For the rest of the year I could write columns riffing off a long piece for the
by the job-hopping, Pulitzer-winning former Washington Post book critic
Carlos Lozada.
His piece is that delicious. He picks up on a long-running theme of this column,
bottomless cynicism about the game of politics and the people who play it.
Mr. Trump’s big election lie, Mr. Lozada writes, “is yoked to an older deception, without which it could not survive: the idea that American politics is, in essence, a joke. . . . When politicians publicly defend positions they privately reject, they are telling the joke. When they give up on the challenge of governing the country for the rush of triggering the enemy, they are telling the joke. When they intone that they must address the very fears they have encouraged or manufactured among their constituents, they are telling the joke.”
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What gives Mr. Lozada’s piece a richness he doesn’t intend is that he himself is engaged in joke telling, in which all this is the work of Republicans, the Democratic election denials of 2000, 2004, 2016 and 2018 don’t exist, the manufactured Russia collusion lie doesn’t exist, Mr. Biden doesn’t play up the white supremacist menace for own benefit, he and his allies don’t flog a climate apocalypse found nowhere in the science.
The joke…
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