every “good” fact
is magnified every “bad”
fact is minimized

If you are a true partisan, you essentially become an unpaid lawyer for your side. Every “good” fact that bolsters your argument is magnified. Every “bad” fact is minimized or rationalized. When partisanship reaches its worst point, every positive claim about your side is automatically believed, and every negative allegation is automatically disbelieved. In fact, allegations of wrongdoing directed at your side are treated as acts of aggression — proof that “they” are trying to destroy “us.”

You see this reality most plainly in the daily Republican theatrics surrounding Trump’s criminal indictments. Rather than wrestle seriously with the profoundly troubling claims against him, they treat the criminal cases as proof of Democratic perfidy. They believe every claim against Hunter and Joe Biden and not a single claim against Trump.

The result is a kind of divorce from reality. It’s a process that my Dispatch colleague Jonah Goldberg memorably described in 2016 as “the invasion of the body snatchers.” “Someone you know or love goes to sleep one night,” he wrote, “and appears the next day to be the exact same person you always knew. Except. Except they’re different, somehow.”

From the New York Times opinion piece, I Was a Republican Partisan. It Altered the Way I Saw the World by David French.

According to the NYT, David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator.

According to Wikipedia, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a sci fi movie in 1956 and … the film’s storyline concerns an extraterrestrial invasion that begins in the fictional California town of Santa Mira. Alien plant spores have fallen from space and grown into large seed pods, each one capable of producing a visually identical copy of a human. As each pod reaches full development, it assimilates the physical traits, memories, and personalities of each sleeping person placed near it until only the replacement is left; these duplicates, however, are devoid of all human emotion.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

As each pod reaches full development, it assimilates the physical traits, memories, and personalities of each sleeping person placed near it until only the replacement is left; these duplicates, however, are devoid of all human emotion.

Devoid of all human emotion.

Kind of divorced from reality.

Sure does sound familiar.

Got to go check for pods.

had adversaries
but could not name, or think of,
single enemy

Very much sounding like the legislator I had first met more than a decade earlier, Ford explained that he had “a good many adversaries” on Capitol Hill, but could not name, or think of, a single enemy.

From When the Center Held: Gerald Ford and the Rescue of the American Presidency by Donald Rumsfeld New York, NY, Free Press An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2018.

In the forward, Mr. Rumsfeld writes, “This is that story, told by one who was privileged to have been there and who had the chance to see a friend rise to the occasion just when our nation needed him most.”

Mr. Rumsfeld quotes Mr. Ford in Ford’s Remarks upon being sworn in, “Purge our hearts of suspicion and of hate. … Our Constitution works. Our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. … Truth is the glue that holds governments together.”

Mr. Rumsfeld then quotes New York Times Columnist, Anthony Lewis who wrote about Ford and his succession to the Office of President of the United States, “… in the person of Gerald Ford, the United States just may have proved itself once again to have the greatest of national assets, good luck.”

I have long felt the United States gets away with a lot of luck.

That starting lineup that invented the United States with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Mr. Washington going first.

Mr. Lincoln showing up out of nowhere in 1861.

FDR for the double whammy of the Depression and WW2.

Then the ink in the pen of luck starts to run dry.

Like most pens you can bang it down on a desk and scribble scribble until a little more ink comes out.

That seems to have been Mr. Ford.

Still everyone in America has a drawer full of old pens that may or may not write.

Holding out for that, one day.

only way to lose
becoming irrelevant
inconspicuous

But Ms. Greene has never abided by the conventional rules of politics, where a loss on the House floor is considered a major defeat.

Since arriving in Congress four years ago, she has played a different game all together —

one in which the only way to lose is by becoming irrelevant and inconspicuous.

From In Bid to Oust Johnson, Greene Tries to Reclaim a Powerful Perch on the Fringe By Annie Karni, New York Times, May 1, 2024.

Ms. Marjorie Taylor Greene is poised to become as famous and well known as Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana who IS famous but you still need The Google.

I long for the day where she is a question on Jeopardy that every one gets wrong.

Irrelevant.

Inconspicuous.

But we lose.

big men of great wealth
played mischievous part in life
… was awake to the need

Two former Presidents of the United States are natives of New York City.

Both wrote books.

One, as a matter of fact, on their marriage license, listed their occupation as ‘Author.’

One was Theodore Roosevelt.

A man who traced his roots back to the founding of New Amsterdam.

A man whose family, when the social list of the top 400 families of New York was put together was asked for their okay (well, not really but there was no question that the New York City Roosevelts would be in the book.)

The other was Donald Trump.

One wrote, ” … as I have said, I was getting our social, industrial, and political needs into pretty fair perspective.

I was still ignorant of the extent to which big men of great wealth played a mischievous part in our industrial and social life, but I was well awake to the need of making ours in good faith both an economic and an industrial as well as a political democracy.

This same man continued, “… because the book “How the Other Half Lives” (about slum life in New York) had been to me both an enlightenment and an inspiration for which I felt I could never be too grateful.

Soon after it was written I had called at his [the author’s] office to tell him how deeply impressed I was by the book, and that I wished to help him in any practical way to try to make things a little better.

I have always had a horror of words that are not translated into deeds, of speech that does not result in action — in other words, I believe in realizable ideals and in realizing them, in preaching what can be practiced and then in practicing it.

I will let you guess which of the two men wrote that.

I won’t come out and say who but I will say that the passage is taken from Theodore Roosevelt; an autobiography … by Theodore Roosevelt, (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1913).

The book in question, How the Other Half Lives, was written by Jacob Riis, a reporter for a New York City newspaper in 1895 when Mr. Roosevelt was NYC Police Commissioner.

Mr. Roosevelt did go to Mr. Riis’ office.

Mr. Roosevelt said simply, ‘How can I help?’

if taxes go up,
I’ll live, if democracy …
it goes down? I won’t!

Based on the line, “I used to be a middle-of-the-road Republican. Nowadays, I think of myself as a Scoop Jackson Democrat — and my views have barely shifted. If my taxes go up, I’ll live. If my democracy goes down, I won’t.“

As expressed by Bret Stephens, an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues, writing in the weekly column, The Conversation (with Gail Collins) titled And the Award for Best Performance at the State of the Union Goes to … March 11, 2024 in the New York Times.