"Hunter Biden said his obsession with naked selfies was a result of 'body dysmorphia,' according to a rambling screed found in the notes of his hard drive."

The NY Post reports.

“I loved to be reassured that my 9-inch very big penis was actually big. It may sound funny to you but its [sic] body dysmorphia … I know my penis is almost twice the size of an average man’s penis,” the first son wrote on July 12, 2018.

He's right. It does sound funny to me.

This isn't funny:

With GOP Senators testing positive for covid, "Will the Senate Have a Quorum to Confirm Judge Barrett?"

Asks Jonathan Adler (at Reason):

There are 53 Republican Senators. As of this morning, three Republican Senators (Tillis, Lee, and Johnson) have tested positive. This means there are only 50 Republican Senators who can attend Senate proceedings. (The Vice President does not count for these purposes.) So if Senate Democrats boycott proceedings, they might be able to grind Senate business to a fault....

To a fault? I'm guessing he meant to say "to a halt." Anyway... Adler observes the Judiciary Committee has been allowing members to participate remotely, so it can reach its quorum that way. And someone needs to be present to raise the quorum issue, and that person — one of the Democrats — would be the 51st Senator. So there's a quorum without Tillis, Lee, and Johnson. Also, under Article I, section 5, the Senate can ask the sergeant-of-arms to go get missing Senators and drag them to the floor.* Lastly, they could try to authorize remote attendance for the full Senate and include the quarantined Senators that way (but that has its own procedural difficulties, described at the link). Adler also notes that 2 of the covid-positive Senators seem to have caught the disease at the ceremony announcing the Barrett nomination.

That is the literary device known as poetic justice.

Notably, poetic justice does not merely require that vice be punished and virtue rewarded, but also that logic triumph. If, for example, a character is dominated by greed for most of a romance or drama, they cannot become generous. The action of a play, poem, or fiction must obey the rules of logic as well as morality. During the late 17th century, critics pursuing a neo-classical standard would criticize William Shakespeare in favor of Ben Jonson precisely on the grounds that Shakespeare's characters change during the course of the play. When Restoration comedy, in particular, flouted poetic justice by rewarding libertines and punishing dull-witted moralists, there was a backlash in favor of drama, in particular, of more strict moral correspondence.

 _________________

*In 1988, Republican Senator Bob Packwood was arrested and carried into the Senate chamber:

"The Senate voted 51 to 48, with no Republican defections and no Democratic support."

I'm up at 5 a.m. reading the NYT about the big tax bill that passed the Senate at 1 a.m.

Did you stay up for the drama — for the exultations and lamentations?

The approval of the bill in the House and Senate came over the strenuous objections of Democrats, who have accused Republicans of giving a gift to corporations and the wealthy and driving up the federal debt in the process.

As the final vote approached in the Senate, Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, gave his closing argument against the bill and scolded his Republican colleagues for talking during his remarks on the floor.

“This is serious stuff,” Mr. Schumer said. “We believe you’re messing up America. You could pay attention for a couple of minutes.”

What a turnabout from 8 years ago, when the Senate voted on Obamacare:

With the supermajority... the Senate moved rather quickly to pass the ACA – or ObamaCare – on Christmas Eve 2009 in a 60 – 39 vote.... Everyone assumed that the Christmas Eve 2009 Senate bill would be tweaked considerably to conform more with the House bill passed two months previously. But now that strategy wouldn’t work, because [after the Republican Scott Brown won the special election in Massachusetts] the Democrats no longer had the 60th vote in the Senate to end debate. What to do? They decided to have the House take up the identical bill that the Senate passed on Christmas Eve. It passed on March 21, 2010, by a 219 – 212 vote. This time, no Republicans came on board, and 34 Democrats voted against. President Obama signed the ACA legislation two days later on March 23.

The rancor has not abated since, as we all know. Republicans invoked Thomas Jefferson’s observation that “great innovations should not be forced on a slender majority – or enacted without broad support.” They cited broad legislative innovations like Social Security and Medicare, both of which enjoyed bipartisan support. They complained that one fewer vote in the Senate or a change of four votes in the House would have been enough to defeat ObamaCare. Democrats responded just as vociferously and passionately that this healthcare reform package was too important and overdue to delay or compromise.

And now the Republicans have their big achievement, too important and overdue to delay or compromise.

The NYT ends its story with a quote from — of all people — Bob Packwood:

Bob Packwood, the former Republican senator from Oregon who helped lead the 1986 tax effort, said that this year’s bill was at least as sweeping as the one that Ronald Reagan signed into law 31 years ago, even though the bills had different goals.

“They have achieved things that I was unable to achieve,” Mr. Packwood said.

Dredging up Bob Packwood feels like a desperate/poignant effort to make the GOP look bad. Packwood was driven from the Senate in 1995. He was the face of sexual harassment in the crucial interval between the unsuccessful effort to keep Clarence Thomas off the Supreme Court and the unsuccessful effort to oust Bill Clinton from the presidency.