Left Jabs

    Panic is sometimes unavoidable, but it’s almost never useful. Which is why we all have to chill about the gerrymander problem and appreciate the position in which we continue to sit. From all indications, the coming midterms will be a wave election, where we can expect people to be voting Democratic in overwhelming numbers. And in a wave election, all bets are off. No district will be safe for Republicans, no matter how cynically it’s been molested by gerrymander. I wasn’t planning to talk about the current orgy of redistricting now taking place in the wake of the odious Callais decision, but then I encountered, in the New York Times, a succession of above-the-fold articles that spiked my blood pressure. Once again, the Times has fallen back on the tired old Democrats-in-disarray model for its framing, the better to scare the clicks out of their readers. Here is one of the headlines, and they’re all in the same vein: Democrats Searc...

  I’m taking this week off, and why not? It’s not like there’s anything happening, like a war or a SCOTUS atrocity or something. Anyway, here’s a repeat from almost exactly a year ago, which foreshadowed just about everything we’re seeing today. What was then a trickle of defectors from MAGA-world is now a deluge of people getting FAFO’d, some surely to death. They’re learning the hard way that they’ve been hornswoggled. Actually, it’s not clear that they’re learning anything, but the Trump regime is reaping the whirlwind, and his idiot supporters are directly in its path. Unfortunately, so are the rest of us.   For nearly eight years, I have regularly ridden my bicycle past a house that has faithfully flown a Trump flag, right underneath Old Glory, without interruption in all that time. The flag has been refreshed over the years — from the original MAGA slogan, to “Keep America Great,” to “Trump 2024”— but the political commitment, and the willingness ...