This week, yet another government shutdown appears inevitable because a sizable chunk of the House Freedom Caucus believes, in the words of Otter in "Animal House," that "this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part."
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's decision to move ahead with impeachment proceedings — and the Democrats' response — reminded me of something Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser reportedly once said, "The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves, which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them we are missing."
In December 1998, Rep. Bob Livingston, Republican of Louisiana, was set to succeed Rep. Newt Gingrich as speaker of the House.
"China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man," scoffed then-presidential candidate Joe Biden in 2019. Two years later, now president Biden declared: "The Chinese are eating our lunch. They're eating our lunch, economically. They're investing hundreds of billions of dollars in research and development. ... We got to compete."
So, Ron DeSantis gets it after all.
There's an approach to political questions that the conservative in me rebels against. Let's call it the "You can't have too much of a good thing" fallacy.
America blew it.
"They're not indicting me, they're indicting you. I just happen to be standing in the way," Donald Trump declared (again) in the wake of a new updated federal indictment connected to the classified documents case.
The controversy over the Biden administration's decision to supply Ukraine with cluster munitions reminded me of my old boss William F. Buckley's famous rejoinder to claims the United States and the Soviet Union were morally equivalent because they both possessed nuclear weapons and spent a lot on defense.
Like many people, I was glued to the news for much of Saturday, watching what seemed, at least for a moment, to be the first stages of a coup d'état — and it still might be.
