From GOP nut to soups

Bret Stephens: Gail, don’t know if you’ve heard, but Marjorie Taylor Greene has accused Nancy Pelosi of running the “Gazpacho police.” Do you think she might also accuse Joe Biden of overseeing a Vichyssoise regime?

Gail Collins: Bret, when I heard that gaffe I knew it’d be on your memory wall. Normally, making fun of Marjorie Taylor Greene is too obvious for your talents. But this was truly a classic.

Bret: There’s the old expression, “from soup to nuts.” When it comes to Rep. Greene, it’s better to say, “from nut to soups.”

Gail: On the opposite end of things, today is Valentine’s Day. Any politicians you’d like to give your heart to?

Bret: None I can easily confess, other than Queen Elizabeth II. You?

Gail: I told you a while back I had a soft spot for Pete Buttigieg, but someone else who’s currently busy with the ever-popular road repair issue is Mitch Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans, who’s in charge of implementing Biden’s infrastructure plan. Still remember the fantastic speech he gave almost five years ago on the importance of tearing down Confederate monuments.

Bret: Landrieu was an effective mayor of New Orleans, which is more than can be said for Mayor Pete’s uneven performance in South Bend. If Mitch can cut through the red tape in his infrastructure job and actually build stuff — an additional rail tunnel under the Hudson, a direct subway link from Manhattan to LaGuardia, a widened FDR Drive, a better airport near Newburgh — he could be a national figure, at least as far as the Stephens family is concerned. Sort of like a modern-day Herbert Hoover, though that’s probably not the comparison he’d like.

Gail: Heh, probably not.

Throwing out one more name — our readers may remember Rep. Katie Porter of California for her righteous takedown of billionaire Jamie Dimon on the tiny pay JP Morgan gives its lowest employees. Now she’s working on financial industry regulation, especially as it relates to investments and trading by her own colleagues.

Really, there are tons of honorable, hardworking public servants out there worth sending a little candy heart.

Bret: OK, so I’m a fan of Jamie Dimon, unquestionably one of the best chief executives in the world. He was said to be a contender for Barack Obama’s treasury secretary, which might have spared us the lame post-2008 recovery. On the whole I wish Democrats would get over their allergy to the financial industry, which is one of the few remaining sectors of American excellence.

But back to valentines, I might send a teeny sliver of a valentine to Mitch McConnell for calling the events of Jan. 6 an “insurrection” and standing up to the insane, fascistic, demented, self-important and self-destructive censure by the Republican National Committee of GOP Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. I’m guessing you are not so charitably inclined….

Gail: Well, hey, hard not to appreciate McConnell’s denunciation of the … insurrectionists. Appreciation doesn’t override the memory of him sitting forever on Obama’s judicial nominations. But at this precise moment — not promising anything about how I will feel tomorrow — I would be willing to forward him a third of a jelly bean.

Bret: A lot of our readers detest McConnell because he’s a highly skilled partisan. But that’s his job. My problem with him is that, unlike Cheney or Kinzinger, he’s totally unprincipled. If you blame Donald Trump for trying to overturn the election through illegal means, which McConnell did, then you have to vote to convict him of high crimes and misdemeanors, which he didn’t. If you think that a president from the opposing party shouldn’t have the right to nominate a Supreme Court justice during an election year (which is constitutionally preposterous), then you shouldn’t assert the right to do so when it comes to an election-year nominee from your own party.

McConnell is part of the Cowardly Lion wing of the GOP that sometimes pretends to be appalled by the Trumpsters but always pulls its punches when it counts. He’s why the Republican Party keeps getting worse. Come to think of it, no jelly beans for him.

Gail: On another front, I spent a lot of last week thinking about student debt, for a column in which I cheered on the idea of some loan forgiveness. Presume you don’t agree, but I’d like to hear your thoughts.

Bret: Strongly against, on the view that contracts should be honored, people who repaid their loans shouldn’t be made suckers for their sacrifice, partial forgiveness of loans will lead to incessant pressure for total forgiveness, and scarce government resources should not be spent on college educated, upwardly mobile young adults. Also, I don’t think we’re really looking at the problem the right way, which is less about the increasing cost of college education, and more about its ever-diminishing quality.

Which, by the way, makes it a shame that we aren’t doing more to steer people toward community colleges and other alternatives to the four-year exercise in binge drinking, weed-smoking and credential-seeking.

Gail: Jill Biden was championing free community college education, but she recently admitted it’s not going anywhere. I appreciate how difficult that would be to do in this economy, but Congress should at least make a mini-effort. They could claim it was a plan to expand educational opportunities for infrastructure workers.

Bret: Not sure I think community college should be absolutely free, but it should be affordable for everyone who qualifies for it.

Gail: Big story this week here in New York City — workers being required to get vaccinated or lose their jobs. What do you think?

Bret: A bad idea, I think, for a few reasons. First, the argument for vaccine mandates is that they stop the spread. But we know that vaccinated people can still transmit the virus, especially with the omicron variant. Second, firing workers who don’t get vaccinated, especially in health care, creates labor shortages that are hurting every part of the economy. Third, I think coastal elites are badly underestimating the rage and radicalism these mandates are generating.

The best reason to get vaccinated is to protect yourself from serious illness, period. By all means encourage others to protect themselves, but mandates and mass firings are a straight road to the emergency that’s unfolding in Ontario. Bad things happen in a democracy when people start feeling like they’ve been dumped into the basket of deplorables, to borrow a familiar phrase.

What’s your take?

Gail: As you know, I’m against requiring people to be vaccinated in the round-em-up-and-shoot-em-up manner.

Bret: Phew.

Gail: But I see no problem in employers — especially employers in the health care industry, for heaven’s sake — requiring that their workers get the shots.

It’s not as if these folks didn’t have mandatory vaccinations for measles and chickenpox when they were kids. And if it turns out that a ton of health care workers — or police officers — would rather stay home than be vaccinated, I suppose their employers will have to adapt. As will we all. Just not ready to give up on the worthy goal of getting as many people protected as possible.

On another matter entirely, have you been watching the Olympics?

Bret: No! Zero interest in giving Beijing a propaganda win. I mean, I wish the athletes well. But every passing Olympics seems worse than the last, and this one may be the worst of all, with the possible exceptions of Munich 1972 and Berlin 1936. The disgrace of the tennis star Peng Shuai’s stage-managed “reappearance,” the revolting use of a Uyghur athlete to light the Olympic torch when Beijing is committing mass human-rights abuses against the Uyghur people, the Xi-Putin Axis, even the inedible “food” for quarantined athletes — spare me.

Gail: The Olympic folk do need to figure out a system that doesn’t confer hosting duties on whatever country is most desperate to spend money to look good at the moment.

Bret: Here’s a new system: They should only do the Olympics in Greece. They should give exclusive broadcasting rights to C-SPAN. They should require athletes to compete in fifth century B.C. attire. And they should stick to javelin and discus throws, barefoot races, wrestling and maybe sailing and rowing, but only if the vessels in question are triremes.