The not-so-secret GOP plan to wreck the economy
Now that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has recognized Joe Biden as president-elect, he's working to extend the Covid recession.
The photograph above is of Alistair Sim, who is the only screen Scrooge worth a damn. His secret was that he underplayed Scrooge’s meanness, making him indistinguishable from any other respectable tightwad you might encounter on the floor of the Royal Exchange (which was sort of Dickens’s point). You’ve probably seen the 1951 A Christmas Carol, because it’s on TV all the time, but if you haven’t I recommend it highly. It’s much darker than other versions, so much so that Radio City Music Hall cancelled plans to include it with a Rockettes kickline and “Living Nativity” re-enactment in its annual Christmas Spectacular. Variety shooed audiences away (“a grim thing that will give tender-aged kiddies viewing it the screaming-meemies…. There’s certainly no Yuletide cheer to be found”), and it flopped on first release. I know no higher recommendation.
My occasion to revisit Sims’s triumph is a column (“Republicans for Recession”) that I just posted for the New Republic. It suggests congressional Republicans are denying aid to state and local governments in a deliberate Scroogelike effort to tank the economy and thereby disrupt Joe Biden’s presidency. I worried a little that this was too cynical, but I note that today’s lead story in the New York Times, citing Republican efforts to constrain the Fed in addition to denying state and local aid, comes close to reaching the same conclusion. By this weekend it may be conventional wisdom. All the more reason to read my piece right away. It’s not like you have any Christmas parties to distract you.