Dear President Biden, Yesterday I read the WP’s 2022 preview – the collection of mini-essays by a handful of reporters and editorialists wherein they attempt to read the tea leaves and predict the big ticket issues for the coming year. Here’s the list of topics (in order): The Pandemic; Climate Change; Elections; Food; Pants; Dogs; …
The System continues to work as designed
Dear President Biden, I’m still checking in with the news a couple of times a day, but I’ve been making the check-ins briefer in an effort not to let myself get lost in the various mucky rabbit holes of our body politic. We’re a flipping mess. And yes, we would absolutely be more of a …
Democracy is messy so lets get stuff done while we can
Dear President Biden, The other day I took a screen shot of the image that was paired with Henry Olsen’s WP editorial entitled “Biden’s vaccine mandates may just backfire.” Initially the motivation was to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. However, once I confirmed that I was seeing what I …
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Victim-blaming and victim-claiming
Dear President Biden, I don’t know yet whether there’s something substantive linking the two stories that have formed a mash-up in my brain or if it’s just my propensity to see connections between random-ish things. I’m hoping that by writing about them, I’ll figure out why my brain is so insistently juxtaposing them. The two …
A lovely sunset and some unlovely illogic
Dear President Biden, We’re shaking up our routine a fair bit this evening in getting the grocery shopping done tonight rather than waiting until tomorrow morning. We’re having some friends over for lunch and the morning will be given over to cooking so shopping for said cooking must be done tonight (getting up super early …
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This shit is real
Dear President Biden, I’m not sure what exactly tipped my brain over into that space where it’s acting like a tongue that can’t leave a rough tooth alone, but just now the phrase “existential dread” landed like a lead balloon and won’t leave me alone. Actually, I doubt it was any one thing having just …
Conspi-racist candidates and middle names
Dear President Biden, Maybe it was because of the heretofore unusual pairing of “conspiracist” and “candidates” in the WP Editorial Board’s piece “A Weird Story Out of Colorado Shows the Dangers U.S. Democracy Faces”, but when I first read it, I parsed “conspiracist” as “conspi-racist.” Here’s the full sentence: “Across the country, conspiracist candidates are …
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It’s not the misery of the moment….
Dear President Biden, According to my NWS phone app we hit 104 yesterday late afternoon. At least that’s the high that was indicated when I checked around 5pm, at which point it had dropped to a mere 100. Later, however, the app listed the high as 102. Who the hell knows? Whatever the high was, …
“Always make new mistakes”
Dear President Biden, I fixed it on my blog, but of course I couldn’t fix it on your correspondence page so I need to apologize to you for the slip up of having conflated you and Mitch McConnell -- “Joe McConnell.” It really was a slip up – perhaps of the Freudian sort – since …
The Big Lies
Dear President Biden, It’s a small problem, but it’s one that I don’t think is unique to me (though how it manifests for me might be a tad unusual), which is the problem of not knowing exactly how to efficiently call out the “bad guys” anymore. It comes up every morning when I’m reciting the …
The Biden Letters 