Michael Goodwin on Biden's Capitulation To The Left; or: Philosoraptor: Right Again

I sure do hate bein' right all the time...
   I did think there was some chance Biden would govern as a moderate, but, as you'll recall, I said it wasn't going to happen--in part because there's not enough of him left to do much of anything. 

Not that there was a whole lot there in the first place...

But anyhoo...

To repeat my oft-repeated metaphor: Trump, for all his many flaws, was substantially good--that is, good on policy. Well, mostly. But really, amazingly good. And incomparably better than Biden. He was (to get to the metaphor) a big, fat monkey wrench in the governmental apparatus that has, by all appearances, largely gone woke. Which means: insane. Biden, on the other hand, would be (I said) like replacing that monkey wrench with a big, central gear that did nothing but facilitate the smooth working of a machine that functions mostly to take us leftward toward a cliff. So the metaphor was really wrong. Biden isn't even a gear. The machine already has everything it needs to function. The wrench was a wrench, a brake, an impediment. It was removed. We lurched left. And that's where we'll keep going. Barring some Reaganesque revolt that temporary moves us centerward. (Though, still, it's just a matter of time before we go over that cliff...but I'm willing to ignore that long-term problem for now...)

tldr: right again. Dammit.

(Of course I completely failed to heed the signs that Trump was flipping his shit after the election. (Which he may actually have been cheated out of. But still. I was waaaay wrong about that.))

   Oh, yeah...but I was supposed to write about Goodwin's post. He writes:

   Frustrated, he [LBJ] launched an attack on the left-wing of his party, declaring, “A liberal is intolerant of other views. He wants to control your thoughts and actions.”
   As Califano writes, Johnson then moved closer to his guests to deliver the final punch: “You know the difference between cannibals and liberals? Cannibals eat only their enemies.”
   Joe Biden knows the feeling. More than five decades later, he, too, is being eaten alive by the Dems’ left, which is now called progressive instead of liberal.
...
   So far, he hasn’t delivered much of anything except trouble and failure and his poll numbers continue to slide downhill. The Afghanistan debacle, the border mess, the still-raging coronavirus and rising inflation are taking their toll on his presidency, and getting passage of the infrastructure deal, which garnered nearly a score of GOP votes in the Senate, would give him bragging rights on a popular issue.
That should make it a no-brainer for all Dems. After all, a failing, unpopular president is likely to cost the party control of Congress next year given the party’s narrow margins.
   But rejection of common sense is a key trait of the irredeemable nature of the left. Johnson, by the time he made his cannibal comparison, already had delivered the Great Society agenda, from voting rights to civil rights to Medicare and Medicaid, but it wasn’t enough for the left.
   For his part, Biden has backed nearly every far-left piece of nonsense in the wind, including a voting rights bill that would put Washington in full charge of federal elections. He talked about making Puerto Rico a state, packing the Supreme Court and ending the Senate filibuster.
   He’s also showed himself to be an open-borders president and adopted the language of the worst race-baiters by insisting the nation is guilty of “systemic racism” even while he calls Americans “good people.”
   None of these positions reflect the Joe Biden people knew from his long tenure in Washington, where he personified the word moderate. Indeed, when he talked repeatedly in his campaign and at the inaugural about “unity” and working as hard for those who didn’t vote for him as those who did, there was reason to hope he was serious about trying to heal the nation’s breach.
Yet here we are, with the president remaking himself as a leftist, the left calling it insufficient, and he shrugs his shoulders and says OK.
...
   Still, because all roads in Washington lead to the White House, the question of why Biden has ceded so much of his power to the insatiable far left demands an ­answer.
   Unfortunately, the answer is obvious. He’s a weak, befuddled president who is the emptiest of empty suits. All talk and no conviction, he couldn’t stand up to the Taliban and can’t even stand up to the wing nuts in his own party.

   There only seem to be two types of Dems today: (i) the crazies and (ii) the ones who vote like the crazies, but may possibly tut-tut about them a bit here and there...y'know...in the privacy of their own homes... Which doesn't surprise me anymore, and never should have. Party allegiance is tribal. And--at least I've always recognized this much--tribalism is nuts. The left has swung so far to the left that only the "right" is anywhere near the center anymore. 

Anyway.

The point is: I toldja so.