Mike Drop

Mike Pence withdrew as a candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, thus ending an accidental political career.  A politician so inept that he lost his first two House bids to an incumbent Democrat, Pence was elected only when the Republican incumbent representing his Indiana district in the House chose not to seek re-election.  Pence's career seemed moribund when he chose to run for a second term as governor of Indiana in 2016 and was seem as likely to lose when Trump selected him as vice presidential his running mate. 

That out of the way, I don't really want to harp on Pence any more because he's gotten enough of a raw deal already.  Yeah, sure, he put his values in a blind trust to support Trump, who was as amoral and blasphemous as Pence was not, but Pence did redeem himself when he refused to try to overturn the 2020 election once it became apparent to him that there was no legal way he could refuse the electoral votes of key states.  Yes, he looked for ways to do it legally, and he even consulted Dan Quayle on the issue, but he did the right thing after he exhausted all of the alternatives.  According to the late Winston Churchill, he's a typical American.

How, you ask, could I be so sympathetic to a right-wing, misogynistic, non-alcoholic-beer-drinking prude like Pence?  Two reasons.  First, Martin O'Malley got subjected to the same ridicule for his presidential run when he ended it in February 2016, and I'm still ticked off about that.  Second, even Martin O'Malley, unpopular as he was with the Democratic base, never had to worry about being hung by his detractors, which is how Pence ended his vice presidential tenure. 

Oh yeah, this isn't going to affect the 2024 Republican presidential primaries.  Even though Pence ostensibly bowed out to encourage other low-performing candidates to do the same and coalesce around one anti-Trump candidate, his support was too miniscule to help any other candidates or change the dynamics of the campaign.  But even if all but one of the candidates not named Donald by their mothers withdraw from the campaign tomorrow and got behind the last person standing in a united front against Trump, it's too late for that.  Trump has a majority of Republican voters in the primary and caucus polls - 59 percent, according to one survey - so even if the anti-Trump Republicans get behind one candidate, they've likely already lost.

Pence's withdrawal from the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, like Will Hurd's before, has further normalized what was once considered an anomaly back in 1987, when Gary Hart and Joe Biden quit their presidential campaigns - the act of presidential candidates ending their campaigns before the start of the primary/caucus voting.  And Hart and Biden quit that early because of scandal.  Mike Pence's only scandals were demonstrating fealty to Trump - and, in the eyes of MAGA Republicans, breaking that fealty when the price of fealty proved to be too high.

More and More Classified Documents

Now the government has found classified documents in former Vice President Mike Pence's home.

And his house looks suspiciously like Joe Biden's.

Given that Pence is notoriously meticulous with things, it's likely that his aides put classified documents in files to be sent back to Indiana when Pence's vice presidential term ended without his knowledge.  The same is probably true for Biden, whose stash of classified documents go back to his vice presidential terms and his Senate tenure.

The National Archives and the Justice Department are urging all former Presidents and Vice Presidents to check for classified documents in their possession.  Jimmy Carter likely has a file pertaining to Lithuanian freedom fighters' plans against the Red Army, or maybe a document specifically explaining to the President why the Desert One hostage rescue was never going to work. 

And as the current President's files have had to be searched for classified documents from his days in the Senate, it's very likely that the current Vice President's files will be searched for classified documents from her days in the Senate, and the FBI will find . . . nothing.

And at that point, MSNBC's Zerlina Maxwell will insist that Kamala Harris must run for President in 2024 because, once again, it's up to black women to save America.

Because, you know . . . white guys can't file.  They can't type either, nor can they even answer the phone. 

On a more serious note, pundits think the discovery of classified documents in Pence's home defuses any political concerns over Biden.  Alas, it might also help Trump keep out of jail. 

The January 6 Hearings - Part Eight

The public hearings of the U.S. House select committee investigating the January 6 attempt to stop the certification of the presidential election of 2020 are over until the fall, but they went out for the summer with a bang.

The committee, under the stewardship of Vice Chair Liz Cheney (Chairman Bennie Thompson came in remotely due to a COVID infection), illustrate how Donald Trump spent the three hours and change - 187 minutes to be exact - in which the insurrection at the Capitol took place.  He made no effort to contact the military or law enforcement even as is top advisers and even his daughter Ivanka urged him to call off his dogs.  The government officials who were trying to do just that were Senate leaders Charles Schumer and Mitch McConnell and Vice President Mike Pence.  Pence was closer to the insurrectionists seeking to make him the first Vice President to be assassinated than many people originally suspected, and  many agents protecting the Vice President were convinced they weren't going to get out alive.  Trump's two tweets during the insurrection only egged on the insurrectionists to do their worst.

Here's how afraid people are to testify against Trump: The agents protecting Pence testified anonymously.

I know it may be in bad taste to make light of that, but before the hearing, the committee reported that these agents would testify in disguise, which intrigued CNN anchor Jake Tapper.  I was hoping they'd testify in public, possible wearing ski masks, fake beards, or from behind a partition, but in fact they audio-recorded their testimonies in advance and their voices were distorted.  Mascot costumes would have been a neat way to disguise them for public testimony, or maybe painted clown faces, but you can't have everything.

Here's one funny detail: Although Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri expressed solidarity with the insurrectionists-to-be as he entered the Capitol to take part in the certification of the electoral votes of the 2020 presidential election . . .

. . . he high-tailed it out of there when they came in with full guns a-blazin' - he was HAWLIN' ASS!

Fa-fa-fa-fa, fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-far better . . ..  Run, run, run, run, run, run, run away! 😛

But even this wasn't as much of a hoot as the outtakes of Donald Trump trying to tape a statement the next day condemning the violence he encouraged without selling himself out - and refusing to say he lost the election.  Or the word "yesterday."  Man, that was more entertaining than finding the lost take of Bob Dylan singing "She's Your Lover Now" in its entirety!

Representative Cheney ended the hearing applauding the patriotism of Trump supporters but declaring that they'd been had by Trump, especially those of them who chose to take part in the insurrection.  She probably had as much luck reaching them as Abraham Lincoln had in his first inaugural address when he urged Southerners not to start a civil war.  But Cheney, wearing white in recognition of the women's suffrage movement of over a hundred years ago, also made it a point to thank the many women - may of them loyal to Trump who testified against him and helped set the record straight.

Hint: She wants to run for President.    

I know this is going to upset a lot of Democrats, but the woman who may finally break the mother of all glass ceilings - in addition to saving our democracy - may be a conservative Gen Xer from the West, and not a coastal bourgeois liberal Baby Boomer.  But she will be from a dynasty.

I can't wait to see what the committee has in store for September.

There's still one thing I don't get . . . Jared Kushner was in the shower?   

The January 6 Hearings - Part Three

Or, sing a song of Mike Pence.

Former Vice President Mike Pence was the subject of the third public hearing of the U.S. House January 6 select committee, in which he was viewed as some sort of a martyr because he did not reject the electoral votes of seven swing states and did not declare Donald Trump the winner of the 2020 presidential election.  Pence's top aides and retired federal conservative judge J. Michael Luttig made it clear that Pence could not  negate Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election and declare Trump the winner, even though right-wing attorney John Eastman (not Linda McCartney's brother) was telling Pence that he could . . . while knowing full well that what he was proposing was illegal!  Eastman was left hoping for a pardon, which he may still get as early as January 2025.  

Mike Pence, however, shouldn't be exalted for doing the right thing, though, not even after the mob camethisclose to getting their hands on them and made him the first Vice President of the United States to be assassinated.  Even though Trump and Eastman pressured Pence greatly to do Trump's bidding - and at one point Trump egged on the January 6 mob to lynch Pence - Pence should have known as early as November 4, 2020 that he had no right to reject the results of the election.  If he had been a true hero, he would have made this clear right after the election, or at least right after Trump's election lawsuits failed, and such a statement would, while it may have not prevented a demonstration outside the Capitol on January 6, have likely prevented such a demonstration from turning into an insurrection.

Judge Luttig, by the way, left the January 6 committee with this warning.  Trump's threat against democracy is still ongoing, and he and his supporters are already planning how to hijack the 2024 election.  Once back in office, of course, Trump will likely find an excuse to make sure he stays in power after that.  In which case, we may be "celebrating" the nation's 250th birthday in 2026 with bayonets at our backs.     

Attorney General Garland, are you listening?

Sing a Song of Pence

Mike Pence just took a stand.

The former Vice President spoke at a meeting of the Federalist Society saying that Donald Trump was wrong when he said that the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which Congress is trying to amend to make its intent clearer, gave him the right to decide who won the 2020 election.  

Trump pretty much admitted to the coup attempt in 2020 and 2021 in a statement defending his novel interpretation of the Electoral Count Act.    "What they are saying," Trump said in reference to attempt so reword that law,  "is that Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away.  Unfortunately, he didn't exercise that power, he could have overturned the election!"

Pence made it clear that the opposite is true.  "Under the Constitution, I had no right to change the outcome of our election," he said, and he added that Vice President Kamala Harris will have no right to do so in January 2025. 

"Frankly," he added, "there is no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American President."

Meanwhile, the Electoral Count Act should be tidied up to make sure that a future Vice President will never again be put in the position that Pence was in - not to mention the fact the he came being close to being lynched.  Congress is working on that.  But it still may be possible for Republican operatives in various states to rig the electoral votes that reach Washington in the 2024 election to make sure that Trump - or Ron DeSantis or some other Mussolini wannabe - gets installed into the Presidency over the will of the voters.  We're still at risk of becoming a kleptocratic fascist dictatorship. 

A fascist dictatorship governed by a party that sanctifies violence as "legitimate political discourse" . . . something so sacred to today's GOP that Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are censured by the party for even investigating it. 

U.S. House to Pence: Invoke 25-4!

He won't do it.

Mike Pence won't invoke Section 4 of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution and remove Trump from office.  He doesn't want to make Trump, who can appeal such an invocation, angrier than he already is.  And that would be reasonable argument if Trump weren't so angry now, having lost business deals and his Twitter account, that there's no way he could be any angrier.   

If Pence doesn't invoke 25-4 per the U.S House's request, the House will have to impeach Trump tomorrow.

And then he'll really be mad. 

Section 4 is the only section of the 25th Amendment that has never been invoked before.

Remove Donald Trump From Office. Now.

Donald Trump did this.

Donald Trump built up a base of rabid right-wing populists to sustain his lust for power and managed to fool enough people into believing that he was looking out for their interests when he was only looking out for his own.  He used that deception to enrich himself and his cronies - but mostly himself -  and give himself so much power through the office of the Presidency that he though the could serve as President for life and exact every last bit of power he could to make himself omnipotent.  He also lied to his supporters and convinced them that he had been rightfully re-elected against President-elect Joe Biden and, refusing to concede, urged them to "stand by" against the liberals, the minorities, the elites, and the so-called Deep State before exhorting them to march to the Capitol on the day of the congressional certification of the electoral vote for President and Vice President.  When they approached the Capitol, the inevitable happened.  

Trump specifically told his supporters to march on the Capitol to force his re-election.  His minions in Congress aided and abetted in planning to dispute the electoral votes of no fewer than six states.  He even tried to get Vice President Mike Pence to invalidate the vote, something Pence was constitutionally  unable to do and something he refused to do.  All indications are that Trump was enjoying the spectacle watching it on TV form the White House.  He has since condemned the violence, but without much if any sincerity, spewing lies about how he wanted and tried to bring order to the chaos by calling out the National Guard (Pence and the Defense Department actually did that).  All Trump did was throw his own supporters under the bus.  With the electoral vote having been certified for Joe Biden, Trump now admits he will no longer be President after noon on January 20.  But here's the problem - he will still be President before then.

In the eleven days left in his "Presidency," Trump, who remains deluded by his own lies, has control over the nuclear codes and has the ability to do a lot of damage even without launching a nuclear missile to some place like Iran.  Five people already died at the Capitol this past week because of him.  He is dangerous.  He must be removed immediately and Mike Pence should be President in the waning days of the current presidential term.  If the Vice President himself won't confer with what's left of the Cabinet (Elaine Chao, the Secretary of Transportation, has resigned, as has Education Secretary Betsy DeVos) and invoke Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, then Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer should do what they promised (or threatened) to do - impeach and convict Trump as quickly as possible.  I still doubt that Trump will leave the White House on his own despite his mealy-mouthed promise to do so this past Thursday, and so he must be removed by any legal means necessary.  The sooner the better.  America has had numerous figures from all walks of life, from politics to popular culture, that have brought disgrace upon this country because they have negatively embodied America in the eyes of the world, and I've written about a few of them here, but none of them have brought the magnitude of disgrace upon this country that Donald John Trump has.

It's time for him to go.   

The One Percent Fallacy

The conventional wisdom about Donald Trump is that he's always lying, like when he told a crowd at an Independence Day speech in Washington that 99 percent of COVID-19 cases are "harmless."  At the same time, Dr. Anthony Fauci says we're in a place that is "really not good" when it comes to the virus, with Trump, a self-professed "stable genius," countering that Dr. Fauci is providing a "false narrative."

"I think we are going to be in very good shape," Trump said, a sentiment echoed by Mike Pence yesterday.

Pure fiction, all of it, but Trump's comment about the virus being 99 percent harmless isn't technically a lie. It is a statement based on a gross misunderstanding of a fact offered up back in March by, ironically, Dr. Fauci himself.

Here's the deal.  Back in March, Dr. Fauci projected that the death rate among people who contract COVID-19 cases would likely be about one (1) percent.  That may have been so, but Trump has obviously taken this to mean that 99 percent of Americans who get COVID-19 would recover and be fine after that, just like most people recover from the flu - which, like COVID-19, is caused by a coronavirus.  But the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is far more deadly, as Dr Fauci noted that the death rate from the flu is 0.1 percent, meaning that COVID-19 kills ten times as many people as the flu.  And, truth be told (but not by Trump), those who do recover from COVID-19 can and likely will have health problems later on as a result of having had the disease.  

Oh yeah, Dr. Fauci's estimated mortality rate for this pandemic may end up being too optimistic. As of yesterday, July 8, 2020, about 3,038,800 Americans have contracted COVID-19, with a death toll of about 131,700.  Based on those figures, the mortality rate is actually 4.3 percent.  Though, to be fair, it was actually higher at the beginning of the pandemic.

And amidst all this, Trump is officially taking the United States out of the World Health Organization and trying to force localities all over America to reopen their schools for live and in person instruction.

The presidential election can't come soon enough.

Sing a Song of Sick Pence

With COVID-19 going full tilt boogie in the South and West, the White House's COVID-19 task force felt it necessary to have a news briefing yesterday, the first in two months,Missing was Donald Trump, who proposed his infamous "disinjectant" cure for the virus at the earlier briefing.

Vice President Mike Pence, in effort to put a positive spin on the COVID crisis, praised Trump for showing bold an effective leadership early on in the pandemic and cited as evidence the progress made by states like New York and New Jersey (wait a minute - don't they have Democratic governors who openly defied Trump?), as well as other states like Connecticut and New Orleans (wait - isn't New Orleans a city in Louisiana?), and went on to talk about the robust economic recovery taking place (with 13 percent unemployment?).   Yeah, we're doing so well, the European Union might ban Americans from entering their countries.  

Pence dodged and weaved questions about social distancing and wearing masks in public, and he was, tellingly, the only member of the COVID-19 task force who doffed his mask to speak but did not put it back on after speaking.  He defended Trump's recent rallies, citing the right of people to peaceably assemble without addressing the rallies' violations of Centers for Disease Control guidelines.  It's worth noting that when Pence started speaking, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, down at about 600 points, recovered a bit, going up to about 510 points or so below the previous close.  Once the media dissected and disemboweled Pence's remarks, however, the Dow reversed course and closes yesterday at 730 points down.

If Pence was trying to help Trump regain the initiative on the pandemic and bruise Joe Biden a bit, he failed spectacularly.

Is there any positive news from the task force briefing that isn't a lie? Yes.  Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been walking a fine line between leveling with the American people and not selling himself out to Trump, said that the virus could be contained and eventually extinguished if Americans do everything within their power to fight it, with a COVID-19 vaccine, which could be available within a year, being "the nail in the coffin" of the pandemic.

Pence's happy talk, meanwhile, was another nail in the coffin of Trump's - and Pence's own - political carer.

And To the Winter Olympics . . .

Finally - 2018 Winter Olympic commentary! 

Red Gerard (his first name is short for "Redmond") won the first gold medal of the 2018 Winter Games for the United States in slope-style snowboarding.  The 17-year-old Coloradan had a few tense moments in the liter twists and turned of his sport, but he managed to hold on and win an upset despite the heavy competition - much of which wiped out.     

I'm still having trouble telling the difference between ice dancing and pairs figure skating, but in the former event, there's no mistaking Canadians Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir for anyone else.  Virtue - who is definitely going to be on my beautiful-women picture blog when I return to focusing on athletes there - and Moir rocked, figuratively with their dance moves and literally with their choice of music - a medley of the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy For the Devil," a Latin instrumental version of "Hotel California," and Santana's cover of "Oye Como Va."  Hear how it goes - this pair is going to go gold like Red.

Speaking of the Reds, the North Koreans were at the Winter Olympics to take part with their southern brethren in the Games, and not just against each other.  The North and South Korean female ice hockey players are competing side by side.   And they got shut out side be side, losing to Switzerland.  But the big loser in the thawing of relations between the two Korean governments may be the United States; while representatives from Pyongyang and Seoul were talking and making nice - and South Korean President Moon Jae-in was being invited to go to Pyongyang for further talks to warm relations and cool tensions - Mike Pence, the Vice President of the United States, was being belligerent and rude toward North Koreans and also South Koreans by refusing to acknowledge the Olympic diplomacy going on around him.  More proof that the rest of the world has given up on Americans to do the right thing even if they have exhausted all of the alternatives.

But at least we're not the Russians, who have been banned from sending a national team because of doping.  Russians without a history of doping who are competing are competing as themselves, not as representatives of a country, which likely means that the only Russians you'll see at these Games are figure skaters.

Yevgenia Medvedeva is hot. ;-)

It's safe to assume that all of the Russian surnames at these Games will have the feminizing "a" at the end, yes . . .  

One more controversy about the Winter Olympics' location has also been settled.  It's spelled "PyeongChang," not "Pyeongchang" - the "C" is capitalized.

I hope that has cleared up any misunderstanding.

Trump's Olympian Disasters

With the Winter Olympics in South Korea underway, I was hoping to spend lots of time commenting on that and not so much on Trump.  But it seems that this White House can't stop creating disasters that are so Olympian themselves in terms of awfulness and size - we're talking Sgt. Pepper movie / Heaven's Gate proportions here, folks - that the Games threaten to be overshadowed. Even the Winter Olympiad itself has been sucked into the Trump vortex; Vice President Mike Pence refused to interact with North Korean guests at the opening ceremony in PyeongChang and showed no interest in inter-Korean dialogue going on there, rattling the saber against North Korea and making These States look more like a dumb brute of a nation than it already does.

And then there's Trump himself.  He's done too much in the past couple of days for me to comment on at length, and maybe even in passing, but here we go.  He just lost two White House aides who were forced to leave due to charges of spousal abuse, and he singled out one of those aides, Rob Porter, by saying he wished him luck in the future and thanking him for doing a great job.  Former Vice President Joe Biden said that Trump had no right to excuse Porter for such transgressions just because he was good at his job.

Trump even took Porter's side, saying that his denials of the accusations against him should be taken into account and that the rights of the accused should always be considered.  As the media have pointed out repeatedly, whenever it comes to domestic violence, Trump always sides with the accused men, calling for due process and saying they're innocent until proven guilty, but never takes the side of or even acknowledges the women making the accusations.  Of course, when Trump makes an accusation against someone, say, a woman - say, Hillary Clinton - she doesn't get due process?

Oh, right, Trump knows his accusations are true because he's a stable genius.

He may not be a stable genius, but he sure is an evil genius.  One week after releasing a politically charged Republican memo from the House Intelligence Committee on the FBI and the Russia investigation and angering the FBI, which wanted to keep the GOP memo confidential, Trump suddenly decided that he likes confidentiality and refused to release the Democratic rebuttal memo, citing sensitive information that shouldn't be divulged.  And he announced his decision on a Friday night, when no one would notice, Winter Olympics or not.  This blocking of the Democratic memo after the release of the Republican memo is the equivalent of giving a presidential candidate extra time in a primary debate and cutting off a rival candidate who seeks to offer a counterpoint.  But then, as a Martin O'Malley supporter, I've seen that firsthand.

It all boils down to one simple fact: Trump defends the accused when they're on his team, but not when they're on the opposite team.  If the accused are on his side, they're victims of politics.  If the accused are on the opposite side, they're being political.  And as for the idea that Rob Porter may be innocent of the charges against him . . . well, yes, I suppose that some men accused of rape or domestic violence are innocent, like Gary Dotson, the Illinois man accused of raping a woman who spent time in prison for it before DNA evidence proved that the accusation was a hoax.  But such examples are few and very far between, and even if you accept the idea that men accused of abusing their wives and girlfriends deserve due process . . . they can't all be innocent! Trump defends every man accused of domestic violence - even Rob Porter, despite the photographic evidence against him!  

Given all of these examples of Trump justice, it's no wonder that Rachel Brand, the third highest-ranking member of the Justice Department and a lifelong, loyal Republican, resigned.     

Oh yeah, the budget deal was approved while all of this was going on.  More on that some other time. 

As for the Winter Olympics, well, the opening ceremony was mostly a bore, but when South Korean figure skater Yuna Kim skated onto the pedestal to take the torch from two Korean female hockey players from opposite sides of the DMZ and light the cauldron, that's when it got interesting.  Because the best entertainment and celebrations of Korean culture came after the lighting of the cauldron.  Though, I agree it was moving when the North Korean and South Korean athletes entered the stadium as one Korean contingent in the parade of nations.  But please, please, no more terrible covers of John Lennon's "Imagine" at these things!  If John Lennon were alive today, even he would be sick of it.

Anyway, thanks to Trump and his ongoing dismantling of the American political system, no one cared about the Winter Olympic opening ceremony, and that's a shame.  It's going to take athletic performances that are beyond Olympian at these Winter Games to distract us from the Distracter-In-Chief.  Shaun White, Lindsey Vonn, Nathan Chen, Mikaela Shiffrin - I'm countin' on ya! :-O

The Little Guy Screwed - You Can BANK ON IT!

The U.S. Senate just used a sixty-day review period for a new regulation from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau - set up to prevent the banks from wielding too much power over its customers - to kill the regulation.  Had it ever gone into effect, this new rule would have made it easier for customers to sue banks for damages done to them; now, they can only go through arbitration, where banks have the upper hand, and there's no way that the rule can be reinstated in the future - ever.  Republicans in favor of the repeal said it protects smaller banks from frivolous lawsuits, but as Stephanie Ruhle of MSNBC said, even the smallest bank is more powerful than the customers it's screwing.  Vice President Mike Pence (above) cast the tie-breaking vote against the rule.  Well, you can't blame Trump for this, though you can blame the Republicans and also the banking lobbyists.

But you can also blame the Democrats in part for how we got here.  The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was set up to reign in banks after the 2008 financial crisis - which I call 9/15, as it occurred when the stock market tanked on September 15 - and that bureau was necessary due to the lack of a law regulating bank operations. There had been a law like that once . . . but the Glass-Steagall Act, which required the separation of commercial banking and investment banking, was repealed in 1999.  It was signed into law by Bill Clinton, a Democratic President.  After the CFPB was set up, the Obama Administration presided over a number of prosecutions of bankers for destroying people's lives.  That number, alas, was zero.   

And in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary/caucus campaign, only one of the top three contenders for the party's nomination opposed restoring the Glass-Steagall Act.

And here is that candidate.

Who were you expecting, Martin O'Malley?

In fact, here's what O'Malley said about 9/15:

Oh yeah, Hillary just turned seventy the other day, and having made it to three score and ten, she should just fade away (and so should Donald Trump, 71 - so let's get that straight).  But she's still out there, "helping" the Democratic Party while trying to make sure it stays on its current neoliberal, pro-business course, nearly a year after she - like the Democratic Party long before - became politically irrelevant.  :-( 

And now that this consumer-protection rule has been repealed before it even took effect, the news media can resume talking about the Kardashians or whatever. >:-(   

The Crash Years

The United States is the Howard Cosell of nations. That is, we're so wrapped up in our own self-importance that we have no idea how much the rest of the world hates us, at least until we elect a dim-bulb conservative to be our President - then we get a sample of such antipathy.

Ironically, Donald Trump is causing antipathy among European nations for having no idea how important we are to them.  He's had to have Cabinet members like Defense Secretary James Mattis, quickly becoming the jewel in the tin crown of an administration (though I'm willing to give Secretary of State Rex Tillerson the benefit of the doubt for now, and new national security adviser H.R. McMaster looks to be a sensible guy), assure European leaders that the Trumpster will not pull back from the NATO alliance in the face of Russian expansion.  Oh yeah, and we're not out to grab Iraqi oil either.  

Also, Vice President Mike Pence went to Munich over the weekend to reassure fellow NATO members that the alliance is strong.  The fact that he's a heartbeat away from ultimate power couldn't possibly have reassured the Europeans, though, because whereas Trump is a vulgarian, Pence is just a rube.  He denies climate science and evolution, and he tried to regulate women and preserve legalized homophobia as governor of Indiana.  European leaders tend to be rather sophisticated, like a gourmet meal.  Mike Pence is the political equivalent of ham and raisin sauce. 

While the United States tries to avoid a collision with its own allies (can you really call them "friends"?), the Democratic Party is trying to avoid an internal crackup - a crackup that, I believe, is as inevitable as Hillary Clinton's perpetual campaign for the Presidency if Clinton stooge Tom Perez is chosen as the Democratic National Committee's (DNC's) chairman.  Perez will undoubtedly push the party toward the Clintons' corporate agenda and split the party down the middle.  Diana Price of Inquisitr.com made this point quite acidly in a recent column in which she also noted that, while the Russian government may very well have colluded with the Trump campaign, the Democratic e-mails uncovered, whether leaked by the Russians or by WikiLeaks acting alone, showed how the party establishment favored Hillary and was pulling every possible trick to ensure her nomination at the expense of other candidates, including Martin O'Malley and the front-running anti-Hillary, Bernie Sanders.

"It's the height of hypocrisy," Price wrote, "for the corporate Democrats and the DNC to complain about election manipulation when the DNC emails leaked verify that the DNC - and former DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, in particular - was gaming the primaries for Hillary Clinton."  Not only were debates limited, but - and this kills me - there was widespread voter disenfranchisement by reducing the number of polling sites in some areas and many voters were purged from the primary and caucus registers. Among other things.  Now that the election is over, Hillary backers in the party establishment are not only unrepentant, they keep ignoring O'Malley and disrespecting Sanders.  They even got angry at Sanders for proposing that less expensive Canadian drugs be legalized for importation into the United States, a bill amendment that every Republican and also thirteen Senate Democrats - including the heir apparent to the Hillary faction, New Jersey senator Cory Booker - refused to support.  Also, Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison. the "Sanders Democrat" in the DNC chairmanship race, has actually demanded that Sanders give his mailing list to the party establishment, which would most certainly be against the wishes of Sanders supporters.

So, imagine what will happen if Perez is chosen as the party chairman?   

So, even if the Russians worked in concert with the Trump campaign - and that is a very serious charge, and one that is grounds for impeachment should it be proven - that doesn't change the fact that whoever leaked these e-mails only proved that the Democratic establishment, by trying to silence the anti-Hillary members of their party and getting them to hold their noses and vote for Hillary in November, is more to blame for Trump's victory than the Kremlin.  If Sanders or O'Malley had been the Democratic presidential nominee and WikiLeaks or the Russians or the Trump campaign or whomever found evidence that the Democratic primary process was fair and clean and that rank-and-file Democrats were happy with the nominee, there would have been nothing for Trump to capitalize on, and, likely thus, no Trump victory.     

Price sums things up nicely:

"With the huge grassroots following behind Bernie Sanders, do you really want to push that argument that Sanders is not someone you want helping shape the Democratic Party, and, in fact, Sanders is someone who offers voters an alternative party to Democrats? This is yet another example of the arrogant thinking by the DNC that voters have to choose either their chosen corporate Democrat juiced into lobbyist interests or choose a Republican. Apparently, the DNC and establishment Democrats don’t realize they are promoting a mass exodus and the demise of their own party with that argument and are incapable of learning their lessons."

A Democratic National Committee chairman who serves the interests of the Clintons rather than the interests of the rank-and-file party members will surely trigger such a mass exodus the same way Whig squeamishness over slavery triggered a defection of its northern and western members to the nascent Republican Party in the 1850s.

At which point Martin O'Malley will do what Abraham Lincoln did in 1856 - tell his old party to screw themselves and join a new party, in the present case a party that Sanders will have already formed.