Gone With The Windbag: A preview of the next Lost Cause

By National Correspondent George T. Strong 

The Mad King’s regime has entered its Battle of Atlanta era. Surrounded by enemies, deserted by its friends, under constant fire, it appears doomed.

Are white women finally abandoning the Republican Party?

Already his confederates have run as fast as they can from the carnage. Stooges and toadies with nothing to offer besides stoogedom and toadyism, like hapless Byron Donalds in Florida, have dropped all of their cherished photos with the Dear Leader. Spineless twerps like Maria Salazar in Florida and Roger Marshall in Kansas are now condemning the ICE secret police they voted to fund so lavishly just last year.

We never want to underestimate the forces of treason and subversion still attacking our Union (just this week, the six bent Republican Lords of Justices invented a new statutory right for your Social Security data to be pillaged and manipulated by crooked state election deniers, despite a clear statutory prohibition on its use), but it does seem as if the insurrection is ready to pack up its gold and take the train to Danville.

What happens next?

We hope that we will see next year the beginning of a desperately needed American Reconstruction of all three branches of government and state supporters of insurrection and disloyalty. Whether that will happen depends on the will of the American people, which has failed us twice in this century already.

But we want to concentrate on something we are sure will happen just as surely as Redemption followed Reconstruction: the creation of a new myth of the Lost Cause.

In the years to come, the Republican insurrectionists and Mad King toadies, who shamefully supported the Mad King’s attack on our Union, will tell us that the glorious cause for which they fought lives on.

In this retelling, the cause will not be enshrining the Mad King’s bigotry and corruption from the White House ballroom to Mount Rushmore. It will be what they are already telling us it was: the noble struggle of the Mad King and his band of brawlers against the forces of Communism, Socialism, and, worst of all, wokosity.

We are hearing the first bars of this tune today as Republicans try to separate themselves from the Mad King’s insanity and rapaciousness while continuing to promote his values: white supremacy and plutocracy.

One of the Mad King’s supporters already told us that he deplores the level of what he referred to as hate directed at those who followed the Mad King into hatred and catastrophe. How unfair it would be to hold the 77,000,000 clowns and their media enablers responsible for the hundreds of thousands of lives lost and ruined by their fatal attraction, from the refugee camps of Sudan to the concentration camps of Louisiana!

The Lost Cause will never die. Just ask Kevin!

By the way, when the doors of the ICE Gulag are finally flung open, we suggest that the Reconstruction authorities require all Republican voters to walk through them so they can see what outrages were perpetrated in their names, just as General Eisenhower did with German civilians living next door to the infernal concentration camps of an earlier tyranny premised on hate and bigotry. 

We will be told that those who seek to reconstruct American society by restoring liberty and justice for all are going “too far.”  Six city-owned supermarkets, extending Medicare to all, and abolishing the ICE secret police and their infernal network of torture centers and black holes are all being held up examples of extremism that must be quashed lest they inflame the passions of the Mad King's troops.

We will also be told that those who shilled for white supremacy and destruction of academic freedom under the banner of killing “woke” must be coddled and respected, starting with larding our universities with unqualified white male hacks, who in turn deserve to be nominated for National Book Awards.

As Republicans have done since McKinley, their campaigns to enshrine white supremacy, plutocracy, and male domination will be rebranded as a noble Lost Cause for  “liberty,” “limited government, ” and most ludicrous of all, “freedom.”  Sure, Jefferson.

The post-Reconstruction Lost Causers bemoaned the imposition of rule by supposedly unfit Black voters enfranchised by the Fifteenth Amendment. Today we hear, and we have a bent racist Supreme Court that endorses the view, that succeeding generations of those pesky unfit Black people are taking university admission slots from supposedly more deserving white and Asian students, based on test scores that sort students by the quality of the education they received.

Even more revoltingly, the 19th Century  “race science” that supposedly proved the inferiority of Black citizens has now been resurrected by a mix of apartheid drug-addled plutocrats and insane academics.  All they need, now as then, is that pesky evidence.  By the way, that wrecking crew will soon to control two major American news outlets (CBS and CNN) and a sitting vice president (JD Vontz).

Another branch of the Lost Cause myth will come from Republicans disenchanted by the Mad King's insanity but eager to return us to the brighter days of Republican rule represented by titans like St. Ronald of Bitburg and Bush daddy and feckless son.

Republicans like Jen Rubin can't wait to go back to the good old days!

Consider former Commentary blogger and Republican stalwart Jen Rubin, who to this day defends the insane bloody war of choice in Iraq (talk about a Lost Cause!) while lionizing Bush son and daddy, who together appointed one half of the current six bent Republican Lords of Justice.  Once the Mad King is gone, does anyone think Jen will stop plumping for more and better wars of conquest while minimizing or dismissing the Republican embrace of white and male supremacy?   

Or the deeply moral former Republican reactionary Congressman Adam Kinzinger, who voted to enrich the rich and let the poor uninsured sicken and die in agony in  Congress, but who now bravely attacks the Mad King.  Once out of the way, we'd expect Adam to return to advocacy of great Republican causes like the ones he voted for and supported his entire f***in' life. 

The new Lost Cause will be framed by Rubin, Kinzinger, and so many other true Republicans as freedom and choice – for rich white men, that is.  As our Vice President recently told a cheering throng of dozens at a campaign rally,

An American should be able [to] choose to work in a place where he is with his kind of people and not find that at the counters, desk or benches they will be forced to work, side by side, with all types of people of all races; that in the lunchrooms, rest rooms, recreation rooms, they will be compelled by law to mingle with persons and races which all their lives they have by free choice, avoided in social and business intercourse. 

Actually, we're sh***ing you.

That was Strom Thurmond, life-long race baiter and Black child rapist, describing how America should be.  And every time you hear about the need to ban trans people from using public toilets or trans girls from high school soccer teams, you're hearing the new Lost Cause. 

25 years after 9/11, did they win?

By Isaiah Thomas
Board of Editors

The 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 hit us harder than we thought it would. We remember not only the shock and horror of the day, but what happened before and after.

We remember the turn of the century as an exciting, optimistic time. The Cold War was over. We had won, and distinguished academics told us that history was over and nothing bad would ever happen again. Russia and China seemed nice and friendly. We enjoyed cable television and looked forward to flat screen TV’s. This Internet seemed like it would be lots of fun. Maybe someday we could watch movies on it!

In retrospect, how innocent we were! Of course, we didn’t know, unlike George W. Bush, that al-Qaeda was determined to strike in the United States, as his intelligence briefing told him. We didn’t know that outsourcing airplane security to minimum wage drones so airlines could make more money might cost thousands of innocent lives. And if the Mayor of New York put his emergency command center in a building already attacked by al-Qaeda due to its proximity to his office and his love nest, who noticed?

That changed.

Remember what happened next? The media last week were full of happy tales of heroic interventions and national unity, and there was indeed a lot of that. As it turned out, thousands labored at Ground Zero, not including a busto real estate developer who never gave a dime to the victims’ families. Now we know that those who worked there were exposed to a toxic stew in the air and ground that has since claimed more lives than the original attack. We know this because the current Mayor of New York released the documents proving it had been suppressed by the supposed Republican heroes of 9/11, now living in disbarred disgrace in Florida.

But even the normally staid New York Times admitted on September 11, 2026 that what happened after the attack destroyed the unity and purpose the nation had mostly displayed in the immediate aftermath:

Yet this recitation of post-Sept. 11 accomplishments masks a harder truth. The principal legacy of America’s response to that horrible day is not a stronger, more resilient nation. It is instead two long, bloody wars — one of which, in Iraq, was started on false pretenses — that mostly weakened the United States, at home and abroad. It is an America more isolated from the world.

More than 7,000 service members were killed and more than 53,000 wounded in the war on terror. By one estimate, it cost more than $8 trillion and 900,000 lives. It drained resources that could have been used to strengthen the country against emerging rivals. Some of the steepest costs are the hardest to measure: the damage to our social compact and our domestic politics. Many soldiers who answered the call to defend the country and fought in the misguided wars, along with their families and communities, understandably feel betrayed by their leaders.

Well, yeah.

Elsewhere in the day’s news you learn that the busto real estate developer, now a corrupt demented bigot who incredibly enough is President of the United States, is intent on repeating the exact same bigoted idiocy that generates the awful results listed by its Editorial Board:

Closing out his speech at the Pentagon today, Trump again suggested that the military conflict with Iran was part of the legacy of 9/11 terror attacks. “Today we renew the sacred oath that we first swore in their names a quarter of a century ago. We will never, ever forget,” he said. “That’s why we fight today. We don’t have a choice. There can only be victory. We fight hard. We fight to win.”

At the beginning, the 21st Century seemed like fun

By the way, we’re losing, just as in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Times was too circumspect to recount accurately how the nation descended from the unity of 9/11 to the abyss in which it is now trapped. In their account, it sounds like a hurricane came ashore.

Let’s take the advice of our old expository writing instructor and use the active voice. The debacles of the last 25 years didn’t just happen. Republicans caused them.

As mentioned already, unqualified Republican frat boy George W. Bush, installed as President by a narrow 5-4 vote of the bent Supreme Court, ignored the torrent of intelligence about the imminence and seriousness of another terrorist attack in the United States. His handlers, including Vice-President Dead-eye Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld, were equally oblivious, despite the best efforts of White House Antiterrorism adviser, Richard Clarke, who couldn‘t even get a meeting with Dead-eye Dick to discuss the al-Qaeda threat until September 4, 2001. (9/11 Commission Report at 201.)

Having left the nation exposed, while the rubble still smoked, the tinny Republican warmongers immediately saw the terrorist attack as a license to carry out their unfinished agenda of global domination, by building an unconstrained lawless Presidency that could chuck U.S. citizens into dungeons without anything resembling due process and overthrowing Middle East dictators who had nothing to do with 9/11.

These Republicans chose to take America to war based on lies, and demonize our allies when they refused to go along with the preposterous war of aggression. Remember freedom fries?

Their henchmen, despite occasional self-serving requests from Bush for tolerance, built the case for war not only on lies but by fanning the flames of American intolerance and bigotry, in this case toward all Muslims, who were regarded as an undifferentiated mass of bloodthirsty terrorists bent on destroying America. They also led a drive to undermine the civil liberties of all Americans, with special emphasis on those who dared to criticize Mission Accomplished George. Remember “shut up and sing?” We do.

The results were accurately described by the Times Editorial Board as far as it went.

But the disgraceful Republican performance after 9/11 resonates strongly today. In 2026, another Republican bigot, stupider and more despicable than even George Bush, has built an entire political movement on hatred and fear of anyone who practices one of the world’s great religions.

We’ve already quoted his laughably bigoted case for starting a losing war of choice against Iran, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, and even came to our aid in the aftermath of the attack.

But the Islamophobia fomented by the previous generation of Republican hacks and warmongers has been stoked to volcanic levels by the current crop of corrupt cynical Republican bigots:

When Zohran Mamdani, as Mayor of New York, said he would as part of his duties, attend 9/11 memorial ceremonies at Ground Zero, white bigots let their freak flag fly:

Council Member Vicki Paladino demanded that Mayor Zohran Mamdani not attend the 9/11 ceremony, saying he “does not belong there” and that “we, the people” do not want him there.

[image or embed]

— Mediaite (@mediaite.com) September 9, 2026 at 1:41 PM

Just a reminder that the core principle of both white racist Republicans and Islamist extremists is that they get to decide who belongs, and who doesn't.

Speaking of hate and intolerance of those with different religions, let's go to Texas!

In the state where white men are men and everyone else is cattle, Texas Republicans are desperately trying to cling to power by making a naked appeal to religious intolerance and anti-Muslim bigotry.

The clown who is running for Texas Railroad Commissioner (despite the name, a powerful office with control over what they call down there erl) posted the following troll bait in support of his campaign for elected office:

Let's unpack this photo.  it shows a bunch of young people in the stands at a Texas football game, wearing Texas regalia (including the stupid hats) and cheering on their team.  That sounds pretty Amurican to us.

To white bigots like Bo, though, there's a problem: most of the cheering guys in the foreground appear to be South Asian.  There are persons of South Asian heritage in Texas.  Some were actually born there.  Some attend the University of Texas.  As for their foreignness, they must be hiding it deep under their disguise as Longhorn football fans.

Smearing these cheering students is consistent with the general climate of Islamophobia in Texas, although someone might want to tell Bubba that most South Asians aren't in fact Muslim.   

Captain Karl Rove, having pocketed his winnings for decades from fomenting hatred and bigotry to elect sh***y Republican candidates, is now shocked, shocked to discover what has been going on his casino:

Karl Rove said he’ll break 30 years of only supporting Republicans to vote against “bigot” Bo French www.texastribune.org/2026/09/14/b...

[image or embed]

— Catherine Rampell (@crampell.bsky.social) September 14, 2026 at 8:05 PM

Sure, Karl.  Now see if you can find those six million emails you erased.

Remember that al-Qaeda’s enemy was the tolerance and openness of the democratic secular “infidel” West. Their goal was to replace it, at least in the Middle East, with intolerant religious extremism, just like Texas Republicans. As the 9/11 Commission report found at 51-52:

To the second question, what America could do, al Qaeda’s answer was that America should abandon the Middle East, convert to Islam, and end the immorality and godlessness of its society and culture:“ It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind.” If the United States did not comply, it would be at war with the Islamic nation, a nation that al Qaeda’s leaders said “desires death more than you desire life.”

Like the Republican Party, bin Laden declared the world “divided between infidels and believers.”  The only difference of course was the religion espoused by the haters.

Bin Laden's followers await his 25th anniversary remarks

Bin Laden also wanted to drive American influence and power out of the Middle East.  Thanks to the Mad King’s disastrous war against Iran and subsequent inability to protect Saudi and the Gulf States,  the era of American dominance in the Middle East has ended.

And the ongoing effort by the corrupt, clueless, and depraved Republican Party to split the United States from its democratic allies, while fostering the recrudescence of Fascism in Europe, may well complete the work that bin Laden couldn’t, before his life was ended by real President Obama.

Although bin Laden was unavailable for comment, from his current residence in Hell he must be pleased by the havoc wrought by 25 years of Republican disasters in the Middle East, all perpetrated in supposed response to his dastardly attack on September 11, 2001.  

Journalism unable to recognize extremism is no virtue (Sorry, Barry)

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling

Like the White House itself, American democracy has been destroyed in part by a wrecking ball wielding by a corrupt demented Mad King bent on replacing it with something more to his liking, like a depraved tyranny that might give pause to Mussolini if not Caligula. 

No wonder that what's left of an independent American media has gotten so exercised about the real problem: extremist Democrats.

Examples abound but here's a representative sample offered by long-time conventional wisdom dispenser and David Broder wannabe, New York Times reporter Carl Hulse:

And the rise of far-left socialist candidates has Republicans seeing an opening to try to brand Democratic contenders across the country as part of a movement out of step with typical Americans. 

Examples of far-left socialist positions include advocating for extending Medicare to all Americans, ending a useless bloody war started for no reason by a demented bully, limiting U.S. aid and support for a country conducting a brutal campaign of persecution and ethnic cleansing against five million people it wishes to expel, and abolishing an unaccountable violent secret immigration police force that has spread fear and terror across America. Pretty far-out stuff, at least according to this hack.  

Hulse's thumbsucker followed endless New York Times coverage of Democratic primaries, which were invariably described as “divisive,” although as even their subhed admits, such divisions disappeared once the votes were counted and party unity prevailed:

So in fact the Michigan primary turned out not to be divisive, which also could be said of every f***in' Democratic primary in 2026, each of which ended with the losing side promising to support loyally the winner in the fight to save American democracy.

But that hasn't stopped the Times from referring to candidates it doesn't like – invariably the progressive ones – as either divisive or extreme or both.

When a progressive candidate seemed to be making a strong run for the Democratic nomination for Governor of Wisconsin, the Times lost no time branding her as socialist and extreme:

Her policy goals and social media rhetoric have raised eyebrows among some Democratic voters, who are questioning whether her views are too extreme to represent Wisconsin’s many moderates and independents. 

These positions, lovingly described by the Times as if it were reviewing an edgy new fusion place in Williamsburg, included views she no longer held, as well as policies like higher taxes on the rich (a category that includes newspaper publishers).

By the way, when she lost to a more moderate candidate, she immediately endorsed him.  So much for another divisive primary battle. 

And what about Republican candidates who might plausibly be considered extreme and divisive, like this clown in Texas:

A self-described gun-rights absolutist and YouTuber known for his inflammatory humor, Mr. Herrera, 30, was initially opposed this year by both Mr. Johnson and President Trump as he challenged the district’s Republican incumbent, Tony Gonzales, for a second straight time. Mr. Gonzales and his allies spent millions painting Mr. Herrera as extreme, highlighting old videos in which he made wildly offensive jokes like saying that a Nazi-era submachine gun was “the original ghetto blaster” and “Hitler’s street sweeper.”...

In the days before Mr. Johnson rallied for Mr. Herrera and held a fund-raiser for him, a video resurfaced of the YouTuber using crude, sexualized insults against a female gun-control activist in 2022. 

Answer: he's not extreme; he's just edgy:  

That's totally different. 

Speaking of extreme and divisive, how about the Texas Republican Party trying to cling to power by fomenting bigotry against Muslims, who represent maybe 2% of Texas's population?

For many conservative voters in Texas, Islam has replaced the border as a major concern since early last year, Republican consultants have said. Anti-Muslim activists and hard-right candidates have increasingly described Islam as incompatible with American values. They warn that the United States could soon look like Europe, where Muslim populations are larger.

“I won’t rest until every Muslim is gone,” one statewide Republican candidate, Bo French, wrote on social media this summer. 

Sounds divisive to us but then we don't have the Olympian perspective of the New York Times. 

Is it divisive and extreme when ill-trained violent masked secret immigration police rampage through American communities to please Geheimespolizeileiter Stephen Miller? Could you characterize views like these as extreme and divisive?

What's the white answer?   Anyway, we couldn't find any news media calling him extreme.

How about the destruction of America's system of public health, which endangers children every day by spreading lunatic vaccine and other health disinformation, largely at the instigation of batshit cracy junkie Brainworm Bobby Kennedy?

None dare call him extreme, either.  Even after unvaccinated children and babies dropped dead from measles.  Even after he appointed a nutcase who compared vaccines to experiments on concentration camp victims, the Times could not bring itself to utter the e-word or the d-word.

Finally, let's turn to the greatest single financial benefactor of the Republican Party, whose endless bags of money are considered vital to the survival of endangered Republicans like Sen. Susan “Distressed” Collins.  What are his views on the issues of the day?

We know that he cheered the victory of the bigoted Russian stooge neo-Nazi AfD party in recent German elections:

“And you don't think that's extreme?” – B. Fleckman

On Sunday, Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (Alternativ für Deutschland, or AfD) party won 43.8% of the vote in a legislative election in the small state of Saxony-Anhalt, formerly part of Soviet-dominated East Germany. The AfD is anti-immigrant and pro-Russia and has won the support of both Vice President J.D. Vance and billionaire Elon Musk. When Musk posted “Well done!” in German to the co-founder of AfD, Alice Weidel, another AfD leader responded with thanks.  

When not endorsing neo-Nazis or giving the Schickelgruber salute himself, the ketamine-demented supervillain has illegally dismantled Congressionally-mandated foreign aid program leading to the preventable deaths of hundreds of thousands of poor and sick people, none of whom were white billionaires from Silicon Valley.

He also stole the Government's Social Security personal data files, to put to whatever he use he chooses in between efforts to propagate a race of superior beings, all short and pasty and with receding hairlines, like their superior dad. He is now attempting the same data-harvesting stunt by paying for a fake website supposedly devoted to protecting the right to vote but in fact stealing as much personal data as he can get his grubby mitts on.

You'd expect our fearless mainstream media to grill every Republican about their links to this extreme and divisive madman.  

You'd be wrong.  Only Democrats are extreme and divisive.  To the New York Times, the nefarious Nazi-lovin' white racist is just a good ol' tech billionaire. 

And the shills for the Party he supports (and which returns the favor with billions in government contracts and immunity from any regulatory oversight)?  According to just one day's Times, they're only meandering, delivering dark speeches, appealing to moderates, displaying Texas flair, and unwilling to rest until every Muslim is gone.

Nothing extreme or divisive to see here, people.  Move along.   

Congress: with America on the brink, let's go home!

By Senior Washington Correspondent John Hay

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Sept. 1) – On this first day of September, the alarms about the future of American democracy are shrieking.

Just today, we learned that despite a court order, the Administration is barreling ahead with an illegal plan to thwart mail-in voting, with the goal of rigging the midterms to keep in power a massively unpopular Republican kleptocracy.

We also learned that in a time of war, a drug-addled Defense Secretary is continuing his maniacal purge of competent uninformed and civilian leadership at the Pentagon, putting U.S national defense at grave risk.

This is the same Administration that is insanely prolonging its war of aggression in Iran, which it has already lost.  Just today, a frustrated and obviously demented tyrant is threatening Iran with 

When a reporter asked if this meant nuclear weapons, the rattled kleptocrat snarled that the question was stupid.  In the meantime, the Mad King continues to post AI slop boasting of non-existent triumphs.

Mad King several pieces short of a full bucket

While our armed forces are squandering U.S. military strength and credibility in this futile violence, they continue to commit war crimes by attacking and killing the crews of small boats on the high seas, who may or may not be smuggling drugs or catching tuna, but who are indubitably not engaged in an armed attack against the United States.

In Venezuela, the Mad King has stolen $13 billion of oil revenues with no accountability and no reporting on where the money has gone.  Now he has announced a vague new scheme to pillage billions of barrels of that country's oil to reward himself and a few cronies. 

Closer to home, the demented Mad King is fomenting a trade war against our neighbor and closest ally solely because the Canadians have dared to oppose his insane plant to annex their large and powerful country over the objections of the population.

Everywhere you look in the Mad King's regime you find devastation and corruption.  His equally insane HHS Secretary, Brainworm Bobby Kennedy, continues to trivialize the public health disaster of this year's measles outbreak by variously trying to rig the statistics and insisting that it's no problem because only the weak die from measles (which of course is false).

To degrade and destroy our environment, the Mad King, not content to perpetuate dangerous climate denial while the Earth boils, has decided to sell off parts of our national parks to his corrupt friends and exempt useless energy-gobbling data centers from environmental regulation.

And we haven't even gotten to the Mad King's assault on the rule of law, from ordering fraudulent indictments against those who stood up to him (like Jim Comey) to unleashing a brutal secret immigration police on law abiding residents to demolishing portions of the White House to build a monument to his vanity. Despite the blatant illegality of the project, five bent Republican Justices on the Supreme Court gave him the green light to continue. 

The barrage on what is left of our democracy have reached a level of intensity not seen since the Western Front of World War I.  The Congress and the Supreme Court, dominated by equally corrupt and extremist Republicans, have failed to do their jobs.

At this desperate hour we turn to our last hope: the large Democratic minorities in the House and Senate.  Surely they will make every effort to defend our beset nation. Surely they will not pretend it is business as usual and shirk their duties by leaving town as quickly and quietly as possible.

It's pretty to think so, isn't it?

But this afternoon,

What could be finer to the hacks at the New York Times than an outpouring of bipartisan enthusiasm? 

Why were Democrats so eager to carry on business as usual in a time of national crisis?

The vote was a lopsided 370 to 48, a reflection of the bipartisan enthusiasm for heading off any funding fight before November, when voters will decide which party will control Congress for the final two years of Mr. Trump’s term. It paved the way for lawmakers to quickly return to the campaign trail for the critical final weeks before the elections. 

Oh. And what does anyone think will happen in November?

Another CR moving the deadline into the new year is likely....

At this point the captious may argue that the Democrats, being in the minority in both Houses, could not have blocked continued government funding.  First, that's not quite true, as such resolutions require 60 votes in the Senate (which rubber-stamped the CR back in the predawn hours of an August morning by a vote of 90-6). 

In any event, politics isn't just about legislating; it's about fighting.

Imagine if all Senate and House Democrats had stood firm and demanded fundamental changes in the way the Mad King regime does business.  Imagine if they demanded defunding the Department of Justice's corrupt prosecutions of political adversaries  Imagine if they had demanded an end to insane retaliatory tariffs.  Imagine if they had sought to defund anti-vax drivel.  Imagine halting the destruction of the White House.  Imagine requiring ICE reforms, like banning warrantless arrests and home invasions, not to mention their shiny new torture mitts. Imagine prohibiting using the Postal Service to suppress mail-in votes.

Democrats were pleased by their peaceful resolution 

The nation's attention would be focused on these and other critical issues, rather than what some Twitch nitwit said a year ago.  The Democratic base would be inspired and energized.  The national agenda would be driven not by the demented ravings of a corrupt madman, but by an organized effort to direct the electorate's attention to the assault on democracy and the rule of law.

Further, keeping the House and Senate at work and in session would provide many opportunities to question Republican cowards about whether they agree with the latest plutocratic insanity.  And there's plenty every day.  Instead Republicans will be able to hide out in their districts or at fancy resorts where they can schnor money from rich s***s. 

But  demanding that Congress address these fundamental issues would have required courage, not to mention a willingness to cut short one's undeserved second vacation.

Either this country is in a grave crisis of democracy and legitimacy or it's not.  When Democrats are willing to do business as usual, they're telling their base and the nation that there's nothing to see here, people, move along.

Midterm elections are thought to depend on base turnout   It's hard to imagine a strategy less likely to motivate the Democratic base to vote when large majorities of their legislators couldn't be bothered to put up a fight.