Keeping track of progressive contradictions (for fracking? against fracking? etc.) would be a full-time, blog-filling job. I have neither the time nor the inclination to take on that task, but here are a few recent ones that come to mind:
- Mazie Hirono and others accused Amy Coney Barrett of slandering LGBTQ people by using the term “sexual preference” because it implies they have a choice. So, they believe one cannot choose one’s “sexual orientation” (their preferred term) because it is baked in … but sex itself is so fluid or non-existent that one can choose whether to be a man or woman or something in between.
- Joe Biden has been running a campaign (insofar as he has campaigned) against the liar-in-chief in the White House and promising to bring integrity and normalcy (shades of Calvin Coolidge) back to Washington. Now, if the New York Post’s recent revelations are true, he ran his vice presidency as a family-owned for profit corporation and repeatedly lied about it. It’s as though he pasted an “I AM THE SWAMP!” sticker on his forehead.
- Biden has been promising to produce more jobs even as he has been promising new lockdowns if the virus isn’t cured post haste.
- Biden has been in Washington so long that, whether or not he is elected president, he could be memorialized in a statue. Alas, he said a number of things early in his career (and some not so early) that would have led some of his most enthusiastic supporters to tear down any such statue as reflecting endemic, systemic, structural, or just plain every day racism.
- On the proper role of judges and justices, Democrats are divided mainly into two groups. One agrees that it is wrong for judges to assume the law embodies all their political preferences, but argues that only Republican judges do that because the law does in fact embody all Democratic preferences. The other group doesn’t care very much about what judges should do, but its members know that their judges routinely “construe” the law so that it reflects their political preferences and assume conservative judges are lying when they say they don’t. Thanks to Freud, we can call this projection.
