Doesn’t Anybody Know How to Play This Game?
31st March 2017
Michael Barone blows the whistle.
“Dare I suggest,” writes the economist and blogger Tyler Cowen, “that the quality of governance in this country has taken a downward turn of late?” Or as Casey Stengel, while managing the New York Mets on their way to a 40-120 season in 1962, reportedly asked, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”
In successive weeks, both Democrats and Republicans have shown a downward trend in the quality of governance and raised questions about whether anybody in Washington can play this game.
March 31st, 2017 at 12:32
A disingenuous question.
The late election demonstrated that the electorate deliberately chose someone who does not know how to play the game and who in fact ran on that very premise.
Yet another instance, if one were needed, of “Be careful what you wish for.”
That sound of feathers is the chickens coming home to roost.
March 31st, 2017 at 13:10
Two assumptions: That the question was aimed at Trump, and that Trump doesn’t know ‘how to play this game’. Both are without merit.
The question was aimed at Congress, both Democrats (who think that acting as if they won will somehow cancel out the fact that they lost) and Republicans (who appear to be uncomfortable with winning and persist in playing “Me too” even when they don’t have to).
Trump does indeed know how to ‘play this game’, but he doesn’t use the Establishment playbook, which is why people (like you) who think that the Establishment playbook is somehow an addendum to the actual rules of the game are so flummoxed. What has Trump actually done so far? Played a lot of golf, signed a lot of Executive Orders, called people names in public, pointed the finger at his predecessor for destroying America, and introduced a budget that has no chance of passage. This isn’t any departure from what Obama was accustomed to doing, except Obama got blow jobs from the DemLegHump Media and Trump didn’t. Other than that, absolutely no different in actual doings. (Not to mention the fact that in 2008 the electorate deliberately chose someone who does not know how to play the game, merely because of his skin color. Trump has at least run an organization and made a profit, which Obama has never done.)