What I enjoy about conservative commentators is that they are predictable. The rhetorical webs they weave follow the same patterns. According to Goldberg, Biden "violated his oath of office" with the eviction moratorium. Biden is a "violator", so we better be on the look out. There's a lot of them about these days, particularly men. He mitigates the charge by explaining that Obama and Bush were also violators. Forget Trump, of course, because he was violator extraordinaire. These Presidents failed to stay "within the bounds of their oath." The Constitution, in all its gravity, is the mighty word of law, passed down to us by the holy fathers, sanctioned by generations and the last defense against tyranny. The final rather pompous flourish by Goldberg "I'd rather live in a country where politicians were terrified of violating their oaths" was disarming. Forget that many in the Republican party in Congress who helped foment and encourage the attack on Congress, still refuse to accept the legally verified election and are happy to accept lies, falsehoods and whacky theories if it keeps them in power and the money coming in. I seem to remember they all swore oaths. Did theirs not count?
The founding aristocrats of the colonies made provision to allow The Constitution to change with the times. They realised that once they had their paws on the vast hinterland to the West everything would change dramatically. They were correct. The impediments to changing the Constitution, however, became more and more difficult the larger the United States became. Thirteen colonies morphed into fifty states and getting them all to agree on vaccines and mask wearing is challenging enough. Change the Constitution? I don't think so. And so we hire large numbers of erudite lawyers to argue the arcane intricacies of a legal lexicon which we stopped using two hundred years ago and leave it to nine brave souls to arbitrate as best they can. Ultimately, whatever is written as law, depends on us all behaving decently and reasonably towards each other.
Right wing commentators are also predictable because, apart from being pompous and self-righteous, they invariably lack a sense of humor. They don't even know how to laugh at themselves. Some on TV, like Hannity, Carlson, Levin and Ingraham adopt this supercilious know-it-all swagger and invite everyone to sneer along with them at anything they don't like, Biden in particular. A line from Edward Albee, the playwright, comes to mind. "The most profound indication of a social malignancy, no sense of humor. None of the monoliths could take a joke." Like the old tent touring evangelists, right wing commentators ooze moral righteousness and indignation and above all certainty. People love it and judging from its popularity flock to it. Those who preach this vision of the world are happy to stoke the fires of prejudice and ignorance with their rhetorical niceties as long as it brings in the cash and satisfies the punters. Meanwhile the country has to be governed, lives and businesses saved, infrastructure rebuilt. Decisions, messy and otherwise have to be made. By the time an army of lawyers, some of whom cost $500 per hour, have gotten to the problem, the main interest becomes keeping the process going for as long as possible by which time the original problem may have disappeared or holed itself up for good in Mar-a-Lago.