Morning Blow

Many political pundits had a 180-degree conversion after the presidential election - not so much toward Donald Trump but away from Kamala Harris.  Before the election, Harris was lauded for her joyful demeanor and her desire to reach out to anti-Trump Republicans, and her campaign received high marks for its positive message and ground game operations.  The day Harris conceded, these same pundits suddenly turned around and lambasted the Democrats for the campaign Harris had led and dissected everything she did wrong.  

Of course, there were warning signs that those of us who were applauding Harris should have seen right in front of our faces.  Elissa Slotkin warned that the Harris campaign was failing to reach out to more voters in Michigan and that the energy on the ground was negative.  Democrats in Pennsylvania complained that the Harris campaign was screwing up with the canvassers they were sending to key counties and cities - like sending Chinese-American canvassers to black neighborhoods.  (Aside: Supermodel icon Paulina Porizkova volunteered for the Harris campaign and canvassed for her in South Philly.  Right.  Send one of the most glamorous and sophisticated fashion models of the past fifty years to canvass in a blue-collar neighborhood dominated by stubborn, ill-mannered Italians.)  And then there was that Trump commercial his campaign ran during NFL games attributing his own policy to provide transsexual surgeries for prisoners to Kamala Harris, which the Harris campaign never refuted.   

We were all fooled into expecting a Harris victory.  We failed to see the warning signs right before our eyes.  But on cable TV, many commentators acted like they had actually been expecting a Trump victory all along after actually having bashed Trump regularly, and nowhere was this more apparent than on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." There, host Joe Scarborough, a fierce Trump critic, and his guests, who included Chris Matthews and Donny Deutsch, were excoriating Democrats for giving blue-collar voters short shrift and acting snooty and smug.  And this attitude persisted for the next couple of weeks.

Then the other shoe dropped.  This past Monday, Scarborough and co-host/wife Mika Brzezinski revealed that they had had an audience with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago retreat over the weekend. 

Brzezinski told her and Scarborough's viewers that, in light of Trump's victory, it was necessary to re-open communications with the unscrupulous real estate tycoon, Brzezinski and Scarborough having had a cordial relationship with him before he was a presidential candidate in 2016 and having frequented Mar-a-Lago at the time they began their romantic relationship.

In other words, they were scared stiff of the looming Trump Mark Two administration and went to Mar-a-Lago to seek his mercy.  

Brzezinski said that even though she and Scarborough continue to have "deep concerns about . . . Trump's actions and words," about 76 million Americans did vote for him, so it's "time to do something different, and that starts with not only talking about Donald Trump, but also talking with him." She insisted that they had told Trump that they would continue to "push back hard" on him when the situation called for it.

 "Don't be mistaken: We're not here to defend or normalize Donald Trump," Scarborough said. "We're here to report on him, and to hopefully provide you insights that are going to better equip all of us in understanding these deeply unsettling times."

What's deeply unsettling is that Joe and Mika would go as far as to prostrate themselves before Trump and surrender their integrity.

Scarborough, whom Trump has falsely accused of being involved in a murder, and Brzezinski aren't so much covering Trump as they are covering their rear ends.  What's worse is that they know what they're doing here.  They have backgrounds as journalists that pre-date their MSNBC morning program.  Scarborough ran a local newspaper in his hometown of Pensacola, Florida when he represented it in the U.S. House; Brzezinski had been a reporter for CBS and was in Lower Manhattan on 9/11.  What they did here suggests what would have happened if Edward R. Murrow had been reporting from Paris instead of London and had sought a conciliatory meeting with Marshal Pétain.  The couple forfeited their obligation to speak truth to power so Trump wouldn't go after them.  This comes after Scarborough had ridiculed Trump for being a loser whose MAGA allies kept losing key elections each year from 2017 on.  It comes after Brzezinski stood up for the rights of women against the misogynistic Trump and reported on the strides of older women with her "Know Your Value" project.  It's a pity she doesn't know hers.

Conclusion:  Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski had to choose between getting into trouble with Trump or dishonoring their profession.  They chose dishonor.  They will get trouble.

And you can count me among they many viewers they've lost.  So what?  Their program, at four hours, is too long, and the third hour is merely a repeat of the first.

Roberta Collins: 1944-2008

Actress Roberta Collins, whose B-movie career you already know about thanks to my posts from this past January, would have turned eighty years old today.

It is impossible to say how her acting career would have turned out had she made it into mainstream Hollywood movies.  But it's possible to imagine how it would have unfolded.  I can certainly imagine a Roberta Collins filmography in which she, not Meryl Streep or Jane Fonda, would have been the star of movies such as Sophie's Choice or Agnes of God, respectively (I'm just throwing out titles at random here), or she might have been the star of a movie that was never made because the studio just couldn't find the right actress for the lead female role.  Collins could have played the mother of a character played by Leonardo di Caprio.  Instead of playing women in prison, she could have played a deputy consul in a U.S. consulate in Munich or Milan or some other major non-capital foreign city, or some other intriguing role.

Think of all the Oscars and Golden Globes she could have been nominated for . . . and she inevitably would have won a few.  If she hadn't fatally overdosed in 2008, when her career was long since done and her life had become a shambles, she might not only still be working today, she might have been looking forward to the 2025 Oscars preparing to accept a Lifetime Achievement award. 

In some parallel universe - one that includes Kamala Harris as President of the United States - Roberta Collins could be a living legend today, recognized as one of America's finest actresses.  She could have been a great actress in this universe, the one we're actually living in.  But we'll never know.  The world as we know it was not kind or receptive to Roberta Collins or her ambition. 😭

Pictured above is Collins as a prison security officer in 1986's Vendetta - her last film role.  😭

Trump's Clown Cabinet

When Trump started making appointments for his second administration, I started breathing sighs of relief.  He made Susie Wiles his White House chief of staff, followed by his appointment of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State.  So far, so good.  More recently, there was the appointment Doug Burgum as Secretary of the Interior.  Okay, that makes sense - he's the governor of North Dakota, he's dealt with land-use issues, and the Interior Department deals with resource management.

Then came the flooding of the zone.

Trump appointed Pete Hegseth - a Fox News "journalist" with no experience in administrating - Secretary of Defense.

Hegseth is a combat veteran and an a National Guard officer.  Appointing Hegseth to lead the Pentagon would be like appointing the head teller of a bank branch as Secretary of the Treasury.  Oh, great, I might have just given Trump an idea!

One fear is that Trump would nominate Mike Davis to be Attorney General.  Davis is a combative lawyer who has verbally threatened New York State Attorney General Letitia James not go continue to investigate Trump further or the administration will "put her fat ass" in prison.

Instead, Trump named Matt Gaetz Attorney General. 

Gaetz is known for credible accusations against him for having sex with minors, and he's a lawyer who never had a case.  He's also never run anything larger than his own House of Representatives office.

And I'm so supposed to be happy that the Attorney General-designate is not Mike Davis? 

Meanwhile, a son of a former Attorney General is on tap to be Secretary of Health and Human Services - Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  An environmental lawyer who would be more useful heading the Environmental Protection Agency, Kennedy is a vaccine skeptic and a conspiracy theorist who thinks he can make Americans healthier with home remedies involving chicken broth, honey, and a calf-liver compress or two - and he apparently believes that the best way to immunize Americans from the measles or the mumps is to have everyone catch them to develop herd immunity.

Kennedy is accused of having no experience with pharmaceuticals.  Not true - he's a former heroin addict!

You're going to need a shot of smack to endure Tulsi Gabbard, who's known for talking smack about American policy in Ukraine and Vladimir Putin's good intentions, in her new role as Director of National Intelligence!

A former congresswoman from Hawaii who was once a progressive and has no experience in intelligence and espionage - except for maybe having watched a James Bond movie or two - Gabbard, who's more of a Bond girl than Bond (yes, I said that), is a woman of Asian and Pacific Islander (AAPI) heritage, suggesting that she would be Trump's token DEI pick.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Cabinet of Trump Mark Two!

Second verse, same as the first.     

Music Video Of the Week - November 15, 2024

"Unholy Rollers" by Screen Syndicate (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Whither Biden 2024?

You know what's depressing about the popular-vote result of the election?  Although Donald Trump got as many votes as he did in 2020, millions of Democrats decide to stay home rather than vote for Kamala Harris.

But what if Joe Biden had remained at the top of the Democratic ticket?

President Biden originally intimated that he would serve only one term, but he never declared his intentions for 2024 one way or the other in the first two years of his term to avoid being seen as a lame duck.  When the 2022 midterm elections turned out to be unexpectedly not awful for the Democrats, Biden took that to mean that he would be in a strong position for 2024.  Also, there was the paucity of serious contenders for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination; too many Democratic rising stars had ended up with brilliant futures behind them when they lost important statewide elections for governor or Senate, and the few Democrats who had the chops to replace Biden at the top of the ticket were handicapped by prejudice or stereotyping.  As I said at the time, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer had just gotten re-elected but still had to deal with her sex as a political liability, given the American people's resistance to the idea of a female President.  There was Pete Buttigieg, but he was too young.  Bernie Sanders, by contrast, was too old.  California governor Gavin Newsom was connected to socially liberal San Francisco, where he'd been mayor.  And the Kamala Harris of 2022 was the same Kamala Harris of 2024 - a black woman whose husband is a Jew.  But any white man with her chops would have been handicapped by simply coming from the San Francisco Bay Area like she did.  And Gavin Newsom clearly was. 

In short, the consensus was that it was either Biden or a houseplant.

So what if Biden had resisted calls to step down and tried to persevere?  We'll never know.  It's all good and fine to suggest that he would have been able to eke out a victory if his own party - and George Clooney - hadn't publicly trashed him this past summer.  Certainly Biden would have done his best to recover from that debate with Trump in a second debate.  Obviously he would have gotten out more in front with the voters, an opportunity the pandemic denied him in 2020.  Clearly he would have talked a lot about economic issues, which would have rung more true from him given his background.  No doubt he would have done his darnedest to make the election about Trump - because of it was about Trump, the Democrats might have gotten an edge.  But the evidence for a Biden victory had he gotten the full support of his party and not had to deal with jokers like Dean Phillips is nonexistent.

So what if Biden had decided not to stand for re-election much sooner?  What if he had decided not to do so in January 2023 and had announced that he would not seek re-election in his February 2023 State of the union address?  Despite the apparent lack of able contenders to succeed him, there is, to be sure, that someone will make the argument that an unlikely presidential possibility - former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley, Kentucky governor Andy Bashear, North Carolina governor Roy Cooper, or someone no one, not even I, has heard of - would have won the nomination in a fair and open primary/caucus contest and gone on to win the general election.  But the case for a dark horse flies in the face of the likeliest scenario - the party would have immediately coalesced behind Vice President Harris, as Representative James Clyburn (D-SC) insisted should happen back in 2022.

But at least, if Harris had become the presumptive Democratic nominee much earlier, she might have been able to get more people to know her better and had much more time to do so that the 105 days or so she did have.

Then again, maybe the American people never really did want as President a black woman whose husband is a Jew, and no difference of circumstances would have changed that.

It is just this sort of second-guessing and pondering what might have been that is going to plague and bedevil the Democrats as they prepare for next year's gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia and the 2026 midterms . . . assuming they're still on under Trump 47.

Trump is already teasing the idea of a third term for himself, which is possible only if he terminates the Constitution.

Shut Up, Nancy!

Nancy Pelosi has a lot of damn gall.

Right after Kamala Harris conceded the 2024 election, she blamed President Biden for Harris's loss.  The former Speaker of the House - and no, I'm not calling her "Speaker Emerita," that's just a title Democrats came up with to rub it in against Republicans  that there hasn't been a Republican Speaker who remained in the House after losing the gavel to a Democrat since Joe Martin in the 1950s - blasted Biden for not withdrawing from his bid for a second term earlier to allow a primary/caucus process to pick a new candidate and for immediately endorsing Harris to avoid a brokered convention.

What a bitch.

I'm sorry, but I have zero respect for someone who led the circular firing squad against Biden this past summer when he faltered in his one and only debate with Donald Trump in June.  Biden had a bad night, to be sure, but numerous Presidents had recovered from bad debate performances - even performances worse than Biden's, as Ronald Reagan's first debate against Walter Mondale in 1984 proved.  Biden was never truly respected in Washington, and as soon as he stumbled badly enough, they pounced like hyenas, and Pelosi led the pack.  You might recall that the more Biden dug in and vowed to stay in the campaign, the more Pelosi said she was waiting for Biden to "do the right thing" and make his decision on quitting it.  She and many other Democratic leaders had asked Biden what his decision on the presidential campaign going forward was, whether he would stay in, and he said he would.  But Nancy Pelosi wouldn't have that.

Pelosi's power play appalled historian Allan Lichtman, who said that he had never seen such a naked public trashing of an incumbent Democratic President by his own party.  MSNBC commentator Symone Sanders-Townsend, who has worked for President Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders, echoed  Lichtman's sentiments, angrily saying on MSNBC this past weekend that Pelosi had not only doomed Biden's chances of winning by undermining his resolve to stay in the campaign but had failed to meaningfully support Harris as his substitute.   

"She played in presidential politics this cycle, and she helped orchestrate the very public demise of the president,” Sanders-Townsend said. She praised her former boss, Biden, saying: "And thank God for Joe Biden, that he came out and, yes, endorsed his VP. 'Cause these people wanted an open primary . . ..  For what?"

For what, indeed?  How could an open primary be set up after Pelosi forced him out in the month between then and the convention?  Pelosi did say that Harris ran a great and inspiring campaign, but that doesn't excuse her ongoing public bark-stripping of the President.   

Sanders-Townsend also quite rightly called attention to Pelosi's apparent failure to ensure a Democratic House majority, as the control of the House of Representatives in the coming 119th Congress at this writing is still not determined and it will come down to a few seats in Pelosi's home state of California.  "I'm gonna say it . . .. Nancy Pelosi, everybody talks about how the Speaker Emerita, you know, she’s so strategic, she can count, she did all of that when she was the speaker in Congress, but my question is: Where is your calculator now?" She added that Democrats were “about to lose the daggone House," suggesting that Pelosi’s successful effort to force Biden to drop his re-election bid led to what happened. 

Joe Biden has been accused of hubris for opting to seek a second presidential term, but the truth is that there was no one other than Kamala Harris who could replace him - the talent pool in the Democratic party having been drained a good deal from years of Democratic "stars" losing elections and being sent off into political internal exile for it - and Harris, being Vice President, was a largely unknown quantity among the voters.  And voters didn't like what they did know about her.  But because she had the chops to be President, and because many party leaders, including Representative Jim Clyburn (D-SC), thought she had earned the right to be Biden's pinch hitter, the choice of Harris without a messy brokered convention that would have left a lot of sore feelings was logical.

Wrong, apparently, but logical.

Biden has always been a fighter who keeps getting back up.  Indeed, he was almost like those old egg-shaped Weeble action figures of the 1970s - he wobbled but he didn't fall down.  Pelosi knocked him over, wouldn't let him get back up, bashed him after the election for making his decision to withdraw at the wrong time only after she belittled him and trashed him in public, and didn't pay attention to her own bailiwick and to diminishing Democratic chances of taking the House back.   So how is the election result Biden's (or Harris's fault)?

The whole thing reeks.

Election 2024: The Post-Mortem, Part Four

And now, a look at the vote. 

Donald Trump won 31 states and 312 electoral votes, with Kamala Harris winning 226 electoral votes.  In case you haven't noticed, the Democrats got fewer electoral votes than they did in 2016.  That's because, unlike Harris, Hillary Clinton, who lost six out of seven swing states, still won Nevada.  This time, Trump took Nevada as well, sweeping every swing state.  Oh yeah, he also won the majority of the popular vote - the first Republican presidential candidate to do so in twenty years.  

Also, 80 percent of the nation's counties (or municipalities in Alaska and parishes in Louisiana) shifted more Republican.  Trump did better than Joe Biden in many jurisdictions and Harris did worse than Biden in many others.  So many counties shifted to Trump that in only Massachusetts and Hawaii did Harris carry every county.

Even most of the 19 states Harris won shifted more to the GOP.   New Jersey, where I live, supported Hillary Clinton over Trump by nine percentage points, and Biden carried the state by sixteen points.  Harris carried it by only five.  She only carried Virginia by a very slim margin.  

Also, Trump carried virtually every demographic group.  As noted in my previous post, he carried white male voters - not just out of the reasons I've already defined, but for lingering anger white men, including I myself, have toward the denigration of us for everything from colonialist genocide to slavery to manifest destiny to Pat Boone.  I had nothing to do with any of that, and neither did a lot of other white males (who are referred to as "white guys," that phrase meant to be a pejorative), yet we continue to be denigrated for these atrocities. Many of us are not racist or sexist or have not committed acts of bigotry, yet we're guilty of that charge until we're proven innocent.  If I had a higher intolerance for that sort of what James Carville calls ""jackassery," like many white men do, I might have voted for Trump myself.  I didn't.  But a lot of white men did, because of that anger, joining with the white men who are total jerks who were already with Trump.

But guess what?  A majority of white women voted for Trump, despite warnings that he would put further restrictions on reproductive rights and might criminalize it nationally altogether.  This is because many states have already codified abortion rights, and seven states voted to do the same this year, and Trump has promised not to sign a federal abortion ban.  White women decided that reproductive rights in states where abortion is legal would remain safe under Trump and voted for him out of concern for the economy.  So did Hispanics, whose votes Trump won 45 percent of, as well as a majority of the Hispanic male vote, and he drew more votes from black men as well.

The only demographic groups Harris solidly behind her were her own - black women - and Jews.  Given her marriage to Doug Emhoff, that's no surprise.  And on a semi-related topic, I have long been open to dating a woman of color, but I never aimed to limit myself to only women of color or women of a specific non-white race.  I always figured that if I ever dated and eventually married a woman of color, it would be by chance, not design.  I am now seriously considering dating black women only.  Because that way, I'll have a far less chance of dating a woman who voted for Trump.  

As a white man who was dating and marrying black women long before Trump entered politics, Trump-hater Robert DeNiro was clearly on to something.

Democrats have two years before the 2026 midterms to go through the numbers and see where they went wrong.  They might be even able do do that sooner, in time for the 2025 gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia.  If they're lucky.  Because if Trump terminates the Constitution as he's suggested, he's going to terminate the opposition next. 

Election 2024: The Post-Mortem, Part Three

The Democrats are already talking about a forensic study of last week's election returns to figure out how they blew it.  They thought they had everyone behind them based on the formation of pro-Harris social-media groups - Black Women For Harris, Latinos For Harris, White Women For Harris - White Dudes For Harris!   White Dudes For Harris, a social media group spearheaded by Jeff Bridges, one of the most esteemed and revered actors in Hollywood - more so than George Clooney.  What could possibly go wrong when you had white men for Kamala Harris?

How about the fact that that the white men for Harris could have held their in-person meetings in a broom closet?

Donald Trump did better with white males than with any other demographic, which should not have surprised anyone.  But he was able to improve marginally with black male voters and even more with male Hispanic voters.  Despite having a running mate who loves to go hunting, despite featuring Bruce Springsteen at her rallies, and despite appealing to so-called "girl dads" who wanted to protect their daughters from extremist MAGA policies, Harris was never going to win over a large number of male voters.  It wasn't just because too many men could not imagine a female President.  It's because her campaign had a soft-focus approach to people who voted more out of emotion than reason.  In other words, she ignored the large masculine side of the electorate - the "bro culture."  The Harris campaign's rallies had an effeminate air to them, featuring celebrity surrogates like Beyoncé Knowles and Oprah Winfrey in a love-fest atmosphere that sometimes bordered on rainbows and unicorns.  But none of this addressed the concerns of men - especially young men.  

The economist Scott Galloway has commented on this repeatedly on cable television, noting how young men are less likely to go to college and have disconnected with society at large, while their female peers have been succeeding in academics and the workplace at a much higher rate.  Young men have returned inward, spending more time online - not blogging, a constructive labor I engage in, but playing video games and communicating on right-wing chat boards.  The Harris campaign addressed the concerns of many Americans, but the young men who felt left out of society felt left out of the Harris narrative.  

In fact, Harris's entire approach to appealing to masculinity was all wrong.  Instead of hunting, like Tim Walz, many men today go for kickboxing.  Instead of Bruce Springsteen, they listen to Jason Aldean.  And not every man has a daughter.  Some not only don't have daughters, they also don't have sons.  Not only aren't many men married, a lot of men don't even have girlfriends.   

Of course, not all men are toxically masculine, but in America, a lot of men are.  A lot of American men like NFL football, listen to macho country music, and drive Ford pickup trucks. I like soccer, listen to jazz, and drive a Volkswagen Golf, but while all that would be fine in France, here that makes me a pussy.  In America, of course, being a pussy is tantamount to treason.  And if you don't listen to Joe Rogan (below), that goes double.

Kamala Harris did try to make some concessions to reach bros while not selling out.  She attempted to get booked on Rogan's podcast, where could have made her case, and she could have, and probably would have, talked to his listeners in a conversational tone rather than a lecturing or admonitory one.  (Not surprisingly, Rogan didn't book her, possibly out of fear that his listeners would think she was making sense.) But most of her efforts to reach such voters fell flat.  Trump was far more successful in reaching them, thanks to an ad his campaign ran on NFL games accusing the Biden-Harris administration of paying for transgender (another example of liberal PC language, as the proper word is "transsexual" - the word "gender" is a literary, not an anthropological, word) surgeries for prisoners - actually a Trump administration policy - and the Harris campaign did nothing to counteract that ad.

There might be a way for Democrats to appeal to men going forward, assuming the Democratic Party is allowed to exist under a second Trump term.  But getting Jeff Bridges and George Clooney to speak on their behalf isn't going to cut it.  Those actors represent a suave, sophisticated masculinity that is completely alien to today's male culture.  The fact that the Harris campaign even needed surrogates like Bridges, Clooney or Bruce Springsteen to appeal to men was actually an Achilles heel.  Because Donald Trump only needed one surrogate.

His name was Donald Trump.

Stay tuned for Part Four.

Election 2024: The Post-Mortem, Part Two

The joke going around Europe and north of the border is this: "What borders on stupidity?  Canada and Mexico."

Americans are in fact quite stupid, believing that Hemingway wrote "The Grapes of Wrath" and that Hamlet wrote "Cyrano de Bergerac," and that Alexis de Tocqueville should never have divorced Blake Carrington.  And Americans are so ignorant of European history that they probably think that England has never had a revolution or a civil war, supposing that kings and queens have simply died and been succeeded for a thousand years with no fuss or muss.  They're so stupid that restrooms in restaurants and coffee shops have signs that say "EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS BEOFRE RETURNING TO WORK," a point of fact that once went without saying.  Conservatives - at least MAGA conservatives - are especially lunkheaded, believing that humans and dinosaurs co-existed and that all Frenchmen are homosexuals.  Certainly, this stupidity propelled Trump back into the White House.  But there's a lot of idiocy among so-called progressives - and that's another reason the Democrats lost in 2024.

Back in the 1960s and the 1970s, the last period in which the Democrats were unquestionably dominant, the party adhered to a liberalism defined not only by support for labor, civil rights legislation, and anti-poverty programs but by building infrastructure and promoting science, which is what the space program was.  As the only elected Republican President between 1961 and 1981, Richard Nixon bent to the liberal ethos of American politics by nationalizing passenger rail transport, creating the Environmental Protection Agency, and expanding scholastic athletic opportunities to girls. And, as liberalism, all of this made sense.

In today's neoliberal era, the Democrats have pursued a so-called progressive agenda that John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson would hardly recognize.  The Democrats have been happy to trust the free market to deliver the nice things that governments should provide while they pursue such nuts-and-bolts issues as hair anti-discrimination legislation.  Instead of prioritizing economic issues that people care about, they've been busy appealing to different groups and been playing identity politics.  They've even tried to police the lexicon in which to have a discourse.  Non-heterosexuals were called "LGBTQ," an unpronounceable acronym (the Q is for "questioning" - my question is why so-called progressives spend time trying to come up with acronyms no one can pronounce).  They decided that blacks should be called "Blacks," with a capital B - elevating a statistical population group to an nationality, after realizing that "African-American" took too long to say.  "Hispanics" were then called "Latinos," because Spanish-speaking populations must be referred to in the Spanish language only, but given the gender-sensitive nouns of the Spanish language, liberal English-speaking Americans decided to call them "Latinx" - pronounced "Latin EX," not "la-TINKS."  And all of these groups have been called "communities" - as in, "New Jersey's Black community," suggesting that every black person in New Jersey lives on the same block in Newark. (And how about "Jewish Americans" or "Muslim Americans" in place of "American Jews" and "American Muslims," the former terms suggesting that an American's religion is more important than his nationality?) 

Even the Black Lives Matter movement, essential as it is to raise public awareness of the senseless killing of black citizens by trigger-happy police officers, has mutated into ignorance and moronism.  So-called progressive activists tied the movement to an effort to "defund" the police, failing to understand that most residents of underserved minority neighborhoods want a strong police force to protect them from criminals.  They stigmatized Democrats like Martin O'Malley for saying that "all lives matter" because conservatives have used that phrase to downplay racist policing and because the premise that all lives matter should go without saying but is an obvious contradiction of reality - even though Democrats like O'Malley, the most recent white mayor of black-majority Baltimore, have a proven track record of serving everyone, not just one group or another.   But the stupidity persists.  A meme I came across on Facebook once explained that saying "Black lives matter" does not mean that other people's lives don't matter, just as people in the movement to save the whales would never say, "Fuck the other fish."

How is that an example of stupidity?  A whale is a mammal, not a fish.  

If liberals can't grasp the nuances of biology, how can we expect other Americans to do so?

Of course, the greatest stupidity of the Black Lives Matter movement occurred when, after Trump had the military violently cleared Lafyette Square, which is in front of the White House, of peaceful civil rights demonstrators per Trump's orders in the wake of George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis, Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser ordered that two blocks of Sixteenth Street Northwest - the street that terminates at a T junction in front of Lafayette Square - have the words "BLACK LIVES MATTER" painted in yellow letters so large they can be seen from space.  Those two blocks are now called - you guessed it - Black Lives Matter Plaza. 

Note the presence of the words "DEFUND THE POLICE" at the right end of the street mural.  This picture was taken on June 7, 2020,  almost seven months to the day before the much demonized police in Washington tried to protect the U.S. Capitol from insurrectionists.  (Click on the picture to see it better.)

This is an embarrassment to our country.  Consider the great public spaces of other national capitals.  London has Manchester Square.  Paris has the Place Vendome.  Rome has the Piazza Navona.  Berlin has the Potsdamer Platz.  Washington has . . . a street mural in a "plaza" named for a slogan.  A good slogan, but still a slogan.  This is the extreme equivalent of renaming streets for Martin Luther King in our cities' worst neighborhoods.  It solves nothing and it does nothing.   

You know, on second thought, maybe "Black Lives Matter" isn't a good slogan.  Originally, the movement was considering "Black Lives Matter Too" as their slogan, the "too" softening the rough edge and appearing to be less divisive.  But that was rejected.

As for Black Lives Matter Plaza . . . maybe Mayor Bowser should have considered, oh, I don't know, creating a real plaza, a granite-paved square with park benches and flower beds, and not create a fly-by-night public space next to an existing public space - Lafayette Square.

Brought to you by the same folks who shortened the official name of Rhode Island from the "State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations" to the "State of Rhode Island" even though the word "plantations" in the state's name referred to the mainland settlements in and around Providence, not cotton farms worked by slaves.  Instead of simply changing the name to the less racially charged "State of Rhode Island and Providence Environs," the "State of Rhode Island" adopted a misnomer as its official name.  Because apparently that was a more important issue for Rhode Island than hearing the economic concerns of their residents.

Democrats will continue to lose elections and supporters as long as they engage in this politically correct nonsense in lieu of real solutions to the problems they purport to address.   Calling non-heterosexuals an unpronounceable acronym won't protect them from discrimination.  Painting "BLACK LIVES MATTER" in giant letters so that people Get It won't bring back George Floyd or prevent other black men from dying at the hands of the police.  And none of this crap will help the middle class pay their mortgages or rents.

As Paul Fussell might have said in his book "BAD Or, The Dumbing of America," in which he distinguished between plain bad - something no one would say was good - and BAD - something phony or stupid that is praised and held dear - it's not the badness of liberal euphemisms or symbolism that appalls.  In a country so welded to superficiality, that's to be expected.  It's the BADness, the idea that superficial sloganeering and gestures can bring about positive change in place of doing the work of communicating and listening to voters while doing the work of educating people in general on the need for a just and equal society.  Real BAD. 

Stay tuned for Part Three.

Election 2024: The Post-Mortem, Part One

Kamala Harris is innocent.

She ran a flawless presidential campaign, she was always on point, she demonstrated a command of the issues, she proved that she had earned her place at the top of the presidential ticket despite never having competed in a primary, and she offered a program that would move the country forward and guarantee freedom for all.

But in the end, 51 percent of voters did not want as President a black woman of partial South Asian descent who prefers Bootsy Collins to Phil Collins and whose husband is a Jew.

If racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and a preference for Genesis over Parliament-Funkadelic were the only reasons Harris lost, that would be troubling enough, for they would show how shallow Americans are.  But there are other reasons for the election results that made Donald Trump the first President to get elected to two non-consecutive terms since Grover Cleveland and the first Republican President ever to achieve that feat.  The Democratic Party suffered a failure of imagination.  They failed to imagine how inflation, immigration, a strong economy that was not as deep as it was wide, a disinterest in politics as usual, and a disgust with the elites who run Washington irrespective of who runs the White House or Congress affected people's perception of how the government works.  They think it doesn't work.  At least not for them.  In running against Trump, the Democrats suffered a failure of imagination, an imagination that would enable to understand why people would vote for him.  They didn't even have imaginations to convey how Trump could destroy democracy.  In spite of Trump's various threats of retribution against his opponents - some of which involved obvious violations of the Eighth Amendment banning cruel and unusual punishment - the Democrats couldn't make people ponder the possibility of using the authorities to squelch dissent, arrest opponents in their homes, force the press to tow the government line, and recognize anti-Trump statements as treason, treason being a capital offense.

Although Harris did what she had to do to win and did her best to convey that she got what voters were going thorough economically and, wisely, did not lean into her sex - the opposite of Hillary Clinton, on both counts - there's plenty of blame to go around in the rest of the party.  Jamie Harrison, the Democratic National Committee chairman, deserves blame for not reaching out to voters in the Midwestern and Southern states or committing to a fifty-state strategy like Howard Dean did.  Janet Yellen didn't help matters any by calling inflation "transitory."  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, despite her best intentions, certainly made the Democrats look foolish with a Green New Deal that wasn't so much aspirational as it was fantasy.  But Democrats at large deserve the lion's share of the blame because the party has largely abandoned the working class in favor of neoliberalism, that idiotic belief that social progress and positive change can come in a free market that offers a variety of goods and services coupled with economic opportunity with a government that provides minimal services beyond a strong military.  The Democrats are a party of elitists who discuss policy over French wine and cheese and spend summer vacations on the Riviera while the closest a working-class bloke ever came to the Riviera was when he rode in the back seat of his dad's old Buick.

President Biden, meanwhile, is more or less the last Democrat who has not forgotten about the working class.  He's the most pro-worker, pro-union, pro-blue-collar President we've had since Harry Truman.  Bernie Sanders has considered Biden to be an ally.  But he's been undermined by a party of neoliberals who continue to offer a retread of the Clinton and Obama policy prescriptions.  And to be blunt, the President enabled Trump's win largely for deciding to quit the 2024 campaign when he did.  The reason for this is twofold.  First, he chose the wrong time to withdraw.  If he felt that standing down from a re-election bid was the right thing to do, he should have done that in early 2023 to give the Democrats a chance to select a new presidential nominee on their own.  Maybe Harris would still have been nominated.  Maybe not.  Second, he withdrew in July 2024, and despite endorsing Harris and giving her his full support, he bequeathed to her a campaign apparatus that was designed to re-elect an incumbent President, not elect a new one.  The biggest miracle is that when the Biden campaign became the Harris campaign, she had a hundred days to eke out a victory and she almost did.  But once again, the Democrats at large need to share the blame here; the party leadership, which never accepted Biden in the first place, publicly trashed him and all but forced him to withdraw when he said he was staying in the campaign and Democrats like Nancy Pelosi refused to take yes for an answer.  Kudos to Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman - no one's idea of an elitist - for standing by Biden. 

And after all that, I have more.  But this blog post is already too long, and so I'll continue with Part Two next. 

Unfinished Music Video Of the Week: November 8, 2024

"Cambridge 1969" by John Lennon and Yoko Ono (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

No Words . . .

 

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. 

Loaded For Bear

If there is any doubt remaining that Trump, if he returns to power in January, will make opposition to him a capital offense, then Trump's latest outrage should sweep away all that.

In Arizona, he told Tucker Carlson in a public forum that Liz Cheney ought to be placed in front of a firing squad to see how she, who supported the wars in the Middle East in the 2000s and 2010s, would feel if she had nine rifles pointed at her face, ready to be fired.

That is, execution by firing squad.

Okay . . . Christian nationalism . . . one-party rule . . . monitoring pregnancies . . . and now firing squads as a form of capital punishment . . . I'm sorry, when did the entire country suddenly become like Utah??? 

Trump was particularly peeved at how Liz Cheney, like her father, could possibly support sending young men to war without ever having actually served in one.  If Trump wanted to highlight the fact that neither of the Cheneys never served in the military and  yet were "chicken hawks" who supported endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he could have done it without threatening Liz with guns in her face.  Though, any criticism of the Cheneys as chicken hawks would have had much more resonance coming from a man who didn't claim to have bone spurs to avoid serving in Vietnam.

The Arizona Attorney General's office is investigating Trump's comments as a possible hate crime.    

Music Video Of the Week - November 1, 2024

"I've Gotta Get Get a Message To You" by the Bee Gees  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Sex and the Single Clown

While I was out one morning last week, I drove by one of those scary-clown mannequins, like the one below, that have become popular Halloween decorations. 

As annoying and creepy as they may seem, clowns are still popular with a wide swath of the population.  They are beloved for many people as circus and birthday party entertainers, and some people's fondest memories are of seeing a clown perform, being silly and ridiculous and also somewhat endearing, be it under the big top, or at a street fair.

I, of course, am not one of these people.  I do have a memory of Ronald McDonald appearing at the grand opening at a McDonald's restaurant as a kid in Pennsylvania, but all I really remember was that he was there.  As was I.  Nevertheless, in addition to the sight of scary clowns on suburban lawns ever October being very depressing, the popularity of homicidal clowns, particularly in horror movies such as It and Circus of the Dead, is quite disturbing.  Such movies exploit the sensitivities of people who have a fear of clowns. Never mind how these movies are meant to make people scream  - just the fact that there are so many clown horror movies is enough to make me scream.

Hey,  I have an idea - how about a romantic clown movie, a movie in which a cute lady clown removes her face paint for a man, turns out to be a beautiful woman, and makes love to him afterwards? 

Oh wait, this is America, you can't show something like that - that's sick!  A female clown taking off her makeup and revealing her face for a man - possibly revealing herself to be of a different race than he is - and then engaging in sexual intercourse with him, possibly still in her clown costume?  Oh, that is so disgusting!

As opposed to a movie where a clown with a sadistic grin painted on his face chops people up with a machete or a chainsaw in hand. 😉

Happy Halloween. 😝

Dr. Steinister - Part Two

Near where I live, there is a house with a "Cease-Fire Now" lawn sign opposing Israeli military operations against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.  A couple of days ago, I passed by it and found another lawn sign next to it - a Jill Stein campaign sign.  

Although I am a former Stein voter who has since expressed regret for voting for her in 2016 - but not regretting voting for a third-party candidate,as I could never vote for Hillary Clinton - I continue to stress that while the once and present Green Party presidential candidate may have been a factor in costing Hillary the Presidency against Donald Trump in 2016 in the states in what used to be called the 'blue firewall,"  as the vote tallies in those states show above, she was not the only factor, and that Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson also cost Hillary Clinton votes in these states (as this CNN article from 2016 explains). Johnson was as much a possible spoiler as Dr. Stein was.  Moreover, many people who voted for Dr. Stein or Johnson might have stayed home if neither one had been on the ballot.

That out of the way, I am happy to present more evidence that Dr. Stein is a fraud.  I once complained how progressives did nothing to start a new party to replace the Democrats after Hillary Clinton's well-deserved loss and the Democratic party's descent into Whig-like irrelevance, but did you notice?  Dr. Stein was one of those progressives who sat on her hands.  In fact, she disappeared as quickly as I expected the Democratic Party to.  She sat out 2020 and let another Green Party member carry the standard in the presidential election that year, and now she's back, promising a more just society if she were to win against all odds.  Don't you believe it.

Her stand for the Palestinians seems contrived and incredulous, since she never spoke out about the Middle East before, but her emphasis on Michigan, with its large Arab and Islamic population, seems to be calculated into helping Trump at Kamala Harris' expense.   Because it is.  She has expressed no fear that her efforts to make inroads in Michigan could help Trump win, just as she doesn't regret that Trump may have won in 2016 because of her candidacy.

Justice for the Green Party should, as its name implies, include environmental justice, but Dr. Stein has benefited from mutual fund holdings that have investments in fossil fuels valued at up to $937,775, which Dr. Stein defended in 2016 by saying that her mutual funds invest in an array of companies and that oil and gas companies are only a small part of the mix.  Okay, so why, as MoveOn.org recently reported,  did she knowingly invest up to $500,000 in a stock index fund that invests in the Keystone XL pipeline that Dr. Stein says she opposes?  And why, after she denounced President Biden for his handling of the Norfolk Southern derailment in Ohio, did she knowingly invest in index funds that have holdings in that same railroad?  

It seems to me that if Dr. Stein really were concerned about fossil fuels, she would have made a sincere effort to invest in more environmentally friendly companies or in mutual funds that invest in such companies.  All you have to do is look at The Nation for ads for such mutual funds.  And if Dr. Stein were concerned about advancing progressive causes, she would be doing the work of advancing them every day, like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) does.  I don't agree with everything AOC says, and I have grown uncomfortable with her narrow test of what a progressive is (Martin O'Malley, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris would all fall short), but say what you will, she does just that -put in the work.  And it's easy to see why she ran for office as a Democrat even though the party was moribund when she entered politics.  Because even a declining, irrelevant, disconnected out-of-touch Democratic Party is preferable to a Green Party at the height of its powers.

And the Green Party of the United States, unlike its European counterparts, will never be a player in national politics unless it gets rid of hypocrites and opportunists like Dr. Stein.

The United States of Amazonia

The late, great comedian Robin Williams once explained why boycotts don't work.  He explained how he and some of his friends wanted to boycott products made in China to protest Chinese abuses of human rights, but they ran into, shall we say, a great wall.  "Damn!  They make everything!" 

Which is why, as much as I'd like to, I can't boycott Amazon, the consumer-product mail-order company founded and run by Jeff Bezos, who has owned the Washington Post since 2013.  When Bezos (above) refused to allow his paper's editorial staff publish an endorsement of Kamala Harris for President to avoid pissing off Donald Trump, who met with executives from Bezos's space-exploration company over possible federal contracts for the firm, all hell broke loose. Post Editor-at-large Robert Kagan resigned, and several editors and columnists for the Post protested vehemently.  (At the same time, Patrick Soon-Shiong, the wealthy owner of the Los Angeles Times - the largest newspaper in Kamala Harris' home state - refused to allow the editorial board publish an endorsement of Harris, causing Los Angeles Times editor Mariel Garza to resign.)  And not only have many of the Washington Post's customers - 200,000, at last count - cancelled their subscriptions, many people have cancelled their Amazon Prime memberships and stopped buying products from Amazon and are asking others to do the same.  

Sorry, that's a non-starter for me.  

I have had to buy most of the products I've bought in the past several months from Amazon.  Among them are a mantel clock, a saucepan, a few car-care products, and the very laptop I wrote this blog post on.  I have found that, in many cases, finding the exact item I want in the stores is next to impossible.  Oh, I might find the right car polish or tire dressing I want in the local auto-parts store, but more often than not, I have to go to Amazon for what I want or need.  

And then there are books and records.   I bought a book about the history of the Volkswagen Golf through Amazon, a book published in Britain that cannot be found at the nearest Barnes & Noble.  And records - specifically, compact discs?  Sure I'd be happy to by my CDs at a record store - if I can find one.  You almost have to go to the ends of the earth to find a record store these days . . . Amazon has made them a little hard to find! 

Jeff Bezos is a genius - an almost evil genius.  He created a shopping system in which you're more likely to find the product you want or need through his company than in a mom-and-pop store, a big-box store like Wal-Mart or Target, or even a chain store at the mall.  And by the way, next time you go to your local mall, you may notice that that record store you used to browse in back in the 1980s is gone.  You might be able to find the album you're looking for at a locally owned record store - one of the benefits of Amazon monopolizing CD sales is that such record stores that survived Sam Goody and Record World are able to stay in business - but the the time and money you spend just to get there might not be worth it.

When you dominate the consumer-retail business so thoroughly that your business is always someone's best bet to get the product they want or need, you're more than powerful.  You're omnipotent.  So it's ironic that Jeff Bezos can't stand up to Trump.   

Der Bund

Kamala Harris was in Philadelphia yesterday while Donald Trump was in New York holding a rally at Madison Square Garden.   They were a hundred miles apart and ten thousand light years apart as well.  While Harris was calling for a coalition of patriots that would strive to make a better country for everyone,  Trump's rally went full-tilt boogie on hatred. 

Trump's Madison Square Garden rally echoed a different time, a different ethos, and a different Madison Square Garden.  And no, I'm not talking about the election campaign rally President Herbert Hoover held in 1932.  I',m talking about the German-American Bund/America First rally that took place at the old Garden in February 1939, in which white nationalists cheered for Hitler and denounced the Jews.  This rally was full of people who cheered for Trump and denounced everyone against Trump.

As expected, Kamala Harris bore the brunt of that attacks, with many speakers calling her a prostitute, or the Antichrist.  But the most egregious comments came from a so-called comedian named Tony Hinchcliffe (below), who ridiculed Hispanics for breeding liberally and called Puerto Rico piece of floating garbage in the sea.  

Interesting. There's another former President who ran to get his old job back as the head of a party that trashed another island populated by destitute Catholics and ruled by a bunch of greedy Anglos . . . 

. . . and Millard Fillmore's Know-Nothing Party platform bashing Irish immigrants only got him Maryland's eight electoral votes! 

My Unenthusiastic Vote

I don't think it's necessary for me to say that I am not making any endorsements on this blog.  It's not because, like the owners of the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, I fear retribution if Donald Trump wins.  Heck, I know a Trump 47 administration is going to come for me if I win based on everything I've said about him here.  I'm not making any endorsements because it would be meaningless.  All I'd have to do is write that this blog endorses Democratic candidate _______ in the ______  election for ________ because of his/her support for reproductive rights, tax breaks for the middle class, etc., etc., etc., and filling in the blanks would be like just adding water to an instant product.

The other reason is that I don't expect anything in These States to get better than it is now even if Harris wins.  I cast my ballot yesterday in the first day of early voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, and I stood in line for over forty-five minutes to do so.  I also have my Harris lawn sign displayed outside in plain view from the street.  But I voted without much in the way of enthusiasm.  Because even though I've been behind her from the start, and any criticisms I had of her before she became the Democratic presidential nominee no longer apply, I look at the suburban-sprawl, SUV-loving, Wal-Mart-shopping America and I know that we will not become a more civilized and enlightened country going forward even with a Harris administration.  I voted for her knowing that a Harris Presidency - or any Democratic Presidency - will not - not - result in single-payer health care, bullet trains for Amtrak, more aid for education, paid parental leave, and all of those other nice things Europeans have had for decades, because Americans are just wired differently from anyone else.

The biggest reason - perhaps the only reason - I'm voting for Harris is that a Harris administration won't make opposition to the government or to the executive branch in particular a crime punishable by death.

Trump will likely do that.

Though, no matter who wins, we'll still have the death penalty in other cases.

We're not Europe.

Out and In

If Kamala Harris is elected President of the United States on November 5, the transition of power from President Biden will be the first transition of power from one elected Democratic President to another since Franklin Pierce transferred power to James Buchanan in 1857.  (By contrast, there have been five transitions of power from one elected Republican President to another since then, the most recent one being from Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush in 1989.)

Bearing that in mind, don't expect a Harris administration to resemble the Biden administration.  If Harris becomes President, she likely won't retain the Biden Cabinet.  She'll want her own Secretary of the Treasury, her own national security team, and her own roundtable of economic advisors.  Her plans to help more small businesses is a clear contrast from President Biden's economic policies.  As a President with a Jewish spouse, she'll likely take a more nuanced policy toward Israel and the Middle East, and as a woman, she's already been more to the forefront on reproductive rights than President Biden, a male Catholic, can be. 

Oh, she may retain a few Cabinet members, just as George H.W. Bush retained Education Secretary Lauro Cavazos from Ronald Reagan and just as Herbert Hoover in 1929 retained Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon from Calvin Coolidge (who inherited Mellon when President Warren Harding died).  She's likely to have an even more diverse Cabinet; after Vice President Tim Walz, the highest-ranking white male Christian in a Harris Cabinet might very well be the Secretary of Commerce.  She may decide to try to get Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su confirmed after Joe Manchin leaves the Senate, as it was he who slowed Su's confirmation to be the permanent Labor Secretary . . .  or she might do what I suggested and appoint Tim Ryan to that post.  But most of her Cabinet officers will likely be new faces one way or the other, some of whom we may not have heard of yet.

One thing is for certain if Harris is elected: She will not retain Attorney General Merrick Garland, given his foot-dragging in prosecuting the mastermind behind the January 6 insurrection (you know whom I'm talking about; I won't mention his name).  Recent reporting has revealed that making Garland the chief law enforcement officer of the nation is Biden's biggest regret.

Music Video Of the Week - October 25, 2024

"Bungle In the Jungle" by Jethro Tull  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Heil Drumpf!

It's not news that John Kelly, Donald Trump's second White House chief of staff, said that Trump admired Adolf Hitler and said that Hitler did good things.  He said all that months ago.

What's news is that reporter Michael Schmidt got it on tape.

More so, Kelly described Trump's Hitler fascination in much greater detail, noting and lamenting is admonition for the loyalty Hitler demanded (but didn't get) from his generals in the Second World War.  Kelly - no one's idea of a liberal (he agreed with Trump that the Civil War could have been avoided by compromise and called Robert E. Lee "an honorable man") - made it clear to Trump that there was nothing Hitler ever did that was good and told Schmidt that he felt that Trump's desire for unlimited, extreme power clearly made him a fascist.

And, even as Kamala Harris has come right out and said that Trump was a fascist, more of her campaign surrogates have been stressing how Trump, as President, would not only arrest leading Democrats for speaking out against him but for arrest average Joes and Josephines for doing so - and even though no one has said that Trump would make dissent a capital offense - except me, of course - and Trump himself has said nothing of the sort, just remember, you should be afraid not just of what Trump says he'll do.  You should be afraid of what Trump doesn't say he'll do.  All you need to do is look at what Hitler himself did without ever mentioning any of it in the parliamentary campaign the Nazis ran in what would be the last free election held in Germany in Hitler's lifetime.

As for the good things Hitler is believed to have done . . . he stole the credit for both of them.  The autobahns were inspired by the first Italian autostradas built by engineer Piero Puricelli in the early 1920s.  Hey, how far back do you want to go?  The Long Island Motor Parkway, the world's first controlled-access road for automobiles anywhere, opened in 1908.  As for the Volkswagen, which Hitler built the autobahns for . . . even some VW enthusiasts mistakenly credit the VW Beetle to Hitler, calling it "the only good idea Hitler ever had."  The "people's car" was actually Ferdinand Porsche's idea, and he conceived of it before the Nazis came to power.  Hitler just gave him the means to develop it, and he used the people's car idea for propaganda purposes; the factory meant to produce Volkswagens (and did, but not until after the war) built military vehicles.

Assembly Halls

Donald Trump is clearly deteriorating.  He keeps talking about arresting and/or executing opponents, serves McDonald's French fries to pre-selected drive-through customers, visits a disaster area in North Carolina and disrupts ongoing recovery efforts, and jokes about women who died for not getting the proper reproductive care.  But once in awhile, I must admit - and I don't like to - Trump makes a valid point.

Trump explained his car tariff proposals last week in an interview before the Economic Club of Chicago explaining how more foreign automakers, particularly the Germans, need to build manufacturing plants in the United States to avoid the tariffs he advocates.  

"Mercedes-Benz will start building in the United States," Trump said.  "They have a little bit, but do you know what they really are? Assembly [lines] like in South Carolina, but they build everything in Germany and then they assemble it here. They get away with murder because they say, 'Oh yes we are building,' but they don’t build. They take them out of a box and assemble them."

That's actually right. It's important here to make the distinction between a car factory that turns raw material - steel, glass, and plastic - into cars and a car factory that takes pre-assembled parts like doors, hoods, and engines and puts them together.  Many of those parts are in fact made around the world, and that economic model doesn't help companies in America that could produce those same parts.  Volkswagen's history in the United States reflects this distinction.  

VW was the first non-American automaker to manufacture cars in the United States when it opened a manufacturing plant in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania in 1978.  The plant managed to last ten years, and it produced thousands of Rabbits, Golfs and Jettas for the U.S. and Canada.  Until its 1988 closing, it made economic sense to build the cars where VW wanted to sell them.   Volkswagen's Mexican factory was a plant like that, but it was an assembly plant, taking parts from crates sent from Germany and assembling them into cars. 

Then, in 1992, VW decided that, to keep costs low for the American consumer, the third-generation Golf (above) and Jetta were to be built from the ground up at Volkswagen's factory in Puebla, Mexico.

A real manufacturing plant benefits the local economy in that it involves sourcing materials locally requiring expertise in making the parts as well as putting them together to create a car.  One could argue, in fact, that the result is a car of better quality.  But before 1992, the Mexican factory had had no experience in making cars from the ground up, and the plant managers didn't know what they were doing. The result was that the quality of the first few cars they made was so bad that the introduction of these cars was delayed for over a year. 

Trump realizes that a manufacturing plant involves more effort to make a product than one that just assembles the product from existing parts, and when the materials for the product are sourced locally, that means a more robust industrial base and a more integrated economy.  The move to turn Puebla from an assembly plant into a full manufacturing plant benefited the Mexican economy, and the lower costs of producing the cars south of the Rio Grande than producing them in Wolfsburg - it's certainly easier to import cars from across the border than from the other side of the ocean - benefited the American consumer and also the Canadian consumer.  But, when you manufacture a product from scratch rather than just assemble parts to make the product, it's important to have everything working in concert with each other.  And VW's Puebla factory was being told - on short notice, I might add - to make cars with no manufacturing ability.  If VW had sold the cars the Mexican factory tried to make at the start, word of their poor quality would have spread like wildfire and even VW die-hards like I would have stopping buying Volkswagens. That would have meant the end of Volkswagen in North America, which was already on death's door beforehand.  (The first third-generation Mark 3 Golfs and Jettas appeared as 1993 models in the San Diego area but were not available in the rest of the U.S. or Canada until the 1994 model year.)

So, I should take Trump seriously when he says that the Germans should build more cars in America as opposed to just assembling them, right?  Well, here's the thing.  Volkswagen's plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee currently operates as an assembly plant.  What made economic sense for VW with the Westmoreland plant in Pennsylvania in 1978 and for the Puebla plant in Mexico in 1992 no longer makes economic sense for either the Puebla or Chattanooga factories now, as both operate as assembly plants.  It would be great if VW or any other foreign automaker could manufacture and not just assemble their cars in the U.S.,  but that's not feasible now.  So, if Trump thinks that foreign automakers are and should always be obliged to manufacture rather than just assemble cars in the United States, he's clearly mistaken.

He's also mistaken when he says the long, back-breaking work of assembling a car from pre-existing parts is so easy, "you could have a child do it."

Please, when I was a child I couldn't even assemble plastic model cars!

And by the way, Trump, the company is not called Mercedes-Benz.  It's called Daimler AG.

Secession Obsession

Donald Trump recently chastised the memory of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican President, for not having done enough to prevent the Civil War, and he said that he should have made a deal with the slave states that had threatened to secede if Lincoln was elected President in 1860.  What Trump had no idea of was that Lincoln did try to make a deal with the slave states.  He said he wouldn't interfere with slavery in their jurisdictions so long as the federal government was allowed to forbid slavery in the territories, but the South insisted on the extension of "the peculiar institution" to achieve economic and political parity with the industrialized free states in the North.

The South, in fact, didn't have to make a deal with Lincoln at all.  Indeed, the South had plenty of reasons not to secede.  Among them:

First, as noted in an earlier blog entry from this month, Lincoln was a minority President, having been elected with 39 percent of the vote.  The truth was that over six in ten voters considered Lincoln too dangerous and radical to be President, and Lincoln had to tread carefully to prove otherwise if he hoped to govern.

Second, the Republican platform of the 1860 presidential campaign that they had no intention of abolishing slavery where it already existed.  Although Lincoln personally hated slavery, he knew there was no way he could abolish it through executive order.

Third, the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which guaranteed the rights of slave owners to take their slaves into free states and back to their home states, was the law of the land, and not even the President of the United States can reverse a Supreme Court decision.   

Fourth - and this is an important point - even though the Democrats had been so divided that the nominated two presidential candidates in the 1860 campaign, they had succeeded in electing majorities in both the House and Senate, meaning that they could block any legislation or presidential legislative proposal that Southerners opposed.

Which pretty much settles it.  The main cause of the Civil War wasn't slavery.  It was Southern stupidity.  Stupidity has long been associated with the South, of course, but it's mainly been associated with rednecks.  But stupidity, it turns out, has extended to the ruling classes - all the way back to the antebellum years.   The leaders of the Southern states had all of these reasons for not seceding, yet they were so intent on keeping fellow human beings in bondage for the benefit of free labor - nay, expanding the institution at a time when other countries had already abandoned it - that they went ahead and tried to form a separate country, the Confederate States of America, and they got the whupping they richly deserved.

And what Donald Trump didn't get was the moral rectitude of Lincoln's effort to contain slavery in 1861, when he took office, and his move to emancipate the slaves and grant them full citizenship in 1864 and 1865 to bring about a new birth of freedom.  Freedom . . . yeah, that's something he doesn't get.

Swiss Time Has Run Out

Did you hear about how the Geneva International Motor Show went this past March?  No?  That's because it didn't go at all.

It was canceled again?  Oh, no, it was held, all right.  

See how well-attended it was?

The truth of the matter is that the 2024 Geneva auto show was a bigger lemon than any of the Renaults shown in the picture above.  In May, its fate was sealed when the show's organizers announced that they were disbanding and that there would be no more auto shows in Geneva.  No one cares anymore.  Only a handful of major auto brands even participated in the show, and none of them offer cars for sale in the United States.    

All auto shows were in a degree of trouble by the end of the 2010s.  Then COVID hit in early 2020.  When the Geneva show was canceled that February, that's when I knew that this virus from China was serious.  The show was canceled for the next two years due to la pandémie de le covíde and in 2023 due to lingering COVID fears and "uncertainties in the global economy and geopolitics," though the organizers were happy to display cars in Doha, Qatar to appeal to crazy rich Arabs.  This year the show was finally held again in Geneva, but a funny thing happened in the five-year interregnum - people in Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe decided to do something else with their time because they didn't really miss it.  

A lot of my own personal life was forever ruined by le covíde, and so were my plans for when I finally go to Europe - this show was on my bucket list.  But as I said before on an earlier post on this blog,  when would I ever find myself in Switzerland in March?  The organizers have since retrenched and regrouped to continue holding auto shows in Doha, but I have absolutely no plans to fly halfway around the world to a dry, sun-baked, oppressively hot city in the middle of the desert with horrible architecture when Las Vegas is so much closer.   

As for European car shows, there's always the biennial Internationale Automobil-Ausstellung in Munich (formerly held in Frankfurt), and the next one is in September 2025, but whether or not I make that depends whether we have a President who believes in freedom to travel wherever we want or a President who plans to turn America into a 3.8-million-square mile East Berlin.