Liberal and left reactions to Trump and Senate Republicans' expressed intention to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court do not make me feel that the American future is in good hands.
For example:
Do tell. Who is "we"? Is Aslan speaking for the People's Liberation Front of Judea here?
CNN pundit Don Lemon had to walk back a remark about "blow[ing] up the system", explaining that it had been taken out of context. He's almost certainly being paid far too much to be shooting off his mouth carelessly on cable, don't you think? I do get tired of being told that we must take the corporate media seriously, because they are responsible, objective news professionals, unlike all those crazy bloggers and nutcases on Twitter.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a little more cautious, but not much.
"This is one of the most important times that we have had for everyday people to stand up," Ocasio-Cortez said. "We all need to be more courageous and we all must act in unprecedented ways to make sure that our rights are stabilized. And to Mitch McConnell, we need to tell him that he is playing with fire. We need to make sure that this vacancy is protected, that our election continues and that the American people have their say."I want to know how Representative Ocasio-Cortez proposes to burn McConnell's fingers. There are apparently a lot of procedural tools available to Senators to slow and even block action in Congress when you don't hold a majority, but AOC's rhetoric here sounds a bit stronger than that. So she sounds like her House colleagues, saying how concerned they are, and how they're not going to stand for Trump's naughtiness for one second longer - and then they do nothing. What happened to the calendar that AOC demanded Postmaster DeJoy deliver to Congress in August? A subpoena was issued, which is more than the Democrats have done before, but I can't find any updates. It's all very well to strut and preen and posture about all the tough things you're going to do, but if you don't carry out your threats, you just look foolish, and no one will take succeeding threats seriously.
There isn't very much Senate Democrats can do without a majority, but there's also no point in puffing themselves up and making threats they have no intention to carry out. Far better to do what they can, and prepare to mock the Republicans when they scream that it's all so unfair.
I don't really expect or want Aslan or Lemon to blow anything up, but all the prattle about Revolution and guillotines and killing Nazis and burning it all down that I see from leftists on social media is embarrassing. For me, it's all summed up by the guy in Charlottesville who lit an aerosol spray to defend himself against a neo-Nazi with a gun - which, miraculously, misfired. (Heather Heyer wasn't so lucky that day.) I would sympathize, because I feel helpless too, but some of the people promising fire and fury, the like of which the world has never seen, are old enough to know better. But cheering on street violence from the sidelines on Twitter, while other people get hurt or killed, is criminally irresponsible. And people who think that giving Nazis the bird is effective are no better than the Never-Trump Resistance they deride.
It could be worse, though:
