William Murchison

When, oh, when will the United States catch up with Iran? Those bearded, bomb-building, Koran-quoting clerics — we underestimate them at our peril. They know enough, the ayatollahs, to get rid of their morality police who have for decades subverted Iranian civic life, as they've reportedly done this week after protests in that country continued. The morality police in Iran were known for harassing Iranians — women especially — who were deemed insufficiently devoted to Islamic purity. Yet when the morality cops apparently killed a young women for her gall in showing too much hair, public protests erupted. Morality is one thing, persecution is another, as the ayatollahs appear to have figured out. Morality requiring visible and painful enforcement can’t be sustained.

“We are Reagan,” a Biden “confidant” tells Axios. After how many hallucinogens, the story doesn’t say. Pretty many would be a fair guess. The story wherein occurred the remarkable comparison never rose more than a foot or so from the ground, likely due to its fantastic nature. Nor was the “confidant” ever identified, possibly to spare his or her children's playground embarrassment. Any comparison of Joseph Robinette Biden and Ronald Wilson Reagan, if it ventures beyond their service in the White House, is about as nutty as comparisons ever get. It might repay us to ask the basis of such a claim, however fruitless.

My brothers, my sisters, hold it right there. Thank you. We’re missing a major point, howsoever understandably. All this media chitchat coupling Joe Biden’s political incapacities to his undoubtedly advanced age and slowing gait requires, in my estimation, some context. Nor do I suggest the president’s recently acquired case of Covid — from which we all pray he recovers speedily and fully — lends point and pith to the discussion. I suggest that the problem with Joe Biden isn’t age as such, nor the infirmities that go with having lived back when Cokes cost a nickel and Ed Sullivan was king of TV.

The usualness, you might say, of the late Bob Dole is what would render him highly, and commendably, unusual in today’s politics. He was no Reagan or Taft, and certainly no Madison. He had no grand vision he wished to implement in public life. But he had judgment and common sense. He lacked entirely the dubious gift for making long-term enemies. His patriotism — his love of the land he served and fought for, with lieutenant’s bars on his GI helmet — was deeply embedded. Most conspicuously, he had guts and determination. He was up for any contest that involved the preservation of his convictions and ideals — including the lifelong contest he waged against the agony of a partly destroyed physical body.

President Biden had no censorious words concerning the Taliban as the evacuation catastrophe in Kabul unfolded, but he sure let ’er rip Thursday when the Supreme Court let stand, for now, a new Texas law blocking early abortion procedures. Out came the dictionary of excoriative synonyms: ‘extreme’, ‘blatantly’, ‘outrageously’. Ripping up any reminders of freedom in Afghanistan is a smaller game, in Bidenesque terms, than ripping out, or extracting from the womb in some other manner, the smallest particle of human life. Such is the mode of modern politics, we might note, sadly. The Texas law, which went into effect at midnight August 31, is the latest attempt by a supposedly sovereign state to mitigate the effects of Roe v.

Off to Washington DC on Monday they flew, maskless with Miller Lites in hand — three-score Democratic members of the Texas legislature, breaking the quorum required for any vote, abandoning their duties at a called special session. Washington DC, where the real power-brokers live and the Vice President of the United States. On from there to a PR opportunity with the President himself. What a telling commentary on the state of American politics, where the story gets around that there’s only one side — the progressive side — worthy of attention on account of its self-trumpeted devotion to the people’s rights. Kamala Harris called the stunt ‘as American as apple pie’ — and sadly she’s not altogether wrong.

Who’d have thought — I wouldn’t have, speaking as a seventh-generation Texan — that the Texas legislature would be held up nationally for a good moral beating? Wham! Wham! Ow! Ow! Yet here we are. Our lawmakers, according to the standard media narrative, have been working to narrow the voting rights of the poor and the non-white. But then legislative Democrats saved us from this awful fate. On the last day of the session, as nasty white Republicans sought to pass a piece of mendacity disguised as voting reform, House Democrats decamped from the Capitol, denying the Republicans their quorum. Take that, you neo-Confederate Trump-lovers! Or so goes the narrative, which is bosh mingled with rubbish.

We live in the wackiest of times, when woke corporate leaders should propagandize for promoting 'racial equity'. They tried it in Georgia, to no avail. The state passed a law to improve a haphazard, disorderly voting process shaped (or unshaped) by pandemic requirements. The heads of two Georgia-based corporations, Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines, scowled. Their finger-wagging lectures to non-woke state leaders were absurd but much publicized. Major League Baseball wasn’t going to put up with being ignored on a matter unrelated to game length and such like. In a door-slamming, cat-kicking snit, MLB announced it was moving the All-Star Game from Atlanta, capital of the offending state, to Denver. Take that, all you Trump fans!

Whew! If not now, when? As Ronald Reagan asked in another context. Maybe — as those of us closer to the situation; e.g., Texans, view it — not for a period stretching to the crack of doom. Democratic whips tell leaders of their party’s would-be juggernaut, ready to ride those vicious Republicans into the moist soil of Washington DC, that the votes just plain aren’t there. New strategies may be pursued — for instance, passing the plan in chunks, instead of as a single, sizzling dish. The trouble is that the Biden plan, whose aim is to sweep illegal immigrants and asylum into the American system with scarce thought for potential consequences, is seen as enjoying stunted appeal. Why would that be?  One obvious answer is that — like the $1.

Even in the quick-as-a-wink world of democratic politics, where calculations change at slot-machine speed, you can feel major moments growling and growing. You don’t know precisely where things and events are going. You just know they are going. We're in one of those moments now, with Texas and its 29 million people poised to move out of the heavy shadow of government control over their lives and movements as we head towards what we must hope is the late stages of this so-called 'war' against COVID-19. On Tuesday March 2 — otherwise known as Texas Independence Day, when Lone Star flags decorate staves everywhere, honoring Texas’ successful struggle in 1836 for freedom from Mexico — Gov. Greg Abbott announced he was letting life return to normal.

Donald Trump’s dominance of the US political scene shows up in surprising ways, at surprising moments. For instance, in the retort of an exuberant Democratic senatorial candidate striving for headway in a televised debate with his incumbent Republican opponent. ‘He’s dishonest,’ says Congressman Robert Francis ‘Beto’ O’Rourke, assailing Sen, Ted Cruz. It’s why the president called him Lyin’ Ted, and it’s why the nickname stuck.’ Oh, boy, the Dems are looking to Donald Trump for character references? As I keep saying – and you’ve probably had the same thought – it’s a weird time we live in, getting weirder by the minute.