So a quick question about politics. It seemed likely to me that all the Republicans in the House were going to vote against our stimulus package, and that’s what happened. Given that we have a President who both campaigned on avoiding partisan politics and appeared to take seriously the idea of sitting down and talking with the other Party, any support from that Party would be viewed as proof of Our Only President’s post-partisan credentials. Although it might have been in the interests of one or two Republican Representatives to cross the lines and burnish their own post-partisan credentials, the discipline of that Party over the last fifteen years or so works against that, both in providing examples of the hammer coming down on such ‘moderates’ and in replacing such Representatives, either with Republicans who disdain bipartisanship and therefore gain nothing by engaging in it, or with Democrats. What’s left of the Republican Party in the House isn’t as vulnerable to such temptations, and then the Party did their job of whipping the vote into shape. I don’t blame them for that, except of course that as far as actual governing<\/i> goes, it stinks.\n
But as we so often observe about politics here in this Tohu Bohu, there’s what happens, and then there’s the story of what happens. So what’s the story here?\n
There are two obvious and competing storylines, it seems to me. One is that Our Only President, for all his post-partisan rhetoric, when the rubber hits the road is the same old partisan politician doing the same old partisan things. The other is that Our Only President put this and that into the package and took this and that out of the package, all in negotiation across the aisle, but when the rubber hit road, the Republicans turned their backs on the whole thing.\n
So here’s a question to Gentle Readers all. Which story about what happened are you hearing? I don’t mean what actually happened, which is (surprise!) more complicated than that. And I don’t really mean which story are the specific outlets reporting, as some are reporting one and some the other, just as you would expect, and the some are having people on to argue it back and forth, just as you would expect. I will say that the cable news people are pretty obviously going with the one that’s good for Republicans, but again, that’s what you would expect. No, what I’m interested in is, as far as you can tell from the general zeitgeist, which story is becoming the<\/i> story? Have you heard actual humans talk about it without being paid to do so? If so, have they settled on a story?\n
The power of rhetoric is, at heart, the power to tell the story of what happened, often before it happens. If Our Only President loses this one, it’s a bad sign.\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Which Your Humble Blogger wonders if there is life outside Left Blogovia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11839"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18664,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11839\/revisions\/18664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}