The scenario is more than possible. The GOP only wants to claim that it kept its promise. Look, ma, we repealed and replaced Obamacare. But Ted Cruz once again foiled us. End of story. End of Trump agenda. Mitch gets to live another day in the fetid air of McConnell's Kentucky whose population is filled with Trump voters and folk who did not vote. When history is written we may be recording how a man with no conscience managed to stay in office by savaging Barack Obama and ensuring the downfall of Donald Trump.

Do you really think this excrescence will pass?

My thinking is as follows. By the end of the weekend, enough GOP Senators will have weighed in to make passage of the Senate health bill impossible. There will be dancing in the street. Mitch McConnell will breathe a sigh of relief. And Trump will go back to full-time drama, having no agenda he can dream of passing. But the damage, friends, is already done and that too suits McConnell just fine. Obamacare, imperfect as it is, has ended up as a pinata for the GOP.

And we will be standing in place as usual

I do not think single payer is exactly what we want. We will get it because blame politics, perfected by McConnell, will persist. It will be passed by a vote of just Democrats.

Binary, tit for tat. McConnell will be happy. This is how it works. We could have had a different verdict with Obama being understood to be a uniter and bipartisanship the norm. But that was a pipe dream.

McCarthy and Cruz

It comes down to decency. It has been so since the 1950s, actually since the founding. We were meant to evolve.

Instead, we fought and long after the fighting has proved to serve no one, it continues.

McCarthy, tutored by Trump's one-time mentor Roy Cohn, was brought down in the 1950s. His bipartisan censure was precipitated after he was flagged during the Army-McCarthy hearing.

The e-lawyer Joseph N. Welsh asked McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" On little black and white TVs, the question transfixed the nation.

McCarthy was toast. Cohn went on to be a big New York mob lawyer and was Trump's best friend and mentor until Trump cut him off when Cohn was dying of AIDS. Even the unflappable Cohn was speechless in the face of such indecency.

I shall close with two tweets from one of my candidates to succeed Trump, Gavin Newsom.

Trump lives in a parallel universe where evil is OK as long as it's directed in a binary way.

Then Gavin had the good sense to tweet the following from Barack Obama. It will not register with Trump supporters but that is their problem.
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