I don't have time to worry about foreign terrorists when I'm surrounded by domestic assholes.  ―old college pal

Greetings from the Far Left Coast, where I have passed the cold, damp, dark days of January reading biographies of the painters Leonora Carrington and Emily Carr, both also writers, and another book about Carr, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Frida Kahlo, along with more of Louise Penny's Three Pines/Gamache novels and The Bridge of Sighs by Olen Steinhauer, the first novel in his Yalta Boulevard sequence that traces the history of an unnamed, fictional Eastern European country during its communist period, from 1948 until 1989, one book for each decade. Bridge of Sighs is dark, cynical, and quite good. Steinhauer's Department of Tourism series about a fictional CIA department post-9/11 is also quite good. Last and far from least, Eight Ball Boogie, a fine Irish noir by Declan Burke with a piquant darkness, raw, rough finish, and the bitter aftertaste of betrayal..

Film. Dernier Domicle Connu (1970), based on the novel The Last Known Address by Joseph Harrington (1965) and directed by José Giovanni, is a decent crime thriller. L'attesa (The Wait) is a 2015 Italian drama directed by Piero Messina with Juliette Binoche at her best. At one point I almost gave up on it but was rewarded when I saw it through to the end. Jeanne (Lou de Laâge) arrives in Sicily to visit her boyfriend at the villa of his mother (Binoche). Giuseppe is not there however and does not answer his phone or respond to Jeanne's messages, and his mother, Anna, behaves quite oddly. Only after a bit does Anna explain to Jeanne that the family has suffered a terrible loss, the death of her brother.

I do not think I give anything away when I tell you that it soon seems apparent to everyone except Jeanne that it is not the brother who died. Anna is distraught, a wreck, evasive when Jeanne asks about Giuseppe. Can it be that Giuseppe is dead and she is simply unable to acknowledge that? Or is something else going on? Jeanne meanwhile is anxious. Why does Giuseppe not answer his phone or return her calls? And why is his mother so bizarre? As the days pass and Easter approaches the women form something of a bond. The dramatic tension is considerable. How will Jeanne learn what happened to Giuseppe? Will she learn he is dead or just mysteriously gone away? What will be her reaction? Could I perhaps have been mistaken about what seemed apparent? And what will happen when the flirtatious young woman meets two young men while swimming in the nearby lake?

Finally, on a lighter and decidedly lesser note, the 1965 comedy What's New Pussycat with Peter O'Toole as a babe magnet, Peter Sellers as his demented psychoanalyst, and as the opening credits have it, "introducing Woody Allen," who wrote the screenplay. Romy Schneider, Paula Prentiss, and Ursula Andress are among the women who throw themselves at O'Toole. Much is heavy-handed, tedious, and dated. The film is partly redeemed by an extended madcap, slapstick, screwball sequence that takes up most of the final half hour.

And onward, down into the muck. The president's reaffirmation of his campaign pledge to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court drew predictable fire from the usual suspects. Some operate on the presumption that any black woman picked to succeed Stephen Breyer will be ipso facto a lesser qualified person than, well, you fill in the blanks. That presumption has been refuted by the distinguished, eminently qualified candidates whose names have been bandied about in the early going. Elements of racism and sexism play into the performative outrage and political gamesmanship. This is what rouses the rabble, I mean, the base. At bottom is pure nihilism. All that matters is power.

Even Lindsey Graham, noted statesman and golfing partner of the disgraced former president, sees nothing wrong with Biden's pledge. The final choice will be made on the basis of various ancillary considerations as these things always are. For example, age: No one would expect the nomination of someone seventy-five years old no matter how otherwise qualified that person might be.

Biden might have phrased the commitment more artfully. He is not known for eloquence, mastery of rhetoric, and kindred elitist talents. One might think this would make him more popular in some quarters.

Ruth Marcus and Paul Waldman in opinion columns at The Washington Post reflect up my thinking on this one.

Marcus:

Would I be more comfortable if Biden hadn’t been quite so explicit? Yes. Partly because it carries an aura of unfairness to announce that no one will be considered who does not meet an announced racial test. Ambiguity has its advantages. Think about the cases the court has just agreed to hear over affirmative action in higher education. Wherever you come down on the issue, letting colleges consider diversity as one of a number of factors is less problematic than allowing numerical quotas.

And partly because it opens the door to critics denigrating the eventual nominee. (The carping over Biden’s Supreme Court pledge is historically inaccurate and racially tinged, January 27, 2022)

Waldman:

Here’s the reality of Supreme Court nominations: Hundreds of people clear the bar of qualifications and intelligence to serve. There’s no such thing as one most qualified candidate. Once a president is picking from that pool, other variables come into play: their age, their life experiences, their ideological inclinations, whether anything about them might complicate confirmation.

…

Every president takes those questions into consideration, and conservatives have supported some nominees precisely because of those ancillary qualities. They praised Amy Coney Barrett for being a mother of seven and for having not attended law school at Harvard or Yale like every other justice. They found that kind of diversity valuable. (The race-baiting response to Biden’s Supreme Court pledge,  January 28, 2022

I know I beat this into the ground, as does Charlie Sykes over at The Bulwark, most recently in a podcast with Ruy Teixeira: Dems' Problems Run Deeper Than Just Biden. Teixeira goes down the line rebutting progressive gospel about how the faithful will build a progressive electoral coalition. Some examples:

• It's all about turnout. Except that in 2020's high turnout election everybody's turnout went up, "including among groups the left would have preferred stayed home. The net result of higher turnout did not significantly boost Democratic fortunes; if anything Republicans may have a benefitted a bit more from the higher levels of turnout."
• It's all about people of color. Progressive dogma holds that growth of the nonwhite population means the future is theirs because "being 'people of color' welds them together into a voter group with unshakeable loyalty to the Democratic party and loathing for the Republican party." Except that in 2020, "running against Donald Trump…and in the wake of a social upheaval after George Floyd’s murder that associated the Democratic party closely with a left stance on the centrality of 'systemic racism' to pretty much every policy issue…the Democrats actually lost ground among nonwhite voters. They lost 7 margin points from their 2016 margin among black voters and a stunning 16 points from their 2016 margin among Hispanics.”

The same ill-founded faith holds that embrace of cultural leftism is a winner and that an election resulting in down-ballot losses and "whisker-thin control of Congress…[somehow suggested] it was transformation time in America."

Teixeira concludes, rightly I think, that Democrats have made themselves seem out of touch with much of the country.

They are now paying the political price for this, staring into a likely defeat in 2022 and the very real possibility that Donald Trump might return to the Presidency after the 2024 election. The left’s theory of the case now lies in ruins and it is up to Democrats to come up with a theory of the case that gives them a fighting chance of staving off disaster. It won’t be easy.

Another example is discussed by Shadi Hamid in an article at The Atlantic about how the cultural left's worldview distorts health policy: Race-Based Rationing Is Real—And Dangerous.

Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich) is on the right track: "We’re going to have to knuckle down and say, not everyone’s going to get exactly what they want. Getting something is better than getting nothing. And that seems to be a complicated concept for some people in my caucus."

James Carville is often entertaining. He is sometimes even right. Among other things, Joe Manchin is not the problem. Carville:

Understand that Joe Manchin is a Roman Catholic Democrat in a state in which not a single county has voted Democrat [for president] since 2008. I repeat: not a single county has voted Democrat since 2008.

Politics is about choices, and he’s up for reelection in 2024. If Manchin runs for reelection, I’ll do everything I can to help him because it’s either going to be Joe Manchin or Marsha Blackburn. It ain’t Joe Manchin or Ed Markey. You got to understand that. It’s really that damn simple. (Sean Illing interview with Carville at Vox, January 27, 2022)

Or as Tim Miller put it, without Manchin you get Senator Cletus Von Ivermectin (R) and Mitch McConnell is majority leader.

"Look," says Carville, "I'm a liberal Democrat. Always have been."

But some of these people bitching about Manchin can’t see political reality straight. Six percent of adults in this country identify as "progressive." Only 11 or 12 percent of Democrats identify as progressive. So let’s just meet in the middle and say something like 7 or 8 percent of the country agrees with the progressive left. This ain’t a goddamn debate anymore.

I have not fact-checked Carville's figures, but they sound plausible. Even if he is short-changing progressives, they remain a long way from a majority even among people who identify as Democrats. There are cadres out on the far left lunatic fringe and woke intellectuals in the hallowed groves of academe who do not identify as Democrats yet would not vote for what used to be an orthodox Republican much the Trumpist faction, but they are even less representative of the country as a whole than progressive Democrats. Talking to themselves on Twitter is not apt to change that.

Another thing Democrats need to do, Carville told Brian Williams on MSNBC, is to stop being so "namby-pamby" and play hardball with the clowns who are the face of the Republican Party. Point out, and keep pointing out, that Matt Gaetz is the subject of a federal investigation about having sex with an underage female. Point out the Ohio State wrestlers who say that their coach Jim Jordan knew they would be molested by the team doctor and did nothing about it. Point out Lauren Boebert's arrest record in Wyoming and talk about how she met her husband.

"Listen, Brian, I have the equivalent of a Ph.D. in White-Trashology, and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert could be the subject of a dissertation." Does Carville perhaps traffic in hyperbole? Judge for youself: GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert and husband racked up arrests in home district  (Jon Levine, NY Post, January 16, 2021).

Once again I rattled on interminably and still pressing issues remain unaddressed: stock market, Urkaine, Canadian truckers run amok, Rams and Bengals advance to the Super Bowl, Tom Brady retires. And far from least, will there be spring training?

Keep the faith.

yr obdt svt

One new blog post: The Anti-vax Brigade: Carrying on an Ignoble Tradition, January 25, 2022. The good news out of DC on Sunday was that the anti-mandate/anti-vax rally numbered only several thousand, far fewer than the 20,000 organizers had hoped for. The event was billed as a protest against mandates, not medicine, but the line between anti-mandate and anti-vaccine is sketchy at best…read more>>

Pictured below: view from the deck, January 14, 2022