Setting the Record Straight

Now that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (my condolences to him for the death of his mother) is no longer a presidential candidate and the remaining third-party candidates are little more than annoyances, it looks more likely than not that the results of the 2024 presidential election will not be affected by a minor presidential candidate as a spoiler.

But was any presidential election ever affected by a third-party presidential candidate?   Maybe once in awhile, like all of the young people in 1968 who may have made Richard Nixon President by voting for Peace and Freedom Party nominee (and Black Panthers leader) Eldridge Cleaver instead of Hubert Humphrey, but not so much in other presidential elections.  It's likely that the 1844 election was decided in favor of Democrat James K. Polk over Whig Henry Clay based on Polk's support for annexing Texas and that third-party candidate James Birney of the Liberty Party, which advocated abolishing slavery, brought out voters who would have supported neither Polk nor Clay, both slaveowners, or not voted at all. The 1860 election was such a hot mess that it produced four major candidates - Republican Abraham Lincoln, northern Democrat Stephen Douglas, southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, and Constitutional Union Party nominee John Bell - and the vote was so sectionalized between the candidates that an electoral deadlock was more likely than a spoiler effect.  Had Douglas won New York, Lincoln would have been denied an electoral majority and most likely would have lost the Presidency in the House of Representatives.  The only times third-party candidates played spoiler was when a faction of an existing party supported one of its leaders on another ticket - such as in 1848, when former President Martin Van Buren was nominated by a reformist faction of the New York State Democratic Party was and subsequently endorsed by the anti-slavery Free-Soil Party for his views against extending slavery into the territories.  Van Buren cost Democratic nominee Lewis Cass New York State and the Presidency, electing Whig Zachary Taylor.  And, in 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt led progressive Republicans out of the party and ran on the Bull Moose ticket against his one-time friend, President William Howard Taft (they later reconciled), he split the Republican vote and helped elect Democratic presidential candidate Woodrow Wilson. 

I bring all of this up as background to correct two blatant misconceptions about the two most recent presidential elections in which the winners of the popular vote lost the Electoral College - that third-party candidates cost  Democrats Al Gore and Hillary Clinton the Presidency.  That theory may or may not be true in the latter case, but it is definitely false in the former.  And both theories, not coincidentally, involve the Green Party.

In 2000, as Vice President Al Gore (above) was running for the Presidency against Republican George Walker Bush, pundits expressed alarm at the support Green Party presidential nominee Ralph Nader was gaining from liberal-leaning voters dissatisfied with President Bill Clinton and said that Nader could win enough Democratic votes to deprive Gore of a victory that November.  When the presidential election results from Florida, the deciding state, ended up being disputed for five weeks and was ultimately decided in favor of Bush by 537 votes, pundits pointed to the thousands of votes Nader got and concluded that Gore did lose Florida and the Presidency because of Nader . . . and have consistently said so ever since.

In reality, as American University professor Allan Lichtman later proved, Gore actually won Florida, but the election was stolen for George Bush because thousands of Gore votes cast by black Florida residents were thrown out by the state, whose governor was . . . Jeb Bush! And the butterfly-style ballots were so antiquated and difficult to fill out that when noted anti-Semitic third-party candidate Pat Buchanan got a large number of votes in heavily Jewish precincts in Palm Beach County, even Buchanan himself said those votes for him had to have been cast by mistake.     

Also, 2016 Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein is seen as the culprit who peeled off enough votes from Hillary Clinton (above) in that year's presidential election to cost her three states in the Rust Belt that then went to Donald Trump.  Well, I have to concede that, if you look at the numbers, Dr. Stein did win more votes than the margins between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in those three states - Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.  (I once said that if everyone in Pennsylvania who voted for Dr. Stein had voted for Hillary, it wouldn't have made a difference and Trump still would have won the state, but the numbers were revised and I turned out to be wrong.)  But did it ever occur to the pundits and politicos who blamed Dr. Stein for Hillary's loss that maybe Hillary Clinton blew it by not campaigning in those states enough or at all?  Michigan congresswoman Debbie Dingell begged - nay, implored - Hillary to campaign in her state, but she blew her off, thinking she had Michigan in the bag.  And Florida was a state Hillary was supposed to win, but people in Florida who had never voted before and had never put much faith in politics came out to vote for Trump.  And that phenomenon was repeated in other states.

Here's another thing.  Dr. Stein was on the ballot in 44 states.  Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson was on the ballot in all fifty of them.  As I noted on this blog once before, MSNBC host Chris Matthews, after the 2016 election, explained that moderate Republicans turned off by Trump who could have voted for Hillary voted for Johnson instead, and that the vote Johnson won in key states was greater than Trump's margin of victory.   At least that was Matthews' reasoning.  So, if third-party candidates are spoilers, how is it that Gary Johnson - who came in third and got double the number of votes Dr. Stein got nationally - had no effect on the 2016 election but Dr. Stein did?

And why isn't then-FBI director James Comey more to blame for reopening an investigation into Hillary Clinton's laptop just before the election than Dr. Stein is?

Come to think of it, why is Hillary Clinton, who was a lousy candidate, totally blameless? 

So again, the only way a third-party candidate can be a spoiler is if the candidate in question is from one of the two major parties and leaves to run on a separate presidential ticket and brings enough fellow members of said party with him or her - as liberal Democrat Henry Wallace did with his Progressive movement and as conservative Democrat Strom Thurmond did with the "Dixiecrats" in 1948 when they both ran for President against incumbent Democratic President Harry S. Truman, when the polls favored Republican presidential nominee Thomas E. Dewey.

Oh yeah, Truman won.  

Spoilers?                

2016 Redux?

She's a woman who decided to run for President and got the party and the incumbent Democratic President to discourage challengers to the party's presidential nomination.  She was talked up as the heir apparent, even though the Democratic Party hasn't produced a successful presidential candidacy by an anointed successor since Martin Van Buren was elected President in 1836.  Once she got running, she began ridiculing her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, and began to exude so much confidence she turned her rallies into hip-hop concerts, making populations in fly-over country feel put down and left out by a smug, entitled elitist.

Hillary Clinton in 2016?  No, Kamala Harris in 2024.

I recently read an op-ed column from Tom Harris (no relation) of The Telegraph in Britain in which he said that Democrats "have learnt nothing" from how they approached Donald Trump in the 2016 campaign.  After flicking away Bernie Sanders and Martin O'Malley like specks of lint, Hillary Clinton, the anointed successor to Barack Obama, ran a race in which she was already measuring the drapes for the Oval Office.  And what ultimately happened then, Tom Harris wrote, could happen to Kamala Harris now.  As far back as 2023, Representative James Clyburn said that Harris was the rightful nominee in waiting for 2028 without even considering the prospects of Gretchen Whitmer and Josh Shapiro.  Once President Biden was out and he gave his support to Vice President Harris, it all had the feeling of a promotion she was getting at the expense of everyone else by being in the right place at the right time.  Given Trump's disastrous appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists, it was only inevitable that he'd be ridiculed again.  But as a former supporter of a presidential candidate who was regularly ridiculed by his own party as well as the press, I can tell you this.  No supporter of a candidate for office likes to see his or her candidate ridiculed in such a manner, and Trump supporters went to the polls in 2016 with a vengeance - their own.  It's not inconceivable that history could repeat itself in 2024, as Tom Harris - a Labour Party member in Britain and no right-winger - has written.

However -  and this is crucial - there are differences between Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.  First, Harris knows she's not the favorite, given the closeness in the polls and the Republican advantage in the Electoral College.  Second, Harris actively courted Democratic convention delegates and did the work to endear herself to the party's rank-and-file.  Third, she has much less of a sense of entitlement, knowing how much of a lead balloon her 2020 presidential candidacy was and why it failed, as opposed to Hillary Clinton in 2008, who was more competitive against Barack Obama in 2008 and ran the same campaign against both Sanders and Trump in 2016 (experience, the gender card, yadda yadda), and with the same arrogance.  Fourth, the reaction from the Democratic Party faithful and Democratic-leaning independents has been more organically receptive for Harris than it ever was for Hillary.  Fifth, she's much younger than Trump,  while Hillary is only a year and change younger than Donald; 2016 was an election campaign between two old white people no one liked, much like the 2024 election campaign almost became.  Sixth, Harris is very comfortable in her skin; she actually loves the hip-hop played at her rallies.

But just as I'm still - still - angry at Karen Hunter for her takedown of Paul Ryan for his predilection for - HORRORS! - 1970s classic rock, Kamala Harris is always going to be one Beyoncé performance at a rally away from alienating enough swing-state voters to tip the balance to Trump.  Culture is still a powerful motivator, and besides, Trump doesn't have to rely on racially based culture issues in the fall campaign like he did last week.  He just has to remind voters of, say, the specter of a female President's Jewish husband being expected to decorate the White House for Christmas.

Don't count Trump out just yet.   

But if he has more encounters with reporters like he did with Rachel Scott, I just might. 😃    

The Ghost of Hillary Clinton - 2024 Edition

Back in January 2017, I insinuated in a blog post that the Democrats - who at that point completely ceased to matter - had thrown away the previous year's presidential election by doing a number of things wrong - mainly by nominating Hillary Clinton, for starters.

Among the other things I accused them of were doing little or nothing to prevent a breach in the Democratic National Committee's computer and blaming the Russians for hacking it, as well as Hillary calling half of Donald Trump's supporters "deplorables."  Given how deplorable many of Trump's supporters have proven to be, and given that the Russians really were intervening in the 2016 presidential campaign with memes and bogus stories about Hillary, you might think I have regret and remorse for what I wrote over seven years ago.

Actually, none whatsoever.  I've been reading John Judis' and Ruy Teixeira's 2023 book "Where Have All the Democrats Gone?," a dissection of the Democratic Party's failures over the past few decades, and their commentary on Hillary's presidential campaign only reminded me of what a lousy campaign she ran and what a lousy candidate she was.  As Judis and  Teixeira explain, Hillary largely ran on an agenda aimed at pleasing the coastal white-collar professionals that had sustained the Democratic Party since her husband was elected President in 1992 and discounted - indeed, disparaged - the deindustrialized areas of the interior Northeast and the Great Lakes region that had suffered from Democratic policies toward trade agreements and toward the banking sector.  She forgot that the backbone of the Democratic Party was - or, more accurately, had been - the working class that built this country and were now wasting away in blue-collar communities that had lost all of those good manufacturing jobs that sustained their towns and regions.  She took a condescending approach to these populations, lecturing them like a schoolmarm for not appreciating how good they would have it under her presidential administration.  "Clinton was heard correctly," Judis and Teixeira wrote, "to be voicing the snobbery of the postindustrial metro areas toward the victims of deindustrialization."

And when it came to race and ethnicity, Judis and Teixeira noted that Hillary only proved how clueless she really was.  Many of those same working-class voters she disparaged were black men; Republicans have actually made incremental gains among black male voters since 2016.  She dismissed the concerns over border security as being anti-Hispanic; in fact, Mexican-American voters in southern Texas have been strong proponents, not opponents, of border security.  Trump actually increased his support among Hispanics (and not just Americans of Cuban or Venezuelan origin) in 2020.  In a rush to berate Trump supporters over stereotyping racial minorities, Hillary never stopped to think that maybe, just maybe, you should not assume that a black or brown person is going to back you just because you're a Democrat.

As noted earlier, it is true that the Russians  were meddling in the 2016 presidential election, and it is also true that many of Trump's supporters were and still are deplorable.  But a smart presidential campaign that reached out to blue-collar voters and made a serious effort to earn votes Democrats had long taken for granted could have easily neutralized Putin's meddling.  And while Hillary did say that only half of Trump's supporters were deplorable and the other half were simply concerned voters who felt that the "new" American economy hadn't worked for them (the latter part of her quote was forgotten), many Trump supporters who were not deplorable and planned to support Trump despite their personal dislike for his bigotry and arrogance felt compelled to wonder if someone like them was who Hillary was talking about when she called half of Trump supporters deplorable.  And was it really half of them?  Maybe more like 30 to 35 percent of them, as polls of the MAGA movement have generally suggested, but 50 percent?  But even Hillary admitted that she was being "grossly generalistic" in her cursory census of how many Trump supporters were god-awful bigots.  Judis and Teixeira discovered in their own research that people who supported Trump in 2016 "were not so much voting for him so much as voting against the elites who were trying to dictate how they talked about race, gender, immigration and a host of other subjects."

Oh yeah, and a lot of people who voted for Trump in 2016 had voted for Obama twice.   

Nowhere was this more apparent than in Ohio, where, at her campaign rally in Cleveland, Hillary was joined by Beyoncé (who performed at the rally) and her husband, Mr. Shawn Carter, in an effort to appeal to the cool, hip voters in Ohio without trying to appeal to the machinists, steelworkers and autoworkers who were more likely to listen to Quiet Riot (a heavy-metal band long out of style) on their CD players (because they made too little money to stream and had to rely on obsolete technology).  Many of those same blue-collar guys weren't machinists, steelworkers or autoworkers; they had been, but their factories closed down and they were underemployed at the local 7-Eleven . . . and their hometowns ended up looking like this!

For the record, this is an abandoned plant in Mansfield, Ohio, along East Fifth Street on the outskirts of town.   

Hillary Clinton's onetime supporters - who continued to revere her for proving that a woman could be a nominee for President of the United States, even though she, umm, lost - continue today to blame Bernie Sanders (who spoke to those same working-class voters the way Trump did), James Comey, Vladimir Putin and Julian Assange for where Trump is today, but they particularly blame the voters themselves.  These are the same Hillbots who echoed her dismissals of calls for banking reform ("Yeah, we don't need Glass-Steagall reinstated!"), parroted her basic description of herself as a true liberal ("Yeah, she's a progressive, and she wants to use her power as President to get things done!") and laughed off a certain 2016 Democratic presidential contender who was not named Bernard by his parents ("Martin O'Malley?  Ha ha ha ha!"). And they're blaming us for refusing to support a candidate who couldn't connect to the very voters she needed?  Who hosted two hip-hop stars in a state where folks still listened to heavy metal?  Who never visited a steel mill or a car factory?  Who refused Debbie Dingell's pleas to campaign for the Presidency in Michigan, a state she lost along with Ohio?  Go home, Hillbots, you're stoned.

Joe Biden, the most working-class-friendly President we've had since Harry Truman, has made great strides as President so far in trying to repair the damage that the Clintons - and let's be honest, Obama too - have wrought to the Democratic coalition with their pro-banking, pro-business, neoliberal economic politics.  But he's only been able to go so far with his support for building new factories, his support for transportation infrastructure, the Chips Act, and his pro-union stance.  That's why he's still struggling against Trump in the polls and why those of us who have publicly opposed Trump could be a year away from either being locked up or strung up for our opposition.  And a second Trump administration would undo, not continue, the progress President Biden has made with rebuilding the working class.  Yes, the ghost of Hillary Clinton's political career is still at work.

We Bought Into a Moment . . .

We bought into a moment.

That's what the late David Carr of the New York Times famously wrote in 2011 about the moment that the press called the 2008 presidential election for Barack Obama.  We thought, while celebrating the news, that a freer, fairer, more progressive era had come to America with the election of the first black President.  

Then, one month into Obama's Presidency, Rick Santelli of CNBC spoiled everything with his call for a Chicago Tea Party from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade in an obvious temper tantrum over efforts in Washington to save the nation from the aftermath of the financial crisis. A bunch of rabid bigots, looking for excuse to unload their racism against Obama, took that as an opportunity to found the right-wing Tea Party movement.  By the time Carr had written that we had bought into a moment, the moment was long gone.  The hope for a second New Deal was dashed by independents refusing to support it, the Republicans had decimated the Democratic House majority in the 2010 midterms, they took control of numerous states, and the Democratic agenda - which included paid maternity leave, codifying Roe v. Wade, building high-speed passenger rail - was in tatters.

But at least we got the Affordable Care Act passed!

Big f**king deal.

As the 2010s began, supply-side economics - which liberals has once thought was finally consigned to the dustbin of history - was reinstated, and the incredible organizing movement that got Obama elected in the first place fell apart.  And except for Bernie Sanders - who, needless to say, never became President - no one has been able to rebuild it.  (The less said about the random and incoherent Occupy Wall Street movement, the better.) And by the way, Obama continued the so-called War on Terror, which resolved nothing.   

It seems that all those of us who want a better America and are willing to work for it have always bought into a moment over and over and over, when we think we finally have the leader of the movement we need to make this country a freer and fairer place.  But politics, naivete, and a general misunderstanding of how things work in These States and how strong suspicions are of "nice things" such as public medical insurance or strict firearms regulation always retard progress. I bought into the moment of Bill Clinton's election to the Presidency in 1992 as a turning point for the country that suggested that better days were ahead.  Instead, we got Newt Gingrich.  Sometimes outside forces rotted in American vices - like violence - disillusioned those who bought into the moment of Robert Kennedy's unity speech in the aftermath of, ironically, Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination in April 1968, only for him to be cut down by an assassin's bullet two months after.  How about when Americans bought into the moments of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, only to see them undermined and gutted many years later?    

Many of us bought into another moment when Barack Obama passed to the torch to Hillary Clinton at the 2016 Democratic National Convention . . . the first black U.S, President passing the torch to the woman who would become the first female U.S. President. 

And remember how resplendent Hillary Clinton looked in her white pantsuit, symbolizing the suffragette movement of a hundred years earlier, signaling a new era of diversity, equity and inclusion? 

People who backed Bernie Sanders and those of us who were in with Martin O'Malley from the day he announced his 2016 presidential bid (talk about buying into a moment) knew better.  We knew that Hillary was everything Obama was not - egotistical, entitled, politically insular, and personally smug.  There was no way she could win the Presidency without acknowledging the dissatisfaction with the whole American system and trying to reach out to voters in the American heartland.  And, she didn't.

On Election Night 2016, Hillbots holding a "victory" party in the Javits Convention Center in New York City were hoping to symbolically shatter the ceiling of the glass building and bought into a moment that never came.  And Hillary, after conceding to her Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, called President Obama and tearfully declared, "I am so, so sorry."

Yeah, you can stuff your sorries in a sack, Madam! 😬

So instead of Hillary, we got a racist and misogynistic presidential administration that favored using military force to crack down on civil rights demonstrators and urban crime waves, as well as appointing federal judges and Supreme Court justices that spurred the end of Roe v. Wade.  And even with that administration out of office, further erosions on freedom - including book bans, anti-black education curricula, and  a rise in anti-Semitism, have persisted.  And, we might not only get that administration back, we might get it back for good.  Or for bad.  Or for worse. 

I'm only voting for Joe Biden or two reasons - because I think he's been a good President, and because I want to stop Donald J. Trump.  But I'm through with buying into moments.  America is what it is and it ain't what it ain't.  We are not Denmark.  Neither Bernie Sanders nor Elizabeth Warren nor anyone else can change that.  But if Trump gets back in, we can and will be Nazi Germany.   

Inauguration Day 2025 is one year from today.  Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy ride. 

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. 

April 2015: The Month That Destroyed America

It was seven years ago this month, April 2015, that two seemingly unrelated events set the United States on a path to its eventual downfall . . . a place we haven't quite gotten to yet.

Why do you think Donald Trump became the 2016 Republican front-runner and was eventually elected President?  Because of his charm and charisma?  Because of his inspiring rhetoric?  Because of his fourteen points?  No, it was because he got help from his eventual Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton (below).  This is what she said in an e-mail about campaign strategy to the Democratic National Committee - written seven years ago this very day - that was later put out in October 2016 by WikiLeaks (admittedly, with a little help from their friends, their accomplices in the Kremlin):  

The variety of [GOP presidential] candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more "Pied Piper" candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party . . .. We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack.

The Pied Piper candidates were Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and another guy named . . . Donald Trump.  So, the Hillary campaign legitimized Donald Trump by focusing more on him than on a nice guy like Jeb Bush.  Really smart strategy, Hillary! 

Trump may by the type to lead rats out of town, but he can also lead lemmings to their deaths. 

Meanwhile, Martin O'Malley, the then-newly former governor of Maryland, was preparing to announce his 2016 presidential candidacy when suddenly Freddie Gray, a black man in Baltimore, where O'Malley had been mayor and had strengthened law enforcement tactics, was arrested for possessing a knife, which was perfectly legal.  He ended up being beaten in police custody and died, and even though O'Malley hadn't been mayor in eight years, the media and also David Simon - the creator of the Baltimore-set police TV drama "The Wire" - somehow blamed O'Malley for Gray's death.  This allowed a Washington press corps already skeptical of O'Malley and his viability as presidential candidate - the man was a protégé of the always laughable Gary Hart, for Pete's sakes! - to take him even less seriously than they already did.  Olivia Nuzzi's coverage of O'Malley's presidential campaign announcement - which focused on anti-O'Malley protestors at the event - was so satirically biting you could almost hear her snicker while you were reading it.  

Needless to say, the media's spin on Gray's death doomed O'Malley's chances to be  a serious contender against Hillary for the Democratic presidential nomination, transferring that role to Bernie Sanders - who could not win the Democratic presidential nomination as an independent, and the press knew it.  (That's why they didn't cover him; besides, they were too busy covering Trump.)  Add that all together, and you had the trajectory of a flawed nominee-in-waiting being crowned the Democratic presidential candidate to take on Trump, and you got . . .

Well, you got economic and environmental policy rollbacks that benefitted the rich, three right-wing Supreme Court justices, withdrawals from various international agreements, an out-of-control pandemic, and . . . January 6.

And all because Hillary - and thanks to her efforts, the press - wanted to elevate Donald Trump and no one wanted to elevate Martin O'Malley.

Hillary Clinton, though, remains the chief villain here.  She wanted Trump as an opponent, and she got more than she bargained for.  And the sooner these Hillbots stop worshipping her and start seeing her as the destructive force she is, the better. 😠

Hillary Versus Trump in 2024?

 Lord God, no! 

Yet one Democratic analyst seems to not only think it's possible, he's almost rooting for it.  Writing in a syndicated column, Douglas Schoen has suggested that President Biden has been so thoroughly damaged by inflation, the pandemic, and continued political division, that he shoudln't even think of running again.  Schoen figures that it's inevitable that Republicans will renominate Donald Trump.  With President Biden bogged down by a foreign policy no one understands and a domestic policy that's even more incomprehensible, as well as being saddled with a Vice President even more unpopular than he is, Schoen writes, it only makes sense for the Democrats to nominate Hillary in 2024.  She not only has experience and is no only battle-tested from having gone against Trump once before, Schoen argues, she can rally female and minority voters and a time when reproductive and voting rights are under assault - and, Schoen argues, there's simply no one else even remotely popular or well-known enough to run in 2024 should Biden, at 82, decline to run again.  Besides, compared to Biden and to Bernie Sanders, who will be 83 in 2024, Hillary will be a youthful 77.

Forget COVID tests.  Schoen needs a drug test.

I refuse to vote for Hillary in 2024 for the same reason I refused to vote for her in 2016.  She's an opportunist and a duplicitous centrist who would not bring fresh ideas or a new start for the country - two things that are even more necessary in 2024, as this nation approaches its 250th anniversary.  Also, progressives hate her like poison.   And even if she does rally Democratic constituency voters, no one knows how she could deal with a scenario in which the 2024 election is rigged in favor of the Republicans because of the various voting restrictions passed in key states. And besides, why would anyone want to relive 2016?  Hillary versus Trump again?  It would be like seeing The Cannonball Run again.  Actually, it would be worse, because at least The Cannonball Run had Roger Moore's wonderfully self-parodying performance as a guy who thought he was Roger Moore.  Alas, Hillary knows she's Hillary, and Trump knows he's Trump.    

Here's another argument against Hillary in 2024: Newt Gingrich originally suggested it.

If the Democratic Party, now severely as divided as the country at large, is in such bad shape that it needs to dig up the Clintons again, the party deserves to die - which it likely will after January 2025, when a reinstated Trump declares martial law and outlaws opposition parties (and shuts down CNN).   There are so many Democratic presidential possibilities that are not being taken seriously enough - Amy Klobuchar, Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg - who could take the fight to the GOP in 2024 as the Democratic presidential nominee if only given half the chance.

But if the Democrats would rather try someone  from the past, say, someone from 2016 other than the ancient Bernie Sanders . . . how about this guy?

You were expecting maybe Lincoln Chaffee? 😛

Oh, Martin O'Malley turns 59 today.  He'll turn 62 two days before the next presidential inauguration. In Democratic circles, he's almost a kid.  Happy birthday, Mr. O'Malley.

The Ghost of Hillary Clinton Still Lingers

New details about how Donald Trump tried to subvert the constitutional process and remain in power despite losing the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, especially the events of January 6, are chilling, especially when you realize the comparisons to Adolf Hitler making himself dictator of Germany after suspending basic liberties in the wake of the 1933 Reichstag fire or to Benito Mussolini marching his black-shirts on Rome to force King Victor Emmanuel III to name him premier in 1922.   The cause for all this can all be boiled down to one simple reason - a political party whose members were blindly devoted to one person and falling in line to give that person the party's presidential nomination and shunning and dismantling opposition to the nominee from the start.

And no, I'm not talking about the Republican Party's embrace of Donald Trump.  I'm talking about the Democratic Party's embrace of Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The Democrats developed a personality cult around Hillary Clinton, idolizing her so much that they needed only to refer to her be her first name.  It's not that they were hell-bent on making a woman President of the United States. It's that they were hell-bent on making this woman President of the United States.  Nobody seriously considered the possibility that she was beatable against the eventual 2016 Republican nominee - even if that nominee were to be Donald J. Trump.  They blindly accepted her and worshipped her as a feminist icon who would provide a powerful symbol for women and girls as President without asking if maybe, oh, I don't know, Elizabeth Warren might have been a better choice for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.  The Democratic National Committee protected her from most challengers to her bid - like Joe Biden - for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, and those who did challenge her were ridiculed and punished for running.  Bernie Sanders wasn't, because he's not a Democrat. But his supporters certainly were ridiculed and punished.  

I was among the ones who said that Hillary couldn't win the Presidency, and all I heard in response was, "La la la, first female President!" A typical response from cultists such as Hillbots.  So I was not entirely surprised when Trump won the 2016 election. But I must say that I was surprised how megalomaniacal he would become and how Hillary's defeat allowed him to assume a position of power and exploit that power for his own personal gain - to the extent that he would even invoke the Insurrection Act or drop a nuclear bomb to keep it.

Although Hillary conceded the 2016 election and did not contest the result, she didn't do herself any favors by whining about her loss to Trump during his four years in the White House.  She could have done something constructive to help combat his authoritarian rule, but instead she acted a lot like he does when he loses, so convinced is she of her own greatness.  She mainly wasted that intervening time bitching about Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard, blaming them and others for her loss, while wallowing in self-absorption.  Dodging blame for an electoral loss isn't much different from denying such a loss.  As Kyle Smith of National Review wrote in January 2020, "Remember when Jimmy Carter published a whiny, self-serving book about his political downfall called 'What Happened'? Remember when Mike Dukakis pushed filmmakers to do a four-hour fan documentary about himself? Remember when George H.W. Bush mocked Bill Clinton at the Grammys? Yeah, me neither."

The 2016 election and the 2020 election had one thing in common - Trump insisted that both of them would prove to be rigged if he lost.  Had he lost in 2016, Trump, as a private citizen, would have had little leverage to sue to stop the certification of Hillary Clinton's election and would merely have challenged the results as a publicity stunt for his business ventures.  But as an incumbent with a lust for power, Trump took the idea of a rigged election seriously, convinced that he was so loved and idolized by his base - just like Hillary Clinton had been by hers - that there was no way he could have lost.  (And when he won in 2016, he was incensed that he didn't win the popular vote, blaming that vote shortfall on illegal immigrants voting illegally.) The bottom line is that Hillary's ego led to Trump, who, fueled by his own ego, then used the Presidency to attempt the establishment of a right-wing dictatorship and continues to poison the well with his control of a Republican Party that hopes to strike the final blow against democracy in America by 2024.

And we also got Trump's "leadership" to get us through a pandemic.

Soon after Biden was elected President, Hillary Clinton expressed interest in working for his administration.  But, considering how her wrongheaded quest for the Presidency worked out, it makes sense that we don't hear much from Hillary Clinton these days.   My only wonder is when her chief henchwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz will be made to answer for enabling the only candidate Trump could have defeated to get the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.

The Ghost of Hillary Clinton - The Sequel

In the 24 days remaining in the presidential term of Donald J. Trump, we are seeing the last violent convulsions - a raging pandemic, vetoed bills, cult loyalty, total chaos - that stemmed from a decision long ago made by the Democratic National Committee to anoint a 2016 presidential nominee with a charade of a primary process to ratify it.

Yes, we are seeing the grand finale of the effects of one woman's ambition to be President of the United States despite having already been rejected in favor of Barack Obama in 2008.  To think, the Trump Presidency could have been avoided if only the Democrats had had a fair nomination contest in 2016 and ended up with a nominee - any nominee - not named Hillary by the nominee's mother. And now the consequences of that decision - the horrible aftereffects of the decision to satisfy one woman's enormous ego, which led to the rise to power of a man with an exponentially more enormous ego - are playing out like the finale of a Fourth of July fireworks show, most of which were canceled this year because of the pandemic. 

Donald Trump won the White House because the Democrats nominated the only person he could have defeated.  The Democrats won it back because they nominated the only person who could have defeated Trump.

And Hillary Clinton has actually expressed interest in a role in Joe Biden's administration.

Good Lord!

The Ghost of Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton may no longer be an active politician, but her spirit haunts the nation.

I've heard a lot of grumblings about how the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg could have retired when Obama was President to allow him to choose a new justice before he left office.  And, even though Obama would have had a hard time getting a Ginsburg replacement through the Senate, especially in the last two years of his second term, Ginsburg didn't want to retire while Obama was in office anyway.  Seems she was so certain that Hillary Clinton would succeed him as President that she looked forward to retiring in 2017 so that the first female President could name another woman to replace her.

Now where would Justice Ginsburg get such an idea that Hillary's nomination for President and her  election to the Presidency were inevitable?  Seems that the good Justice, so right in many ways, was led astray by Hillary and by then-Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz into thinking there was no way any of those silly male Democrats running for their party's 2016 presidential nomination was going to get in Hillary's way and there was no way on God's not-so-green earth that she could be defeated by Donald Trump.  My guess is that HRC and DWS told RBG, "Don't worry - we got this!"

Seems Justice Ginsburg, like so many others, got played, and played in service of Debbie's Machiavellian methods and Hillary's massive ego.  Sure, she believed that Hillary would win in 2016 - heck, I did too, although I didn't vote for her - and so of course she thought Hillary would become the 45th U.S. President  and appoint a woman in her place, especially a woman as liberal as she was. 

And instead, we have Donald Trump, who now gets to replace Justice Ginsburg with a woman, and a right-wing one at that  - most likely an Irish Catholic jurist who will remind everyone why Americans hate Irish Catholics known for serving in public office.

Or just plain laugh at them.

I still can't get over the fact that no one, after all that's happened in the past three-and-a-half years, has written to me to apologize for laughing 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley out of the campaign.

The Enemy Of My Enemy Is Not My Friend

It's an old Arab proverb used to justify alliances with people you shouldn't join forces with: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."

I fell victim to that proverb in 2016.

The millions of people who supported Bernie Sanders and the dozens of us who supported Martin O'Malley did not obviously agree on the same candidate in the 2016 presidential campaign.  We also didn't agree on the same things all of the time - in fact, given O'Malley's pragmatism and Sanders' radicalism, we sometimes couldn't agree on what to do about something about an issue even while agreeing that something had to be done about it.  But because we had a common adversary in Hillary Clinton, we stood together against her.

When O'Malley was eliminated from the 2016 presidential primaries, however, I didn't follow the lead of other O'Malley supporters who decided to go all in for Hillary because they thought she was the safer choice.  To me, Hillary was still the enemy.  I walked backward into the Sanders camp and without much enthusiasm, but I was seriously thinking of voting for him in the 2016 New Jersey primary until it became apparent that it was ridiculous to register as a Democrat to vote for an independent in the Democratic presidential primary - especially when Hillary was all but guaranteed the nomination by the time the New Jersey primary was held.  I sat out the primary and supported no one.  When Hillary became the presumptive nominee, I did what the Bernie bros did - I backed the Greens' Jill Stein for President and called for the Greens or a new party to replace the Democrats.  I made good on my promise to vote to Dr. Stein to get back at Hillary Clinton, her enabler Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and everyone else who tied a symbolic rock to Martin O'Malley's ankle so as to avenge my candidate.  Hey, so what, it wasn't like Trump was going to win, right?

But Trump did win, though Hillary carried my state of New Jersey, and here's where we are now.  The progressive movement is a joke.  Progressives did nothing to build a new party around their values in the past three years; they only caused more trouble for the Democrats.  Sanders ran for President as a Democrat again despite the fact that he is not a party member.  Hillary Clinton and Debbie Wasserman Schultz are gone, and Democratic National Committee Tom Perez let the presidential primaries go on without a finger on the scale . . . and Joe Biden emerged as the presumptive nominee after a fairly fought and difficult contest - a contest which Biden almost sank to oblivion in.  And there's a pandemic going on.

At this point, Bernie bros have shown their true colors.  Having taken a verbal flamethrower to not just Biden but to all of the Democratic presidential candidates  not named Bernard by their mothers, they've since taken to ridiculing Biden for his stutter, mocking him as being a daffy old creep, and now pushing a sexual-assault charge that has more holes than Swiss cheese.  They've conveniently ignored his liberal record as a U.S. Senator and the context of some of his more controversial Senate votes and tried to smear him as an unfit candidate, calling on him to step aside so the runner-up can take his place.  Guess who the runner-up is.

Never mind that Sanders has endorsed Biden, trusts him, and is urging his supporters to vote for him rather than go third party in November because of the need to defeat Trump.  Good luck with that, Bernie.

I'm not voting Green in 2020 even if Biden is projected to win 90 percent of the vote in New Jersey and doesn't need me.  Because I am not with the Bernie bros this time.  Bernie bros, the enemies of my enemy in 2016, are no friends of mine.  I have come to understand that they have no interest in compromising, cooperation, or any other activity a political system admittedly in need of reform requires in order to achieve the big-picture goal of getting your side to win the White House. Bernie bros refuse to accept their candidate's loss and work with the Democrats to get Trump out.  They want everything their way - no compromise, no concessions, no give and take - at a time when it is politically unfeasible.  They have no tolerance for anyone who disagrees with them and they are willing to destroy the Democrats for not being pure enough on the issues at the risk of helping Trump.  They're a bunch of mean-spirited spoiled brats. They're a cult.  They're, as I like to say, the Islamic State of political fandom.  And I'm sick to death of having to deal with them.  In 2016, at the Democratic convention, Sarah Silverman said they were being ridiculous over their refusal to support anyone other than Sanders.  Now they're just being petulant.

And they would have treated Martin O'Malley with the same displeasure, distrust, and hatred they've shown to Biden had O'Malley ever become the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee in either 2016 or 2020.  They would have played up the charge that he had a love child with a black TV newswoman, a charge ten times as implausible as the charges against Biden.  They would have bashed his criminal justice record as mayor of Baltimore.  And I know this because, it turns out, they considered O'Malley a joke in 2016 as much as Hillary Clinton supporters did.  Both the Clinton and Sanders campaigns were united in their disrespect for O'Malley, which only clinches for me the following conclusion.  The enemy of the enemy is not your friend. The enemy of your enemy is still your enemy.

Hillary Clinton may have been an adversary to me, but Hillary is no longer a concern.  Joe Biden is not Hillary Clinton.  Joe Biden is not my enemy.  He is my candidate.  Go with Joe.  

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 . . .

What's The Matter With James Howard Kunstler?

Does anyone remember when James Howard Kunstler was the most trenchant social commentator and urban planning critic in America?

Kunstler, who turns 71 today, first made a name for himself in 1993 with his book "The Geography of Nowhere," a brilliant polemic of American automobile suburbia and how the United States' man-made landscape of tract housing, shopping malls, highway strips, and office parks littered the countryside with cartoon architecture and left our cities - especially old industrial metropolises like Detroit - as dead zones while turning us into an antisocial people.  He offered a bit of hope for the future and proposed that we were ready to move on from the egregious mistakes we made in building our nightmarish human habitat and the horrible effects on society that created, such as life revolving around television and the growth of the "pathological ghetto culture" (his words) in our cities that begat hip-hop.  His two follow-up books, 1996's "Home From Nowhere" and 2002's "The City In Mind," cast doubt on reason for hope despite the New Urbanist movement that advocated (note tense - the movement didn't last) traditionally designed neighborhoods and towns, and his 2005 book "The Long Emergency" and 2011's "Too Much Magic" went further in explaining how our overreliance on technology and insatiable appetite for fossil-fuel energy was leading to Armageddon.

Kunstler isn't writing about that so much on his blog anymore.  He's too busy defending - yes, defending - the Trump administration in its efforts to thwart impeachment and removal from office.  He's not a  Trump fan - he mockingly calls Trump the "Golden Golem of Greatness," and he thinks he's a buffoon - but he's angry at Democrats for trying to nullify his election to the Presidency, which he sees as legitimate, and he regularly attacks them as being part of the "Deep State" that's trying to subvert the will of the people in the 2016 election (54 percent of the electorate, including Kunstler himself, voted against Trump), as if the Democratic Party and the federal bureaucracy were trying to overthrow the elected government like the CIA tried to overthrow elected governments in Latin America.  He sees Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as being part of a cabal trying to restore control of Washington, and he sees the Mueller report and the impeachment process as part of this . . . when he isn't dismissing the New York Times and the Washington Post as organs of the state.

In other words, Kunstler has drunk the right-wing Kool-Aid that Trump's base has been sipping for years.  Some of his rage stems from his understandable and justifiable hatred of political correctness and the demonization of white men, but he seems to think that there's some sort of nefarious plot on behalf of female and non-white Americans to to try to create some sort of PC Utopia that will get not just Trump but all white guys out of the way.

One point Kunstler has still been making on occasion is that he thinks we're going to run out of oil any day now.  We'll more likely run out later than sooner, which is why so many people are investing in alternative, renewable energy sources, but Kunstler doesn't have faith in any of them to create a sustainable civilization based on present-day standards or even mid-century-modern (i.e., 1950s) standards, and he views electric cars, from Bolts and Volts to e-Golfs and Teslas, as a joke.  (Though Kunstler supports conventional passenger rail, he doesn't hold out hope for high-speed rail in America , arguing that the age of cheap energy has peaked and that it is too late to have here what Japan has had for half a century.)  Because of all this, Kunstler has gone into some sort of survivalist mode, preparing for an inevitable civil war where identity politics will lead to a multifaceted struggle pitting Americans of different races and ethnicities against each other and also pitting men and women against each other . . . which, again, he blames on Democrats.

What's shocking is what Kunstler is not saying.  He doesn't talk about the need to revitalize our cities and leave auto suburbia behind like he once did, and he doesn't talk all that much about solutions to our long-term energy needs like he used to.  He may still write on his blog about the inevitable end of fossil-fuel energy from time to time, but, given his disdain for solar power and fuel cells, doesn't offer ideas and solutions of his own so much now.  He's focusing virtually all of his attention on his hatred and paranoia on the governing class and how they won't accept Trump's election as fair and square.   I actually accepted Trump's election as fair and square - hey, Hillary blew it! - but I don't see some sort of wicked Democratic-Deep State plot to make their opponents suffer and pay for voting for Trump.  That's tin-foil-hat talk.  

James  Howard Kunstler has lost his interest in critiquing America's autocentric living pattern and its disregard for decency and culture.  He himself has taken an indecent turn on his own blog, spewing out the same Fox News-type vitriol that coarsens our culture.   He's not only lost his edge . . . he's lost his mind.

What a loss, indeed. :-(

I hope he enjoys his birthday today, but it seems like he isn't capable of enjoying much.

Mueller Time Is Barred

After Attorney General William Barr looked over the report on the Russia investigation handed in by Robert Mueller  (below), he issued a summary of the Mueller report this past Sunday - giving talking heads on cable news something to talk about all day along on the slowest news day of the week (pre-empting in the process a couple of CNN documentaries I'd been hoping to watch!) - that said there was neither evidence of collusion between the Russians and Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign nor evidence of obstruction of justice.

Trump quickly claimed victory, suddenly embracing Mueller as a truth-teller and blasting the Democrats for insinuating that a crime had been committed and that they will pay dearly for their attempted character assassination.

So is this the end?  Are the Democrats doomed to wearing egg yolk on their faces all the way to next November? Is Trump vindicated?  Not so fast.  Mueller was supposed look at the extent of Russian interference in the 2016 election and catch the guys who were involved.  He did that.  And while he found no evidence to suggest that Trump went so far as to collude with Putin to get himself elected President, he did find a whole lot of other wrongdoing that highlighted the extent of Russian interference in our elections.  There's another problem - while Mueller's report said that he couldn't find enough evidence to charge Trump with obstruction of justice, he couldn't find enough evidence to exonerate Trump either.  It was Barr who said that Trump was exonerated, which makes sense, considering that he was appointed by . . .  Trump.

And Rod Rosenstein more or less agreed with Barr's conclusion.

And while this investigation had nothing to do with Trump's finances and tax returns, there is some information in the Mueller report that could be helpful in those investigations being handled by the Southern District of New York and the New York State Attorney General's office, as well as House oversight committees.  So this isn't over for Trump.  But this should put to rest the idea that this investigation would be the silver bullet that would take Trump down.  Of course, the Mueller report should be issued in its entirety, and, in matters like this, we should never take the word of an Attorney General appointed by the President on such a matter as the final word.  But while it may raise more questions than it answers, looking at the full Mueller report isn't necessarily going to answer any more questions.  Democrats were ready to accept Mueller's findings - which, by the way, yielded a lot of indictments - whatever they may be, and now they have to do so.   

Besides, what if Trump is telling the truth and he did not collude with the Russians?  Could it be possible that the Russians did try to interfere in the 2016 presidential election even as Trump had nothing to do with it, and that any charge that he didn't win fair and square is being leveled by Democrats who are ready to blame everyone for Hillary Clinton's loss except Hillary Clinton herself for her lousy campaign and the Democratic National Committee for failing to get a reliable firewall for their e-mail servers when those same Russians decided to break into them?  No, of course not, that would destroy their narrative.

It seems nothing short of high irony that the biggest critics of what Trump called "this Russia thing" are not Trump supporters but are in fact liberals and anti-Clinton Democrats.  They saw the Russia investigation as another diversion from the real issues regarding the quality of life in America and a distraction from the fact that the Democrats have done little to help the people and have failed to pass universal health care or bank regulation.  The Russia story, as far as they're concerned, was just another ruse by establishment leaders to get people's minds off the real issues - Russophobia from the Cold War days repackaged to dupe the masses.  Well, guess what - the Mueller report is the best thing to happen for Democrats as well as for Trump.  It may be an even better thing for Democrats.  The Mueller report is the end of the beginning, a precursor to the other investigations I alluded to that will take place with a lot less noise for now.  This frees the Democrats, especially their 2020 presidential candidates, to talk about the issues affecting average Americans and not about Trump, even as Jerrold Nadler, Adam Schiff, and Elijah Cummings lead their respective House committees' investigations of Trump outside the limelight of public scrutiny.  These subsequent investigations could find something to reverse Trump's fortunes, but for now, Democrats have the opportunity to change the subject to serious issues like health care and climate change.  Nancy Pelosi's decision to avoid pursuing impeachment looks more like a stroke of genius and less like a stroke.

Note to Democrats: It was never Mueller's duty to save the day.  It's up to you to save the day by energizing your base and nominating for President someone people can actually vote for, as opposed to having a place to cast a ballot against Trump, while providing congressional oversight over his conduct in office.  Mueller's work is done.  You are only getting started.

Hillary 3.0 2020?

Just when I thought it was safe to go back into the 2020 presidential campaign . . .

. . . the legend continues.

Hillary Clinton, who went into the 2008 presidential campaign against Barack Obama thinking that she was owed the Democratic nomination, she being a former First Lady and all, and got the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination through a rigged process only to find out that enough voters in the Rust Belt disliked her enough to swing the 2016 election to Trump, hasn't ruled out running again in 2020!  She might actually do it!

"Clinton is telling people that she's not closing the doors to the idea of running in 2020,” CNN's Jeff Zeleny said recently on the CNN (for Clinton  News Network) program "Inside Politics." "I'm told by three people that as recently as this week, she was telling people that, given all this news from the indictments, particularly the Roger Stone indictment, she talked to several people, saying 'Look, I’m not closing the doors to this.'"

No!  No more!  I'm closing the door on it!  And so should everyone else!  This woman should not be allowed anywhere near a debate lectern.

I'm so disgusted.  My candidate from 2016 isn't running this time - and would probably be laughed out of the race again if he did - and those egomaniacs Hillary and Bernie most likely will run again.  None of the other candidates have inspired me enough to get enthused about 2020 - least of all showboater Kamala Harris or Hamlet-on-the-Rio Grande Beto O'Rourke.   Looks like we get four more years of Trump.  I am so out of this presidential campaign season.

Really out.

Nineties Nostalgia

Out on the road yesterday, I didn't see a Grateful Dead sticker on a Cadillac, but I did see a pro-Clinton (as in our 42nd President) sticker on a Mini Cooper.  It was from the Clinton Presidential Center and it simply said, "I miss Bill."

Where was the little voice in that motorist's head saying, "Don't look back, you can never look back?"     

I don't miss Bill Clinton.  I don't miss him because the better, happier more civilized America I was expecting from his election to the Presidency in 1992 never materialized - no universal health care, no improved public transit, no improvements in education, an economy that did nothing to narrow the gap between the rich and poor, and a Republican Congress that mostly ignored all that.  In fact, apart from the lack of a sex scandal and a six-year Democratic Senate, the Obama administration was the exact same way!    

Democrats ought to be looking forward, but they're so dressed to the nineties that they can't help but look back at good old days that weren't as good as they look in retrospect.  I can understand their nostalgia for 1992 - after all, that was the year of one of the few elections in recent history where Democrats won everything.  But I can't understand why they acted out their nostalgia by nominating the other Clinton for President in 2016.

Did they really think that Hillary could re-create the 1990s - the decade before 9/11, the decade before the financial crisis, the decade before the opioid-addiction epidemic, the decade before the hollowing out of so many towns in the heartland that weren't in all that great shape back in the nineties to begin with?  Did they really think we could go back to the Clinton years by putting another Clinton in the White House?  Oh wait, both Clintons would have been back in the White House, with the same co-presidency approach they took between 1993 and 2001.  The memes showing Bill Clinton in front of the White House with the words "I'm moving back in!" that showed up on Facebook before his wife lost to Donald Trump sum up the misguided nostalgia of the Hillbots.  These people were more annoying than rock fans who still hoped for a Beatles reunion concert even after John Lennon's death.   

So before anyone suggests that we can bring back the nineties, let me remind you of a few things:

• Kurt Cobain is dead.
• Janet Evans isn't coming out of retirement.
• Arsenio Hall doesn't have a late-night talk show anymore, and Jerry Seinfeld isn't rebooting his sitcom.

So let's move forward and concentrate on what's at stake in 2020.  In the meantime, go to a Foo Fighters show, be sure to root for Katie Ledecky at the next Olympics, and watch Stephen Colbert.  And "Murphy Brown" is getting rebooted; at least there's that.     

You Don't Fit the Suit

Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez (below) said he was going to do something about Trump when he took over his party's chairmanship, and today he filed a suit against the Trump campaign, the Russian government, Wikileaks, and Paul Manafort for hacking the DNC's e-mail server and releasing those unflattering e-mails about Hillary Clinton that Perez says tipped the scales for Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

Wait a minute - I thought he said he was going to do something about Trump.

So let me see if I have this straight.  The Democrats are suing numerous entities on charges of a conspiracy that Robert Mueller has not yet proven existed, with little thought toward coming up with a message that will resonate with voters in this year's midterm elections, and they're going to spend exorbitant amounts of money - even as the national committee struggles to keep the party from going bankrupt - on this suit instead of on support for Democratic candidates and for get-out-the-vote operations in November . . . and they're doing it to send a message to the Russians and warn them not to tamper with the midterms (a problem state election boards should be doing something about) and also to fire up a Democratic base to vote for candidates in the general election who more often than not will be candidates favored by the Clintons while the party tries to stop progressives in state and local primaries - even, I believe, in states and districts where progressives can actually win - and continues purging progressives from positions of power.  

Does this all make sense to you?  Because it sure doesn't make sense to me.

Even more nonsensical is how the DNC has a lot of damn gall to sue anyone for rigging the system when the DNC itself was so good at rigging the 2016 primaries and caucuses to prevent Martin O'Malley from gaining any traction and to prevent Bernie Sanders from getting anything with the traction he actually gained.  One progressive by the name of Amir Amini summed up this hypocrisy on Twitter quite nicely: "So the DNC is suing a foreign country for being unfair to the Hillary Clinton campaign in an election in which the DNC was caught undermining democracy itself, violating its own rules and colluding with the [Clinton] campaign and the [mainstream media] to stop Bernie."

And Martin.

Next time the DNC wants to rig a primary process and collude with the press and a corporate presidential campaign to put the least winnable presidential candidate forward in the general election, maybe they should consider getting a better firewall for their server.   

Also, DNC factotums should think twice before firing off any e-mails that may make someone like Hillary "look bad."

But then, Hillary didn't need any help with that.

Many progressives seem to agree that this suit is a way for the Democratic establishment, which backed Hillary Clinton to the hilt, to get back at those who stood between Hillary and the White House while continuing to refuse to acknowledge that it was a mistake to nominate her for President in the first place.  In other words, they're trying to . . . exact revenge?  Oh no, you don't, DNC!  After you screwed my candidate, you don't get to avenge being screwed yourself!  You don't have to leggo my Eggo, but keep your filthy hands off my Pop-Tarts! ;-)