Well, Marc Thiessen’s Washington Post column is sure to raise the ire of a significant number of the WaPo’s readers:
This Thanksgiving, I am grateful for many things — but when it comes to politics, I am especially thankful that Hillary Clinton is not sitting in the Oval Office.
I am thankful that Neil M. Gorsuch is on the Supreme Court and that President Trump has secured a conservative majority that will protect human life, religious liberty, the Second Amendment and limited government. I am also thankful the president is moving at record pace to fill the federal appeals courts with young conservative judges. While the Supreme Court only hears about 80 cases a year, the federal appeals courts get final say on about 60,000 — and because Democrats ended the filibuster, they can’t stop Trump from filling those courts with conservative legal rock stars. The Senate has already confirmed eight of Trump’s nine appellate nominees — the most this early in a presidency since Richard Nixon – and Trump will appoint plenty more before his first term expires. As former Clinton adviser Ronald A. Klain complained in The Post, “the next two generations of Americans will live under laws interpreted by hundreds of [Trump-appointed] judges.â€
I’m not nearly as thankful for all of the things he lists as he is. I have mixed feeling about practically all of them. Perhaps Mr. Thiessen’s column is click-bait and I’ve fallen for it. Is he trolling?
However, in a similar vein there’s one thing I can say I’m thankful for this year. I’m thankful that the president and the federal government generally is getting more critical scrutiny from the media than it has for a a number of years.
The thing that gets me is whenever conservatives tell us how happy they are that Donald Trump is appointing lots of conservative judges, they can never mention just why all those judicial posts were open. It’s a special gift from God, evidentally.
But. Mitch McConnell’s gimmick of blocking regular appointments and then of holding open a Supreme Court position for over a year is not one that will be forgotten. Nothing about it in the silly old Constitution conservatives pretend to take so seriously — of course not — but the lesson’s been learned, and no one’s going to forget it now, Amazing isn’t it, the way we Americans keep the essential elements of our government unchanged!
In this era, everything everywhere is trolling of animosity for self-advancement. Both parties benefit from continuously stoking their ideologues’ hatred and self-righteousness and frightening everyone else into line. And as we see in the above column, our news media are gleefully complicit.
“It’s a special gift from God, ”
Indeed, else we wouldn’t currently be exposing just how corrupt the Obama Administration was, what with Lois Lerner, Uranium 1 and the campaign duplicity of the DNC and its tentacles.
I’d put away the tin foil hat, though. I don’t think McConnell was in the pessession of Kreskin-like skills in the year before the election.