You’ve roasted the bird. But oh crap, you’ve forgotten the wine. You’re not sure anyone gets out of this alive without the wine, so you hop in the car and dash over to the store. Except you don’t remember to put the bird back to warm in the oven before you leave. You don’t even remember to cover it in foil.
Meanwhile, your dog is a dog. It doesn’t care that is should never, ever have been given this opportunity in the first place. It doesn’t care about the bigger picture. When its oldest instincts kick in, its agenda is strictly its own. It gets up on the counter and gets to work on that bird. Delicious.
Alas! It hears your car in the driveway. This, as Bruce Springsteen might say, is the important part. In this instant, how does your dog react?
Does he run and hide?
No, he does not.
Does he make an effort to somehow cover his indiscretion?
No, he does not.
From this instant until he hears that doorknob turn, you know exactly what he does.
HE STARTS TO EAT FASTER.
No offense intended, but for the purposes of this post, your dog is the congressional GOP and the Trump administration. They’ve been feasting with abandon, because that’s who they are.
No responsible adults have been around to stop them. Upon seeing the midterm tallies roll in, certain people might expect or even hope they would course-correct, but certain people would be fundamentally misunderstanding the situation. It’s time to:
Name Stephen Miller to run the White House.
Trash procedural norms to fast-track more judicial confirmations before the next Congress.
Refuse to back off the ego-stroking tariffs that cost them so many votes, and no backing off the needless boondoggle in Iran that cost them so many votes.
Game-plan with Putin before telling Ukraine to do things the U.S. would never do in the same situation. Things that their own Saint Ronnie would never in a million years have suggested.
And so on. We won’t even get into the the ballroom, the arch, the next body of water to catch Trump’s attention.
For the next two years — but especially for the remainder of this Congress — there will be no “lessons learned,” no moderating of the sort they’re always concern-trolling the left to do.
If America thought this bunch were capable of any other impulse, then the midterms would not have been such a bloodbath. But mainstream America has figured MAGA out, at last. So they voted in the return of adult supervision, some foil over the turkey, and some well-placed gates around the house.
We shouldn’t’ve been so careless in the first place. We got distracted, we weren’t thinking clearly. The consequences are real and often permanent, from ICE to the measles. But this November, especially, we have an unexpected gravy boat of reasons to be thankful. Help is on the way. It’s far from perfect but better than it was — and there’s always the wine.
Neil can sing us off in the middle of a Blue month that has shown us what we’re capable of (in Mississippi!) even while our past mistakes continue to take their toll.
