The Art of Losing Isn't Hard to Master

Joe did a good job covering the shutdown cave this morning, so I’m just here for color commentary. A few random bullet points:

• Kudos to Kay, who called it that cancelling flights would make the shutdown go away. It wasn’t SNAP, it wasn’t paying government employees — it was the spectre of a bad travel Thanksgiving. The possibility that some of these entitled soft fucks might have a hard time flying back to their districts, and some of their rich donors wouldn’t be able to fly their private planes, ended the shutdown within a couple of days.

• Obamacare is effectively dead. I’ll budget at least $15K for horrible insurance next year and I’m still not sure that will be enough. Most people who don’t have resources will drop their ACA policy, therefore causing it to be more expensive for the rest of us.

• There is a very important message to rank-and-file Democrats in this vote: fuck you. Fuck you for being excited about Mamdani, who we didn’t pick. Fuck you for hoping. Fuck you for expecting us to have a plan. Just keep sending us your small dollar donations and expect nothing, absolutamente nada, from us in return. That message goes double for any Trump voters who switched to the Democrats last Tuesday.

• Trump is going to spike the ball on this as hard as his aging, decrepit limbs will let him, and in the mind of the public, he’ll be right. Democrats threw a tantrum and got nothing. We were all inconvenienced for a vote that could have been taken a couple of months ago with the same result.

• Trump and the rest of MAGA also learned that cruelty towards people he doesn’t care about is a great lever to get what he wants from Democrats. He’ll do it again next time, more quickly and more savagely. It’s no coincidence that the pardon of yet more J6ers was announced this morning.

• The way to tell if a Democratic Senator really opposed this bill is to see if they support removing Schumer as Minority Leader. If they don’t, then they are quiet, lying supporters of this kind of chickenshit politics. Brian Schatz is a great example, as far as I’m concerned.

Since MAGA has been flooding the zone with shit, the Democrats who dreamed up this cave can tell themselves that the country will forget about their cowardice by next year and still vote for them. And, hell, they’re probably right — there are only two choices on the ballot. One of them is rusty tire rims and anthrax, the other is just mealy-mouthed do-nothing cowards. People will vote for the latter, alright, but they won’t do it with excitement, nor will sometime voters bother to vote for this milquetoast nonsense.

This is so far from meeting the moment that I can’t even:

Finally, a guy who attends a bunch of Democratic fundraisers and has his finger on the weak, thready pulse of centrism has this observation:

Ezra Klein, another centrist whisperer, validates this with his reporting. The “logic” here is that if Republicans did away with the filibuster then what would stop them from doing horrible things: for example, passing legislation that would let masked thugs roam the streets of our cities, defunding government agencies they don’t like, etc. Obviously, the Democratic caucus of the Senate as currently constructed will never vote to overturn the filibuster if this is the fear-based reasoning they’re using.

Last night makes it even more clear that the fight to make the Democratic Party a functioning opposition party isn’t going to be quick or easy, since there are at least 20 or so Senators who need to be primaried away in order to get some fighters in the ring. 2028 will be just the start. It might take a decade or more. Hope was alive after Tuesday, and like clockwork these clowns killed it last night.