The Mad Bomber

The likely package bomber who terrorized CNN and anti-Trump public figures, one Cesar Sayoc of Florida, was caught after only a few days, but the madman in the White House, Donald Trump, is still at large  - and acting at his rallies (wait - he's still having rallies during a national emergency?) like the bomb scare is an inconvenient joke designed to stop the latest Republican surge of momentum, which it might.  Or it might not; the idea that it's a joke might even make the Republicans septuple down on voting a week from this coming Tuesday.  As evidence of that, Trump supporters in North Carolina were waiting yesterday in the middle of the pouring rain just to see Trump at his rally there.  Does anyone on the Democratic side command that sort of devotion? 

Be that as it may, Trump should be leading and uniting the nation at a time of crisis as the nation's patriarch, just as I'm sure that Hillary Clinton, one of the bomber's intended targets, would have been had she been elected to be the nation's matriarch.  Instead, he's mocking his opponents, dismissing the media, and trying to change the subject back to whatever it was before this bombing story broke.  And while he may not have started the rumors that Cesar Sayoc is a Democratic operative sending these bombs as a hoax to make Republicans look bad, they are spreading so fast and being pushed so relentlessly by Fox News - "Fascinating," says Fox's Martha McCallum speaking of this conspiracy theory as if it were fact - that it's easy to see why Republican momentum hasn't been dampened any.

The Democrats will likely have the vote of every thinking person on November 6, and I hope that means they have a majority.  I hope this bomb scare - or, more appropriately enough, Trump's reaction to it - motivates Democrats as much as the Kavanaugh hearings motivated Republicans.  There's a precedent for that; then-House speaker Newt Gingrich's efforts to keep Republicans motivated in the closing days of the 1998 midterms by playing up Democratic President Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky angered Democrats so much that they voted in greater numbers than usual and helped their party gain seats in the House (but not the majority) in a year where the party controlling the executive branch was supposed to lose seats in the legislative branch.  (The Senate remained unchanged that year, 55 Republicans and 45 Democrats.)  As a result, Gingrich  quit his speakership and his House seat.  So, again, I would encourage Democrats to react to Trump's bullying and his insensitivity to the bomb scare (the Cintons and the Obamas shouldn't wait up nights for Trump to call them with words of sympathy for having bombs being sent to them) by voting en masse in the midterms.  Otherwise, the Democrats will look even more irrelevant than they do now.

And Robert Mueller will be out of a job.

The 2010s have been a disastrous decade for Democrats.  More ominously, though, this decade - which started with the Citizens United decision from the Supreme Court - this decade has been a disastrous one for the nation.  Don't blow it this time, Democrats!