Opinion

Mitch McConnell’s chief skill, above strategic cynicism, is the ability to look deeply concerned about matters of grave consequence.

He had his “grave face” on Tuesday. He said: “There is no room in the Republican Party for antisemitism, for white supremacy. Anyone meeting with people advocating that point of view, in my judgment, is highly unlikely to ever be elected president of the United States.”

Democrats lose because they abandoned the working class.

Pundits and politicians have repeated that since 2016. The Democrats are, supposedly, kale-eating coastal-urban elites who focus on culture war issues and alienate meat-and-potatoes, Boss-listening heartland Americans. That’s why liberals lose.

Liberals understand the dangers facing trans people. If there were any doubt beforehand, there was none after the Club Q massacre last month in Colorado Springs. As if to sharpen the horror, the gunman’s dad told a local TV news crew that when he heard about his son’s butchery, he worried he might be gay. Phew! He’s not! Praise God!

These dangers stem directly from the demonization of trans people by right-wing sadists and propagandists. They libel and malign trans people’s intentions. They accused them of “grooming” innocent children for later sexual predation, or of worse (for instance, playing key roles in the QAnon conspiracy narrative about Democratic “cabalists” conducting kid-rape rituals before drinking their pure sinless blood.) They accuse allies of normalizing pedophilia. Theirs is a gothic discourse bent on making trans people seem subhuman.

Joe Biden and the Democrats are desperately trying to salvage the Child Tax Credit expansion, which pulled millions of children out of poverty.

Reducing child poverty is especially beneficial to families in red states, where poverty is most entrenched. Yet opposition to the expansion has come from Republicans and from red-state Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

Imagine if Dwight Schrute of The Office worked in global health instead of paper sales. That’s how Dr. Andrew G. Huff comes across in his new book The Truth About Wuhan: How I Uncovered the Greatest Lie in History.

Huff is a former vice president of the EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), a science charity that studies the impact of the illegal wildlife trade on emerging infectious diseases. The EHA looms large in the fevered imaginations of lab leak boosters, because it’s a nexus between the US government, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and by extension, the Chinese government.

Tuesday was a bad day for Kevin McCarthy. The California congressman wants to be the next House speaker, but lost the majority vote three times. As you know, because the press corps keeps saying so, no majority leader has failed so badly in 100 years.

McCarthy is wounded. Even after he wins the speakership, and he will, he won’t have authority. As the Post’s Greg Sargent said, the MAGA insurgents will. They don’t call themselves that, of course. They call themselves the Freedom Caucus. They don’t want freedom. They want anarchy and chaos. The word “governing” is meaningless.

In one of its last acts of 2022, the Biden administration and the Democrats in the Congress passed a measure that reaffirmed their commitment to addressing the student-loan debt crisis.

The measure was buried in the Secure Act 2.0, an overhaul of the retirement system. That act was itself buried in the end-of-year $1.7 trillion spending package (known as the omnibus) that included $45 billion in aid to Ukraine and vital fixes to the electoral system.

Everyone blames the liberals. That should be the American motto. Put it on the money. Put it on the national monuments. Everyone blames the liberals and their ideas about liberty, even other liberals.

But everyone should blame the institutions that get the liberals’ ideas wrong, and everyone should blame the illiberals for blaming the liberals for the institutions that get the liberals’ ideas all wrong.