one honorary doctorate that I know of, from West Virginia State University.  I know this because my brother, who was in the administration of that institution, used to brag about having placed the doctoral hood over Manchin's shoulders at the ceremony wherein he got that degree.  Lately my brother hasn't been bragging about that so much, since Manchin has turned out to be such a fly in the Democratic ointment.  He really should have put the hood over his head and fastened it with a zip tie.)

     But in spite of the Insidious Doctor, the President has managed to get a pretty big chunk of change to the American people, and is working hard on getting even more out there.  This is money the stingy bastards in the Republican Party would have begrudged the nation, and continue to begrudge us, especially the poorest among us.  They'd rather give it to the rich and assume that it will somehow trickle down to everybody else.  Or not.  They really don't care.  Why the citizens of West Virginia don't realize how much damage their own senator is doing to them personally, poor as they are, only speaks to how thoroughly brain-dead they are, on the whole.  Okay, enough about the Insidious Doctor and the benighted hillbillies of West Virginia, whose state song was co-written by a guy from out west who barely even visited there.  Jesus what a bunch of blockheads, and what a God-forsaken place they live in.  Okay okay, I've beaten that dead horse enough. 

     What with Congress not being his best friend and all that, Biden has had to do most of his good stuff the same way his predecessor did most of his bad stuff, by exercising his inherent executive powers.  And he's done a lot of that.  He's reversed a number of environmentally damaging decisions regarding federal land use that the last guy put in place, for instance.  Also, he's diversified his cabinet in refreshing ways, and appointed a large number of women and nonwhites to the federal bench.  His FBI, under the ultimate authority of Merrick Garland, a guy who should be on the Supreme Court right now, has rounded up and is in the process of prosecuting over 700 of the seditious turds who stormed the Capitol last January 6.  The FBI is also on the hunt for right-wing extremist organizations.  Biden's departments and agencies have given the go-ahead to the building of vast solar farms and have tried to promote other alternative forms of energy and carbon-reducing measures.  He's rejoined the Paris climate accord, tried to reassure NATO and the EU that we're not their enemy, and has quit kissing Russia's ass.

     In August Biden ended the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, which was a very good thing.  Yeah, the Afghanis are getting the shits put to them by a bunch of Islamic crazies, but that's not exactly a new thing for them, and no matter how many more years we might have stayed there it wouldn't have changed the situation, except to have kept a bunch of feckless crooks in charge of a government that only we were propping up.  Were we protecting ourselves?  Hell, no.  Were we protecting Afghanistan's neighbors?  Well, considering that its neighbors are Iran, Pakistan, and a couple of the lesser Stans, hell, no to that as well.  Were we maintaining some sort of delicate strategic balance in the region?  Shit, no, because there is no such balance.  Anyway, now the Taliban is in charge and it's going to have to start acting like the leader of a nation instead of a perpetual guerilla force.  This will either bring them down from within or push their neighbors to do something to keep them in check, instead of having the country bankrolled by the U.S. and European colonial powers.  So Biden finished ripping off the band-aid that Trump, in perhaps his only decent foreign policy move, had begun to peel off a couple of years earlier. 

     Biden and his government also have continued to stand up for the right of women to have abortions on demand, even though that might not work out so well in the coming months.  This he has done in spite of being a Catholic himself, which makes him a better Catholic than some of the nasty shits on the Supreme Court who seem poised to take the U.S. backwards into the middle of the last century on the abortion issue.  It's always struck me as interesting that a country like Ireland, held for centuries under the brutal and abusive thumb of a rigid Catholicism, could legalize abortion almost overnight, whereas the good old U.S. of A., technically religiously neutral, could give in to the most conservative elements of both the Protestant and Catholic branches of Christianity, thus balkanizing the country on the abortion issue.  What a farce.  Biden also opposes the death penalty, which is in keeping with his religious beliefs, but also shows that he has some guts and common sense and humanitarian leanings when it comes to the administration of justice.

    All right, on immigration Biden hasn't been doing so well.  In part he's been hampered by the federal courts, but he seems to be interested in reversing some of Trump's harsher policies.  And all in all he's more liberal on immigration than the President under whom he served as Veep for eight years.    

     That brings up a final point, before I end this rather turgid posting.  Joe Biden, despite his flip-flopping moderate past in the Senate, is today the most domestically liberal president this country has had since Lyndon Johnson.  Seriously.  No wonder conservatives hate him.  Sure, he has a lot more to do, and it's bound to get tougher to do after the midterm elections.  And yes, he's reversed his old positions on a number of issues, but in the right direction, not the wrong one.  That shows maturity and growth and a willingness to listen to others, not hypocrisy.  And he has not, since he was sworn in, taken a single position that I'm aware of that isn't fundamentally in line with the liberal ideals of his party.  If you can name one, then let me know.

     I shouldn't have to say this, but I will.  For a President, being liberal is a good thing.  It's not a panacea for the nation's ills, by any means, but it's better by far than being moderate or conservative.  This is a time for realpolitik, not whiny idealism, yet Biden remains an idealist, just not of the whiny sort.  He's a plodder, plodding in the correct direction, and he's surrounded himself with similar folks.  No, he's not a socialist, and we might wish him to be, but if he were he'd have an even tougher row to hoe than he does now.  

     And one last thing: charismatic he's not, no doubt about it.  But he's taken this country, in less than a year, from a presidency based on a disgusting cult of putrid personality, where every day saw a new headline about a new atrocity of presidential abuse or incompetence or dishonesty, to one where the President doesn't want or need to grab headlines on an hourly, or even a daily, basis.  Biden is a normal human being, with an abnormal amount of humility for someone in his position.  For that I give him a lot of credit, and wish him well.