DIRECTIONS

According to the Real Clear Politics Web site, Joe Biden is sitting on a 42% approval rating, after one year in office. (And just so you know, Donald Trump has the same rating, currently.)

That sounds pretty bad, but you have to take into account the fact that a lot of folks polled are Republicans, some 68% of which don't even think Biden is the legitimate president of this country.

I got a feeling those guys are not very likely to endorse the man's performance.

Democrats, on the other hand, also have issues with the president: lack of voting rights legislation, failure to pass Build Back Better, and so forth. They may even still be smarting from the retreat from Afghanistan and how it was handled (though I doubt it could have gone much better).

Democrats are especially annoyed at Biden for not getting more done, despite having majorities in both houses of Congress.

But does he really have a majority in the Senate?

Two DINOs there seem to have as their mission in life to prevent Biden from getting much done—mainly by refusing to fiddle with the filibuster, that controversial Senate procedure that requires 60 votes to pass pretty much anything.

(By and large, Republican Senators line up the way Mitch McConnell tells them, which is designed to stop Biden at every point. In other words, pure partisan politics as its finest.)

One of those obstructionist Democratic Senators, Kyrsten Sinema, was recently censured by her state party leadership for failing to do everything in her power to ensure voting rights in this country.

For their part, Republicans are against any legislation that bolsters voting rights. Those guys need to be able to cheat in order to get elected. National voting rights are an existential threat to the GOP.

Quoting from the ABC news site: "H.R. 1 is an attempt to use the Democrats' slim majority to unlevel the playing field and take away the rights of roughly half of the voters in the country," said Mark Weaver, a GOP consultant based in Ohio and an election law attorney.

Losing an election just naturally destroys your life: The winners repossess your car, foreclose on your house, shoot your dog in the face, and slam you and your family into a concentration camp.

We've all been there, right?

Another Republican Tweeted that voting rights would turn America into a one-party country, like Venezuela or Russia. Mitch McConnell called the bill a "power grab." You just have to look at it from their point of view.

The other DINO, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, would seem to have an excuse to rob Biden of presidential victories. He represents a state that went for Trump in 2020. Manchin's constituents might covet some of the provisions in the Build Back Better bill, but perhaps they're willing to forgo those goodies in the near term to reach a higher goal: the eventual re-election of Donald Trump in 2024.

Sinema doesn't have that excuse. Arizona went for Biden, a result that has withstood multiple attempts to delegitimize.

The deeper question, should congressional representatives take their instructions from the people in their district or should they listen to national party leaders, who may have loftier prizes in mind?

(I wrote about this in my previous post.)

Another category of polling displayed on the Real Clear Politics site is the question of whether the country is headed in the right direction.

The latest poll (Reuters/Ipsos), taken just a few days ago, puts the break at 23/62, folks not at all happy with the way the country is going.

The thing is, I have a lot of trouble understanding a poll like this.

Suppose a large number of people think the country is headed for a Stop-the-Steal-induced civil war. Some of those guys might conclude civil war is the right direction. So, are they part of the 23% who are happy with the trend, because squabbling over 2020 takes them where they want to go?

Or would they be part of the 62%, folks who think matters are going so badly another civil war would be warranted? (And they're all for it.)

Could go either way, it seems to me.

On the other hand, the people who are fed up with Stop-the-Steal nonsense, think this is a bad trend. Is Biden supposed to take the hit for this, because he hasn't managed to stamp it out?

(Mitt Romney once said you have to tell those folks the truth. Unfortunately, they already know the truth: Trump won the election in a landslide. They know he did because he said so, repeatedly.)

In other news, people are sick and tired of the Covid pandemic. Is Biden to blame for this, too? And if they're also angry about vaccination mandates, which is worse? Biden's authoritarianism, or the continuing pandemic?

I guess you could blame the guy for each or for both.

Mounting inflation pisses people off, you bet. But if it leads to Biden being a one-termer, then inflation is a good thing, in the Trumpist book, at least.

If folks are looking for new stuff to lay on Biden, a lot of bad stuff could happen before the mid-term election: Russia's invasion of Ukraine, for instance. Or more rocket tests from Kim Jong-un. Or another, even deadlier variant of the Covid virus.

Or the president could get lucky: Maybe the Army's vaccine against both SARS viruses—and all their variants—could lead to a crushing defeat for Covid.

I'm thinking Joe Biden might slurp up a little credit for things like this.

Maybe it could offset the blame he gets for stuff he has no control over.

TELLING THE TRUTH

How do you know when someone is telling the truth?

If the statement in question concerns something you know nothing about, you may have to do some research. Which is tricky, because if you go to the wrong sites on the Internet, you might verify somebody's ridiculous position by listening to somebody else's effed-up lies.

And that could lead you down the proverbial garden path, which intersects neatly with the one paved with good intentions: Welcome to Hell, Bubba!

But maybe you won't have to do any research.

The easiest way to tell if someone is truthful is if they're saying something you already know to be true. You have now not only verified the statement, by extension you have gone a long way toward verifying the person making the statement. At the very least, the next thing the guy says will inspire a lot less skepticism.

You also may have unknowingly stepped off a cliff, and it's a long way down.

Here's the problem: You're a human being, which is almost never a good thing.

Because human beings are the stupidest, meanest, and craziest creatures in the Universe, as far as anybody knows.

It's What's Wrong With Us.

Humans are the ones who think they know things. Unfortunately, they're almost always wrong. Worse, they virtually never find out they're wrong. Everywhere they look, they see proof that everything in their head is true.

Or so it seems. Good enough for human work, at least.

See, it's easy to know when other people are full of crap. We just don't have nearly as good a track record when it comes to sussing out our own fragrant pile of faulty knowledge.

If somebody says something you already believe to be true, it's likely they're packed with the same brand of crap that resides in your own rotten melon. Consequently, you've learned nothing about the veracity of the speaker. Which means your new-found confidence in the guy is entirely misplaced.

Let's take Donald Trump, for instance.

I have often heard his loyal followers say they like him because he tells the truth. That's a statement on an almost infinite level of balderdash. The man is carved out of a single block of living crap.

Can his followers be that stupid?

Of course they can. In fact, we're born to it.

But I think what's really happening is that Donald Trump is spouting nonsense that matches—or at least rhymes with—the crap that already exists within the listener's rancid brain.

They're all full of the same damned crap!

Maybe politicians know this, and exploit it. Or maybe they just instinctively act this way. They stand in front of the cameras and spout their crap and see what happens. If their crap is popular, they move ahead and gain power.

And that is incredibly dangerous. It's how you end up with a siege at the Capitol. Stuff like that.

This whole problem began with a flaw in the democratic process engendered by eighteenth century communications.

The basic idea of representative government is that some guy will sit in a room in the Capitol and do what you tell him to do. He represents you in that room. It shouldn't matter what his opinion is on the subject at hand. He's supposed to do what the folks back home want him to do.

But what if he can't find out in time what you want him to do?

Bad roads, lack of telegraphs, etc., old-time technology, all of it disconnects the people from the people's representatives.

How do we solve this dilemma?

We hold elections and let potential representatives blab our their opinions on various issues. We pick the one most like us and let the guy do what he thinks best under whatever circumstances come up in that room, stuff we don't find out about until it's all over.

We can't tell him what to do, so we have to trust him to be the same guy we elected. We have to trust he isn't swayed by lobbyists, and so forth.

Up comes a refinement: political parties.

Vote for the party of your choice, and trust the party leaders will insure the stuff gets done right. They can literally use their Whip to make it happen.

Unfortunately, politics is a supremely blunt instrument.

And at base, it's still all about a match between the crap in your head and the crap in the representative's head (or his adherence to the party's crap agenda).

It's still just crap. Human crap, which is some of the most corrosive material there is.

And there's no guarantee this crap is lined up with the best interests of the country. Don't forget, Germans elected Hitler's party.

Two cheers for democracy!