MSNBC: It Was All a Scam

I think MSNBC has jumped the shark.

MSNBC is tanking in the ratings, like most so-called "legacy media" outlets, at the expense of news sources online, some of which barely qualify as sources of news or anything else of value.  But the defections from MSNBC are quite telling.  The fallout from Joe Scarborough's and Mika Brzezinski's November 15 pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to lick Trump's boots is just the tip of the iceberg.

In case you hadn't noticed, MSNBC had been squarely behind Joe Biden's re-election campaign right up to the afternoon of June 27, 2024, before the President stumbled, fumbled and just plain flopped in his debate with Donald Trump that night.  Eager to separate themselves from the train wreck that was Biden's debate performance, MSNBC commentators - including not only Joe Scarborough but also folks like Jen Psaki, who worked for Biden as his press secretary - pleaded with the the President to abandon his bid for another term, certain that he was going to lose.  This was quite different from political pundits like Jonathan Alter and Steve Schmidt (both of whom, in full disclosure, have appeared on MSNBC in the past), who had been saying long before June 27 that Biden should have stood down from a re-election bid much sooner and allowed a primary/caucus contest to determine his replacement.  You actually saw MSNBC hosts suddenly turn on Biden like a weather vane in a windstorm as if they had never had faith in Biden from the start.  

For the record, I had hoped Biden would decide not to run for re-election right after the 2022 midterms,  but when he went ahead, I trusted that he knew what he was doing - and I never believed that his facilities were rapidly failing and that he was being protected by a power-hungry coterie of advisers, as some pundits had suggested.  I was more disgusted at both pundits and top Democrats abandoning him without even giving him a chance to recover.  And many MSNBC commentators, in a first sign of something being rotten in Denmark, continuously obsessed over Biden's age without considering Trump's clearly obvious dementia.

And then came Kamala Harris.  I already mentioned in an earlier blog post last week how the reporting on the Harris campaign was propaganda, but I didn't know just how insidious the influence of Democratic insiders was until I started listening to podcasts with observations from people who know more about the inner workings of MSNBC than I do about how much in bed MSNBC bigwigs were with the Democratic National Committee and the consultant class that rips off Democratic candidates like Harris for telling them what they want to hear.  But maybe I should have figured it out myself; in spite of various danger warnings throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, Democratic consultant Simon Rosenberg constantly appeared on MSNBC programs, as well as on his own YouTube channel, repeating the same two meaningless mantras over and over - "I'd rather be us than them."  "We're winning, but we haven't won yet."    

If some consultant has to keep repeating the same canned lines, it's likely more wishful thinking than thoughtful analysis.

The positive, optimistic reporting and commentary from MSNBC was clearly erroneous.  There's nothing wrong with being wrong, but, just as Biden went from being an asset to a liability in the eyes of MSNBC personalities on a Thursday night in June, appraisals of the Harris campaign went from faint praise to damnation on a Wednesday morning as MSNBC commentators who had been applauding the Democrats for running a wonderful campaign were suddenly picking them apart for a cluelessly inept one.  It was like someone excoriating Mrs. O'Leary after the Chicago fire for keeping her cow and her oil lantern in the barn together after having told her before the fire that keeping a cow in proximity to an oil lantern was perfectly safe.  

The coverage of the whole campaign was all wrong.  Although MSNBC did a good job in covering Trump's multiple deficiencies as a candidate, as a politician, as a businessman, and as a human being, it failed to do what was necessary in any election - inform the voters on the issues.  Some MSNBC personalities rightfully decried the horse-race aspect of mainstream-media campaign coverage, but its own coverage was more about the stylistic differences between the two candidates than the pocketbook issues affecting the voters.   None of what the voters were concerned about showed up in what folks on MSNBC - especially guests who appear on numerous programs at different times - were talking about.  Voters not savvy about the issues wouldn't have been much enlightened about the issues, but they would have learned about girl dads and McDonald's photo ops.

And as if all of this weren't dizzying and head-spinning enough, we now learn that the Harris campaign donated $500,000 - in two separate transactions of $250,000 - to the Reverend Al Sharpton's National Action Network nonprofit civil rights group ahead of a friendly interview that Reverend Sharpton conducted with Harris . . . which, by all accounts, would have been a friendly interview even without those donations.

And in case you're wondering why Reverend Sharpton would compromise his journalistic integrity in such a blatant matter, you forget one thing - he's not a journalist.  He's a minister and a civil rights activist.  But he's not a journalist.  He's a public figure who happens to have a show on a cable news channel.

Right, I have to stop watching MSNBC.  In fact, I already have.  Like so many others, I have tuned out as I have lost intertest in watching MSNBC for any genuine insight to the mess that is this post-election period.  I'm angry about how the channel's personalities helped push Biden out after having stood by him and I'm ticked off at how they gave Harris such favorable coverage only to turn on her once she lost.   I'm pissed at how their news coverage of the whole damn presidential campaign was in contrast to what was actually happening.  I can't be bothered with them anymore.

Time to go back to "BBC World News America."   

My Unenthusiastic Vote - Part Two

I can't wait until Election Day is over . . . and then I can go back to watching something other than the news on television.  Unless, of course, Trump wins and I have to prepare to flee the country before he returns to power and turns the nation into a 3.8-million-square-mile East Berlin.

But, assuming Kamala Harris wins, which is beginning to look more likely,  I am expecting the next four years to be little different from the previous four years . . . though I do expect the Heritage Foundation to reprint a version of its right-wing agenda for the next Republican President with a new title . . . Project 2029.

I'm sorry.  I've been living in These States too long.  When anyone talks about change coming to America, I'm like . . .

Let me explain it in the best way I can understand . . ..  When Bill Clinton was elected President in 1992, I expected change for the better . . . and got Newt Gingrich and the Contract With America, followed by another Bush.  When Barack Obama was elected President, I expected change for the better . . . and got the Tea Party.  When Martin O'Malley ran for President, I expected change for the better . . . and got laughed at for supporting a loser of a candidate, followed by a choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump . . . and then "President Trump," two words I still can't put together with a straight face.  And when Joe Biden was elected President, I expected change for the better . . . and got the January 6 insurrection, before President Biden was even sworn in.  After that, I pretty much decided that America is what America is, and we shouldn't try to make America what it ain't.

So I think I'm going to stand back, but not stand by.  The 2024 election campaign is coming to an end.  Wake me when it's over.

Especially if Trump wins, because I know his administration will see to it that, thanks to what I've written about him here, I'll be sleeping permanently.  Likely, with the fishes. 

Kamala Moves Along

Kamala Harris celebrated her sixtieth birthday today.

Her presidential campaign looks better now than it did a few weeks ago, now that she's done more media - including a pivotal appearance on Fox News - while Donald Trump is talking about Arnold Palmer's private parts and trying to show what a good short-order cook he is.   

One advantage Harris should have going into the the final sixteen days is experience.  Not hers - Trump's.  Hillary Clinton could do no more than warn voters in 2016 what a Trump Presidency could be like, but Harris has the advantage of reminding us of what a Trump Presidency was like.  And it wasn't pretty.  Add to that the fact that Trump has not promised but threatened what to do in a second term and it makes perfect sense for the once-joyous Harris-Walz campaign is reminding us just how dangerous Trump really is.

We'll see what happens. 

The Enemy From Within?

People thought I was being hysterical and hyperbolic when I kept saying that, if Trump got re-elected President, he would make dissent a capital crime.  He demonstrated that quite clearly in an interview he gave to the insufferable Maria Bartiromo on Fox News.

"I always say, we have two enemies," Trump said to Bartiromo.  "We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries."

Trump added that he didn''t think the aftermath of the election would produce any violence , as President Biden recently warned, at least not from the side that votes for him.  Rather, the violence would come from his . . . opponents.

 "I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within . . ..  We have some very bad people we have some sick people, radical left lunatics." he said, adding that any unrest caused by anti-Trump demonstrators "should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary by the military, because they can’t let that happen."

In other words, Trump will arrest and subdue anyone who expresses opposition to him.

And he will likely, as I keep saying, make dissent a capital crime.

With three weeks to go in this presidential election campaign, the pro-democracy coalition fighting Trump must hang together in 2024 . . .

. . . or they will most assuredly hang separately in 2025! 😱

The Harris-Walz Bandwagon

Going into the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the Harris-Walz ticket seems to have caught like wildfire. Kamala Harris has injected enthusiasm and energy heretofore lacking among Democrats into the 2024 political season, and she has introduced a set of policy proposals that would directly help Americans deal with inflation and acquire the ability to purchase a house. Like Harris, Tim Walz, her vice presidential running mate, relates easily to Americans in ways that most Democratic presidential and vice presidential nominees of the past forty years never could - not just failed nominees like Michael Dukakis or the 2004 John Kerry/John Edwards ticket  (not to mention Hillary Clinton, so I won't), but even successful presidential nominees like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and successful vice presidential nominees like Al Gore, who in retrospect were too polished and too centrist to strike a chord in people and inspire them to make and sustain a clean break from the bedrock Republican principles of low taxes, small government, and supply-side economics - Reaganism.  

Since 2016, though, Reaganism has mutated into Trumpism, a mean-spirited movement that not only benefits the rich and the powerful but seeks to enslave the masses in a punitive, fascistic despotism in which the rights of ordinary citizens based on race, gender or class are severely curtailed and failure to tow the line or voicing opposition to the authoritarian order is punished with equal severity.  How can such a system be so cruel?  The cruelty is the point . . .which I believe is a maxim originally enunciated by Heinrich Himmler.

Since 1980, when the election of Ronald Reagan to the Presidency emasculated a once-proud Democratic Party that had won eight out of the previous twelve presidential elections and had controlled 22 of the previous 24 Congresses, the only way the party has been able to loosen the GOP hold on power in Washington was to nominate fortysomething centrists for President whose charisma reminded voters of Reagan or to cultivate congressional leaders who struck a centrist pose to counter rightist orthodoxy espoused by people like Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan. President Biden began the process of ending the era of Republican domination but has been hindered by his Washington-insider perspective and, let's face it, his age in his efforts to stop Trumpism from gaining permanent power with an iron fist. Harris and Walz, with their real-world perspective and relatability, their vigor, and their symbolism of a new, multiracial, democratic America, are ready to finish what Biden started - and save America from fascism in the process.

Lamestream Media and Lamestream Democrats

When, tomorrow, President Biden has his first solo news conference since the first and possibly only 2024  presidential debate - and his first solo news conference since long before that - it will have been two weeks since the debate, in which the President was so incognizant that he spoke about taking pride in beating Medicare.  Since that disaster, Biden has attended rallies in North Carolina and Wisconsin and reverted to top form, he's done an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, he's campaigned vigorously in Pennsylvania with Biden backer John Fetterman, the state's junior senator, he's spoken to Joe Scarborough on his MSNBC morning show by phone, and he's given a stirring speech about NATO at its seventy-fifth anniversary summit in Washington, D.C.  And when Democrats and pundits said he needed tme to make a decision about whether to withdraw from the 2024 presidential campaign or to stay in, he made the decision - he's staying in.

Then Democrats and pundits said he needed time to make his decision.  

Didn't they get his reply?  They got it, they just don't want it.    

If Churchill had had this sort of backing from the British people on the eve of the Battle of Britain, the Germans would have occupied the U.K. without having to fire a shot.

I've seen Democrats flee from the hills and the media start performing last rites for a political career when Democratic candidates for the Presidency committed an unfortunate faux pas - like Howard Dean, who didn't deserve the abuse he got, and Gary Hart, who did - but never have I seen such aversion to a blunder by an incumbent Democratic President.  Bill Clinton actually got less blowback over Monica Lewinsky.  The more determination Biden shows in staying in the campaign, the more Washington Democrats and pundits are determined to make him drop out.  As of this weekend, nine House Democrats called for Biden to step aside for someone else.  Yesterday, a tenth Democratic U.S. Representative called for Biden to step aside, pushing the number of House Democrats against Biden's decision to keep going into double-digit territory - Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, who happens to be my congresswoman.  It would have been eleven if Tim Ryan, who forfeited his House seat in Ohio for a fool's errand of a bid for a U.S. Senate seat not won by a Democrat since John Glenn won it in 1992 - and is now held by a phony who could be the next Vice President of the United States - were still in Congress, as he's called on Biden to step down as well.  Three Democratic U.S. Senators have joined this chorus of Cassandras, including Michael Bennet of Colorado, who expressed fear that Donald Trump could win the Presidency in a landslide and that Republicans could win both Houses of Congress on his coattails.    

As you may recall, Tim Ryan and Michael Bennet ran for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, two of 26 Democrats who did so.  Bennett may be from Gary Hart's home state, share Gary Hart's birthday, and hold Gary Hart's old Senate seat, but he also demonstrated that he shares Gary Hart's inability to be elected President.  Ryan, having failed at defeating Nancy Pelosi as House Democratic leader in 2016, also failed to stay in the 2020 presidential campaign beyond 2019. 

As for the pundits . . ..  Any attempt to list all of the newsreaders and pundits on television and podcasts who want to give Biden the hook would double the length to this already long blog post, so I will concentrate on two - David Axelrod and James Carville (below) have both said that Biden has clearly shown a deteriorating mental acuity and a failure to articulate his goals for a second term, and they have doubted his effectiveness since long before the debate.  Axelrod is still living off his reputation for getting America's first black President elected, and Carville has been coasting on his success in Bill Clinton's 1992  presidential campaign.  They're like the New York Jets acting like they're still champions because they won the 1969 Super Bowl.

And they're not the only ones who have doubted Biden's political abilities.   Biden was counted out in 2020 after losing the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.  After Biden lost in Nevada, Chris Matthews said it was over for him, using an historical reference to the fall of France in World War II - and because his analogy substituted Bernie Sanders supporters for the German Wehrmacht, it was Matthews who ended up calling it quits as a pundit.

But seriously, folks - how far back do you want to go?  Biden was so disrespected as Barack Obama's Vice President that even if his son hadn't died of cancer, he still would have been pressured into not running for President in 2016, thanks to all of the white bourgeois liberals who made Hillary Clinton the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee-in-waiting as early as January 21, 2009.   Biden's 2008 presidential campaign got so little traction that he was laughed out of the campaign after the Iowa caucuses (which is still better than Martin O'Malley getting laughed out of the 2016 presidential campaign during the Iowa caucuses).  Biden became the front runner for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination only because Gary Hart withdrew as a result of his sex scandal, and Biden and the other candidates for the nomination were dismissed as the "Seven Dwarfs" for their lack of national stature.  Then Biden paraphrased a British politician without attributing him and got caught in a plagiarism scandal over a term paper he'd submitted in law school, giving the press more opportunities to ridicule the Democrats  - but especially Biden - as not being ready for prime time.

I can go back even farther than that.  On Election Night 1980, the last presidential election Walter Cronkite would cover for CBS News, Cronkite asked about future Democratic presidential possibilities in the wake of President Carter's loss to Ronald Reagan.  Someone suggested Joe Biden, than a second-term Senator from Delaware. Cronkite just chortled mockingly.  So don't tell me this animosity toward Biden has to do with his age - or with his inability to construct a sentence, which is attributable to a stutter he's had all his life.  It has to do with the fact that he's Joe Biden and the fact that pundits don't like him.

And now can I direct your attention to someone the media haven't been covering in the past two weeks - Donald Trump?  Donald Trump is also old and inarticulate.  He talks about sharks trying to attack sinking electric boats and encourages Putin to invade more of his neighbors.  He has a problem when pundits ridicule and criticize him.  He takes their names not for when he can kick their asses but when he can fry them.  He wants to force women to carry babies to term.  He wants to introduce tariffs that might have made sense when Henry Clay first proposed them two hundred years ago but would destroy the economy in an interconnected world.  He wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act.  He wants to declare martial law to deal with demonstrators and suspend the Constitution so he can abolish opposition parties (and so Michael Bennet can count on the Republicans controlling Congress in a second Trump term even if the Democrats win both chambers this fall).  And - he's a convicted felon!  And a certified rapist!  And his party's Project 2025 agenda would bring about the second coming of the Third Reich!

The media haven't mentioned any of that in the past two weeks.  I just did.

Trump has taken advantage of the media narrative about Joe Biden's age and deterioration - which, of course helps Trump going into the fall campaign.  He's mostly stayed out of public view, appearing at a rally only once since the debate, virtually denying the Democrats the pleasure of using his own words against him.  Pundits and newsreaders are only too happy to go along with the story about Biden possibly dropping out, since it's such a great drama.  And Democrats are all too happy to keep the story going with their concerns about Biden's age and abilities because they are too timid to back Biden when he needs them the most, Senator Fetterman, the Congressional Black Caucus, and a smattering of others being honorable exceptions.   They think Biden's determination to continue his campaign will help Trump getting back in power.  You know who's helping Trump get back in power?  They are.

I'm sorry, I have no patience - not even with my own congresswoman - with Democrats who run away from Biden when he needs their support the most.  And I have even more intolerance for the media, which is more concerned about ratings than about reason.  Biden will the Democratic nominee, and the anti-Trump coalition must support him now and for the next four years.  The end!

Well, it's not really the end.  I still have comments about folks looking at ways to replace Biden, and I'll address that topic in a future post.  

Let Trump Talk

I'm not talking about rescinding the gag order on Donald Trump in the 2016 election-interference case.  I'm just talking about letting Trump say anything he wants on the campaign trail.

Why?  Well, let me put it this way.  The push to electrify transportation modes has apparently been extended to watercraft, which means that gasoline-powered boats would also give way to boats that run on electricity.  One could make a reasonable and defensible argument against electric watercraft due to the perils of the large batteries the motors would require in place of gasoline powering internal-combustion engines, such as possible electrocution in an accident.  But only Trump, in addressing such a concern, would suggest that the battery would make the boat heavier and prone to sinking with the possibility of a shark ten yards away and suggest preferring electrocution over being eaten by a shark.  And only Trump, rather than talk about people's concerns would go on a rant about boats, sharks and batteries in a landlocked state like Nevada, in a desert city like Las Vegas, near the Colorado River, made unnavigable by the Hoover Dam, which forms Lake Mead, made unnavigable by rapidly declining water levels.  And with plenty of fish, but no sharks.

Incoherent rants like this one are exactly what the campaign wants.  The Biden campaign.

A lot of people are upset that, of the four indictments against Trump, only one has yielded a trial (which found Trump guilty of election interference in 2016).  The Supreme Court has paused the 2020 election interference case to decide whether Trump has presidential immunity regarding the events of January 6, Trump's lawyers have paused the Georgia racketeering case to get Fani Willis off it, and Judge Aileen Cannon has paused the classified-documents case in Florida.  But, as the 2016 election interference case proved, Trump can't talk much, he can't do much campaigning, and he can't run off at the mouth so much while he's on trial for something.  With no trials scheduled for the immediate future (and possibly for the twelfth of never if Trump wins back the White House), Trump is now free to have more rallies like the one in Las Vegas and say more stupid things about sharks, pizza, false teeth, old shoes, lunch, missing lunch, crab cakes, Lapland, recorders, otters . . . purple things in general . . . and thirty thousand clowns eating bananas. And the Biden campaign will have plenty of material for ads, meaning that Trump, by delaying the other three trials, has put himself in a trap. 

And maybe he'll keep ranting about sharks.    

Hee-GOTCHA! 😃 

Debate THIS!

President Biden took the imitative and challenged Donald Trump to a debate - and then another debate - after Trump insisted that the President would never agree to any debates.  Biden was forceful in laying down the gauntlet and made it clear that he wanted to challenge him - and with no studio audience, and outside the parameters of the rules of the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD).

A lot of pundits have suggested that Biden should not debate Trump and that it's not in his interest to do so because Trump will crosstalk him and make baseless, knee-jerk accusations against the President of doing what Trump himself does constantly.  But Trump - who skipped all of the Republican presidential primary debates in 2023 and early 2024 - said that he wanted to debate President Biden and suggested that Biden would not be up to the task and thus avoid the prospect t make Biden look weak.  Biden called Trump's bluff.  

It won't be an Oxford-style debate - the closest we ever came to that was when there was a presidential debate at the University of Mississippi (get it?) - but it will likely be a more honest tête-à-tête then the stilted, dry, formatted debates the CPD has given us for the past thirty-odd years.  Such debates, more often than not, are joint news conferences, not a genuine exchange of ideas and proposals,  and they are a far cry from the original debates of the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon campaign.  Yes, the commission had its rules, but Trump proved that rules were made to be broken, and he shattered them beyond repair.  So let's have it - June 27, no holds barred, mano a mano.   

Oh yeah, the Commission on Presidential Debates was formed in an ad hoc manner in 1988 for the second presidential debate between Vice President George Bush and Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis when the League of Women Voters, the organization that had sponsored the debates before, no longer wished to be involved in what they thought was a sham.   

Man, that's cold.

Gaza: Six Months On

If President Biden is voted out of office in November, the ongoing war in Gaza will be the reason.

Enough young people are appalled at Biden's unwavering support for Israel in the war against Hamas in Gaza, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to go after Hamas with the sort of force comparable to the use of a thermonuclear device, to deny Biden a victory in the election by going third party or staying home.  Nothing Netanyahu has done in prosecuting the fight against Hamas has persuaded the Biden White House to change their policy toward Israel because of Biden's interest in ensuring Israel's right to self-defense.

Except that Israel is gong way too much on the offensive.  This past week, members of Jose Andres' World Central Kitchen were killed by a precision missile fired by the Israeli "Defense" Force, leading many to suspect that part of Israel's strategy is denying relief workers the freedom to feed the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians who have been turned into refugees and are barely scrounging to get by.  President Biden angrily demanded that Netanyahu open a route to food relief for charities to get through, threatening to condition further aid to the IDF, and Netanyahu acquiesced to the demand as the IDF punished those responsible for the firing of the missile .  This will help, but not much.  What Biden really needs to do is reduce aid to Israel to purely defensive weapons and get that damn temporary pier along the sea built to accelerate aid to the Palestinians. 

Biden has to make more of a tilt to trying to get a cease-fire arranged and get as much aid to Gaza as possible before he loses young people and Arab-Americans on such a widespread basis that it's impossible to win Michigan, a state with large Arab-American and Islamic populations as well as many politically active youth (particular among college kids) and a state he absolutely needs to win in November.  Alas, it may already be too late. 

No Labels . . . No Candidate

No Labels, the political non-movement aimed at running a presidential ticket to appeal to centrist voters (because nominating Hillary Clinton to appeal to centrists worked out so well for the Democrats), gave up the ghost and announced it would not field a ticket for 2024.  

No Labels had made a sincere effort at finding a presidential candidate who could win enough states to reach the minimum majority of 270 electoral votes and offer a more palatable platform than what the Democrats and the Republicans have espoused, but it was not only sincere, it was stupid.  Those of us who would have rather stuck our fingers in an automatic garbage disposal than vote for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump in 2016 and looked toward building a new party to replace one of the existing major parties could have told the No Labels nobodies that long ago.  Third-party movements meant to create a new major party to replace one of the existing ones are doomed to fail because the major parties rig the system to prevent it from happening.  And when there is a window for a minor party to displace a major party, as there was in early 2017 when the Democrats were declining and falling faster the the Roman Empire in the late fifth century, the potential organizers of such a party miss the opportunity.

To be fair, former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman (above), a leader of the No Labels movement who died last month, did make it clear that No Labels would sit out the 2024 presidential election if they determined that a No Labels ticket would tilt the election to Trump and there was no clear path for a No Labels victory in November.  So shouldn't I give credit to the leadership of No Labels for gauging the situation and making the right call?  No, I shouldn't.  The folks at No Labels made this decision not out of seeing the error of their ways but because they couldn't find anyone dumb enough to accept their nomination for the Presidency.  One centrist politician after another - and Chris Christie, who's a centrist like I'm a jet pilot - turned down No Labels' offer of the group's presidential and vice presidential nominations.  And let's be honest here: If Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who has talked openly about running for President, had been offered the nomination, he likely would not have accepted it.  Also, to be quite blunt, Lieberman's death took the wind out of No Labels' sails. 

So now that that's out of the way, we should now turn to the next task at hand - denying Robert Kennedy, Jr. ballot access in swing states.

Step It Up, Joe

The sudden disasters affecting Donald Trump, which I covered in my post before last, have certainly helped President Joe Biden in his efforts to win a second term and keep Trump out of the White House, but it's hardly going to be enough.  Biden faces headwinds within his own base, with young people, Muslims and Arab-Americans - who make up a large part of the Democratic electorate in the crucial state of Michigan - angry over his Israel-Gaza policy, as well as with blacks and Hispanics, and he may face more serious headwinds from progressives if he tries to add additional security to the southern border by executive order without the guarantee of a payoff in the form of getting Ukraine any aid.  And so many Democrats are getting dispirited with Biden even as Trump's base remains committed to their cult leader that the only wind at Biden's back, so far, is his own.

That stinks. 

David Ignatius of the Washington Post has a column out suggesting that President Biden take whatever action he can on Israel, Ukraine and the border - that is, respectively, stand up to Benjamin Netanyahu on his prosecution of the war against Hamas, find a way with House Democrats to circumvent House Speaker Mike Johnson and get aid to Ukraine, and issue executive orders to crack down on migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, the Squad be damned.

Some of Ignatius's column must have gotten through to the White House.  CNN reports that the United States is promoting a new United Nations draft resolution to call for a temporary cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war and is also planning to warn the Israelis against aground incursion into Rafah, where displaced Palestinians are now staying.  President Biden, still undecided as to what he can do, if anything, to shame Speaker Johnson into allowing a vote on aid to Ukraine, is announcing tomorrow sanctions against Russian President Vladimir Putin for being responsible for the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.   Navalny (below) was the brightest hope for a permanently democratic Russia (as opposed to the temporarily democratic Russia that Boris Yeltsin led in the 1990s), and his death has caused that hope to fade rapidly.  Biden's proposed additional sanctions would be in concert with the condemnation of Navalny's murder that has come from every major world figure.

Except for Donald Trump, who compared Navalny's torture and murder to his own legal indictments.

There are other issues Ignatius overlooked.  Biden has to find another way to promote his domestic successes, like cheaper insulin, even as he has to stop promoting economic successes that not enough voters feel ("Bidenomics" is the worst one-word slogan conceived since "Fahrvergnügen").  He also needs to remind voters that he ended the COVID pandemic in this country with his wise, prudent approach to the disease.  He should also point out that he successfully pushed through legislation to allow Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices with pharmaceutical companies.  And there are other issues I could mention as well, like, oh, I don't know, infrastructure projects?

One of the biggest issues working in his favor is abortion, yet Biden, the second Catholic U.S. President, is reportedly uncomfortable talking about it.  He'd better start getting comfortable about it.  More Roman Catholic voters actually favor Trump over Biden than the other way around, so even as Biden shouldn't be afraid of offending conservative Catholics whose votes he doesn't have a prayer - literally - of getting anyway (like all of the Catholics on the Supreme Court not named Sonia by their mothers), he, as a Catholic, should be able to espouse a pro-legal-abortion stance as a medical issue so no one gets the idea that all Catholics are, well, the bad guys.

And we'd hate for that to happen.

Look, Pope John Paul II found out the hard way that freeing Poland and Lithuania from communism wasn't going to convince everyone that he was a good guy, so Joe Biden, knowing that he can't please everyone, should just come out and declare his personal opposition to abortion while expressing point-blank his even greater opposition to imposing his personal beliefs on others.  Many Catholics won't like that.  Some pro-choice non-Catholics may be even more hostile to that message, as Catholic politicians who adhere to their faith in their personal lives even as they may contradict it in their political lives get no brownie points from the Vatican's critics outside the Church.  But the vast majority of voters would be pleased to find a Catholic President who is broadminded enough to accommodate other points of view on the topic of abortion, and it would go a long way toward defusing the growing anti-Catholicism I see in this country; I mean, how is it that some of the most vocal critics of Islamophobia have no problem dismissing Catholics offended by assaults on their own faith as a bunch of intolerant fools, when Islam is just as patriarchal and socially conservative as Catholicism, if not more so?

As for the need for Biden to get out and engage with the voters, I don't fear that he won't do so.  Remember, the only reason he didn't engage with the voters so much in 2020 was because of that crazy little thing called COVID.  But when he does get out, President Biden needs something he can engage voters with.  This blog, and David Ignatius's column, offer constructive suggestions on what Biden can bring to the campaign trail.  

One Thing After Another

You know, here's been so much going on recently, I can't keep up . . .

A snowfall today that turned to be a much bigger deal than originally forecast has allowed me to stay home all day and type up this blog post, in which I try to make sense of a senseless campaign for what could be the last American presidential election with more than one candidate.

Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments that Colorado (and, by extension, Maine) can drop Donald Trump from the presidential ballot on the basis of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which bars insurrectionists from running for office, and it turns out that not being allowed to go to the Capitol on January 6 was the best thing that could have happened to him. Trump's lawyers argued that Trump technically did not support the insurrection because he wasn't at the Capitol that day, despite the fact that he did nothing for three hours to stop it.  More galling was the suggestion hat Colorado can't keep Trump off the ballot because one state - a state Joe Biden will likely win in November anyway -  shouldn't alter the course of a national election.  Even Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson made that assertion despite years if not decades of history showing states denying voters to cast a ballot on the basis of their race.

Meanwhile, Trump has appealed the federal court decision against presidential immunity to the Supreme Court, as expected (as I expected), which could delay the federal election intervention trial,but hopefully not for too long.  I think the trial will start.  Just not next month.  More likely, sometime in mid-spring.    

As for Joe Biden, many Democrats still fear the effect of the age issue while the media go on and on about Biden's age without even considering the more pertinent issue of his intelligence (and the 77-year-old Trump's lack thereof).  Robert Hur's reference to Biden's age in his independent counsel's report doesn't even pertain here, as these concerns have been playing out for months.  Many pundits are critiquing the Biden campaign for not allowing the candidate to grant an interview during the Super Bowl, missing the opportunity for President Biden to communicate with the voters he needs among the game's 123 million viewers . . .  like young women who were watching the game because Taylor Swift's boyfriend was playing for the (ultimately victorious) Kansas City Chiefs. While I understand the argument for such an interview, I have a few arguments against that:

• Many people who watched the Super Bowl will likely either vote for Trump or stay home in November.
• There were 138 million Americans of voting age - myself included - who didn't watch the Super Bowl because they don't care about American football.
• Taylor Swift didn't actually perform at the Super Bowl halftime show.  Usher did.  And a lot of rockist music fans have strong opinions about that! (I'll get to that in a later post.)  Taylor Swift was just there. 
• Does the prime minister of Great Britain give an interview during the FA Cup match?

With the Super Bowl over, and the presidential campaign continuing, Biden has plenty of opportunities ahead to make the case for himself.  If the polls don't move in his favor by next month, though, I'll begin to worry.  Because poll numbers can solidify into permanence eight months out before anyone votes.  If that sounds unthinkable, just remember I was a supporter of Martin O'Malley's eight-month campaign for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.  All throughout those eight months, O'Malley was in single digits in the polls and all throughout those eight months, I kept expressing faith that those numbers could move.  And they did. In the wrong direction; in Iowa, the only state O'Malley competed in, he won only a fraction of a percent of the vote and withdrew as a candidate.

My advice is to prepare to move abroad in December if you can or keep you rear end clean if you can't.  And to be fair, even fleeing the country might not help, because Trump's return to power could put the whole planet in jeopardy.  Just don't be surprised if, come January, the border closes to emigrants and opposition to the Dear Leader becomes a capital offense. 

The Plot Begins To Unravel

Nikki Haley is treating her second-place finish in New Hampshire as a victory of sorts, and she may have a point.  Although she lost New Hampshire by eleven percentage points, exit polls show that a majority of those who voted in the primary would not vote for Donald Trump in a general election matchup with Joe Biden and that Haley would do better against Biden with Republicans and independents than Trump.

Biden may be doing better against Trump and is doing very well among independents,  Recent polls show that, although his approval rating is still nothing to write home about, he actually beats Trump handily in New Hampshire and now has an edge in recent polling in Pennsylvania.

And Trump sees the handwriting on the wall that is closing in on him.  When Haley presented a cool, calm, collected persona in her sort-of-victory speech and declared that the campaign has just begun, Trump responded with the least gracious victory statement ever committed to video, thanking Haley's fellow South Carolinian Tim Scott for his endorsement  by saying that Scott must really hate Haley, who appointed Scott to his seat to complete an an unexpired term.

An embarrassed Scott quickly went up to him and said, "No, I just love you!"

No one's buying it.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have here a bromance made a few feet below heaven.

Trump must be getting desperate because not only is he saying things like "We are an institute in a powerful death penalty" and "And my cream pie kitty ate an Armenian zapato con queso dipped in chocolate syrup" (I made up one of those - can you guess which one Trump actually said?), he's wearing more bronzer in the most pathetic attempt to look youthful and vigorous since Democratic presidential candidate Alan Cranston dyed what was left of his hair in 1984.  

Increasingly, Trump's last hope is that third-party candidates siphon enough votes away from Joe Biden (and I'll get to that later). 

By the way, what's the difference between Gene Simmons and Donald Trump? One is a sexist vulgarian who wears face paint in public and entertains white-trash audiences in big arenas. The other is a heavy-metal bass player.  😛  

And Nikki Haley is right when she says that New Hampshire is not the end of the presidential nomination process.  That would be New Jersey.  😛

The Carroll case?  I'll address that in a separate post.

The Gloves Come Off (Finally)

President Biden kicked off his 2024 presidential campaign with a speech near Valley Forge in Pennsylvania to remind Americans who are angry at him for his support of Israel, his failure to bring satisfactory prosperity to the nation, and, worst of all, his corrupt acceptance of payments from foreign governments (oh, wait, that was Donald Trump!), of what happened three years ago this month.  He made it clear that the attempted insurrection on January 6, 2021 was part of an ongoing effort by Donald Trump to regain and hold onto power, even if it means neutralizing a few people - even law enforcement - to do it.

"For the first time on our history, insurrectionists had come to stop the peaceful transfer of power in America - first time- smashing windows, shattering doors, attacking the police," Biden said. "Outside, gallows were erected as the MAGA crowd chanted, “Hang Mike Pence.” Inside, they hunted for Speaker Pelosi [of] the House, was chanting, as they marched through and smashed windows, “Where’s Nancy?” Over 140 police officers were injured. Jill and I attended the funeral of police officers who died as a result of the events of that day. And . . . because of Donald Trump’s lies, they died because these lies brought a mob to Washington."

It was a forceful and defiant speech.  The President doubled down three days later in a speech at Mother Emmanuel Baptist Church in Charleston, South Carolina, the site of the 2015 racist shooting of black parishioners in a Bible study group.  There, President Biden reiterated his attack on Trump's accusations of a stolen election and remind people of his white-supremacist supporters and tendencies.  But the President has to keep up they attacks, and for one simple reason - they . . . work!  His earlier campaign speeches, in which he took pride in his record, sound like bragging.  And while it's not bragging if you can back it up - and he can - he can only back it up with statistics and figures, not how people feel about what he's done.  Neither statistics nor figures can move or inspire voters to come out to the polls.

Not surprisingly, Biden's speech in Pennsylvania got mocked by Fox News - not for its content, which Fox commentators likely found irrelevant - but for stumbling over his words and acting "confused," the result of a lifelong stammer that MAGA Republicans have used to depict Biden as too old and feeble to serve as President for four more years.  Meanwhile Trump, only three or four years younger than Biden but overweight and out of shape - and also prone to defecating in his pants more often than his supporters did on the Capitol Rotunda floor on January 6 - is held up by the MAGA crowd as the archetype of Kennedyesque vim and vigor because he's feisty and combative, and he also has all of his hair (which he sprays on regularly).

Sadly, I can't be certain that many people have been listening to Biden's speeches.  As today's music scene proves, you can offer something that sounds great, but who cares if not enough people are listening to it?  That's why Biden has to keep up this new attack.

Remember, when they go low . . . we kick 'em!  Eric Holder said that.  If we don't, those of us who oppose Trump will be sent to labor camps and/or executed.  I said that.   

Her Again?

Marianne Williamson is running for President again. 

Because if a crooked real-estate developer (I know, a redundancy) and beauty-pageant owner could be President (he couldn't), why not a college dropout turned self-help love guru and spiritual adviser to Oprah Winfrey? 

"I wouldn’t be running for President," Williamson said, "if I didn’t believe I could contribute to harnessing the collective sensibility that I feel is our greatest hope at this time."

You mean the collective sensibility that calls upon us to stand by President Biden and quell a primary challenge from within the Democratic Party that could help the 2024 Republican presidential nominee?

To those who are content to write off Marianne Williamson as a sideshow who isn't going anywhere - a description Edward-Isaac Dovere gleefully used to describe Martin O'Malley - Republicans were quick to so the same to Pat Buchanan in 1992, but his presidential candidacy derailed George Bush's re-election hopes.  Williamson could very well be able harness - as she puts it - pie-in-the-sky progressives who are dissatisfied with Biden's efforts to return America to the social contract that existed before Ronald Reagan destroyed it and fail to realize that the collapse of much of his progressive agenda was due to various reasons (*cough cough*, Joe Manchin, *cough cough*, Kyrsten Sinema, *cough cough*), and she could end up forming an unexpectedly potent political force.

And those who still doubt that possibility, I offer these two words - Bernie Sanders.    

And now that Marianne's in, I expect Dwayne Johnson - who has seriously talked about running for President with CNN's Jake Tapper -to throw his hat into the ring as well.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Can anyone tell me what sort of nation we're living in where Marianne Williamson and Dwayne Johnson are taken seriously as political contenders and Martin O'Malley is laughed at?  This country needs an enema!  

Martin O'Malley - The End (Or, An Irish Wake)

I'm done.

Six weeks ago, I wrote a letter to former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley a letter urging him to consider running for President again in 2024 if President Biden were to decide not to stand for a second term.  Now, friends. there was one of two things O'Malley could have done, and one was to write me back saying that not only was he considering another presidential campaign in 2024 if Biden doesn't run again, he would even consider challenging Biden for the nomination - which wasn't likely, and I didn't expect it - and the other was that he would write me back and thank me for my support of his political career going back seven years but he truly believed that his time as a presidential prospect had come and gone and he had no desire to return to the political arena in any way, shape or form, which was what I expected, but there was a third possibility that I hadn't stopped even once to consider, and that was . . .

Crickets.

That's right, crickets.  Though it's been six weeks, O'Malley hasn't responded to my letter.  I think I can interpret his silence as a no.  It's a safe bet that he meant what he said back in 2019 when he said his moment as a viable presidential candidate had passed, which was why he instead endorsed Beto O'Rourke for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.  He was wrong about Beto, of course (and I have more to say about the former Democratic wunderkind later on), and I hope that he would realize that he was also wrong about his own future political prospects. Arizona congressman Morris Udall once famously declared presidential ambition was a disease to be cured only by embalming fluid, but there's now a second cure for presidential ambition . . .  utter ridicule, which was what O'Malley got all through 2015 and 2016 and even got as soon as Trump's presidential term began, when O'Malley hinted that he might run in 2020.  

A politician still burning with presidential ambition wouldn't pull the plug on his own Web site.  Nor would a politician still burning with presidential ambition disband his political action committee (PAC), which is what O'Malley did to Win Back Your State, a PAC devoted to helping Democratic state legislative candidates.  And a politician still burning with presidential ambition would have campaigned for Joe Biden in 2020 despite the threat of an out-of-control virus, which would put said politician in good standing with President Biden for a Cabinet or ambassadorial post.        

But then, Martin O'Malley has just accepted what is likely a much better gig - chieftain of the O'Malley clan, which involves organizing the clan gathering in Ireland in June 2023.

I've concluded that an O'Malley Presidency will never happen, especially after all of the bad luck O'Malley has had.  Murphy's Law has hung over his head like a cloud since he left the governorship of Maryland, as evidenced more recently  by his wife Katie's failure to win the Democratic nomination for Maryland Attorney General.  President Biden's move to make the South Carolina Democratic presidential primary - a primary O'Malley would have no chance of winning, given his relative unpopularity among black Democrats - the first Democratic presidential primary in the nation is a fatal blow to any remaining desire to win the White House that O'Malley might have had.

So that's it - one more thing I'm giving up on.  And to be honest, writing O'Malley and sending that letter to his home address was probably in bad form, as I likely violated his privacy.  Sending the letter to his law office would have probably been a better idea.  It would have been something though, if he had resolved himself to make another try for the White House because of my letter.  Maybe it's true that one person can make a difference, but that ne person was never going to be me.

And there's my Irish wake for the political career of Martin Joseph O'Malley.  See you 'round the pubs!

The End of the World Is Near

Its obvious that Armageddon is at hand.

Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination yesterday.

Give me climate change insead.  At least we have a chance to survive that.  How do we survive Trump? 😢