The best part of last week’s elections in the U.S. had a lot less to do with who actually won than with the very notion that they were normal. America went back to doing elections in the traditional manner, a great breath of fresh air in the aftermath of the suffocating atmosphere created by the relentless outrageous lying and coup designs of the repulsive orange one that came before.
As a brilliant comic skit on Saturday Night Live illustrated last weekend, the issue for the new governor-elect in Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, was to do his best to distance himself from Trump short of directly repudiating him. As it turned out, Trump did not set foot in Virginia during the entire campaign, even as much as Trump has subsequently tried to credit himself for the win.
It was almost worth handing a victory to a Republican if only to show how that party can get on with life without Trump. Of course, there will always be those particular sycophants in the GOP who will continue to measure themselves by a perceived standard of Trump, but increasingly irrelevantly.
Also, the Democrats in the House proved themselves far more worthy than most media pundits were willing to give them credit for, surprising them by their passage of the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill last week, a development that is a true game changer for America.
So, while holding the orange one at bay on the one hand, the country actually took a giant leap forward reminiscent of the New Deal of FDR’s first years in office. If it can be matched with President Biden’s Build Back Better domestic legislation in the next few weeks, it will have an impact comparable to the New Deal, when Social Security and other development and job creating programs were initiated that eventually pulled the nation out of the Great Depression.
As Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg asserted on the TV blab shows last weekend, the current multi-trillion package should go down in history not as FDR’s New Deal, nor as Teddy Roosevelt’s Straight Deal, but as Biden’s Big Deal.
Yes, Mr. and Mrs. America, when it all gets done, this is a Really Big Deal.
It requires correcting a systemic problem being perpetuated by the major media, which keeps insisting on describing Biden’s withdrawal of all American troops from Afghanistan as “chaotic” at best. The reality is that Biden was able to airlift an incredible 120,000 persons safely out of the country in the face of one single terrorist incident that killed about a hundred, as bad as that was. By insisting on the characterization of the historic withdrawal as “chaotic,” thereby implying it was less than competently executed, the media has perpetuated just another unjustified slam at Biden.
There was also the critique of Biden by a member of his own party, Rep. Abigail Spanberger, to the effect that “America didn’t elect Biden to be a new FDR, but just a normal person.”
That was before, as many were shocked to learn, his epochal New Dealish infrastructure bill got passed.
In fact, what we’ve been witnessing this year in the face of the coup attempt on Jan. 6, has been a remarkable repudiation of everything that coup represented about the nation’s particularly unhappy four years leading up to it.
Yes, some Republicans got elected this November, but notably without the taint of Trump. And the man America elected to hold Trump to a single, tortured term has treated his victory as a mandate to deal with the lingering effects of Trump and of the Covid-19 pandemic by way of bold, long-overdue initiatives to put the nation back on the right track.
The aftermath of this month’s elections and the passage of the infrastructure bill has been to help lift a giant cloud off America. Trump may not go away right away, but he is going away. The damage he did to the nation and the national psyche is unprecedented in our national history.
While no one can promise that Trump will, or won’t, wind up in jail, what’s now trending is certainly in the direction of his discrediting and humiliation.
