When age doesn’t bring "wisdom"

 

While Republican debt ceiling hypocrisy is in full swing, there is another, more dangerous game they are playing, and California Sen. Dianne Feinstein...

 

 

...seems to be playing right into their hands. Feinstein’s illness from shingles has kept her away from Senate duties and her responsibilities not just to her constituents, but to the country. Although we are told that after much criticism from her colleagues and in the media she is "on her way," her illnesses don’t seem to be going away anytime soon, and it concerns not just her physical health, but her mental health as well, since shingles does affect the brain. 

Feinstein’s mental and physical health has been an issue for a few years now. Just a year ago the San Francisco Chronicle reported concerns from fellow senators that she was unable to “recognize colleagues” or “keep up with arguments in the chamber.” The Chronicle reported concerns that her “memory was rapidly deteriorating” and it was felt that she could “no longer fulfill her duties without the her staff doing much of the work required.”

Feinstein was 88 at the time, and since then The New York Times and others have called for her resignation and replacement because of the damage being done to the Democratic agenda, most egregiously on judicial appointments since she sits on the judiciary committee and her vote is needed to bring forward judicial nominees. There is no greater need at this time to counter the seating of far-right judges with their extremist "cultural" agendas.

Feinstein was at least cognizant enough to understand what is at stake (or simply taking the criticism "personally"), and in an effort to forestall further anger at her prolonged absence from the Senate, she suggested a temporary “replacement” on the judiciary committee, but we are talking about the non-existent ethics of Republicans here, and they predictably defeated the motion.

Republicans know how to play the “game,” which means they don’t let concepts like fair play, morality or ethics get in the way; they are corrupt to the bone and only care about power, the fascist variety if they can get away with it like they are in Florida. 

But Democrats--what a bunch of losers. They readily eat their own over the tiniest infraction (particularly if there is some gender politics angle), and they don’t know how to play hardball or make quid pro quo deals anymore even within the party membership when their agenda is on the line. 

We saw this coming with “new” Democrats like Bill Clinton, who chose to work with far-right Republicans like Newt Gingrich to pass laws on financial “reform,” social programs, immigration and crime that turned out to be disastrous.

Clinton did nominate radical feminist Ruth Bader Ginsburg for the U.S. Supreme Court, and one suspects that this was on the “suggestion”—or “else”—of Hillary. Ginsburg was a mostly reliable left-wing vote on the court, and because of her feminist political leanings she opposed anything that smelled of the “patriarchy,” or at least from the white side. 

Naturally Ginsburg never seemed to realize that most women don’t consider themselves feminists, since the term for many implies as destructive an agenda and that of the radical far-right. And although I wouldn’t exactly put Ginsburg in the same boat as Clarence Thomas, what they did share was a tendency to use their own  “personal” agenda in place of “judgment.”

So why am I bringing Ginsburg into a discussion about Feinstein? A few moments of consideration should make that clear. Like Feinstein, Ginsburg was too arrogant and self-centered to have the gift of foresight. While Feinstein’s thoughtless insistence on quitting on her own good time as the months passed by without her vote in the Senate to move forward on an increasingly lengthy logjam of judicial nominees, Ginsburg arrogantly refused to acknowledge that her time might come up at moment.

Again, it was for personal political reasons that had nothing to do with common sense or reality; in 2016 Ginsburg began to use the term "she" in reference to the next president, and who she wanted to nominate her replacement; obviously she assumed this would be Hillary. One reality was that for 21 years until her death in 2020, Ginsburg faced a series of cancers and other illnesses that she refused to acknowledge the seriousness of, even in 2019 claiming she was “cancer free” before dying of pancreatic cancer a year later at 87. The other reality, of course, was that Hillary lost the election.

People called Ginsburg an “icon” and “hero.” But hindsight tells us her refusal to face reality and resign while Barack Obama still had sufficient time to nominate her replacement proved to be disastrous for at the very least her own personal agenda. Even some female commentators today chafe at the charge that it is “misogynist” to criticize Ginsburg for failing to see that in the last years of Obama’s presidency that the wind of change had moved in the opposite direction, and that Hillary Clinton’s election was no “gimme.” 

Ginsburg didn’t help her case after the 2016 election by whining about the “macho atmosphere” that was the typical feminist “explanation” for Trump’s victory. She, like most feminists, were at a loss to explain why 53 percent of white women in 2016 (as would a similar percentage in 2020) voted for Trump instead of “history,” so she had to find the usual feminist scapegoats.

The damage done is most clearly seen in the overturning of the supposedly sacrosanct Roe v. Wade with the help of Trump’s three Federalist-approved nominees. With John Roberts joining the minority who opposed the overturning of Wade, it would have taken that one vote to prevent it. 

There almost certainly will be more decisions approving the right-wing “culture war” agenda set by Republican-dominated states. Dorothy Samuels, formerly of the New York Times, observed that Ginsburg’s “passion” for “equality” was being undone by the “extraordinarily self-centered thing” she did in failing to read the tea leaves, which  “helped to give us a court that for a long, long time is going to be undoing the equality rulings that she was part of.”

Feinstein is now being accused of similar self-centeredness in having as one of her “legacies” potentially being the disastrous failure of the Democrats to take advantage of the opportunity they have to counter the far-right’s effort to control the country’s federal judiciary system as well as the Supreme Court, and deny the majority in this country at least their right of "choice." Name-calling by gender activists won’t change that reality.