"President Biden promised to usher in a golden age of bipartisan cooperation, but instead he is showing a reverse Midas touch..."

"... taking issues that once united Republicans and Democrats and making them partisan and divisive," writes Marc A. Thiessen (at WaPo).

Until Biden came along, every single covid-19 relief bill was approved with overwhelming bipartisan support in both houses.... For Biden, who promised to put his “whole soul” into uniting Republicans and Democrats, passing a bipartisan covid bill should have been a layup. I mean, Trump did it five times. But instead, the president has turned unity into division by using covid relief as a pretext to pass all sorts of liberal spending projects that have nothing to do with the pandemic....

There has long been strong support among Republican leaders for an infrastructure package of as much as $1 trillion. But instead of uniting Republicans and Democrats around a bipartisan deal, Biden is using infrastructure as a pretext to spend more tax dollars on things that have nothing to do with infrastructure. A Politico analysis of his $2.25 trillion proposal found that only $821 billion, or 37 percent, is focused on traditional infrastructure items such as transportation, electricity and Internet....

How does Biden justify the hyperpartisan start to his presidency? Just as Democrats redefined “infrastructure,” the president is now trying to redefine “bipartisanship.” Biden recently declared, “I would like . . . elected Republican support, but what I know I have now is that I have electoral support from Republican voters.”

FROM THE EMAIL: Iain writes:

The President has spent his entire career as a windsock, showing us all the direction of the prevailing winds that would keep Joe Biden in public office and in the public eye. He's always been a partisan hack, but with his own electoral interests front and center. That he is now touting division as unity and partisanship as bipartisan is a sign of either his cognitive decline and weakened independence or of his reading that this is the way the wind is blowing. Or both. Wind direction, or the perception of it, can differ if there is an obstacle between you and the wind, or something that alters the wind in a small area to appear directionally different from the actual prevailing winds. Time will tell, I suppose, which way the winds are actually blowing.

And Bob Boyd writes:

"Biden...promised to put his 'whole soul' into uniting Republicans and Democrats"

That's like promising to put a mouse turd into a double batch of oatmeal cookies.

I have a thing about headlines that begin with the word "how."

You may remember my post from last December, "How the word "how" has become the most deceptive word in the history of headlines": "I'm sure some 'how' headlines sit atop articles that really explain how to do something, but I must cry out against the infestation of 'how' in headlines." 

Since it is my self-imposed task to be on the alert for "how" headlines, I must bring you this from today's Washington Post: "How the forces inside the GOP that pushed out John Boehner led to Matt Gaetz." 

I doubt that this piece (by Paul Kane) is really going to tell me how these "forces" led somewhere. I expect to find only an assertion that the moderates who used to have the GOP under control have lost their grip. But I'll give Kane a chance. Show me the forces and show me how they "led to Matt Gaetz" (whatever that means).

Reading, I see Kane is reviewing Boehner's memoir, which, Kane admits up front, hasn't got one word about Matt Gaetz. 

Boehner writes about his distaste for immoderate politicos within both parties: They are self-promoters who "claim to be true believers and purists, like the right-wing Freedom Caucus or the left-wing Squad, but really they are just political terrorists." There were always people like that in Congress, and Boehner supposedly wanted to tame them.

Kane writes: 

In his new memoir, [Boehner] finally admits that he couldn’t control this new crowd, that they often handled him, not the other way around. “They didn’t want legislative victories. They wanted wedge issues and conspiracies and crusades. To them, my talk of trying to get anything done made me a sellout,” he writes.

The very people who had delivered him the speaker’s gavel had now made his job a living hell.... After a couple years Boehner met with Roger Ailes, a longtime friend who was then head of Fox News. He pleaded with Ailes to keep flamethrowers like [Michelle] Bachmann off the air.

Instead the TV executive told the speaker that the Obama administration was spying on him — the conspiracy theories were within Fox headquarters. Fox was afraid that other conservative personalities would eat into their ratings, so they ignored Boehner’s entreaties and steered deeper into that world, right through Trump’s own 2016 campaign, according to Boehner.

“These shows went from real commentary pushing conservative ideas to just pissing people off and making money,” he writes....

And Gaetz flourished in that environment — that environment that was always there, that Boehner (purportedly) didn't like but couldn't change.

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There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.

"You might be getting tired of hearing about the Great Comments Decision of 2021 but here are my two cents after thinking about it for the past few days."

Writes a reader named Chris.

I’ve been following your blog for a long time having come over from Instapundit probably in the early 2000’s. I’m not a commenting kind of person but I do read a lot of them. I love it when people who are knowledgeable about the article or post weigh in and add value to the discussion. That is what a great comments section can do.

Lately I’ve been seeing both in your comment section and others something I came to recognize back in the 1990’s.

I used to watch the old PBS MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour show. They would do a 10 or 15 minute news summary and then dig deeper into three or four issues with experts or panel discussions. After many years of watching I got bored with the show and after thinking about it realized it was because they had the same cast of experts on the panels year after year. I now could predict almost perfectly what I was going to hear on any issue once I knew who was on the panel. I stopped watching after that happened.

Your comments section was in the same place. The same list of characters who repeated the same arguments. I found myself scrolling by many comments once I recognized the names because I knew what they were going to say. This dynamic, far more than any right/left political considerations, is what was greatly reducing the value of the comments for me.

The main value I was still seeing in the discussions was when people from across the country reported their experiences. I will miss that. It was a great way to understand a bit more about what was happening in other parts of America.

But it would be easy to make the case that the negatives in the comments vastly outweighed this particular positive. It is kind of sad that I see people who want to blame the closure of your comments on their political enemies on the “right” or the “left.” Not everything has to be political and not everything you dislike is caused by the other side.

I grew up in a time when people could disagree politically and still be friends and neighbors. We had better figure out how to do that again and remember we are all Americans or we are headed for some very dangerous places. I intend to keep reading your blog as long as you are interested in writing it. Not because I agree with everything you write, but because you offer something I don’t see in the media or other blogs. And rather than try to define what that is I’ll just call it cruel neutrality.

Thanks, Chris. 

If you have comments on this (or another post), you can email me here. I love the way the email approach is working, and I hope you like the many updates on today's posts: here, here, here, here, and here.

Chris says he loves the comments "when people who are knowledgeable about the article or post weigh in and add value to the discussion." That might be exactly the kind of thing that readers will submit by email. I have high hopes that this email approach will make everything better. I'm feeling very positive about the response in the email. I stop and read email when it's good for me, and the quality of what I'm receiving is very high.

"Harvey thinks Michael is a soulless, tasteless, lying prick."

From "How Harvey Weinstein Survived His Midlife Crisis (For Now)," a 2004 article in New York Magazine. The "Michael" in question is Michael Eisner. If you care. 

I'm seeing that quote because it is in the Oxford English Dictionary, the most recent example of the use of the word I looked up, "soulless." That is, most recent for meaning 2a: "Of a person: lacking spirit, sensitivity, or other qualities regarded as elevated or human; (now esp.) lacking in human warmth, feeling, or sympathy; cold, heartless." 

I'm actually more interested in meaning 1, "Having no soul," because I was having a real-life conversation about the notion that some people don't have a soul, and whether, if that could be true, the soulless person could acquire a soul, and whether a person who regards another person as soulless has a moral or intellectual obligation to look inside himself and seriously examine whether he himself has got a soul.

I read the news today....

"Legendary Drummer Nick Barker Thinks Modern Death Metal Has Become Soulless "There's very little artistic merit these days'" (Metal Injection).

"Millionaire Sandbanks residents are at war with developers over £250m plan to build 'soulless' block of 119 flats on site of Victorian hotel where radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi set up wireless station in 1898" (The Daily Mail).

"Internet slams ‘idiot’ senator who tweeted graphics attacking infrastructure bill" (Raw Story)("Each of you Republican Senators is just a soulless husk void of a heart, morals, or any ideas of value-- mere grifters and racists willing to say and do anything for money, the future be damned. What a legacy"). 

"Justin Bieber Continues to Gush on the Soulless ‘Justice’" (The Emory Wheel).

 "Godzilla vs Kong Review – Soulless CGI MonsterFest" (NerdFest).

"Safaree Samuels Explains How Social Media Creates Culture of Soulless Materialism and Vanity: ‘The Reality Is Nobody Shows the Struggle’" (Atlanta Black Star)("Social media got 22-year-olds wanting to off they selves cause they don’t make 6 figures and drive a 7 series. S–t is terrible. Got Women thinking if you can’t afford a Chanel bag, you doing bad in life and offer them nothing. Got dudes thinking a good 9-5 is slavery. Nobody likes their body, nobody like their home. Just a mass group of people wanting what others have. Or pretend to have"). 

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