Otter: I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part!
They’re just the guys to do it:
WASHINGTON — Vice President Mike Pence signaled support on Saturday for a futile Republican bid to overturn the election in Congress next week, after 11 Republican senators and senators-elect said that they would vote to reject President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory when the House and Senate meet to formally certify it.
The announcement by the senators — and Mr. Pence’s move to endorse it — reflected a groundswell among Republicans to defy the unambiguous results of the election and indulge President Trump’s attempts to remain in power with false claims of voting fraud.
The New York Times normally pulls its punches, but peppers this report with comments [emphasis mine] about “unambiguous results,” that every state has “certified the election results after verifying their accuracy,” and that Republicans have attempted to question those reults by “offering vague suggestions that some wrongdoing might have occurred” and amplified them via “specious claims of widespread election rigging that have been debunked and dismissed.”
Not that any of that matters to the metastasized remnant of an American political party currently in control of the U.S. Senate.
Lionel Trilling suggested there were “no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation” in 1950. With modest exceptions, the conservative and reactionary impulses at that time, he wrote, do not “express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”
Would that he could see conservatism today. He could expand his formulation to include conservative and reactionary impulses expressed in similar actions and irritable gestures that seek to resemble fealty to this constitutional republic.