The Wrongologist

The Daily Escape:

Great Santa Run, Las Vegas NV – December 2021 photo by Ellen Schmidt

(We will be taking the next few days off. Posting will be light and variable until the New Year)

Merry Christmas! You shouldn’t be cruising the internet today, but here you are, and Wrongo thanks you for stopping by. Many say that this is the most wonderful time of the year, but perhaps it’s better that we don’t think about what a roller coaster ride 2021 was for all of us.

Don’t you think that we need a little Christmas after the year we had? The tune “We Need a Little Christmas” is from the musical Mame, which opened on Broadway in 1966. It is sung in the scene when the stock-market crash of 1929 has just happened, and Mame’s deceased brother’s 10-year-old son has been entrusted to her care. She introduces him to her free-wheeling lifestyle, using her favorite saying: “Life is a banquet, and most poor sons-of-bitches are starving to death.”

Our economy is fine, but Mame’s saying (above) still sounds right in 2021.

With due respect to the Grateful Dead, what a long, strange trip 2021 has been. The January 6 attempted coup happened less than a year ago. Biden’s Presidency is only 11 months old. The DOJ and 1/6 Committee are working away on an unprecedented case that is way more complicated and difficult than most of us seem to comprehend. So, amid the sudden re-emergence of yet another Covid variant, in this case, Omicron, let’s take a minute to review Biden’s performance.

The Atlantic’s David Frum offers some perspective:

“Relative to its strength in Congress, the Biden administration has proved outstandingly successful. In 11 months, Biden has done more with 50 Democratic senators than Barack Obama did with 57. He signed a $1.9 trillion COVID-relief bill in March 2021….He signed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill in November. He signed some 75 executive orders, many of them advancing liberal immigration goals. He’s also won confirmation for some 40 federal judges, more than any first-year president since Ronald Reagan, and twice as many as Donald Trump confirmed in his first year with a 54-vote Senate majority.”

More from Frum:

“Anybody can win a poker game with a good hand. It takes a real maestro to play a bad one. Biden won a bigger pool with worse cards than any Democratic president ever. He won that pool because Manchin gave Biden more loyalty under more adverse conditions than the moderate Democrats of 2009 gave to President Obama.”

Frum, a Never Trump Republican, closed with thoughts that mirror Wrongo’s:

“The Democrats have a year remaining in the present Congress. That’s too little time to waste on recrimination, but time enough to secure voting rights, to accelerate the shift to carbon-zero fuels, and to complete and publish the investigation into the attack on Congress on January 6, 2021. A rebuff is not a retreat. It’s a sign to proceed in a different direction.”

That’s a great perspective, we shouldn’t dwell on who blocked the Build Back Better program, but on what remains to be accomplished.

Here, the Fields of Wrong have about an inch of snow, with a little more to come. We’re settling in for a couple of long winter nights, bookended by music of the season, good food and drink, and possibly some binge watching of movies and favorite TV series.

Merry Christmas to all. Keeping with this week’s theme, here’s another seasonal tune. Watch and listen to the Celtic Trio and a Choir perform “O Holy Night”:

Be kind, not just at Christmas, but all the time.