QOTD -- Do Your Damn Job... The Right Way

 

"... Biden’s agenda calls for making the super-rich pay more taxes, capping prescription drug prices, restoring abortion rights, addressing the climate crisis and creating stronger alliances to confront the growing threats facing the world’s democracies.

"Trump’s agenda calls for him to become a dictator and create alliances with other dictators, as well as to harass his opponents with the Justice Department, send troops into American cities, put millions of immigrants in camps and crack down on the press.

"The future of a 248-year-old democracy is at stake. From a political perspective, it’s the most crucial year of our lifetimes.

"If you’re a journalist and you find this election boring, you’re in the wrong damn business." -- Mark Jacob at Stop the Presses, on how it appears the puerile corporate media is, once again, ignoring "the biggest story of our lifetimes" in favor of its prized narrative of "the two old white guys rematch nobody wants."  Turns out, once again, we citizens get the media rehash nobody wants while we fight to save democracy.

QOTD -- The Warrior

 

"Two ideas about how to move the United States back to normal, less acrid politics have warred with each other ever since Donald Trump rode division and resentment to power. On one side were calls for big-hearted efforts at reconciliation and mutual understanding. On the other was an insistence that the extremist virus had to be contained before anything better was possible.

"President Biden’s State of the Union address on Thursday was about many things, especially a furious energy that countered talk about the limitations of his age. But above all, it marked the final collapse of the reconciliation strategy. It was an acknowledgment that sermons about putting aside our differences are out of touch with the country we have become..." -- E.J. Dionne, Jr., in today's Washington Post, leading off an op/ed about the political reality we face, and the reluctant warrior who has to abandon his natural conciliatory approach to politics in favor of leading an existential war to defend democracy against domestic enemies -- the forces of "resentment, revenge, and retribution."