BERNIE SANDERS MUST BE LAUGHING HIS ASS OFF.

 You figure it has to be parody, but no --

--it's Rich Lowry, so if anything it's self-parody (though really, don't you have to have style to be parodied? The closest thing to a style hallmark Lowry has is "bad"). Just three months ago, Lowry endorsed Trump's reelection as "The Only Middle Finger Available... a gigantic rude gesture directed at the commanding heights of American culture." But he couldn't get enough people to go along with Presidency as Fuck You, so now he's offended by the Communist Insurgency of Sleepy Joe Biden. 

Joe Biden is off to the most left-wing start of any Democratic president in recent memory. 

Just two weeks later, the dulcet tones of Biden’s inaugural address already seem an artifact of a bygone era.

Ah, the "unity" thing. At this very moment Biden is engaged in negotiations with the Republicn party -- which does not hold a majority in either house, nor the Presidency -- in pursuit of bipartisan consensus. Many of us think he's a sap to do so. What no one beside Lowry thinks is that it's divisive. 

But Lowry claims Biden is governing "further to the left of any Democrat who made his career prior to the ascendency of the cultural left" -- which date I don't see in my political timeline: Was it the birth of the Frankfurt School in 1918? The manumission of slaves? Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban/And the Beatles' first LP?  (Lowry clearly stuck this in to ward off anyone who remembered FDR.)

It isn’t new for Democratic presidents to want to tax, spend and regulate, even if Biden seeks to do more of all three than his immediate predecessors. Biden layers on top of this a cultural agenda that represents a new dimension of radicalism that would be alien and baffling to bygone Democrats, who may have wanted to extend the New Deal but never sought to transcend the gender binary. 

Those old-time Democrats might have cursed America with Social Security and Medicare, but they never would have countenanced homos and he-shes! Hell, some of them didn't even like the colored. You could talk to a Democrat in them days! 

Thereafter Lowry gives a rightwing pocket history of evil-but-no-Biden Democrat Presidents, culminating in this howler: 

Bill Clinton and Obama were both ambitious but also cared about the budget deficit and allowed it to restrain their agenda in a way that the Biden Democrats now totally reject. 

That's a new way of saying "We got Democrats trained to clean up Republican presidents' deficits, and here comes this Biden guy who still wants to give money to the suckers instead!" (Missing from Lowry's column: the words "COVID" and "coronavirus." He refers to the $1.9 trillion package simply as a "relief bill," no doubt hoping to conjure in his readership visions of welfare queens and strapping young bucks instead of virus-infected millions.)

Lowry's also mad at Biden's climate change agenda, which he says "speaks of an overwhelming hostility to fossil fuels." See, Biden talks unity, but then gives Exxon Mobil the back of his hand! Also:

There will also be a continual focus on what Biden’s chief-of-staff calls “a racial-equity crisis,” which will be a warrant for a new, more aggressive identity politics. 

People already treat racism as something undesirable  -- as Biden gets "aggressive" about identity politics, people may begin to think it's unforgivable, and then how will Republicans ever get elected? 

There are other, better reasons to root for Biden's barely-adequate package to pass, but it would also be nice to read Lowry's "Joe Manchin: Mountain State Marxist" column.