A phrase that I love was rolling around the Internet Wednesday, “Cory Booker gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.”
It was an extraordinary thing that Senator Booker did, a marvel of physical stamina to hold the floor for a record 25 hours and 5 minutes. He started at 7 p.m. Monday and ended at 8:045 p.m. Tuesday. Moreover, he then went on MSNBC and probably some other stations live to talk about it.
I watched for a couple hours Tuesday morning when, among the more than two dozen colleagues who stepped up to ask him questions as a way of giving him a breather, Senators Coons, Markey, Warner and Warren took their turns. I then had the audio on through my work day until I left at 6, confident that he would go for and beat the record, which by then he was only an hour away from.
Among the notable comments through it all were his own, when he said, “I confess that I have been imperfect. I confess that I’ve been inadequate to the moment. I’ve confessed that the Democratic Party has made terrible mistakes that gave a lane to this demagogue. I confess we all must look in the mirror and say ‘we will do better.’”
A commenter on Blue Sky noted, “It is extremely revealing that Corey Booker was able to stand for 25 hours and talk and make sense, and that every time the GOP open their mouths their utterances are insensible, incomprehensible, ungrounded in fact. Trust people who tell the truth. People who lie and fabricate are not trustworthy.”
It’s also been pointed out that Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who previously held the record of 24 hours, and was engaged in an unsuccessful effort to defeat an element of civil rights law, was the same age as Booker when he set the record in 1957.
Thurmond was allowed a restroom break, unlike Booker who held the floor the whole time. Thurmond read from the encyclopedia while Booker spent his time in very long and surprisingly substantive history and political science lessons, quoting at length from the Federalist Papers and much more, aimed at calling out injustice.
His heroic effort came in the context of important, major electoral returns in Pennsylvania the week before and in Wisconsin and Florida reflecting a huge shift in the public sentiment away from Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Stock market and Tesla cybertruck sales nosedives have also been indicative of this marked change coming only 70 days in the new Trump presidency as he was claiming his universal tariff day as “Liberation Day.”
“Liberation Day,” shall we consider as turning day, or revelation day, or expose day, liberating illusions, or any impairment of vision. We Can See Clearly Now Day.
But still, the ongoing Trump effort to rip apart the Western Alliance and to torpedo the U.S. economy, is achieving levels of damage in such short order that will take an enormous effort to eventually overcome.
The summary by Financial Times’ Edward Luce under the headline, “Ten Weeks That Shook the World,” on Wednesday is unsettling to be sure.
Among the more ominous observations in that report is the fact that, on top of everything else, Trump has already effectively wiped out, “vaporized” Luce puts it, the U.S.’s “soft power” assets, reducing for an immediate instance, the U.S.’s ability to help in the wake of the worst earthquake in decades in Myanmar.
“Chinese and even Russian aid teams were on the ground within days. Having dismantled USAID, American assistance has yet to arrive,” he writes. “America’s new guard are almost all white, all male, and mostly unqualified to lead the great departments they are vandalising. Should there be any doubt the U.S. has embraced brutalism?”
It goes to the heart of our problem: no one can expect that a person as clearly devoid of graces, who operates in such clearly-documented ways over many years as a cruel sociopath, will behave in any other way than to insure the actual realities he tries to hide behind egregious falsehoods will out.
