Martin O'Malley, Won't You Please Come Home?

Soon after the Dobbs abortion opinion first draft from the Supreme Court leaked, I found this meme on Instagram.

So I made this meme in response.

With Roe v Wade about to fall by the wayside and possibly every other freedom standing between us and a Republican President's declaration of martial law as well,  Hillary Clinton's supporters are once again bashing everyone who voted for a third-party candidate over Hillary in 2016, including those who had voted against her in the Democratic primaries, and letting Trump appoint all of those Supreme Court justices.  In response to those people, who never considered the idea that Martin O'Malley or Bernie Sanders could have actually beaten Trump in 2016, I offer the following meme: 

What don't Hillbots get?  She was a bad candidate, she was too polarizing to have enough mass appeal to win a popular majority (she only got 48 percent of the vote for President), and the only reason she was the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee was because the Democratic National Committee scared off or punished anyone who challenged her. The end. 

If I may now return to Martin O'Malley . . ..  O'Malley has kept a low profile since his endorsement of Beto O'Rourke for the Presidency, which more or less killed O'Malley's political career.  Given his lack of interest in campaigning for Joe Biden in 2020, it makes sense that he wasn't appointed to a top administration job.  If he pops up at all anywhere these days, it's his support for his wife Katie's campaign for Attorney General of Maryland - her dad's old job.  Most of O'Malley's tweets on his Twitter feed are in fact retweets from Katie's Twitter account.

None of this changes the fact that O'Malley was right about Trump in 2016 like Hillary Clinton was but was also right when he said that Hillary couldn't win the Presidency - in fact, his wife was the first person he said that to.  No one ever apologized to him for refusing to take him seriously and for mocking his own presidential ambitions, which continued even after Trump was sworn in as President.  With President Biden in deep trouble politically over inflation and Democrats saying privately that the party really ought to consider someone else for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination, Martin O'Malley may want to rethink his assertion that his "usefulness as a candidate for President has passed," even though pundits tend to agree with him; O'Malley's name never comes up as a possible 2024 contender.  Nothing new there, considering how the press always belittled him.

But he's still worth considering.  He has a record as mayor of Baltimore and as governor of Maryland that brought more positive than negative results, and the negative results - overpolicing in Baltimore when he was mayor, tax increases in Maryland when he was the state's governor - can be finessed.  And he'll only be 62 in January 2025, young by today's standards.  And if his wife gets to be First Lady and remain Attorney General of Maryland, should she be elected - now that would be a presidential power couple! 

I would love for O'Malley to run for President again, of course, but not only am I not expecting it, I don't plan to join his campaign if he does.  The fact is that, after working tirelessly to promote his 2016 presidential candidacy online and drum up support for him in Iowa only to get nowhere, get ridiculed online for my support for O'Malley, see the "inevitable" Hillary Clinton get the nomination and lose the presidential election to Donald Trump, I don't want to support any particular presidential candidate anymore.  My support for a presidential candidate now begins with entering a voting booth to cast my general-election ballot and ends when I've come out of the booth after having cast it.  Because, as with so many other things in life these days, I don't want to get involved in a political campaign anymore.  I've pretty much lost my idealism.

This is nothing new, really.  Bill Dixon, the manager of the 1988 presidential campaign of Martin O'Malley's mentor, Gary Hart, never worked on a political campaign ever again after the sex scandal that forced Hart out of the running thirty-five years ago this month.  Because of the media circus the scandal created, Dixon was too disillusioned to bother with another campaign after that.

I know exactly how he felt. 

2016 All Over Again

With Bernie Sanders surging in the polls and possibly edging out Joe Biden at a crucial moment in the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton, right on cue, is attacking Sanders in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter about a new documentary abut her debuting at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah.  She says that nobody likes Sanders, no one ever tried to work with him in Congress, and he has a pattern of being misogynistic toward female presidential candidates by questioning their experience of electability.  For those reasons, she refused to promise to campaign for him if he is the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, despite the fact that he campaigned for her in the 2016 general election season.  She cited Sanders' alleged statement to Elizabeth Warren that a woman can't be elected President - even though he encouraged Warren to run for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination and only ran himself after she did not, and had once told young girls back in 1988 that he believed a woman could be elected President one day.  

Hillary, of course, chose to ignore all that.  She said that what Sanders is reported to have said to Warren is part of a pattern of misogynistic behavior.

"If it were a one-off, you might say, 'OK, fine.'" she said.  "But he said I was unqualified. I had a lot more experience than he did, and got a lot more done than he had, but that was his attack on me . . ..  I just think people need to pay attention because we want, hopefully, to elect a President who's going to try to bring us together, and not either turn a blind eye, or actually reward the kind of insulting, attacking, demeaning, degrading behavior that we've seen from this current administration."

Really?  She got things done?  What did she get done? I honestly can't answer that question.  As for Bernie Sanders, he may caucus with the Democrats, but having an agenda more in tune with that of the Danish Parliament than the U.S. Congress has ensured that he's in a minority of one regarding most of his pet issues, such as free college tuition and Medicare for all.  Of course he hasn't gotten anything done in the House or in the Senate.  Though, Hillary and her handlers past and present - especially her past handlers, the political commentators on MSNBC identified as veterans of her 2016 presidential campaign - would be correct to point out that he couldn't get much done as President with a Congress unlikely to implement his agenda without strings attached.

I'll come right out and say it again:  Now is not the time to nominate someone as far to the left as Bernie Sanders because no one in Middle America is ready for a 180-degree turn to his agenda after four years of Donald Trump's reactionary administration.  As for Hillary's critique, it doesn't do anyone any favors, and it's more of a self-serving posture than a warning to Democrats that Sanders can't win.  It's simply Hillary wanting to rerun 2016 and nursing a grudge against everyone who voted against her and wanted nothing to do with her.  And since so many Bernie Sanders supporters - whom she painted with a broad brush and dismissed as mostly young male sexists who create the culture of the movement around the Vermont senator - find her so repugnant, this is only going to help Bernie rather than hurt him.  Hillary, please - shut the hell up and get off the goddamned stage!

I watch this Hillary-versus-Bernie fracas with utter disgust as a former Martin O'Malley supporter who, seeing the media become obsessed with the feud between the two, got pissed off every time they ignored or ridiculed my candidate.  I felt like the president of a neutral country during the Cold War watching the American President and the Soviet General Secretary going after each other and wanting to point out that both sides were equally ridiculous and unworthy of being taken seriously.  We had a third candidate that offered a choice of productive liberalism, an alternative to squishy moderation and radical change.  But you all laughed in my face.  So it doesn't matter to me whether Hillary or Bernie comes out ahead.  They should both be left behind.

And one final thing . . .

Brazen Brazile

Almost twenty-five years to the day after Bill Clinton was first elected President of the United States, Donna Brazile brought the Clintons' control of the Democratic Party to an end in one fell swoop.

The revered veteran Democratic operative dropped a bombshell in the form of an excerpt in her new book about the 2016 presidential election, "Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House."  It seems that President Obama's 2012 re-election campaign left the Democratic Party in so much debt - to the tune of $24 million - that when Hillary Clinton agreed to put money into the Democratic National Committee (DNC), it came with strings attached. The party would get just enough money from contributors to stay afloat, with the bulk of it going to Hillary's campaign.

The plan, finalized in August 2015, worked like this: Once a person contributed the maximum $2,700 allowed by the Federal Election Commission for individual contributions to Hillary's Brooklyn-based campaign, he or she could then contribute an additional $353,400 to a joint fundraising committee that served as a sort of a clearinghouse for Hillary's campaign, the DNC, and 32 Democratic state committees.  The joint committee was called - of course! - the "Hillary Victory Fund."

Brazile explains that the $353,400 contribution figure accounted for $10,000 to each of the 32 state parties who were party to this agreement, which totals $320,000, with the remaining $33,400 going to the DNC. "The money would be deposited in the states first," she wrote, "and transferred to the DNC shortly after that. Money in the battleground states usually stayed in that state, but all the other states funneled that money directly to the DNC, which quickly transferred the money to Brooklyn."

This arrangement of such an organization seemed suspicious to Paul Blumenthal, a political reporter for The Huffington Post, who said that such agreements aren't made until a candidate has secured the nomination.  The fact that it was put together so early in the process didn't seem to bother Democratic bigwigs, some of whom defended the agreement rather glibly.  Raymond Buckley, the New Hampshire Democratic Party chairman, said that he didn't believe that it was ever "too early to start preparing to win the general election."

Already, Democratic leaders are insisting that Brazile's book is a bum rap and that Hillary couldn't have possibly rigged the primaries when the fund was meant for the general, not the primary, election campaign.  Snooty Democratic establishmentarians are citing a memo, recently obtained by NBC News, making it clear that any "activities performed under this agreement will be focused exclusively on preparations for the General Election and not the Democratic Primary."  Besides, they say, Bernie Sanders signed a similar agreement, and Martin O'Malley certainly would have signed one if Debbie Wasserman Schultz had removed her boot heel from his neck long enough to let him.  So where's the rigging?

But Paste.com's Walker Bragman - full disclosure, he's a friend of mine and I'm also friends with his mom - invites us to pay closer attention to the choice of words in this memo.  "'Preparations for the General Election' does not necessarily mean 'during the General Election,'" he wrote.  "Moreover, [there was] the provision about hiring the new DNC Communications Director from the . . . candidates 'identified as acceptable to HFA [Hillary For America, i.e. the Clinton campaign]: to occur by September 11, 2015' - long before the primary had concluded."  To which I would add . . . long before the actual primary and caucus voting had even started. 

And here's the kicker:  Included in the agreement was a provision that the DNC would give the Clinton campaign "advance opportunity to review online or mass e-mail communications that features a particular Democratic primary candidate."  Also, the DNC was required to alert the Clinton campaign "in advance of mailing any direct mail communications that features a particular Democratic primary candidate or his or her signature."  As Brendan Fischer, the reform-program director at the nonpartisan voting-rights organization the Campaign Legal Center, wrote in a tweet, "How does anybody believe the DNC-HFA memo only applied to the general [election]? Clinton controlled every communication mentioning a primary candidate." 

The agreement definitely put Hillary in charge when it came to the party's preparations for the primaries.  The party had placed its ability to function in her hands, because it was so broke that it had no choice.   This newly revealed information dovetails quite nicely with the decision to hold a small number of primary/caucus debates (more debates were added only after Martin O'Malley dropped out), the inconvenient scheduling of said debates, and Hillary's own disregard for down-ballot races.  It also reveals a disconnected chairwoman in the form of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who pretty much let Hillary run amok with the party apparatus.  Brazile admits that Wasserman Schultz was "not a good manager" and that "Debbie expressed little interest in controlling the day-to-day operations of the party."

The biggest culprit in all this, surprisingly, is not Hillary or Wasserman Schultz but President Obama.  Obama was so insistent on remaining above politics that he paid no attention to the party and left it to its own devices.  As a result, the party not only ended up in the red, it allowed a thousand elective offices to go red - those House, Senate, gubernatorial, and state legislative seats that went Republican.  And when Donald Trump turned the White House Republican red, that was the GOP's nice red cherry on the top.  Obama  was a good President overall, but his neglect of the party's problems was a denial of his responsibility as a Democratic President.  Which begs the obvious question:  If he didn't like politics, why did he get into politics?  And here's another question:  If he was so concerned about his legacy, why didn't he help build up the party to ensure that his achievements would survive his Presidency?

Last night's gubernatorial victories for Democrats Ralph Northam in Virginia and Phil Murphy in New Jersey have given the Democrats a new lease on life in this Age of Trump, as has the approval of Medicaid expansion in Maine, but the party still has a long way to go before it can return to anything resembling a position of power on the national stage.  A candidate like O'Malley, who can appeal to both the mainstream and progressive wings of the Democratic Party if only more Democrats knew who he was, can move the party forward as its 2020 presidential nominee, but not a candidate that appeals to only one group or the other; Mike Lupica, speaking on MSNBC, said that DNC chairman Tom Perez has to be scared to death at the idea of another Bernie Sanders presidential candidacy (and Sanders isn't even a party member), and another campaign from a Clinton or a Clintonista, I would add, would be equally distressing.  Donna Brazile herself must have known just how much of a predicament the party was in back in 2016 when she discovered what Hillary had done and had to tell Sanders, er, what happened.

Brazile telephoned Sanders and told him of the Clinton agreement in September 2016, two months before the election.  "I explained that the cancer was that she had exerted this control of the party long before she became its nominee," she wrote in her new book.  "Had I known this, I never would have accepted the interim chair position, but here we were with only weeks before the election." Sanders, Brazile says, took all of this calmly and asked for his opinion.  She admitted that she didn't trust the polls showing a Hillary victory, finding a "lack of enthusiasm for her everywhere."

"I urged Bernie to work as hard as he could to bring his supporters into the fold with Hillary, and to campaign with all the heart and hope he could muster," she writes.  "He might find some of her positions too centrist, and her coziness with the financial elites distasteful, but he knew and I knew that the alternative was a person who would put the very future of the country in peril. I knew he heard me. I knew he agreed with me, but I never in my life had felt so tiny and powerless as I did making that call.  When I hung up the call to Bernie, I started to cry, not out of guilt, but out of anger. We would go forward. We had to."

And given how much she, like so many thinking people, feared a Trump Presidency, it's easy to see why she gave Hillary debate questions in advance to give her an inside advantage.  Or why she wanted to replace Hillary with Joe Biden.

Here's What I Know About You If You Dismiss Martin O'Malley

If you have ever ignored, scoffed at, dismissed, or just plain razzed 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley (below), and if you still do so, here's what I know about you.

You will never get it.  You will always let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  You care more about personality than policy.  You don't listen.  And unless you supported Bernie Sanders, you have something against white guys.  You may even use the term "white guy" as an insult.

You will never get it.  As the two leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were fundamentally flawed.  Hillary had too much baggage from her political career and carried a sense of entitlement to the Presidency because she is the wife of a former President.  Bernie was hobbled less by his politics than by his isolation from the Senate Democratic caucus and his status as an independent; there was no way a U.S. Senator who does not belong to the Democratic Party would ever get said party's nomination.  Of the three top Democratic presidential candidates, Martin O'Malley was the only one with a realistic chance of winning.  But you wanted to have nothing to do with him.

You will always let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  As governor of Maryland, Martin O'Malley raised taxes on the rich, expanded mass transit, curtailed gun rights, supported same-sex marriage rights, established an all-payer rate system to control health care costs, and pushed through groundbreaking environmental regulations.  If you haven't read Matthew Yglesias' excellent column making the case for O'Malley's presidential candidacy, here is the link - again.  And yet you tell me that his record is not good enough?  What the hell do you want, anyway?   You're put off by him because he doesn't fill all of your checkboxes of what a good progressive should be?  Because he didn't achieve free college tuition or a living wage?

You care more about personality than policy.  Hillary is a star politician, the first woman who had a realistic chance to win the Presidency, and her every move was and is news.  She's a celebrity.  Bernie has electricity and charisma with his revolutionary rhetoric.  And you think O'Malley is a joke because he's not a star?  You laughed at him because he has no pizazz and no sparkle?  Ever see O'Malley get his Irish up?  Ever notice how charismatic he is when he goes after Donald Trump?  Ahh, you don't care, he's just another boring ol' former governor - "Martin who??" - and he's not a big star.  Like Donald Trump.  Why didn't you look at what O'Malley has done and not what he is?   Because he's not a star?  This is the Presidency, not a Hollywood movie!

You don't listen.  Everything Martin O'Malley warned would happen if the Democrats blindly supported Hillary turned out to be true.  He said that it was counterproductive for the party to circle the wagons around Hillary, he said it was necessary for the Democratic presidential candidates to debate more often and let the voters know what they and the party stood for, because all the voters were getting was the sound of crickets.  He warned us all that if the Democrats didn't allow an honest contest for the party's presidential nomination, the Republicans would get the advantage in the general election.  But you didn't listen!  And you kept ridiculing him?  You have no business ridiculing Martin O'Malley.  Rather, you should be dropping to his feet and apologizing profusely to him for not heeding his warnings!  But you won't, because if you laughed at him when he said that the party was protecting Hillary and was squelching debate to protect Hillary, you were obviously for Hillary from the start.

Which brings me to my final point: If you were a Hillary supporter, you use the term "white guy" as an insult.  You're not interested in giving the Democratic presidential nomination to a male Caucasian.  You'd rather play identity politics by nominating another woman or another person of color, or someone who's both, but without regard to whether such a candidate would be the best candidate.  You don't want to contemplate the idea that the best candidate to go against Trump in 2020 may very well be a white male like O'Malley, because you're too busy wanting to make history by nominating someone who checks all the boxes on your political-correctness list.

Here's something you ought to know about me:  I am going to continue to support Martin O'Malley for President in 2020, and there ain't thing one you can do to change my mind.   So you'd better not try.

I Gotta Get a Grip

You know all of those times on this blog that I accused Hillary Clinton of telling Martin O'Malley to "get a grip" when he went off a tirade about gun control in a Democratic presidential debate?  Well it turns out that I misremembered what was said.

In the Democratic 2016 presidential debate that took place in December 2015, O'Malley blamed the federal government's failure to pass gun legislation, an action he achieved in Maryland as that state's governor, on the "flip-flopping political approach in Washington that both of my two colleagues on this stage have represented there for the last forty years."

At that point, Sanders replied, "Whoa, whoa, whoa.  Calm down a little bit, Martin."  Hillary Clinton then said, "Let's tell the truth, Martin." 

"I am telling the truth," O'Malley replied.

Clinton and Sanders then responded by saying that O'Malley had misrepresented their records on gun control, but O'Malley refused to concede the point.  Whether he was telling the truth about his primary opponents' positions on guns or not, though, Hillary Clinton did not say to O'Malley, "Get a grip, Martin."

The funny thing is, I watched that debate myself, and I could have sworn remembering that she did tell him to "get a grip."  But the transcript of the debate shows otherwise, and a USA Today article about that very moment in the debate concurs with the transcript.  But then, there have been times when I can't even remember what I had for lunch the day before, and there were a couple of times when I distinctly remembered things that could never have happened, as I explained in this blog entry from a few years ago.  So, no, Hillary did not go nasty on O'Malley and tell him to get a grip, and I apologize for having said - here and elsewhere - that she did.

I also apologize for the sore-thumb typos in my since-fixed post about what happened in Las Vegas. :-O

However, I maintain that when Bernie and Hillary descended on O'Malley in that moment during that debate, Bernie acted like he was O'Malley's dad and Hillary acted like the aunt you can't stand but tolerate because she's married to your mom's brother.

Ugh.  I think I need a vacation.  I've been having a tough time lately . . .. :-( 

An Open Letter to Hillary Clinton

Dear Hillary:

Stop it.  Just . . . stop it.

Stop blaming everyone else for your loss in the 2016 presidential election.  Why do you even go on about it?  

I'm not going to read your book "What Happened," because, as I've already made it clear in this blog, I know what happened.  You ran a lousy campaign and you gave no compelling argument for why you should be President.  All you did was make an argument against Donald Trump.  But I didn't need you to make that case for me.

Oh, I'm sure there were other factors.  I know the Russians pulled a few tricks here or there, even though I don't think they cost you the election. And I'm not going to deny that voter suppression occurred in certain states.  But you're the one the blame the most for your loss, and downplaying and even denying your culpability by overplaying culpability elsewhere does not do you or the Democratic Party any favors.    

Once your book tour is over and your book is forgotten, just go away.  Walter Mondale went away.  Michael Dukakis went away.  Please do the same, unless you plan to fight climate change or go back to the State Department in a future Democratic presidential administration (assuming there ever is one), which is how Al Gore and John Kerry respectively redeemed themselves after losing their presidential bids to George Walker Bush (although Gore actually won).  Otherwise, we don't need you anymore.  And we don't need or want you to run for President again.  We need . . . 

. . . new leadership.

Sincerely, 

Steven Maginnis

P.S. When you come to Montclair, New Jersey for a book-signing event on September 26, just remember that a hurricane might disrupt your plans.     

Book Review: "Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign" by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes

"After the primary loss in Michigan, Hillary needed answers from her team about what they planned to do to make sure she didn't get blindsided again.  It was hard enough running against Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, the Republican National Committee, the FBI, the House Benghazi Committee, and the national media - plus slippery-lipped Joe Biden on any given day - without her own team screwing things up.  The one person with whom she didn't seem particularly upset: herself.  No one who drew a salary from the campaign would tell her that.  It was a self-signed death warrant to raise a question about Hillary's competence - to her or anyone else - in loyalty-obsessed Clintonworld."

Thus wrote political reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes in their book "Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign," a book that simultaneously confirms the suspicions of Hillary Clinton's political opponents and surprises them as to how right they were and how much they didn't know.  Democrats who opposed Hillary's candidacy for their party's nomination feared - and Republicans hoped - that her own liabilities would doom her presidential ambitions, but "Shattered" presents a candidate and a campaign far more flawed than anyone ever realized. 

The book makes clear that Hillary Clinton was a troubled candidate who set out to win by default.  She cornered all of the top Democratic campaign experts and donors to clear the field of challengers for the party's nomination, refused to acknowledge any Democrats who did challenge her (and played mind games with Vice President Joe Biden to discourage him from running), and failed to present a solid reason for why anyone should vote for her.  But what is really eye-opening is how the campaign unfolded.  Both Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill are depicted as being cut off from reality and vindictive toward their critics within the party, and Hillary in particular comes across as being cold and heartless toward her own staff.  Campaign staffers, meanwhile, knew she was beatable and susceptible to being defeated by Donald Trump, yet they avoided communicating their concerns to the candidate out of fear of being seen as disloyal.  Hillary was astonishingly tone-deaf to warning signs of her vulnerability, such as on her e-mail issues and suspicions that she felt "entitled" to be the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee.   She saw her problems with white working-class voters - the same voters she'd courted in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries against Barack Obama - and made no effort to reach them, preferring instead to focus on minority voters and women.  And for all of her efforts, she failed to anticipate the rise of Bernie Sanders and how Trump would exploit the same weaknesses in Hillary's campaign that Sanders did.

"Shattered" depicts a campaign more animated by data and analytics than by actual voter outreach - so much, that entire states like Michigan and Wisconsin (which Hillary lost to Trump) were taken for granted in the general election.  Campaign manager Robby Mook tried to run an efficient, lean operation that emphasized the Democratic base rather than persuasion.  But Martin and Parnes keep coming back to Hillary as her own enemy (but not her worst).  One memorable tidbit is about how she was prepared to undermine U.S. Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland in his bid for the Senate when it became apparent that blacks were more likely to vote for his primary opponent, former Representative Donna Edwards, who is black, and because of the unions' ambivalence for her and their support for Van Hollen.  "Who gives a f--- about Chris Van Hollen?" she said. Hillary feared that too many union votes would help Bernie Sanders in the concurrent Maryland presidential primary.  (Van Hollen won his primary in Maryland, as did Hillary.)  But there was another reason she was ready to undermine Van Hollen; the Clintons kept a Nixon-like list of disloyal Democrats to punish for their apostasy, and Van Hollen (who was elected to the Senate) was one of their worst offenders.  This is one of many eye-opening stories, such as the preponderance of American flags at the Democratic convention to hide anti-Hillary delegates from TV cameras and concerns that Hillary was working too hard during the general election campaign when she should have been resting, opening her to concerns about her stamina.

"Shattered" isn't a perfect book, though; it downplays Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz's role in tipping the scales for Hillary (though the account of her lust for power made my jaw drop!), and the influence of third-party presidential candidates is completely overlooked; Libertarian Gary Johnson gets only one mention and Jill Stein doesn't even get that much.  But Martin and Parnes validate a lot of long-held suspicions about Hillary's deficiencies as politician and what ultimately made her unelectable.  The fly-on-the-wall accounts of campaign strategy alone are worth the time to read this page-turner.

Hillary Clinton is putting out her own campaign memoir in September 2017, with the infantine and obvious title "What Happened."  You don't need to read her memoir, because, in "Shattered," Martin and Parnes will tell you exactly . . . what happened.   

Scare Away the Snark

I couldn't take it any more.

After watching Donald Trump as President, and especially after seeing him rip the Paris climate accord to shreds, I could no longer limit my anger toward all the pundits, reporters, and commentators who ridiculed 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley (above, obviously) and undermined his own political viability to rants about them on this blog.  I decided to respond to some of them directly.

A little late, I know, as these condescending comments about O'Malley were made months ago, during and immediately after the election campaign.  But in light of Trump's utter failure as a President and as a human being - and in recognition of the possibility that O'Malley could have been the 2016 Democratic nominee and defeated Trump if the press hadn't marginalized him - it seems appropriate to respond to these naysayers now.  And just remember, the mainstream press gave Trump free media by covering him so extensively, so they're to blame for Trump as much as the Democratic National Committee is for rigging the primaries and caucuses for Hillary Clinton.  Maybe more so.

First, Joanna Rothkopf.  Rothkopf edits Jezebel.com, a women's-interests blog, and she used that platform in the fall of 2015 to belittle O'Malley for appearing on "The View" and singing and playing on his guitar a Taylor Swift song to connect with female voters.  She specifically said that O'Malley was proof that "a white man who is eager to play his guitar in public belongs in one of the deepest circles of Hell." Well, I found this snooty little excuse for a commentator on LinkedIn, and I wrote to her, saying, "I was a Martin O'Malley supporter, and you are a goddamned idiot!"

I also expressed regret that she thinks that all the great sixties and seventies classic rockers are going to Hell.

Next, Molly Ball.  Ball wrote a favorable profile piece about O'Malley in 2014 in the Atlantic, for whom she works, but a year later, she acted like she'd never heard of him when discussing a Democratic forum in November 2015 on CBS and then later ridiculed O'Malley's attempts to be heard at a subsequent Democratic presidential debate in which moderator John Dickerson was clearly trying to ignore him.  Having found her Atlantic e-mail address, I wrote to her and made it clear that  I was not amused by any of this.

"You, Ms. Ball," I also wrote, "acted like someone else wrote this profile article under your byline without your knowledge - that sort of 180-degree turn against people in public service that makes voters turn against the media. Nor did I appreciate your apparent snark in your comments about O'Malley when discussing him on CBS or responding to John Dickerson's treatment of him during the CBS debate. I'm only writing this now in 2017 because, having seen Donald Trump in action and having just seen him withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate change agreement, I am extremely ticked off with how the media laughed O'Malley out of the race even as they gave Trump so much free media. Your and other reporters' cavalier dismissal of someone who could have defeated Trump in the 2016 general election - we know now Hillary Clinton could not have - did a great disservice to democracy and to the nation. I am sickened by all of the snark that my candidate received. Your attitude did not help."

And how about CNN's Jake Tapper?  When O'Malley refused to entertain thoughts of reconciliation with Trump and his supporters, saying in a Twitter message that no one opposed to fascism in Europe and to racism in the South talked of reconciliation and adding that it was time to fight, Tapper tweeted back, "What exactly do you mean by 'fight,' here, governor?"

What the hell did Tapper think he meant?  O'Malley meant it was time to fight, something his fellow Democrats don't seem to be able to do these days (not one Republican House or Senate seat has been flipped in a special congressional election since November 2016).  "What do you want Martin to do," I wrote to Tapper via Twitter, "lay down with candles in the rain?"  

Well, these are the examples of snark against O'Malley that I remember best, but if I tried to respond to every slight against him, I'd get carpal tunnel syndrome.  Rest assured, though, if I see or hear any more pundits go after O'Malley in the future - and I know that is going to happen - they can expect a pretty fierce rebuttal in one form or another.  

I know - "What exactly do you mean by 'fierce,' here, Steve?"

What do you think I mean?  Just read the above comments again.

And eat your Pop-Tarts!  

No Excuses

Hillary Clinton is at it again.

At a recent conference in California, Hillary sat herself down in a red leather chair - apparently symbolic for a hot seat - and once again blamed Trump, the Russians, James Comey, and others for her loss in the presidential election in November 2016.  Only this time was different, because she also blamed the Democratic Party and the Democratic National Committee for her defeat.  She also complained that the party was bankrupt.

Well, it's certainly intellectually bankrupt, but Hillary means it was financially bankrupt and "on the verge of insolvency" when she became the nominee, and she bitched that she had to throw money at the DNC's data collection system.  "Its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong," Clinton explained. "I had to inject money into it."

This comment left Democrats incredulous.  While the party has had its money issues, party insiders said that the problem with data has been less of a cash-infusion issue or a quality issue than a chronic inability to make it uniform and consistent - something that Hillary apparently failed to grasp when she was the party's de facto leader as its presidential candidate.  According to one Democratic insider, Hillary showed disregard for warning signs in key states like the so-called "blue firewall" of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which all went to Trump.  The DNC's voter data in those three states, he said,  didn't look anywhere near safe but Hillary's campaign team "thought they knew better."  Her deflection of responsibility for her loss to people like Debbie Wasserman Schultz is more like mean, stunted fruit than sour grapes.

Hillary has taken to acting like the 2016 presidential campaign isn't over.  She needled Trump for his infamous "covfefe" typo on Twitter, and when Trump re-iterated her penchant for blaming everyone but herself for her loss, she then replied, "People in covfefe houses shouldn't throw covfefe."  She's still campaigning and apparently won't leave the stage until she gets a rematch with Trump.

Hillary - it's over!  Stop it!  You're not doing any favors for anyone!  Except the Republicans, particularly Reince Priebus, Trump's chief of staff, who cheerily tweeted how you conceded that the Republican Party "has much better resources and data than [the Democrats]."  You just didn't throw the Democrats under the bus, you threw them under a convoy!

But then, getting thrown under a convoy of buses by the candidate she rigged the system for doesn't make Debbie Wasserman Schultz a martyr . . .

. . . it just proves that she's as incompetent as a political operative as she is as a member of Congress.

This Just Got Interesting

The title is ironic.

The Justice Department has just appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller as a special counsel to investigate Russian meddling into the U.S. presidential election and helping Trump.  This is a positive step, but it's a baby step at best.  A independent prosecutor needs to take the reins of this investigation, and the White House seems unfazed by this latest development.  Trump maintains his innocence.

"As I have stated many times, a thorough investigation will confirm what we already know - there was no collusion between my campaign and any foreign entity," Trump said in a statement reacting to the Mueller appointment. "I look forward to this matter concluding quickly. In the meantime, I will never stop fighting for the people and the issues that matter most to the future of our country."

Gag me with a spoon.  Well, we'll see about that.

Meanwhile, things on Wall Street got really interesting yesterday - the Dow Jones average dropped over 300 points over more news about Trump's possible meddling into the FBI's Russia investigation.  And did I mention that he's beginning his first foreign trip as President?  

Maher's Attacks

Bill Maher used his "Real Time" show this past Friday night to take Jill Stein supporters to task for voting for the Green Party presidential nominee instead of Hillary Clinton.  He made the argument that if the had not been such "liberal purists," they wouldn't be bitching about Neil Gorsuch, Scott Pruitt, or his tyrannical executive orders.

Uh, yeah . . . let's remember a few things about the election:

Hillary Clinton lost because she failed to carry Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.  If every Stein voter in those states had voted for Hillary, she would have won Wisconsin and Michigan but not Pennsylvania, and Trump would still have won.

I voted for Jill Stein.  I live in New Jersey.  Hillary won New Jersey with a majority.  My vote absolutely did not affect the outcome, and Maher's statement denigrates people who voted their conscience and took a big risk to help the Greens get federal funding for next time.

Dr. Stein came in fourth in the popular vote, with Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson third.  Republicans and centrist and center-right independents who dislike Trump and who could have voted for Hillary - voters Hillary could have possibly won over - gave Johnson vote margins larger than Hillary's defeat margins in some states.  Why isn't Maher taking Johnson voters to task?     

Oh yeah, Maher told Stein backers - including Dr. Cornel West - to go f**k themselves.

Guess Dr. West won't be a guest on his show anymore.

Stein voters - and Johnson voters - are not to blame for Trump. Hilary is to blame for Trump because she was a lousy candidate.

Meanwhile, Hillary says she takes responsibility for loss while still deflecting blame for it to others.  Come on, Hillary, even your husband parses words better than that.

Seeing Green

NBC News and the Daily Kos - two media outlets who think Hillary Clinton is a goddess - recently commented on a December 2015 dinner that celebrated the tenth anniversary of Russia Today (now known by its initials, RT), the English-language Russian TV channel.  Two Americans attended the dinner and were seated at Russian President Vladimir Putin's table. One was now-disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

The other was Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein.    

Dr. Stein is being called a traitor by establishment Democrats for being present at that dinner.  There's no evidence that she colluded with the Russian government and conspired with Putin to defeat Hillary Clinton.  She was at that dinner because she saw RT as a vehicle to get the message of her presidential candidacy across to American voters who, had they stuck to mainstream media, would not have even heard of her.  But the problem with the RT association is that the news channel is seen as a pro-Kremlin propaganda machine to influence the American electorate, and the optics of Dr. Stein at that dinner were unfortunate.

"Jill Stein was a part of Russia’s plan for the election," insisted Mark Sumner of the Daily Kos. "They gave her what the U.S. media had denied - attention and flattery. In return she praised RT and chastised the American media. Both sides got just what they wanted."

Yeah, well, I didn't make my decision to vote for Dr. Stein this past November based on any Russian propaganda.  I voted for her because I couldn't bring myself to vote for Trump or Hillary after my original and second choices - Martin O'Malley and Bernie Sanders - got eliminated.  If NBC News and the Daily Kos - both engaged in the sort of Russophobia associated with the Republicans during the Cold War - want to keep fueling such hysteria to explain away Hillary's loss, fine.  But they shouldn't blame anyone other than Hillary and the tone-deaf supporters who gave her the Democratic presidential nomination for Donald J. Trump.

Yet they're still blaming Dr. Stein.    

"Stein did well enough to help Russia achieve its aims," Sumner wrote. "Her vote totals in the crucial states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan were all greater than Clinton's margin of defeat, and arguably denied Clinton an Electoral College victory."

Not entirely true. Trump beat Hillary in Pennsylvania by 68,236 votes; Dr. Stein won 48,912 votes in that state, meaning that Hillary would still have been some 20,000 votes short without Dr. Stein on the ballot. But here's where my research found something interesting. I had said here earlier, based on the numbers I heard, that Dr. Stein's vote total in Michigan was greater than Hillary Clinton's margin of defeat and that her vote total in Wisconsin was less that Hillary's margin of defeat.  In fact, they were greater in both states; Trump beat Hillary in Wisconsin by 27,257, and Dr, Stein's vote total in Wisconsin - 30,998 - was indeed greater.  In Michigan, Trump beat Hillary by 10,704 votes, and Dr. Stein got  a greater tally of 51,463 votes.  But the election had already been called for Trump before Michigan's total was finalized, meaning that, without Dr, Stein, Hillary could have won Michigan but still would have lost the election.  And as long as Hillary was never going to win Pennsylvania even without Dr. Stein on the ballot, she could have topped Trump in Wisconsin and Michigan and still lost.

Got all that?

The bottom line is that even if the Russians did influence the election - and I'm saying that they did or didn't - Hillary lost the election not because of Russian propaganda or minor-party opponents but because she was a lousy candidate and should never have been nominated.

Having said all that, I'm not supporting Dr. Stein for anything any more, despite having voted for her in November.  Why?  Because she failed to do what she was expected to do.  Win the Presidency?  No, no one expected her to do that!  She was, though, expected to get at least five percent of the vote for the Green Party to get the party federal matching funds for the 2020 presidential election and help develop the Greens as a credible alternative to the Democrats.  She failed.  And when the election was over, I hit the reset button.  The day before the election, I was a supporter of Dr. Stein.  On Election Day, I voted for Dr. Stein.  The day after, I was a Martin O'Malley supporter again.  Because he was and he remained my first choice for President.  

The U.S. Green Party may one day be a party like its European counterparts and win enough seats in Congress and in state legislatures to get concessions from major-party caucuses, but it's never going to replace the Democratic Party as the major opposition to the Republicans.  Meanwhile, the "unity tour" between centrist Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez and progressive non-Democrat Bernie Sanders has been a flop, showing how bewildered and rudderless the Democrats are.  Again: I believe that the Democrats could go full Whig and disintegrate before 2020, allowing a new party to fill the void.  I still want Martin O'Malley to run for President in 2020.  But not necessarily as a Democrat, any more than Abraham Lincoln and William Seward would run for President in 1860 as Whigs.  Of course, they both ended up running as members of a new party altogether.     

As for Dr. Stein, she has already been the Green Party presidential nominee twice, and she will be seventy years old in 2020.  Thanks for being a voice of reason, Dr. Stein, but you should do what Hillary won't . . . retire from the political scene and let someone else carry the banner going forward.

Losing Yesterday's Fight

Is there any way the Democrats can be more pathetic?

First, they nominated Hillary Clinton for President.  Her campaign was a parade of smugness and overconfidence.  After she lost in the Electoral College, Democratic election lawyers urged her to demand recounts in key states won by Donald Trump that, taken together, would make the difference in her favor by swinging enough electoral votes to her and away from Trump.  Recounts were instigated in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, with only the Wisconsin recount completed successfully - and that recount only re-affirmed Trump's victory there.  Only it was Jill Stein of the Green Party who instigated the recount - not to help Hillary, but to ensure that the process was fair.  And while it got the Green Party more votes in one county . . . 

. . . it got Trump 131 more votes statewide.

"This recount was never about changing the outcome; it was about validating the vote and restoring confidence in our voting system to Americans across the country who have doubts," Dr. Stein said.  And she did more to re-assure confidence in the electoral process than whining Hillary supporters who wanted recounts with the hope of . . . changing the outcome.

Then the Democrats pestered Trump electors to change their votes, and former 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Lawrence Lessig - the one 2016 Democratic presidential candidate less serious than Lincoln Chafee - said the electors were morally bound to vote for Hillary.  And then the electors voted.  Hillary actually lost five Democratic electors while Trump lost only two Republican ones.

And finally, when the electoral votes were counted in Congress, House Democrats protested the outcomes from one state or the other but couldn't get one Democratic senator to back them up.

And by the way, Democratic efforts to keep fighting after after losing the fight was not restricted to Hillary.  On January 3, after the old six-year-terms of the Senate's Class 3 seats expired at noon but before the new terms in that class began, Democrats technically held a majority in the Senate, so the Daily Kos had petitioned Senate Democrats to use that interlude to confirm Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.  The same Senate Democrats who wouldn't challenge Trump's victory three days later?     

Democrats have been doing everything possible to put Hillary in the White House after losing the election, and then they wonder whey no one takes them seriously and why supposed allies like I keep laughing at them.  They keep fighting the last battle, which they've long since lost.  They're like the guy who just drew the short straw and insists that, now that everyone knows how the process works, the next time is the one for keeps.

Oh yeah, they want Hillary to run for mayor of New York City.

Steve to Democrats: You lost - give it up!

Get Over It

Well, the Electoral College voted for President.  And even though the official count before a joint session of Congress doesn't take place until January 6, we already know the results - Donald Trump won.  It seems that secret ballots aren't so secret when it comes to electoral votes - the count was made public before Congress had the pleasure of hearing the final tally in person.

And efforts to deny a presidential candidate with enough electoral votes to win a bare majority as constitutionally required worked out very differently than envisioned.  One candidate did indeed lose a significant number of votes to so-called faithless electors, casting a shadow over that candidate's bid for the Presidency and making people realize what a bad idea it was to nominate said candidate.

Unfortunately, that candidate was Hillary Clinton.

Donald Trump lost two electors in Texas, one of whom voted for John Kasich while the other voted for Ron Paul, bringing his total to 304 votes.  But Hillary?  She lost five electoral votes - three in Washington State that went to Colin Powell (a Republican!), one from the same state that went to Native American activist Faith Spotted Eagle, and one vote from Hawaii that went to Bernie Sanders.  She would have lost seven electoral votes if two other electors, one from Maine and another from Minnesota, had been able to vote for Sanders without having their votes invalidated by state laws binding them to their party's nominee.

There you have it: Hillary was so unacceptable that she lost more electoral votes than the Donald, even after all those efforts to cause massive electoral defections from Trump.  Hillary supporters will still insist to the end of the year and through the next four years that their candidate won and she's the legitimate President.

Dear Hillbots:  You lost.  Get over it.  You backed the wrong candidate in the primaries, and now you have to live with the fact that you were instrumental in bringing down the Democratic Party like a house of cards.

And for Pete's sake, stop blaming the Russians.  Even though the FBI now agrees with the CIA that the Russians must have hacked the Democratic National Committee's e-mails, neither agency has produced proof of that.  Also, all of those damaging e-mails have one thing in common - they're true.  And there's no way Putin could have hacked electronic voting booths - they weren't hooked up to the Internet.            

To respond to the inevitable complaint that the Democrats will be strong again and ready for 2020 after having learned the lessons of 2016, when they narrowed their choices for the nomination for President down to an ex-First Lady and a codger, dig this: Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and Michelle Obama (!) are the Democratic front-runners for 2020.

And Governor O'Malley?  Dr. Stein?  Please consider joining forces and forming a new party together to replace the Democrats!   Because after a lifetime's worth of lessons in 2016, they still haven't learned anything.

Welcome Back, My Friends, To the Election That Never Ends

Just when we thought we'd washed the smell of the 2016 presidential election off our persons, along comes a whole slew of recounts - along with Donald Trump's subsequent paranoia - to stink up America again.

New York magazine reported last week that election lawyers and computer scientists were encouraging Hillary Clinton to ask for a recount of the popular vote in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, all Rust Belt states that Trump officially won.  The lawyers and computer scientists claimed that there might be voter irregularities in the computerized ballot machines and presidential vote counts, as the tallies contradicted polls leading up to the November 8 vote.  Specifically, these experts were afraid that the electronic ballot boxes might have been hacked, though there's no evidence that such a thing happened anywhere; despite concerns of Russian hacking of the vote, the Obama administration is convinced that there was no foul play anywhere in the country, and that there has been no voter fraud.

The three states cited have a combined total of 46 electoral votes; Hillary is 38 electoral votes short of a majority.  She would have to reverse the results in all three states to win with a total of 278 electoral votes to 260; Trump could lose any two of these states to her in recounts and still win.  With all three states in his column, Trump has 306 electoral votes to Madame H's 232.  The Clinton campaign was prepared to let it go, citing the victory margins for Trump and saying that there most likely weren't enough votes that could be reversed and change the outcome. 

Then Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein decided to stir up some serious stuff.

Dr. Stein pushed for a recount in Wisconsin and raised millions of dollars over the Internet to pay for it; she was able to file for one just before the deadline, and so the Badger State is counting the votes all over again.  She is not only working on getting recounts done in Michigan, which just certified its vote totals, and Pennsylvania, but she is threatening to get recounts done in as many states as she can.  She certainly can do that; she's raised more money than she needs.  Hillary's campaign has sent lawyers to Wisconsin to oversee the recount and plans to do the same elsewhere should other recounts go forward. 

Now why would Dr. Stein instigate recounts that could theoretically help Hillary Clinton, whom Stein had repeatedly bashed throughout the campaign?  Well, it certainly isn't to help the Hillary become President instead of the Donald.  Dr. Stein doesn't think any of the results will change as a result of any of these recounts; her point is that, if even the possibility of hacking the vote is there,  then recounts should be done to prove once and for all that there was no hacking, otherwise we'll never know whether or not the vote was legitimate.

Needless to say, Trump and the GOP think this is a colossal waste of time, and Trump himself has made this clear in a series of tweets.  Trump has accused Dr. Stein of raising doubts about the election to raise more money for the Greens, even though Dr, Stein has stated that the money she's collected - $6.5 million - is specifically earmarked for helping to pay for recounts.  Maybe Trump should do what Hillary is doing and send lawyers to the recounting - a recounting, remember, that Hillary never asked for - to show his support for making sure the vote was fair and square.

Astonishingly, Trump has not only dismissed the recounts, he's also opined - without any evidence whatsoever - that he should have won the popular vote (Hillary is ahead by over two million popular votes) because too many people voted illegally.  This does not make a ton of sense, considering that Trump obviously doesn't need the popular vote, having won the Presidency in the Electoral College . . . unless you consider the possibility that he's seeking a popular mandate from an electorate in which 53 percent of voters cast ballots against him.

Dr. Stein may likely emerge as the heroine of the 2016 election.  She's raised more money for recounts than she did for her entire presidential campaign, and she's cast light on the need for the United States to ensure free and fair elections. If she raises more money than necessary, she will dedicate the surplus funds toward election integrity efforts and to the promotion of voting reform, so she's hardly doing to this to help Hillary.  She's actually doing this to help the Greens by garnering favorable publicity for their progressive causes.  Recounts in more states may even get the Greens enough votes to have five percent of the vote nationwide and thus qualify for federal matching funds and automatic inclusion on state ballots in 2020.  It also undermines an already unpopular Trump as he prepares to take office.

And as if that weren't enough, Hillary supporters, who ironically mocked Trump for threatening not to accept the results of the election if he lost, are now urging 38 of Trump's electors to switch their votes to Hillary and make her President instead.  The electors, by the way, don't vote until December 19, and the ballots aren't even counted until January 6.  (If Trump should somehow lose 38 electoral votes to Hillary, then the transition to the next administration will suddenly be very bumpy and very interesting.)  

In the meantime, the recounts are just one more thing to get through.  And when the computer experts who count the votes are finished doing that . . . maybe they can come over to my house and do something about my Internet connection periodically going out.  

They Were Right

Remember these guys?

They are, of course, Hillary Clinton's opponents for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, clockwise, from top left, Bernie Sanders, Jim Webb, Martin O'Malley, and Lincoln Chafee.  None of them were given a fair shot at the nomination because the Democratic National Committee tipped the scales for Hillary - even though all four of these guys turned out to be more in touch with political reality than the nominee.

First, let's start with Martin O'Malley.  I don't need to tell you again that he was right when he said that more debates would help the party get its message out and when he said that Donald Trump could possibly win the Presidency, but I will add that he said, when he declared his candidacy for the White House, that the Presidency is not a crown to just give to anyone or to pass between two families at a time when the 2016 general election looked to be a Jeb Bush-Hillary Clinton race. The Democratic establishment, as we all know now, disagreed.  Ironically, Republican rank-and-file voters did agree with that assessment; that's why they rejected Jeb Bush.

Now, Bernie Sanders.  He said that Democrats needed to adopt a progressive agenda and energize the base, but Hillary supporters laughed him off as a candidate whose supporters were too narrow-minded in their focus on income inequality.  But he was right.

Jim Webb?  He distinguished himself as a candidate who could talk to the white working class and said that the Democrats needed to reach that demographic.  That and a buck only got him a newspaper.  When he said earlier this year that Trump might appeal to the very people he focused on in his own presidential campaign, a commentator on MSNBC - I can't remember who it was - had a two-word response to Webb's comments: "Who cares?"  But Webb was right.

And Lincoln Chafee?  On Bill Maher's talk show once, Chafee expressed concern over the ethically dubious aspects of Hillary's career and thought they would be a problem, and both Maher and fellow guest Alex Wagner responded with dismissive groans.  But Chafee was right.

Yes, they all were right . . . but not as right as the Democrats will be wrong if they think the party can go forward doing what they've been doing.   

President Trump???

This is not good.

The Democrats had an excellent chance to keep the White House and possibly win back the Senate, and they blew it.  There were several good reasons to keep the Democratic hold on the executive branch, but the party's now-discredited establishment couldn't think of one.  All Hillary Clinton offered was that, under her administration, Americans would be "stronger together."  And now Donald Trump is to become the forty-fifth President of the United States!

Before I continue, I have to address the fact that I voted for Green Party presidential nominee Dr. Jill Stein.  I don't regret casting my ballot for Dr. Stein one iota.  I would never have voted for her if I thought for a second that she could win enough votes in New Jersey to deprive Hillary Clinton of the state's fourteen electoral votes and give them to Trump.   And, she didn't.  Hillary won the Garden State with 53 percent of the vote.  I'm proud of my vote for Dr. Stein; I did my part to help her get to the five-percent threshold necessary for the Greens to get federal matching funds for the 2020 presidential election . . . even though Dr. Stein didn't quite make it.

That out of the way, I now turn to the election results. Trump won on fouls, using every epithet in the book against women, racial and ethnic minorities, and Muslims, and feeding into people's paranoia and resentments.  He exploited the legitimate concerns and grievances of the cratering middle class and turned them against convenient scapegoats.  And all Hillary Clinton could offer in response was that she was not Trump.  She never offered a positive domestic program to help people get ahead and never explained why her interventionist foreign policy proposals would make America safe.  She merely promised more of the same of President Obama's policies without explaining why this would be good enough.

There's a whole class of people who feel alienated from the natural constituencies of both major parties, Republican fat cats and Democratic cultural elitists.  They resent Wall Street bankers for getting rich at their expense and entertainers who live good lives paid for in part by their fans. Many of them are working low-wage jobs and seethe with resentment toward these constituencies and for a long time were like powder kegs waiting to explode. That sound you heard on Election Day was those same people going "Kaboom."  And Donald Trump lit the fuse.

It didn't have to be this way.  The Democrats had presidential candidates who had the same ability to speak to disaffected Americans that Trump did.  Joe Biden, who ultimately decided not to run, had it.  Bernie Sanders had it.  Jim Webb had it.  Certainly Martin O'Malley had it.  Hillary didn't.  But the Democratic establishment wasn't interested in anyone other than Hillary being their standard bearer.  Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her minions tipped the scales for Hillary, discouraged and silenced those Democrats who wanted to run for the nomination against Hillary, and brought the hammer down on those who did.  Hillary's supporters happily approved.  They didn't care that she was  a fundamentally flawed candidate. They didn't seem to mind her ties to Wall Street.  They overlooked her hawkish call for a no-fly zone in Syria and how it risked a military confrontation with Russia.  They were all too busy chanting, "La la la,  first female President!"

I saw how the Democratic establishment pushed Hillary and stifled alternative voices.  As a Martin O'Malley supporter, I saw my candidate ignored when he called for more primary debates.   I saw how he was marginalized, along with Webb and Lincoln Chafee, and not given the chance to make his case.  Then, after O'Malley dropped out and Bernie Sanders surged and had a realistic shot of winning the Democratic nomination, Hillary's underlings undermined Sanders at every turn. Despite the fact that Hillary was a flawed nominee, they forced her on the electorate and assumed, once it became apparent that Trump would be the Republican nominee, that Hillary would win because she was not Trump.  Hillary herself acted like she was entitled to the Presidency, not so much because she's a woman, but because her husband had been President in the 1990s and because she thought it was her turn.  The Democrats could have come up with a strong nominee who could beat Trump had they held a fair nomination contest, but they gambled everything on Hillary, and now they're paying for it.

Not only was the Democratic establishment so smug about the 2016 election, so were Hillary's rank-and-file supporters.  I quit several Democratic Facebook pages because of the nasty comments from so many Hillary fans about her competitors for the nomination  - O'Malley's obscurity, Sanders's far-left policy proposals - and the ridicule and insults I got simply for supporting O'Malley.  When I  backed Dr. Stein in the general election, Hillary supporters ridiculed her and her movement to build up the Greens.  Then they tried to gaslight me into voting for Hillary because they said a vote for Dr. Stein would help Trump by splitting the anti-Trump vote.  They weren't reaching out to me with friendly persuasion; they were chewing me out with angry threats.

All through this campaign, from the start of the nomination contest in the spring of 2015 to the nominating conventions, I kept saying that Hillary was a flawed presidential candidate, and Hillary supporters laughed at me.  Several of Hillary's opponents for the Democratic presidential nomination kept warning that Trump could win, especially Martin O'Malley, and so did I.  Hillary supporters kept laughing.  It looks like I have the last laugh now . . . although I don't feel like laughing.  The Republicans have all the power in Washington, having kept control of both houses of Congress, and the Democrats are completely devastated . . . and, like I once said, looking very Whiggish.

I can't let this go without calling out the media for being complicit in anointing Hillary as being inevitable and treating her opponents for the Democratic presidential nomination with contempt while giving Donald Trump the free media that proved to be the oxygen for his victorious campaign and thinking it wouldn't lead to his victory.  The press let us down as much as the Democratic establishment.

If there's any bright side to all this (and I'm stretching it here), it's that Hillary Clinton appears to have won the popular vote, and the Democrats gained two seats in the Senate in Illinois and New Hampshire . . . and may win a third Senate seat in Louisiana next month, thus denying the GOP a three-fifths filibuster-proof majority.  Trump doesn't have the mandate he thinks he has.  So the opposition has to get its act together and do what Martin O'Malley asked of his supporters - "hold strong."  Liberals in the Democratic Party ought to be ready to bolt the Democrats and form a new progressive party with the Greens.  I hope O'Malley himself does what his mentor Gary Hart did the night Ronald Reagan was re-elected President - begin recruiting for another presidential campaign for the next election.

In the meantime, the notion of "President Trump" is a reality.  And to Hillary supporters, I hate to say I told you so, but . . . I told you so. :-(

Election 2016: No Endorsements (Except For Jill Stein)

I normally post endorsements in select political contests in various parts of the country just prior to Election Day.  Not this year.

This blog endorses no one for any office up for election this year, except for Jill Stein of the Green Party for President, and I made that endorsement back in June.  I have not followed any of the crucial House or Senate races, or the small number of gubernatorial races, for 2016, and I see no reason to waste my time making any endorsements for them now.  Why should I?  I'd only endorse the Democratic candidates because they are not as bad as the Republicans (though I have in the past endorsed Republicans on occasion), and I'd be endorsing these Democrats for their interchangeable, predictable stands on the issues - issues that, incidentally, haven't been resolved for a quarter of a century.  Why am I still bitching about high-speed rail years after the publication of Joseph Vranich's book on the subject urging that it be built in America?  Why are we still talking about campaign finance reform?  Why are we still trying to do something about a shrinking middle class?  What does it matter if I endorse a candidate who says he or she is going to do something about a problem when I know full well that nothing is going to be done about it?

As for the major-party presidential candidates . . . to hell with them.  Donald Trump is a bigot and a megalomaniac who should never have gotten this far. Hillary Clinton is a flawed, untrustworthy candidate who got the nomination of her party through the bullying and the neutering of her opposition.  Hillary is the Democratic nominee not because she's a woman but because she's a Clinton, and I am sick and tired of living in a system that recognizes dynastic entitlement - Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton, with a period of Obamus Interruptus - at everyone else's expense.  At this point, I don't care that the FBI has cleared her of any wrongdoing on the basis of the last of these newly discovered and mostly redundant e-mails. 

The Presidency, as Martin O'Malley once said,  is not a crown to be passed between two families.  Or three.  Trump is not from a family that has produced a President before, but if he wins, you can bet that his adult children will end up helping him run the country, with their own little fiefdoms in the executive branch.  Although one may take comfort in the idea of Ivanka as White House chief of staff, one cannot take any comfort at all in the suspicion that Trump has always treated his presidential bid as a money-making scheme, and if you think it's bad now, imagine how he and his family could use the Presidency for their own collective enrichment! 

So, yes, I'm voting for Jill Stein.  I have been told that if you don't vote for Hillary, you're essentially a sexist, and if you vote for Jill Stein, you are a sexist who is voting for a woman whom you know isn't going to win simply to hide your misogyny.  Let's get something straight; I was ready and eager to vote for whomever got the Green Party presidential nomination, male or female, and it's actually hard to vote for a minor-party candidate when you know she isn't going to win simply because of that fact.  But the Greens need five percent of the vote on Tuesday to get federal matching funds for 2020, and ballot access in all fifty states (something they couldn't quite achieve this time), and even though I may be marginalizing myself by voting Green, I am prepared to do just that . . . in the interest of helping to dismantle the two-party system as we know it.

Sadly, Jill Stein is the only Green Party candidate for any office in my precinct.  I'll vote for Democratic or write-in candidates in the down-ballot races, but I'm pretty steamed over the fact that I have no other Greens to vote for.  If you can vote for Greens in down-ballot races, and if you feel comfortable voting for them, you should do so.

Okay, I'm off my soapbox.  I won't be blogging on Election Day, because I understand that hackers, possibly from Russia, may be wrecking havoc with various Internet sites and possibly the Internet itself.  I'll be back Wednesday or Thursday after this mess of an election is over.  As Dan Rather would say, courage.  Go out and vote.

Sue Digs Jill!

Life ain't easy for a girl named Sue.

  

Especially if the "Sue" in question is actress Susan Sarandon, who has not drunk the Kool-Aid and gone over to Hillary, like other past supporters of Green Party presidential candidates have - Michael Moore, how could you? - and has received nothing but scorn and ridicule for refusing to go along with the rest of the Hollywood "liberal elite."  Sarandon has made it official - she's endorsing Jill Stein for President.  No compromising positions here.

So here's the deal.  Sarandon, a one-time Bernie Sanders supporter, had seriously been considering a move like this for a long time, and for good reason.  Hillary is not a progressive, but she plays one on TV.  But Sarandon knows better than to be fooled by Hillary's rhetoric and by her commitment to a liberal Democartic Party platform that Madame H will forget exists as of November 9.  After all, Sarandon has long espoused liberal causes such as the $15 minimum wage, GMO labeling, and breaking up the big banks.  Hillary supports none of those things.  And while Sarandon opposes hydraulic fracturing in oil exploration, offshore drilling, and military aid to Israel with no strings attached, Hillary supports . . . all of those things.

It's Madame H's foreign policy proposals - and Donald Trump's as well - that really gets Sue's knickers in a knot.  She's afraid that either one of them will get us into World War III.  And, again, for good reason.  Hillary supports a no-fly zone over Syria, as previously noted, which could get us in a military conflict with Russia - as previously noted.  Donald would likely appease a Russian takeover of Estonia.  And either one of them could start a war with Iran.  

"They’re both talking to Henry Kissinger," Sarandon says of the two major-party candidates.  "[Hillary] did not learn from Iraq, and she is an interventionist, and she has done horrible things - and very callously. I don’t know if she is overcompensating or what her trip is. That scares me. I think we’ll be in Iran in two seconds."

And here's what Sarandon said of Dr. Stein: 

"I'm therefore very happy to endorse Jill Stein for the Presidency because she does stand for everything I believe in. It's clear a third party is necessary and viable at this time. And this is the first step in accomplishing this end. Fear of Donald Trump is not enough for me to support Clinton, with her record of corruption. Now that Trump is self-destructing, I feel even those in swing states have the opportunity to vote their conscience."

So there you have it - Dr. Jill Stein's first major celebrity endorsement, and it's a prestigious one, coming from one of America's finest and most learned actresses.  Meanwhile, Hillary has a basket of deplorable pop stars and reality-show stars backing her, everyone from Kimye, Katy Perry, and Mr. Shawn Carter (Beyoncé's husband) to the spectacularly insufferable Madonna, who has been trying to get votes for Hillary by offering oral sex to undecided voters.  Meanwhile, Oprah Winfrey has come out for Hillary, and she's even come up with a catchy slogan for Madame H - "You don't have to like her."

No, but it would sure help. 

The Green Party likely won't win the Presidency, and it has an uphill battle to get the five percent support at the polls that it needs to qualify for federal matching funds for future elections - especially when media rhymes-with-glass-poles like Chuck Todd push the narrative that support for all minor-party candidates is dwindling.  And Susan Sarandon must know, like I do, that, because of that fact, we Green backers could be riding off a cliff much like Louise Sawyer, Sarandon's character in the 1991 classic movie Thelma and Louise.  But it's a joyride I'm happy to take.  I'm sure Susan Sarandon herself would agree.        

The Clintons Treat Jill Stein Beastly

Having bitch-slapped Bernie, emasculated Marty, and put themselves in a position to watch the Donald hang himself with his own rope, the Clintons are now dealing with another e-mail controversy that involved newly discovered e-mails about the e-mail issue, found on a laptop shared by Hillary aide Huma Abedin and her estranged and strange husband Anthony Weiner.  On top of that, the FBI, as I've been led to understand, had tried to get a search warrant for Wiener's electronic devices without success but decided to push ahead anyway, suggesting that either FBI director James Comey is trying to influence the outcome of the election or Attorney General Loretta Lynch is trying to keep damning information from hurting the Democratic ticket.  With the campaign entering the home stretch, and with Hillary Clinton to win, the Clinton campaign has been counting on trying to run out the clock before anyone else or anything else trips them up.

And even before the latest e-mail issue broke, the Clintons were already working to make sure that Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein doesn't trip them up.

A recent piece in the Daily Beast by Yashar Ali unmasked Dr. Stein, just before Halloween, as a hypocrite because she and her husband, Richard Rohrer, have investments in mutual funds that in turn are invested in oil companies and big pharmaceutical corporations.  Well, there's just one thing wrong with that - the investments that Rohrer and Dr. Stein are retirement accounts, which as many as fifty million Americans, including teachers, police officers, tradesmen, or anyone who works for a company whose benefits include 401ks or IRAs, have.  These Americans are saving money for their retirements, and sometimes the mutual funds that the accounts are tied to are invested in big companies.  There's little if anything that the people with such accounts can do about that.  One would have to wonder why Ali sees this as big deal, until one notices that Hillary Clinton's daughter Chelsea is on the board of directors of the the Daily Beast's parent company.

What a devoted daughter Chelsea is.

So why shouldn't Dr Stein be considered a hypocrite because of her investments?  Well, let's look at comparison Dr. Stein herself has cited. Fox News has sneered at environmental activists who work to combat climate change yet drive cars.  Yeah, well, in America it's pretty hard to get around without a car, because public transportation in this country has been all but decimated.  And yes, I myself am a big Volkswagen enthusiast who supports public transit.  So what?  I've never been against cars, I just think we Americans rely too much on them.  If I could take a light-rail line to get somewhere, and if it had frequent reliable service, I would take it, because even people who love cars don't want to rely on their cars all the time and want to save wear and tear on them.  But just as we have to use less energy-efficient means of transportation because better alternatives don't exist - while we work to bring those better alternatives into existence - we also have to deal with economic reality as it is before we can change that reality.  Or as Dr. Stein explains, "The Daily Beast is suggesting that participating in the American economy is incompatible with working to change it . . ..  Unfortunately, to change public policy, one must participate in the economy enough to generate the resources to create change, ideally in a way that minimizes damage and maximizes change."

But, you'll probably believe the Daily Beast's spin, and you'll probably forget about the time Hillary said that anti-fracking activists should "get a life," or maybe you'll overlook her distinctions between a private position and a public position (remember her husband's promised middle-class tax cut, and how we didn't get one?), or maybe you'll even overlook her support for a no-fly zone over Syria that could provoke a military confrontation with Russia and lead to the world war she says Trump would instigate . . . because Hillary's media mouthpieces have already convinced you that a vote for Jill Stein is a vote against your personal interests, and maybe even a vote for Trump, and if you know what's good for you, you'll vote for Hillary.  

Don't buy it.  Hillary is not going to lose the presidential election because of Dr. Stein.  She's comfortably ahead in the polls, and she's even farther ahead in a few swing states, as well as in reliably Democratic states like my own New Jersey.  The Clintons aren't afraid of Jill Stein being a spoiler.  They're worried about Dr, Stein getting five percent of the vote and thus qualifying the Green Party for federal matching funds to make it competitive for the future.  This would actually allow a real progressive party to challenge the Democrats for the liberal voting bloc in this country.  That would be a disaster . . . for the Clintons.

"Let's be clear: this attack wasn't to point out a conflict of interest with Jill," Stein campaign manager Gloria Mattera wrote in a fundraising e-mail to Dr Stein's supporters.  "It was to silence all dissent to the coronation of Hillary Clinton."  "Coronation" is an appropriate word, since one prominent 2008 Hillary supporter once said that the Presidency is not a crown to be passed between two families like the Bushes and the Clintons.  (Alas, that prominent Hillary supporter was Martin O'Malley.)  Now, more than ever, we must resist efforts by the Clintons to silence the liberal opposition.  Now, more than ever, we must work to make the Democrats go full Whig if they keep pushing their disastrous neoliberal agenda.