Anticipatory obedience

 Until this morning I thought Merrick Garland was President Biden's worst appointment.  That's when I read about Colleen Shogan.

Shogan is the U.S. Archivist, the official in charge of the National Archives and Records Administration, and what she has been up to will shock you.  She and her advisers run a museum on the National Mall where visitors go to see the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and other documents.  What they can no longer see, as Andrew Restuccia and Rebecca Ballhaus write in the Wall Street Journal, is anything even a tiny bit "controversial" which might upset the Moms for Liberty or other proponents of sanitized American history.  

In the adjacent "Step into History" photo booth, which frankly sounds like a silly idea from Zelig or Forrest Gump, visitors can no longer be "photographed" with divisive figures like Martin Luther King, Dolores Huerta or Minnie Spotted-Wolf, the first indigenous woman to serve in the Marines.  Instead, they can join Richard Nixon welcoming Elvis Presley to the White House, or Ronald Reagan with Cal Ripken, Jr., of the Orioles.  "After reviewing plans for an exhibit about the nation's westward expansion," they write, "Shogan asked one staffer, 'Why is it so much about Indians?'"  Dorothea Lange's photos of Japanese-American internment camps were also deemed "too negative and controversial."  The contraceptive pill was another touchy item, replaced by patents for television.  They even removed a photo of Betty Ford wearing an Equal Rights Amendment pin, although the ERA has been a dead issue for decades.

I don't see how Shogan ever qualified for this job.  She's not a historian or a librarian by training; she writes mysteries with titles like K Street Killing and Stabbing in the Senate.  Her husband works for Charles Koch's libertarian outfit Stand Together, which may be a clue.  At her confirmation Josh Hawley called her an "extreme partisan," probably because the Emancipation Proclamation is on display.  The best spin I can put on all this is that she expected another Trump administration and wants to keep her job and maybe her head.  It's what Timothy Snyder calls "obeying in advance."  

Increasingly, it looks like that may not be necessary.  A pollster named J. Ann Selzer told the Bulwark that she saw a "strong lead" for Kamala Harris in -- wait for it -- Iowa.  To my knowledge neither Harris nor Tim Walz has even campaigned there, though it borders Walz's home state of Minnesota.  No Democrat has, for years.  If this is accurate, who knows what's happening elsewhere on the Plains?  

Trump is still "weaving" in Pennsylvania today (you might as well make a virtue of incoherence) and telling the faithful he won't mind being shot as long as the assassins "shoot through the fake news."  He hasn't thought this through but that's his approach to everything.  (The weave isn't even original -- Professor Irwin Corey was doing it years ago.)  He wove in a new fantasy about how Al Capone would kill Mike Lindell if he didn't like his pillows.  At this point, even the psychiatrists are saying, "I fucking give up."

Kamala Harris made an unannounced appearance on Saturday Night Live (past my bedtime) and Trump FCC appointee Brendan Carr is whining that it violates the equal time rule.  Fine.  They can book Trump for next Saturday, and he can rant unintelligibly for ninety minutes or until some men buckle him into a strait jacket.