I’m not one to complain — except when writing a column, knocking around the house, or making small talk with friends/detractors, who are often one and the same. But other than that, the “c-word” is my middle name. “Contentment.” (Not the other c-word, monsters.) That said, this summer has really blown.
Here in the DMV — as our peppy local anchors like to call the DC-MD-VA area to try to make it sound sexier (it’s hard to be sexy when sharing an acronym with the Department of Motor Vehicles) — we are going on what feels like Day 45 or so of mid-90s temperatures, with about 200 percent humidity. The largemouth bass are sulking, and can’t be bothered to expend the energy to chase topwater flies. Which are the only kind you can fish, since the ponds are choked with mid-summer hydrilla beneath the surface. The dog doesn’t want to go for walks. (Would you, in a fur coat?) And if you’re outside for longer than five minutes, you need a change-of-shirt and possibly pants, depending how comfortable you are soldiering on with swamp-ass.
But there’s one thing that’s fatiguing me even more than the physical weather, and that’s the political climate. For it’s hard to go five minutes these days without some defeated sad sack reminding you that no matter how awful Donald Trump’s first six months have been — no matter how much his ever-shifting tariffs are jacking prices to hell, no matter how many academic and media institutions he shakes down for extortion booty, no matter how many bribes he takes in plain sight from memecoin dinners/private-jet-donating-foreign governments, no matter how many idiot offspring strike lucrative deals abroad trading off his name, no matter how much he coddles the pedophiles he was supposed to wreak havoc against, no matter how many billionaire sociopaths he appoints to destroy basic government functionality, no matter how out-of-touch he is with common-man concerns while pretending to be their champion, no matter how hard he sodomizes the republic on a near-daily basis — well, Democrats have the real credibility problem.
And they’re serious.
I’m not a Democrat, never intend to become one, and have never been in the habit of defending Dems. Neither do I see any reason to roll that boulder uphill now. At least not in earnest. But at this late date, with this much destruction in Trump’s wake — with a Republican-majority Congress and Supreme Court not only serving as democracy-hobbling enablers, but eager accomplices — blaming Dems for the current dysfunction is like blaming my overtaxed AC condenser for the swamp-ass DMV temperatures. It’s a misappropriation of ire.