"Why Won't Obama Lead?" Redux

If you were to lightly scan this January 1st column by The New York Times' editorial board --

Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now

-- you could be forgiven for thinking that the grandees of the Gray Lady had finally gotten it through their thick, savvy skulls exactly what the stakes are for the future and who exactly is holding a knife to the throat of our democracy.

Things have not gotten any better?  Check.

But peel back a layer, and things are far from normal. Jan. 6 is not in the past; it is every day.

Trump is still pulling the strings?  Check.

It is Donald Trump who continues to stoke the flames of conflict with his rampant lies and limitless resentments and whose twisted version of reality still dominates one of the nation’s two major political parties.

The GOP base is nuts?  Check.

Polling finds that the overwhelming majority of Republicans believe that President Biden was not legitimately elected and that about one-third approve of using violence to achieve political goals. Put those two numbers together, and you have a recipe for extreme danger.

The GOP leadership are cowards, liars and fascist goons?  Check.

Party leaders’ rhetoric suggests they see [themselves] as the only legitimate governing power and thus portrays anyone else’s victory as the result of fraud — hence the foundational falsehood that spurred the Jan. 6 attack, that Joe Biden didn’t win the election.

Destroying democracy is now the active project of Republicans at the local level?  Check.

Over the past year, Republican lawmakers in 41 states have been trying to advance the goals of the Jan. 6 rioters — not by breaking laws but by making them. 

Little bit of history thrown in for context and remind the carriage trade why they pay for NYT subscriptions?  Check.

This isn’t the first time state legislatures have tried to wrest control of electoral votes from their own people, nor is it the first time that the dangers of such a ploy have been pointed out. In 1891, President Benjamin Harrison warned Congress...

Adam Kinzinger stroking his imaginary goatee and wondering aloud about shit that has been perfectly obvious for decades?  Check.

“And I’ve gotten to wonder if there is actually any evidence that would ever change certain people’s minds.”

So you're cruising through the column, mentally congratulating the editorial board for finally laying a rhetorical 2x4 squarely upside the heads of the actual authors of this monstrous crime when, buried way down in the 20th paragraph you find the meaty thumb of The New York Time's toxic Both Siderist addiction pressed firmly down on the scales.

Democrats aren’t helpless, either. They hold unified power in Washington, for the last time in what may be a long time. Yet they have so far failed to confront the urgency of this moment — unwilling or unable to take action to protect elections from subversion and sabotage. Blame Senator Joe Manchin or Senator Kyrsten Sinema, but the only thing that matters in the end is whether you get it done. For that reason, Mr. Biden and other leading Democrats should make use of what remaining power they have to end the filibuster for voting rights legislation, even if nothing else.

And just like that it's 2010 all over again.  When, in the face of open, smirking, unified Republican obstruction, slander and sabotage --

-- the savvy Beltway pundits demanded to know why Barack Obama was refusing to use his magic Green Lantern Powers to lead and unify the yadda yadda yadda. From Ezra Klein in The Washington Post, May 3, 2013:

[Ron] Fournier and other adherents of the Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency are caught between a question they can't answer and an answer they can't abide. They don't know exactly what Obama — or any other president — could do to overcome the structural polarization that's cracking Congress. But the idea that there's nothing the president can really do is too displeasing to entertain. It suggests that politics is broken, and it won't be fixed, at least not anytime soon. And that's an unacceptable answer, even if rejecting it leaves you with an unanswerable question.

Sure, today the entire process is, in fact, being held hostage by the two senators the article mentions by name.  Two senators, who, thus far, have shown themselves to be completely immune to threats, promises. protests or bribes to do the right thing. 

That's the story. 

Period.  

Full stop.

And yet somehow the Beltway media is incapable of processing this simple reality.  They cannot abide the fact that, in an evenly divided senate, a screwball dilettante from the desert and a meathead from a backwards, coal state satrap can play Caesar and make it stick.  Therefore some share of the blame must somehow fall on "Mr. Biden and other leading Democrats" because they refuse to use their Green Lantern Powers compel those two senators to yadda...

yadda...

yadda.

No Half Measures