Let Thursday be an object lesson
Jesus resurrected Lazarus after four days. Conservative British Prime Minister Liz Truss resigned Thursday after her 44-day attempt at resurrecting Thatcherism failed. Dramatically, amid economic chaos. Anyone with a memory longer than the shelf life of a lettuce could have predicted that, and did.
On this side of the Pond on Thursday, President Biden was in Pittsburgh to celebrate how his $1 trillion infrastructure plan is helping to resurrect the Fern Hollow Bridge that collapsed in January:
“It’s being done in record time,” Mr. Biden said. “It normally takes two-to-five years to build a bridge like this, and the total project cost $25 million — fully paid for by the federal government.”
The result, he said, is a bridge that will be traversable “by Christmas, God willing.
“I’m coming back to walk across this sucker,” he said.
Democrats build things. Fix things.
“Republicans ain’t fixin’ shit,” said comic Trae Crowder on Thursday. “Help is not in their vocabulary.”
Columnist David Frum attributed the Truss’s rapid collapse to defects in the UK Tory party.
“The problem is that you’re not eligible for the captaincy unless you agree it was a brilliant idea to scupper the ship in 2016- and can convincingly act baffled why it has been sinking ever since,” Frum tweeted, referencing England’s exiting the European Union.
Let Thursday be an object lesson.
But it won’t be to Republicans. Anyone who believes a Republican Party handed control of Congress in 2023 will gaze on Liz Truss and be dissuaded from following her off the economic cliff has the I.Q. of that lettuce (Media Matters):
Many right-wing media figures on Fox News and Fox Business lauded Truss when she first came to power promising an unpopular libertarian economic policy vision. Perpetually wrong right-wing economist Stephen Moore said on September 26, “I love what Liz Truss is doing in England, I think it’s exactly the right agenda. … It’s exactly what the United States should be doing.”
Days earlier, former Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow favorably compared Truss’ “terrific supply-side economic growth plan” to the Republican Party’s midterm policy agenda. Fox Business host Stuart Varney gushed, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if she were pointing the way for America?” He later said, “Liz Truss is doing economic policy right,” and “it’s just a shame we can’t copy” her tax cuts in the U.S.
Rarely is the question asked: Is our conservatives learning?
On Monday, I insisted Democrats spend more time touting their economic accomplishments than reacting to the vile spew from the right. If polling shows voters trust Republicans with the economy more than Democrats, maybe it is because Democrats are counting too heavily on Dobbs to get voters to the polls when many minds are on their budgets.
Finally, on Wednesday I spotted an ad bragging on Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. More, please.