Sometime soon Chris Coons will be all over TV to crow over triumph of bipartisanship that was Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. Coons is the go-to quote-miester about how bipartisanship is America at its best and two Republican votes have warmed his heart and made his little Coonsie rock hard. And I will say, “Ew, Dude. Gross.” And also “Who the fuck cares?”
Honestly, who gives a fuck that the vote was “bipartisan”? Does it mean the clock has been set back to 1980 and comity and collegiality will once again rule the Senate? Fuck, no.
Does it mean the “fever has broken” and Republicans will now go back to acting like human beings? Give me a fucking break.
It means nothing.
Someone mentioned DeSantis maybe being the next GOP nominee. I checked it out on Predictit.org. Looks like a two man race with Trump contracts trading at .40, DeSantis at .30, everyone else is in penny stock territory. While it is hard to imagine the GOP nominating such a vile blobfish, such a morally deformed star-nosed mole, but hey…they nominated Trump so anything is possible.
I read that Macron was running on a very un-popular platform plank called “making everyone work two or three more years to qualify for a pension.” Smart. He must be working with Terry McAuliffe campaign geniuses. Anyway…
France is Having an Election
French voters will go to the polls for the first round of a presidential election on Sunday. If no candidate receives a majority — and none is likely to — a two-person runoff will take place two weeks later on April 24.
The favorite is the incumbent, Emmanuel Macron. But his lead in the polls is not huge, and the war in Ukraine seems to be hurting him. Inflation was already fairly high in Europe, as it is in much of the world, because of the pandemic. The war has caused prices to rise even further, mostly because of sanctions on Russian oil.
While Macron has focused on trying to find a diplomatic solution in Ukraine — and is failing, so far — his leading opponent has instead focused on the French economy, my colleague Roger Cohen explains in a preview of the election. That opponent is Marine Le Pen, a hard-right candidate.
As Roger writes, “Her patient focus on cost-of-living issues has resonated with the millions of French people struggling to make ends meet after an increase of more than 53 percent in gas prices over the past year.”
Le Pen has a long history of friendliness to Putin. Her party has taken loans from a Russian bank, and she met with him in 2017 in an attempt to strengthen her political image, Elisabeth Zerofsky writes in a Times Magazine story about the French far right. Until the invasion, Le Pen largely supported Putin’s policies. Even now, she largely opposes hard-line policies toward Putin.
Le Pen trails in the polls by roughly six percentage points — a small enough margin for an upset to be conceivable. If she wins, the autocracy-friendly caucus within Europe’s democracies would become far larger than it already is.
“A victory by her,” Roger writes, “would threaten European unity, alarm French allies from Washington to Warsaw, and confront the European Union with its biggest crisis since Brexit.”