CSotD: 2 a.m. in the Sophomore Dorm
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The expression “2 a.m. in the sophomore dorm” goes back at least to Usenet days. It refers to overly idealistic ideas and nonsensical proposals that arise in the wee hours of the morning among people who have not yet learned how the world works and who base their judgment on how the world should be rather than how it is.
And who think that, if they bought the world a Coke and kept it company, they could teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. Or, that, if they blew it all up, a utopia would arise from the ashes.
And who were too young to realize that, while flowers in gun barrels had been a lovely gesture, the authorities responded by beating the crap out of the Pentagon protesters and the war dragged on for eight more years.
As Horsey lays out in his excellent essay, the current consensus in the sophomore dorm is that the Democrats are spineless and that, if they’d just let people go hungry, federal employees go unpaid and airlines cancel flights a little longer, the GOP would have surrendered on health care funding.
I’m not going to criticize every cartoon about spineless Democrats, but Davies has a moderate criticism of the ending of the shutdown that has a place in the discussion.
The ACA subsidies were scheduled to run out December 31, which, you’ll note, is seven weeks away, and it became obvious that the heartless GOP machine was willing to let people suffer in the shutdown rather than negotiate any extension of those funds, much less agree to a meaningful continuation.
Their promise of a vote on the issue is flimsy, but their refusal to budge was rock-solid.
However, the Senate having promised a vote is Step One of putting them on the record, while Johnson’s possible refusal to bring it to a vote in the House would amplify their heartlessness.
If flower power wasn’t effective, “the whole world is watching” was, and the public will notice if the GOP refuses to compromise and health insurance premiums skyrocket.
Good. Back out.
But if you think nobody will notice, and nobody will hold you accountable, bear in mind that the sudden rise in premiums will hit everybody, not just the lower half of ACA recipients. You aren’t going to sneak dawn past those roosters, no matter which party they belong to.
While, for the Democrats, a stubborn refusal to compromise brings to mind the term Pyrrhic victory, in which Pyrrhus declared that one more such costly victory would utterly destroy him.
Winning battles is nice, but winning the war is what matters.
Another anti-settlement cartoon allows me to indulge in an apt analogy:
The team was behind at the half, but scored two touchdowns in the third quarter (recent court decisions and the election victories) to pull within two points. Then, facing a 4th and 25 with a full quarter left, the coach sent in the punter despite the crowd shouting “Go for it!”
The punter pinned their opponent back on its own three-yard line, facing a newly reinvigorated defense and an offense ready to score when they got the ball back.
And the crowd is screaming “Fire the coach!”
Point being that converting a 4th and 25, while glorious, was highly unlikely, and pointless, given the score and the current momentum.
Similarly, it was clearly impossible for a further holdout to change the GOP’s attitude towards suffering in general and health care coverage specifically. But things were moving in the right direction and it would be stupid and self-destructive to change growing Democratic momentum back into stalemate.
Anderson explains the current situation. Assuming the public isn’t overwhelmed with negativity from the liberals’ circular firing squad, Republican obstinacy will speak for itself.
The MAGA crowd will continue to be True Believers, just as they continue to believe that foreign countries pay tariffs and that Trump is losing money in the presidency. But they’re not a majority or close to it.
Whamond twists the saying, but what he suggests has not yet manifested itself, except to the extent that Marjorie Taylor Green has gone rogue and that she, Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace defy Trump on release of the Epstein files. As they say down South, “Two toothpicks don’t make a lumber yard.”
And Whamond joins in the persistent mangling of the old sailors’ myth, set into a cartoon by Russell Brockbank in 1951:
The superstition was that rats would sense a ship’s fate before it sailed and would depart dockside.
But, goodness, once the ship actually begins to sink, everybody — rats, sailors, ship’s cat, whoever — tries to get off.
Trump has surrounded himself with extremists, incompetents and toadies, so we can’t expect a group of influential Republicans to confront him as Nixon was confronted on the eve of his resignation, but I remember the visible disillusionment of Republicans on the Watergate Committee and in the impeachment hearing, as they saw the enormity of his corruption.
We’re not there yet.
But stay tuned, because, as Molina points out, the reopening of the House will bring a vote on releasing the Epstein files.
The question of whether children should go hungry and without health care may be political, but the question of whether they should be raped and exploited is harder to encapsulate.
The pieces are now falling into place, and while Fox and other loyalist media may not dwell on the scandal, it’s hardly going to go unnoticed, at least by mainstream Republicans, even if the MAGA minority keeps their heads in the sand.
Johnson is too late to keep Pandora’s Box closed now. He can try shutting it down on a voice-vote, but Democrats will ask for a recorded vote, and then we’ll see who’s willing to go on record in favor of sheltering pedophiles.
They only have to hold onto the support of people who don’t buy groceries. Or health insurance. Or Christmas presents.
In the words of Churchill, “Now, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Keep the faith.
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