Author: jamesgillen@yahoo.com

“There’s a special place in Hell for Republicans who should know better.”

-Steve Bannon

“Republicans did not win elections because they were popular, because they had good ideas, or because they had a mandate. They won because voters hated their opponent more, or did not hate them enough to come out and vote. They fail to consider that if you get voters sufficiently pissed off, that dynamic may reverse. ”

–Me

The Alabama special election that ended up pitting Democrat and former prosecutor Doug Jones against Republican Judge Roy Moore (that’s his first name, Judge) for the Alabama US Senate seat picked up a great deal of significance because of the thin Republican margin in the Senate, and over the course of time because of Judge Moore’s prior history of reactionary opinions and the bombshell revelations of his pursuit of teenage girls in his thirties. Jones won the election with 51 percent of the vote, very close but with a wide enough margin to avoid a recount. This doesn’t mean that Roy Moore is conceding the results. In statements after the election, he claimed that big money from the establishment prejudiced the results. If he really wants to get attention, he should blame the result on Russian hackers.

It is testimony to where American politics is at this point that when the racist theocrat with a rumored thing for young girls lost an election, it came as a surprise. It probably shouldn’t have, though. While Doug Jones was canvassing neighborhoods last weekend in the company of (mostly black) celebrities and Democratic Party figures like Cory Booker, Moore was conspicuously absent from Alabama, choosing to watch his son in this year’s Army-Navy game instead. Even before that he was refusing to make appearances in the state, almost as if he were embarrassed about something. Then, the very Monday before the election, Alabama’s senior Senator Richard Shelby – who had been a Democrat before joining the Republican Party during the Clinton Administration – told the press that he could not vote for Roy Moore, and instead cast a write-in vote for a different Republican. As it turned out, about 22,800 write-in votes were cast, exceeding the gap between the votes cast for Moore and Jones.

So, third-party protest votes saved the day. That’s not a phrase you see very often!

The election result is a critical blow to the Republican Party, and in retrospect it is a blow that is completely self-inflicted. Not only that, it is a catastrophe that could have been averted at several points.  It started when Viceroy Donald Trump decided to reward Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions for his early support by making him US Attorney General. (A decision he now has other reasons to regret.) Sessions’ seat was safe for Republicans, because the governor of Alabama was a Republican. However Governor Robert Bentley appointed state Attorney General Luther Strange to the post in February, despite or maybe because of the fact that Strange was prosecuting an impeachment case against the governor and had recommended that it be delayed.  At this point, Strange was to serve out the remainder of Sessions’ term which would have ended with the 2018 election cycle. However, Bentley ended up resigning over his various scandals in April and was replaced by Lieutenant Governor Kay Ivey. She then decided to hold a special election for the Senate seat this year. Bentley had ruled against a special election as Governor citing costs, but Ivey made the decision for an immediate election citing state law.  Again, at this point the seat was still assumed to be safe for the Republican Party. But then Roy Moore showed up. Despite Strange being supported by the national Republican establishment (including Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell), he was challenged by Moore and conservative Mo Brooks in the Republican primary. Strange won the first round of votes but failed to clear the margin for a runoff, which Moore subsequently won in August.

Even then, the expectation was that Moore would win easily. The last time a Democrat won a Senate seat in Alabama was with Richard Shelby in 1996, who again ended up turning Republican. Initial polls after the primaries had Moore leading. Even after the Washington Post article about Moore’s sexual history came out, Republicans rushed to defend him, including both Trump and former president Steve Bannon, both of whom liked Moore better than Strange to begin with. And Moore and his supporters continued to make statements that rallied the Trump Right and appalled everyone else. It culminated shortly before the election when a group identified as a “pro-Trump super PAC” got a 12-year old girl to interview him for a campaign video.

I enjoy a sick joke as much as anyone else, but there is such a thing as taking it too far.

It became clear long before the Moore campaign that the only reason one would have to vote for the current Republican Party is to flip off the liberals. And if that is all they have to offer, tweaking the liberals is a valid tactic only up to the point that it alienates the people who don’t identify with either team but may hold the balance in a close election.

I’ve often thought that the lesson of the 2016 election was that if making liberals cry was the only thing that mattered, then Donald Trump would have won the popular vote. And a lot of the Democrats’ problem is that they haven’t grasped this. But what Republicans refuse to get is that Hillary Clinton did win the popular vote because most voters realized that making liberals cry was not the only thing that mattered.

In his Politico column, conservative Rich Lowry offers a theory:  “We don’t know if Trump will experience a midterm shellacking on par with Obama’s in 2010, or, getting more speculative, go on to win reelection anyway. But every indication is that Obama and Trump are similar in that their signature politics work much better for them than their parties.” He observes that Obama’s charisma failed to attach to Democrats in the midterms (though the unpopular health care bill might have had something to do with that) and “(Obama’s) party felt the full fury of the backlash against his agenda, while he, winning reelection handily on the strength of his core voters, was held harmless.” Similarly with the current Republican ascendance, “all the people stirred up into a lather of anti-Trump loathing might want to do something with all their pent-up energy — like vote. With Trump nowhere near a ballot for the next three years, the only alternative is to take it out on the nearest person with an “R” next to his name.”

What that means is that just because the Republicans got one retarded howler monkey in a suit elected, that doesn’t mean the trick will work twice now that the novelty has worn off. Especially now that people have seen what the monkey will do with an executive order.

Yet, if protest votes (or abstentions) made a difference, the fact remains that for a large part of election night Moore held the lead in the vote tallies, and it was still possible that Moore was going to win the election because enough people saw his vices as virtues. What really tipped the balance, after 10 pm Eastern Time on Tuesday, was when the final reports for Jefferson County (Birmingham area) came in, giving Doug Jones his final lead. Jones won the most urban counties and got 96 percent of the black vote, and 61 percent of votes from voters under age 45. While Roy Moore did not receive the same level of Republican turnout that Donald Trump did in 2016, this election was determined by black voters.

If state laws – and their enforcement by Alabama government – are being skewed in such a way as to making voting at least inconvenient for black neighborhoods, and their votes still made the difference in this race, that indicates just how motivated the black community was.

Even then, it wasn’t necessarily because Doug Jones was offering anything. The Washington Post had an article covering the opinions of black voters in the state, with one woman saying “I obviously know what he did to prosecute white supremacists years ago, but I don’t know what he has done for the black community lately”. Another man went on Twitter saying: “”Today I voted to defeat Roy Moore because he’s horrible, not because I felt encouraged by Doug Jones. I still think Jones’ campaign was a mess that disrespected the Black community. I know other Black Alabamians felt the same too, but we did what was needed.” Certainly the fact that Doug Jones successfully prosecuted the two Alabama church bombers didn’t hurt, but the conviction was in 2000 for a crime that happened in 1963. Jones actually did the work and campaigned hard while Moore assumed he could coast on the votes of his base, but if the lesson for Republicans is that the base would vote for Moore anyway, the lesson for Democrats is that there were still almost enough Moore voters for him to win. In both cases, the potential for error was in taking the voter base for granted, as Democrats have been doing for quite some time. It remains to be seen whether either party will learn that point.

In retrospect, it turns out I was right in another column:

“You might remember that in 2012, after Mitt Romney lost a presidential run to incumbent Barack Obama, the Republican National Committee commissioned a “growth and opportunity project” –  more commonly referred to in the press as their post-election ‘autopsy’ – in which the feedback they got in surveys, focus groups and other methods indicated that the GOP was faulty at ‘messaging’, that young people in particular ‘are rolling their eyes at what the Party represents’ and ‘many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.’ The proposed solution was for the party to ‘stop talking to itself,’ basically meaning outreach to other people who don’t already agree with the doctrinaire Republican position, as opposed to catering to the stupid bigots fortified by talk radio and alternative media. And the response from the ‘base’ and Republican organizers in the 2014 midterms was ‘we SHOULD TOO cater to the stupid bigots, because they’re the ones who show up and VOTE, and vote for the hardcore conservatives who fight for us.”

“…Now, as with the Romney Autopsy, Democrats ought to do the opposite of what they’re being told. That doesn’t mean (you) should nominate another dull party hack who has no grasp of the victory conditions for a presidential election. It also doesn’t mean you should emulate Republican psychology. You will never top Republicans when it comes to tribal, us-versus-them, persecution-complex, ‘the only way to stop Satan is to self-lobotomize and vote for the lesser asshole’ mentality, and if you try, you will defeat the purpose of claiming to be different from them. But you can learn what they learned from their defeat: First, find the people who will vote for you no matter what, and cater to them. Second, wait for their leader to show up.”

When the Republican Senate passed its tax “reform” bill just after midnight on December 2, journalist Kurt Eichenwald sent this tweet: “America died tonight. Economic suicide adopted to feed the insatiable greed of donors, who have been refusing to dole out $ to GOP until they got their tax cuts. Voters fooled by propaganda and tribal hatred. Millenials: move away if you can. USA is over. We killed it.”

I wouldn’t be quite THAT pessimistic, but we are seriously running out of options, given that one ruling party (the Democrats) are not currently in power and doesn’t have any ideas for how to turn things around if they were, while the current majority (Republicans) are not merely mistaken but outright destructive.

The actual tax reform bill as passed by the Senate still included several points amended on the copies with markers. This is going to come back and bite Republicans in the ass when they find out the (“) symbol means inches and not feet.

What we have is being passed off by liberals as “economic libertarianism.” Which is BS. Of course I’m going to say that because I’m a Libertarian. But assume that economic libertarianism is based on the axiom “taxation is theft.” (Not like liberals have given a better definition of it.) You can say that that attitude is blinkered and just plain wrong. But even taking it at face value, it would mean that we should tax as few people as possible, and as little as possible. What this bill is is a scheme to have as few people as possible pay as little as possible while in many areas, we are maintaining or even expanding government spending on the backs of the other income levels by removing the exemptions and services that will be given to the upper income levels. In other words, it would be a tax increase on many of us. Hardly libertarian.

The thing that neither the Left nor the Right are willing to admit is that if you already have wealth and power, you don’t need the government to give you more. That is not why a (classically) liberal democratic republic exists. In fact, the Founders created this country to rebel against the previous paradigm where a government was set up specifically to take the resources of the majority and use them solely for the benefit of the hereditary elite. This idea may stick in the craw of America’s “conservatives”, but then the idea that “all men are created equal” offended a lot of people, too.

But if it’s easy for liberals to say that libertarianism (whether of the Republican or Libertarian Party variety) is just a giveaway to the rich, and if the rest of the country more or less accepts that, that’s because the primary promotion of an economically libertarian or “fiscally conservative” platform is that of Paul Ryan and his ilk. And the result does more to promote socialism than anything the Left could come up with on their own merits.

What’s really sad is that the reason for pushing so hard on a bill that practically nobody wants is that the Republicans care more about their wealthy donor class than voters (given how much they gin the election system to keep safe seats, and how little Republicans care about what their own party does to them). There’s just one problem. The “fiscally conservative” Republicans were so eager to stick it to blue states with their plan that they alienated wealthy donors in those states, since the tax “reform” eliminates a lot of the previous deductions that were given to residents of high-tax states like New York, where a lot the richest Republicans live. So according to the Washington Examiner: “I think checkbooks stay closed until they see how it plays out,” said Eric R. Levine, a Manhattan attorney and Republican donor who bundled contributions for Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., in 2016. “I’m not even trying to raise money in the fourth quarter.” Because donors “foresee higher personal taxes under a plan that axes deductions for state and local taxes without offering what they consider compensatory reductions in marginal income rates, even with the repeal of the Alternative Minimum Tax that hits many upper-middle-class Americans. They resent that the bill excludes their white-collar service professions — think law, finance, and consulting — from the bill’s lower small-business rate, even as it shrinks the corporate levy to 20 percent from 35 percent. ”

Oh, and it gets even gooder. Just today (Dec. 4) nymag.com had an article from Eric Levitz clarifying just one case of how Republican hastiness on the tax scam is already biting them in the ass. In order to get all the cuts the Senate bill needed while still adding only so much (just $1.5 trillion) to the deficit, McConnell had to scramble for other means of making up revenue. At present, the country has a corporate tax of 35 percent- which is subject to modification by various deductions, down to a minimum tax of 20 percent. The alternative minimum tax was supposed to have been removed in the first Senate bill, but in order to help make up the gap, they put it back in as part of the last round of wheeler-dealing. However, they forgot to lower the absolute minimum below 20% – which is where the base corporate tax rate is in the new bill. This makes all the various deductions and investments hitherto used to lower corporate taxes useless. Levitz quotes a Wall Street Journal article (paywall) in which the head of Murray Energy Corp spoke: ““What the Senate did, in their befuddled mess, is drove me out of business and then bragged about the fact that they got some tax reform passed,” Mr. Murray said in an interview Sunday. “This is not job creation. This is not stimulating income. This is driving a whole sector of our community into nonexistence.” Murray Energy, by the way, is a coal company.

All of which means that, given that Big Money is all that Republicans have going for them, dissension in the ranks makes it that much harder for Republicans to maintain the support they need going into the 2018 midterms. Midterms usually are a hostile environment for the ruling party, but Republicans made things that much worse for themselves with their legislation this year. Of course they felt the need to pass all the things on their agenda now that they finally had the opportunity to do so. Because they finally had a Republican president in the White House who would sign their dream bills and help them make America great again.

Yeah, about that.

On Friday December 1, former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn – who had already left his joint defense agreement with Donald Trump’s legal team – pleaded guilty to a charge of lying to the FBI in regard to communications made with then-Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak before Trump’s inauguration. And as predicted, later in the day it was stated that Flynn was in agreement to testify about his knowledge of communications between “senior administration officials” on this matter, the current rumor being that the main “senior official” being implicated was Trump’s son-in-law and Schmuck Without Portfolio Jared Kushner.

And in response, on Saturday December 3, Trump tweeted:

“I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!”

9:14 AM – 2 Dec 2017

Raising, among other questions, how did he know Flynn had lied to the FBI at that time?

To paraphrase Dr. King’s Bible quote, the arc of the moral universe is long, but Trump won’t shut his fucking mouth.

But later that day, the Trump team announced that Trump’s personal lawyer, John Dowd, was the one who drafted the tweet.  Oh, so that wasn’t Trump that posted that incriminating tweet, now that he realizes what he did. It was his lawyer. His PROFESSIONAL LAWYER. Who posted something that would tie Trump to the Flynn case. In Trump’s name.

Well, I guess that completely exonerates Trump. I mean, if this is what the White House sends out after consulting with a lawyer, imagine what Trump would have revealed if he’d just shot his mouth off.

(Dowd, by the way, was noted in Wikipedia as a Trump staffer who forwarded an email from a conspiracy theorist to conservative media saying that Black Lives Matter was infiltrated by terrorists and that there was no difference between George Washington and Robert E. Lee.)

I sincerely doubt that Trump’s lawyer posted that tweet. If only because a real lawyer, when asked to vet that statement, would respond by yanking Trump’s smartphone out of his hand, throwing it against the wall and then stomping it to a million bits while Trump watched, as a professional opinion on why that statement should not be made on Twitter.

In any case, this would beg the question, “just how fucking stupid do you have to be to believe this slimy criminal?” but this is the Republican Party we’re dealing with. Ultimately I have to attribute Trump’s motive in making that post to one of two thoughts:

“I can admit to anything because Paul ‘Paulie Numbnuts’ Ryan and Mitch ‘the Bitch’ McConnell will always be there to protect me”

or

“Somebody stop me. Somebody please stop me.”

Unfortunately it’s not that simple. A lot of Republicans might be willing to toss Trump to get Vice President Pence to take over, since he’s a more sincerely conservative Republican than Trump and would be less likely to incriminate himself on Twitter. However it may already be too late. See, the stated reason that Trump fired Flynn was because Flynn had lied to Vice President Mike Pence (who was running the pre-inaugural transition) about contacts with Russia. If Flynn lied to Congress about this, and this lie was the same thing he told Pence (according to big-mouth Trump) then if Trump knew it was a lie at the time and this incriminates him it is hard to see how it doesn’t incriminate Mike Pence. Thus, any charge that is substantial enough to incriminate Trump could also incriminate Pence for the same reason. If the President is removed from office and the Vice President is also not able to serve, the law states that succession falls to the Speaker of the House.

Which means that the acting president would be Paul Ryan. AKA “Paulie Numbnuts.”

Unless of course Mueller is allowed to drag this thing out past the point of the 2018 midterms, and in the perhaps 50-50 chance that Democrats can actually capitalize on Republicans’ unpopularity, then the third in line after Pence would most likely be House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi.

You know, the liberal feminist who at first defended John Conyers against sexual harassment charges and called him an icon of Congress.

Nancy “we have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it” Pelosi.

We really are screwed, aren’t we?

“The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

-The Call of Cthulhu, H.P. Lovecraft

Every so often when I get bored web-surfing, I decide to quit looking at political websites from unimaginative centrists and politically correct, virtue-signaling leftists and see what it is that is animating conservatives these days.

And then I remember why I quit doing that.

A primary example of genuine conservative intellectualism is at Pat Buchanan’s The American Conservative website, which aims to be something other than the easily digested grievance politics of Breitbart or Fox media, which doesn’t stop them from frequently arriving at the same place. The American Conservative (TAC) is often considered an exponent of the “paleoconservative” wing of thought, “paleo” being from the Greek for “old” (in contrast to ‘neo’) and analogous to the paleo diet (describing practices from approximately 2.5 million to 10,000 years ago).

Examining conservative arguments, it becomes clear that there is a clear and irreconcilable difference between libertarianism and conservatism, especially of the Buchanan “paleo” variety. Both conservatism and libertarianism hold that facts exist and are not subject to political correctness or social engineering, but libertarianism still has its classical liberal roots. Libertarianism still holds to a belief in humanism and the value of progress. Conservatives take most progress as a necessary evil at best. (What counts as unworthy ‘progress’, like the Civil Rights Act or the right of women to vote, depends on the individual.) But the common sensibility boils down to: everything sucks. The present sucks. The past is a Golden Age; while the exact time period and what made it good are not fully defined, it can always be defined in the negative sense that the past is always better than the present, and by extension, even this present will be better than any future. Thus the main duty of the conservative is to preserve or restore the old virtues against cultural erosion and fallible human nature, knowing all the while that this noble cause is doomed to failure. It’s a worldview somewhere between J.R.R. Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft.

The moral sense of this magazine is best represented by Catholic Orthodox Christian apologist Rod Dreher. Dreher is probably the most frequent contributor to The American Conservative, also serving as an editor. Quite a few of his posts are the sort of culture-war scares that he has in common with the hard Right. For instance the one where he reposted the picture of a drag queen reading to children at a library named for Michelle Obama: Xochi Mochi, a Satanic Latinx with cotton candy hair, cake-frosting makeup and four giant white devil horns as a crown. Dreher is clearly horrified by this person, and I can understand why. When a grown man poufs up his hair (perhaps to conceal pattern baldness) and then paints his face to a skin color unknown in nature, it has an unnerving effect on many observers.

Yet Dreher is not always so superficial. Indeed, with much of his blog, Rod Dreher writes extended, often profound disputations on the meaning of Christian faith. But as I read them, the more eloquently Dreher makes his case for Christianity, the more it reinforces my atheism. Dreher has written much about his own religious journey and how he had been a staunch Catholic before he investigated the pedophilia scandal within the clergy. Realizing that the Church at its highest levels would rather cover up to save its prestige than turn the criminals over for punishment, Dreher lost his faith and only regained it after shifting to the Orthodox Church. Such turmoil is inevitable when the institution you are depending on to protect tradition and morality is enabling the worst sort of depravity.

At some level, Rod Dreher must know that conservatives are doing the same thing that spiritually tore him apart.

And to Dreher’s credit, he (unlike Pat Buchanan) DOES recognize this and does care. In the last election, he registered independent and voted for a write-in candidate. But TAC is the crew he rolls with. And the contrast between Dreher’s conscience and conservatism in practice is simply an example of why conservatism is counterproductive at promoting a moral order, let alone a political agenda.

But that’s from the standpoint of religious apologism. In the secular political realm, most TAC columnists (who as of Thursday November 9 are oddly silent on the matter of the 2017 elections and the rumors around Roy Moore) focus most of their energies on stopping the menace of neoconservatism within the Republican Party (and analogous policies within Democratic presidencies).

Both “neoliberal” and “neoconservative” are legitimate terms referring to distinct platforms, but they are also general enough, and overused enough, that they are sometimes even conflated. Most often, though, it is a partisan attack made “within the ranks.” Left-wingers may hate conservatives and especially “neocons”, but they really hate neoliberals. With the paleoconservatives, it’s pretty much the same deal. But in either case, the speaker is drawing a distinction between his group, the authentic people, from the moderate “normie” sellouts. It doesn’t matter if our party has the White House and is setting the agenda in Congress. We know better. It’s basically doing to politics what Maximum Rock And Roll did to punk, with similar results.

Specifically in the case of neoconservatism, that movement is defined by roots in the anti-communist wing of the Left, but in the post-Soviet period continues to base itself in an aggressive foreign policy, military adventurism  and a support for Israel which is uncritical to the point of being counterproductive. Thank goodness, Donald Trump has put a stop to all that.

On November 1, frequent TAC contributor Paul Gottfried commented on the issue of the Trump-Russia investigation. Conventional conservative opinion is attempting to push blame for the matter on the Democrats for sponsoring the original investigation into Trump through the Fusion GPS firm. In “Why the Hush on Neoconservative Links to Trump Dossier?” Gottfried demonstrates TAC’s punk credentials by turning suspicion onto his fellow conservatives.

Specifically, the Washington Free Beacon was a conservative website that was noted as retaining Fusion GPS before the Democrats did. Gottfried says other conservatives didn’t delve into the true neoconservative roots of the Free Beacon, in particular that their editor-in-chief, Matthew Continetti, is married to Bill Kristol’s daughter. “The Washington Free Beacon has been a rallying point for neoconservative Never-Trumpers in Washington, and the hiring of Fusion GPS to go after Trump has all the hallmarks of their skullduggery. We shouldn’t be surprised that a neocon publication hired an agency to manufacture news against someone it was trying to bring down; it turns out that Trump, though, was too big a target for Kristol and his friends to successfully dispatch.” Gottfried continues, “I certainly do not blame the liberal media for describing the Beacon as a ‘conservative’ publication, or for tracing the controversial dossier back to ‘Republican allies.’ I heard the same stuff on Fox News, after noticing that Kristol’s son-in-law frequently appears on the Fox All-Star Panel. My impression is that the GOP media are unlikely to abandon their neoconservative buddies and sponsors—and there are very good reasons for this. They all depend on the same donor base, write for the same publications, and share the spotlight with Fox News. It would be suicidal for the conservative establishment to go after its neoconservative participants. Some alliances are indissoluble as well as extremely hazardous. Fox News might allow Tucker Carlson to occasionally rough up such maniacal global interventionists as Ralph Peters and Max Boot, but lowering the boom on their friends for what they can blame entirely on the Democrats would be another matter altogether.”

This line of argument stinks, and like a pig farm or the garbage dumpsters outside Trump Tower, the stench announces itself from miles away. Basically, Gottfried, like his publisher Pat Buchanan, has a common enemy with Trump in the “neocon” Republican establishment. So they’re willing to let the little boy have his tantrums as long as they do more damage to that establishment than to the institutions they want to preserve. But Gottfried, like Buchanan, is also smart enough to realize that Trump is too crazy-stupid to last, and even if he does, the real danger is that the longer he hangs on, the more of a threat he poses to those governmental and social institutions, and when he blows up in their faces, the fallout might disgrace their movement for years and let the neoliberal/neoconservative establishment regain status by default. So Gottfried and other TAC contributors have to build a preemptive case that anything that goes wrong with Trumpism is never their fault, and if Trump has his downfall (due to losing re-election, getting impeached, or hastily swallowing a chicken bone), then he was never really one of them in the first place.

At least Dreher is more honest about his motivations. Last week he started one piece by saying, “Sometimes it seems to me that identity politics and the collapse of the political center are pushing us all towards a prison-gang mentality, in the sense that you may not want to join up with the gangsters of your own tribe (white, black, Latino), but you do to protect yourself from the attacks of the other tribes.” And he concludes another essay by saying “As a registered Independent whose economic and foreign policy views are to the left of the average Republican’s, I would love to have the chance to consider voting Democratic in a national election, especially with the GOP in such a mess. But out of self-protection, I can’t take that chance. ”

Believe me, I can sympathize with that argument. But if being NotTrump wasn’t enough for me to endorse Queen Hillary the Inevitable, then simply being NotHillary certainly can’t be enough for me to endorse Trump now.

Silly me, I thought that if you hated a president who was a pathological liar, crooked real-estate investor, sleazy womanizer and all-around honorless weasel, the last thing you would want to do is support a candidate who has none of Bill Clinton’s competencies but magnifies all his vices to an exponential degree.

I mean, “conservatives”, your boy is the radical antithesis of what you say you want. It’s sorta like if the Russian Bolsheviks had tried to undermine global capitalism by replacing the old monarchy with a corrupt American plutocrat.

…No wait, it’s EXACTLY like that.

I had another idea for a column, but I wanted to deal with something that came up in the news. Thursday, longtime Democratic Party operative Donna Brazile wrote an article for Politico in which she gave behind the scenes details of the management of the Democratic National Committee, beginning with her own discovery that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had gained control of the DNC before the primary races were over, including not only fundraising but communications. And furthermore this was necessitated by the fact that Barack Obama had left the Democratic Party $24 million in debt in 2012 and had only paid half of it off by 2016.

First, a few points for consideration.

The Politico article is an excerpt from a larger book about the 2016 election which Brazile is now promoting. And in that regard, sometimes the best way to clear a room is to throw a grenade.

(The name of the book, by the way, is ‘Hacks.’ Which may be the greatest Freudian slip of the year.)

Secondly, the details of Brazile’s account of DNC finances are such that, in Clinton’s defense, she pretty much had to take things over. It does however bring up the question of how the party treasury got so bass-ackward in the first place.  Clinton herself has commented on this point after the election, saying that the party was “bankrupt, it was on the verge of insolvency, its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong”. But even if one sides with Clinton and her “this was messed up when I got here” position, it raises a larger issue. The DNC under Obama didn’t need to raise much money for a 2012 primary campaign when Obama was running for the nomination unopposed, but they hadn’t invested anything in state races. Further, Brazile found out that expenses in 2016 were double what they were when she was interim DNC chair five years previously – despite not needing as much staffing in that period. And when Clinton took over distribution of funds, she had promised to rebuild the funding of state Democratic Party organizations, but according to a May 2016 Politico article,  only 1 percent of $61 million raised got to those state parties. Indeed, money that one of Clinton’s fundraising committees had raised for state parties ended up being transferred to the DNC. The issue wasn’t so much that someone needed to take over financing and state party support after years of neglect. The issue was that even after Clinton took over, the Democrats were still spending too much money and not distributing it to state parties.

And as I’ve said at least once, it was obvious by the end of the primaries that the system was rigged against Sanders, AND that that’s not why he lost. What it really comes down to in retrospect is that the Democrats were the incumbent party in the White House with a popular but term limited president, and Barack Obama seems to have made a deal that Hillary Clinton would be his successor even if he never quite came out and said so before the national convention. This meant that she had built in advantages that would have accrued regardless and would have applied even if (say) Joe Biden had run for the nomination. Since Sanders had never run as a Democrat before, he didn’t even have Biden’s level of party support and organization, and in the long run that meant Sanders’ ground game was not where it needed to be to beat Clinton. But then, if Clinton was winning fair and square, then the party elite didn’t need to put a thumb on the scale, and if they wanted to retain the pretense of being “Democratic”, they certainly didn’t need to be so obvious about it.

Of course the fact that this news (or freshly-dug old ground) is not flattering to Clinton and the Democratic establishment has caused their supporters to come out with all sorts of defenses.

First, Clinton fans keep insisting that what Clinton did wasn’t wrong because the Democratic National Committee is a private organization that sets its own rules and contracts, and therefore nothing that happened was illegal. But that is a point frequently made by Brazile herself in her text.

Second, it’s one thing to look at the Bernie Bros and political novices and tell them “I’m sorry, but you just don’t know how the system works.” (Not withstanding that for some of these younger people, this was their first campaign, and after observation many of them concluded that the system doesn’t work.) It’s something else when you have Donna Brazile, who is a veteran operator, who was hired specifically to get party organization and finances in order, partly because she had served in a similar role before, and with that knowledge of finances she’s wondering how expenses got so out of control, and then you tell her, “you just don’t know how all this works.”

You want to know why I’d rather be a Libertarian than a Democrat? Because the fat guy in the Speedo has a better sense of optics.

But what gets me is that all the Clintonistas smugly demanding “SHOW us where what she did was illegal” are the same people who howl and whine that Queen Hillary the Inevitable wasn’t crowned by majority vote. And of course the reason for that is the Electoral College. That institution may not be moral or fair (at least on those rare occasions that it produces a result that Democrats don’t like) – but it IS legal.

Checkmate, atheists!

And the other complaint of the Clinton camp is that airing the dirty laundry is only going to hurt the cause. Aw, liberals. Are you afraid that Trump is gonna be mean to you? I guess it hasn’t occurred to you that Trump and Sean Hannity and his other court toadies are spreading baseless propaganda about Clinton and other Democrats. Are you admitting that you will suffer more damage if the critique is based on fact? Now you’re starting to get it. You don’t do the right thing because you think people will be nice to you. You do it because it’s the right thing to do. Likewise you don’t avoid doing the right thing because you think your enemies will be mean to you. They’re going to do that anyway. That’s why they’re your enemies. That’s what I tell Republicans. But they already know they have no incentive to be reasonable or bipartisan because they know Democrats will not accept it. Even if Republicans were reasonable, (which they’re not) Democrats would still say they were a bunch of meanie vicious ogres who want to ban abortion and force women to give birth to babies so that Republican billionaires can raid the maternity wards and eat them. There’s no convincing them. But some people haven’t made up their minds yet. So when you know that the enemy is going to make stuff up, the last thing you want to do is make their job easier and your job harder by giving your enemy real ammunition. Like, if you are a Republican and you keep going on about the value of life and the need to stop abortion, and then you support a tax “reform” that kills the credit for adoption, it makes people on the outside wonder how seriously you take this “pro-life” jazz. The point is, if you’re a Republican, that’s on YOU.

Similarly, Democrats: you don’t shoot the messenger because the truth hurts you politically. If the truth hurts, that’s your problem. Viewing Brazile’s piece solely in terms of how it hurts Democrats and wishing it hadn’t been brought up makes you look disingenuous, scared of reality, and desperate to control the narrative. In other words, it makes you look like a Clinton.

In some sense it doesn’t matter if you do the right thing or not, because some people will vote for your party no matter what, and others won’t, no matter how unqualified their party’s candidate is. On the other hand, some people are not yet committed, or a mix of liberal and conservative attitudes, or don’t vote for either party because they think they’re both crooked. Some of those you might be able to sway. And given the margins of victory in Trump’s states, the need for those people means that sometimes the truth MIGHT matter as much as propaganda. Some liberals tell me that’s not true, that everything is so hyper-partisan that people will vote for their chosen party regardless. Not so. Otherwise if Democrats outnumber Republicans overall and are dominant in the high-elector-value states, Democrats will usually win. What happened was that a lot of people who voted Obama in 2012 did not vote, or voted for Trump, in 2016. Just as a lot of the white conservatives who voted for Trump last year did not vote for Romney in 2012, because they were just as demoralized by their plastic faker as liberals were by the plastic faker they had last year.

I was telling a Bernie supporter on Facebook that stuff like this will do more damage to the “Democratic” party institution than Uranium One, Seth Rich or whoever Hillary’s elite Ninja squad was supposed to have assassinated this week. Because unlike the Fox News rumor mill, this is independently verified and confirmed by a Clinton partisan, who was a partisan BECAUSE she was hired to do a job and serve the Party, and that meant she expected her party to know shit from Shinola and be up to the task of defeating the most unqualified and malevolent candidate in American history. Clearly, they were not.

Which brings me to my final point.

If I agree with Democratic partisans on anything, it’s this: January is coming up, and Democratic candidates are going to have to start their engines for the midterm races. That means the party needs to get its act together and work in the same direction. But that can’t happen if it keeps rehashing The Election, and liberals can’t stop rehashing the election because the institutional Democratic Party won’t accept that they can’t win by resetting reality to October 2016 and then saying that everything is fine. In the same regard, they’re not going to fix the country just because a Democrat is president. After all, that was our situation a year ago.

An older column, but perhaps useful for reference.

 

Yeah, What ABOUT Ukraine?

This is the text of an email that I sent to the office of Jeff Flake (R.-Arizona).

Dear Mr. Flake:

On Tuesday October 24, you made a public announcement that you were not going to run for re-election to the Senate in 2018, on the same day making a speech to the Senate explaining your reasons. Among other things, you said “our democracy is more defined by our discord and our dysfunction than it is by our values and our principles… We must never regard as ‘normal’ the regular and casual undermining of our democratic norms and ideals.” Without referring to Donald Trump by name, you specifically said: “Mr. President, I rise today to say: Enough. We must dedicate ourselves to making sure that the anomalous never becomes normal.” But you concluded by saying that you had to address this matter by retiring at the end of your term, because: “It is clear at this moment that a traditional conservative who believes in limited government and free markets, who is devoted to free trade, and who is pro-immigration, has a narrower and narrower path to nomination in the Republican party – the party that for so long has defined itself by belief in those things. It is also clear to me for the moment we have given in or given up on those core principles in favor of the more viscerally satisfying anger and resentment. To be clear, the anger and resentment that the people feel at the royal mess we have created are justified. But anger and resentment are not a governing philosophy.”

The reaction among Beltway liberals and even conservatives was not entirely sympathetic. Many wondered why you would refuse to fight against a system that you now consider intolerable, while others pointed out that the fact that one can only speak out by refusing to participate in it is the reason it cannot be reformed. But the general mood was one of disappointment. I have even seen one columnist (David Faris, at The Week) say that you and Bob Corker ought to defect to the Democrats if you really want to make a difference by tilting the balance. I can understand why you would dismiss such an appeal. It’s not like Democrats are doing very well on their own merits. Moreover, liberals who seriously proffer such an idea severely underestimate the cultural gap that has to be crossed, especially on issues like abortion rights. They don’t understand the level of persecution complex in conservatism, just as they overestimate their own capacity to argue in good faith. When a leftist says “be reasonable and compromise with us!” the right-winger hears “You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.”

But your party already has been assimilated, hasn’t it?

You may disagree, but I’ve thought that the pathologies behind Trump were long-developing before he decided to run for office, and that the Republican Party already was more his party than your party. They were just waiting for Trump to show up. As Jonathan Chait put it in a short but potent piece for New York Magazine, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/10/jeff-flakes-rousing-speech-illustrates-trumps-hold-on-gop.html “The conservative identity of the modern party is a function of elites harnessing ethno-nationalist resentment, and using it to advance a policy agenda favored by conservative elites. At times they have succeeded (a series of tax cuts) and at times they have failed (attempting to privatize Social Security and reform immigration). But they largely declined to question the underlying cast of their party and their method of using one kind of political appeal to harvest votes, and using the power acquired thereby on another kind of policy altogether. Trump stole their base from them fair and square by appealing directly to what they wanted. ”

If you believe that anger and resentment are not a governing philosophy, and if you also believe that it is now prohibitively difficult for a Republican like you to succeed in the Republican Party, then you must realize that there is no longer a party there worth supporting. At the same time you want to have genuine political competition, which cannot happen by defecting to the Democrats. But what is really necessary is to realize that this is not a matter of “waiting for the fever to break.” It is not a matter of waiting until Trump is not president anymore and assuming things will get back to normal. Things will not get back to normal. Because “normal” was a dysfunctional political system that was not serving the voters, and that is why they ended it.

For one thing, you have to ask yourself how much of your opposition to Trump is based on his policies (whatever they are, I don’t know) and how much is based on who he is. Put another way, would you still support the same agenda in the Senate if the president were, say, Ted Cruz or any other Republican? And then ask: Would the people who voted for Trump support your party’s legislative agenda if any other Republican were president?

I suspect the answers to these questions are Yes and No, in that order.

And that is why you did not call on Republicans to vote for Evan McMullin or Gary Johnson when you had the chance, it is why you did not make your decision until now, and it is why your fellow Republicans have yet to muster even that much courage.

Because you – and in the broad view, when I say “you” I mean the Republican Party collectively more than you, Mr. Flake – have operated on the same bait-and-switch that Mr. Chait implied in his piece, where the donor class that funds your campaigns wanted one thing and the people that actually vote wanted another and you were trying to split the difference and hope neither of them noticed. The result is that while you may think the Republican Party represented free trade, immigration reform, and small government, its voters wanted a Big Government that looked out for their demographic. Even now, the two factions are lying to each other, and lying to themselves. Steve Bannon, Trump’s “populist” idea man, is currently planning to take the scalp of every incumbent Republican Senator except Ted Cruz. Why? Because he, like Bannon and Trump, supports and is supported by the Mercer family. (Just as Bannon, Cruz and Trump are all connected to Goldman Sachs.) The people who claim they are going to “drain the swamp” are just as much a part of it as all the others.

Senator Flake, you correctly decided that the only way to win this game was not to play it. But that isn’t enough. Because walking away is not going to improve the system in the long run. In the short run it means that the forces currently in control will be able to replace you with someone more to their liking.

Returning to Chait’s column: “In his dramatic resignation speech on the Senate floor, Flake holds up as the solution the separation of powers created in 1789:

I stand to say that we would better serve the country and better fulfill our obligations under the constitution by adhering to our Article 1 “old normal” — Mr. Madison’s doctrine of the separation of powers. This genius innovation which affirms Madison’s status as a true visionary and for which Madison argued in Federalist 51 — held that the equal branches of our government would balance and counteract each other when necessary. “Ambition counteracts ambition,” he wrote

“Whatever its other successes, this aspect of the Constitution’s design is proving a failure. Ambition is not counteracting ambition. Members of the Legislative branch are able to oppose Trump only if they surrender their ambition. The Constitution did not anticipate the role that would be played by political parties, which has created a reality in which the Legislative and Executive branches are either set in implacable opposition to each other (if under split control or in which the former is a tool of the latter (if under unified control). ”

This is an issue with the system regardless of who the president is. It was a problem with the Democrats under Barack Obama and especially under Bill Clinton. But until now it was not a national security issue.

Donald Trump did basically the same thing as Bernie Sanders, running for the nomination of a major party that he never really belonged to and had never served in office under, because that would have been easier to run for the general election than as an independent. But in Trump’s case, it was also because he knew that an effective sub-branch of government would have no choice but to do what he says. There are reasons why Sanders failed and Trump succeeded, but mostly because the two parties were not in the same situation. The Democrats had a popular incumbent president who (along with senior leadership) decided it was Hillary Clinton’s “turn” after agreeing to support his nomination in 2008. Thus the party put its thumb on the scales during primary season. Moreover, Sanders really didn’t have much of a support base in the South, where he really needed to pick up votes. Whereas not only did Trump appeal to Republicans who felt like they weren’t being listened to before, the Republican leadership was so desperate for power after eight years out of the White House that they would say anything, promise anything and break any other promise to follow somebody who looked like a winner. And so, they did. And they, and you, continued to support him no matter what shameful thing he did, because to you the shame was worth political power. And because doing otherwise would have let the Democrats win.

And so your party continues to support Donald Trump, who is doing that much more than the Democrats to undermine traditional morality and the institutions of government, precisely because you are enabling him to do so.

The party system has become like a cancer on the body politic, and like a cancer, it turns the healthy processes of a body against itself in order to grow.

It cannot be allowed to continue this way. But it will do so unless it is stopped. And you are one of the few people who is in position to do something about it.

My suggestion: change your party registration and run for re-election under the Libertarian Party.

Republican voters are all angry at the leadership, but whereas the Trump fans were mad at them for not making the country a police state, the rest of us were angry at them for going too far in that direction. Your party leadership blew us off because compared to the amount of nativists out there, you decided there weren’t enough of us. But the nativists are all with Trump now. So we’re going to have to be enough.

Your base will have to be the people who have no base. The rest of us. The people who, like you, saw what was happening to the political system and decided we wanted no part of it.

Would running as a Libertarian spoil the next Senate election? The question is, spoil it compared to what? That is a choice every potential candidate has to make if for one reason or another they can’t get a major party nomination. As journalists have pointed out, both Lisa Murkowski (a Republican primaried by the Tea Partiers) and Joe Lieberman (a Democrat primaried for not being left-wing enough) did end up making independent runs and winning re-election without a party. You already are facing the choice of a party that betrays your principles versus a party that always opposed your principles. There would have been some measure of grief if you had acted on principle earlier, but not nearly as much as the amount you have to face now that you’ve painted yourself into a corner.

Doesn’t running as a Libertarian mean abandoning conservative principles? What principles are those, or rather, what principles do conservatives still have in practice? Are you worried that you would have to give up being anti-abortion? The Libertarian Party is not as specific on the issue as the Democratic Party. The party platform (at lp.org) says: “Recognizing that abortion is a sensitive issue and that people can hold good-faith views on all sides, we believe that government should be kept out of the matter, leaving the question to each person for their conscientious consideration.” In any case, weighing the unknown number of potential unborn versus the thousands upon millions of people in Korea, Japan and the United States being endangered by Donald Trump’s vanity, the matter of being “pro-life” is a simple question of priorities.

But you said you didn’t want to go through the stresses of running a campaign. Well, that’s the beautiful part. If you’re running as a Libertarian, you won’t have to run all across the country, hat in hand, schlepping for campaign contributions. Because you won’t get any. Certainly not from the Koch Brothers, who are often cited as founders of the Libertarian Party but are not helping them now. It’s almost as if, contrary to liberal propaganda, corporate billionaires want a regulatory state, as long as they can control it. So don’t even bother. Just do your job like you’re doing now. In fact, you’ll have just as much chance of getting elected as a third-party candidate as you will by taking your current choice of action and not running at all.

What you will have is something no other third-party candidate has, and that is the advantage of incumbency. That in turn means you can use the media exposure you already have to promote a new concept of politics, that holds freedom of trade, freedom of movement and freedom of conscience as primary values, that holds the Constitution as the law of the land, not the whims of the political class. That is what you and a few other Republicans like Rand Paul have always said you believed in, but perhaps if you had gotten that across with your legislation, you might not be in this dilemma now.

If you don’t want to do this, that’s okay, but if you are remaining in the Republican Party for the duration of your term and thereafter, that means you are going to have to answer some questions when, not if, they come up. Like, if “Chemtrail” Kelli Ward is nominated to take your seat, will you endorse her, for the sake of party? Or will you say that there are bigger issues than party? If you don’t run as a Libertarian, if you don’t at least try to get out of the trap, then you’re in the same situation you are now: wait until the primary and watch a Trump sycophant take your nomination or wait until next November and watch a Democrat take the seat. Quite likely both. At least this way you can try to change the terms of debate, and that is the only way anything can start to improve.

Because like I said, Mr. Flake, some of us already made your decision some time ago. We did not know exactly how the crisis would manifest, but we knew something was coming, based on the decisions that Republicans were making, and we knew that the system they created could not last. As you came to realize this week.

As they used to say on the Left: If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

 

P.S.: The response I got from the Senator’s email was: “Thank you for contacting me. Because of the overwhelming number of e-mails I receive every day, I can only respond to residents of the State of Arizona.”