The phrase “autopsy” in regard to post-election analysis came about after the Republican Party commissioned a study shortly after Mitt Romney lost to President Obama in 2012, despite Obama not performing as well as he had in 2008. It was not actually called an autopsy, but that’s the phrase that developed in the political media. So ever since then an analysis of the losing party’s campaign in an election has been referred to as such, except of course, for the 2020 election, which according to the Church of Trump canon dogma that will soon be enshrined in official documents, Donald Trump DID NOT LOSE despite the fact that he’s officially elected the 47^th president and not still the 45^th. So here’s my personal analysis for what went wrong with the (Biden) Harris campaign and what Democrats could do better in the next presidential campaign, assuming they’re allowed to have one. I can only hope this is not the literal autopsy of the Democratic Party, but let’s see what happens in Trump’s first hundred days.

On Facebook, I’d posted a Reason Magazine article pointing out that after 2016, Democrats did, sorta, have an “autopsy” on the results of the election, saying “In fact, Democrats tasked then-Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D–N.Y.) with compiling an autopsy of the 2016 election, only to then effectively bury it: Maloney presented the report to lawmakers “during a members-only gathering at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee headquarters” in 2017, Politico reported, but “members were not allowed to have copies of the report and may view it only under the watchful eyes of DCCC staff.” Which is about par for the course with these people. And one friend, thinking that the premise of learning from the Republican victory was to be more like them, asked me, “If the result of the autopsy is, the only way to beat them is to be more like them than they are, what’s the point?” And I responded: “Winning. Without which being less like they are is irrelevant. Moral victories don’t count.”

The fact that the nominally democratic party is so elitist and controlling tells you a big part of the problem right there.

Of course learning from how the other side wins doesn’t mean you’re going to be as evil as they are. The Democratic Party is not run by a womanizing pathological liar and real-estate cheat. Bill Clinton retired. And it’s not like they didn’t learn from you. This election Republicans learned how to use early voting and mail-in balloting as opposed to acting like mail ballots were possessed by evil spirits.

I should have guessed that Nevada was a microcosm for the country. When early voting started I kept noting Jon Ralston’s blog on The Nevada Independent site, and he immediately noted that the rural counties north of Clark County/Las Vegas had a huge turnout for early voting and they were nearly all registered Republicans. Whereas Clark County normally has a Democratic “firewall” but it was very small compared to previous elections. Things picked up a little as it got closer to Election Day (and it looks like Senator Jacky Rosen and all Democratic House members got re-elected) but Nevada went for Trump because the early data was actually the trend.

Trump won with slightly less vote than he got in 2020, and he still won the popular vote because about 14 million people (at this week’s count) who voted Democrat in 2020 stayed home. Trump did not raise the “ceiling” on his support. Kamala Harris fell through it. And as Tom Powell Jr. on TikTok said, “when you don’t vote, this is the shit that happens.”

That should be the first lesson right there. Just as Trump picked up a lot of voters who you wouldn’t think would be the usual suspects for the Trump fan club, so too a lot of the people who didn’t vote this time and are not fans of Trump did vote for Biden the last time. The lesson is, you’re not representing those people. In the next four years, or however much time you still have left, you ought to go and search for those people in the neighborhoods you lost. Have your staffers “of color” talk to their own families, and their relatives, and friends and ask what issues they’re concerned about that they expect government to be able to fix. I don’t assume that gender-neutral addressing will be high on the list.

Secondly, as James Carville – a political strategist who won for you – is famous for saying, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Because clearly, even the horror stories about Project 2025 and the deaths of pregnant women in miscarriage because no one wanted to be accused of facilitating an abortion weren’t enough to deal with ridiculous inflation. Which HAS gotten under control now, but “under control” doesn’t mean prices have actually gone down. Knowing that you would be blamed, you should not have instituted inflationary policies in the first place. Or at least, not if you were going to let the guy who tried to seize control of the Capitol by force run free braying his stab-in-the-back mythology and using his fan club to bully the very Republicans he tried to kill to march in line behind him again. That’s another thing, you should have prosecuted Trump THE very day he quit being president and not fuck around for two years while he did all this. (Another Facebook friend pointed this out to me, and I agreed, and said, ‘that’s a great example of why we’re not like them, isn’t it?’)

The inflation issue brings up another relevant bit of advice: Act as if (even if it is statistically impossible) that all voters are dumber than a bag of rocks, only more opinionated. After all, the Republicans do, and look where they are. That does not mean being patronizing. That’s part of what got you where you are. It means, don’t just assume everyone knows the obvious, cause what’s obvious to you is not necessarily obvious to everyone else. Remember, a person can be smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.

Part of this means finding out how people actually communicate these days. Milblogger Jake Broe pointed out that for-profit corporate media is dead. And apparently Republicans figured this out four years ago. It was good that Harris appeared on Fox News, 60 Minutes and “Call Her Daddy” but they should have gone more in the latter direction with those liberal-leaning podcasts that exist. Broe says one reason they didn’t is because if you go on some podcast for three hours, you run the risk of actual conversation, and that risks saying something stupid. But he says the American people are ready for this. Maybe so. Donald Trump says stupid shit all the time.

The recurring point in all this is: Meet people where they are. Learning from the enemy does not mean becoming more evil and stupid than they are, because that really would defeat the purpose of winning. It means, learning what they’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. Specifically, finding out what voters want and presenting your agenda as being in line with their interests. Assuming, of course, that you know what your agenda is.

And this is all assuming that you’ll even get another fair shot at the White House. From what all the Trumpniks are saying, by 2028, I don’t think you will.

But hey, Democrats, there’s still all kinds of weirdo loner Republicans out there who want to assassinate Donald Trump, and nobody’s taking their guns away. So you’ve got that to look forward to.

RE: “He’s Winning This Thing“

Dear Andrew,

If there is anything more embarrassing than Howard Stern and Stephen Colbert fangirling over Kamala Harris in their interviews, it’s you fangirling over a candidate you say you’re voting against. Like when Trump describes his word salads as “the weave.” You really think that’s clever? When I think of “the weave” in relation to Trump, I think of something else coming off the top of his head. It’s like a thatched-roof cottage up there.

And when you say Harris’ answers to substantive questions are generalities like “I believe in building consensus. We are a diverse people. Geographically, regionally, in terms of where we are in our backgrounds. And what the American people do want is that we have leaders who can build consensus”, quite so, but at least air is a substance. As opposed to Trump, who in his Detroit speech said: “I said who the hell did that, I saw engines, about three four years ago, these things were coming, cylinders, no wings, no nothing, and they’re coming down very slowly, landing on a raft in the middle of the ocean someplace, with the, circle, boom, reminded me of, the Biden circles that he used to have, right, he’d have eight circles, and he couldn’t fill them up, but then I heard he BS with the popular vote, I don’t know, I don’t know, couldn’t fill up the eight circles, I always loved those circles, they were so beautiful, they were so beautiful to look at, in fact the person that did that, that was the best thing his, the level of that circle, was, great, but they couldn’t get people, so they used to have the Press, stand in for the circles, because they couldn’t get the people, then I heard we lost, oh, we lost, now we’re never going to let that happen again, but we’ve been, abused, by other countries, we’ve been abused by our own politicians really more than other countries.”

He’s winning this right now? What kind of country is this where he COULD be winning right now?

I agree with you on some points. Like, Pennsylvania being as central as it is, Harris’ running mate should have been Josh Shapiro and not Tim Walz. But exactly what “bold and risky” thing do you propose she do that wouldn’t piss off her voter group, which lest we forget, is basically everybody in this country who’s not already for Trump, and can’t agree with each other on everything, maybe not anything?

We can’t get Obama back. For various reasons, we couldn’t get Pete Buttigieg to run, and I think both of us would prefer that. But Harris would have both of them in her corner. And as I said: We could have Biden, and we all suspect how that would play out. When you said he should bow out, you knew what the options were. This is what we’ve got. And if you can’t back Harris, you know what you’re going to get.

I know Harris’ problems. But it’s a little odd that the Michiganders who hate how Biden-Harris have not stood up for Palestinians think that Trump and Jared Kushner would be any more sympathetic. I find it hard to be believe that all the people who voted against abortion bans and supported state abortion rights in the midterms would go along with a guy who is going to support a national abortion ban. (And don’t say he wouldn’t. I actually believe that the guy who was in the Jeffrey Epstein Frequent Flyer Club doesn’t really care about banning abortion, and I can believe that the guy who had Elton John perform at his wedding party doesn’t really care about persecuting gays, but he caters to the people who DO.)

I have been asking myself over the past week or so: How is it that Ruben Gallego can be leading Kari Lake for the US Senate race in Arizona by 10 points in one poll, incumbent Democratic Senator Jacky Rosen is leading Sam Brown in Nevada by anywhere from 2 to 13 points, and incumbent Democratic Senator Bob Casey is leading David McCormick by anywhere from 2 to 8 points, yet polls in all three states show Trump either tied or leading?

Is Trump really that popular and Harris really that unpopular? I wouldn’t doubt it. After all Trump was unpopular enough that he lost to Biden even though Republicans made some downballot gains in 2020. But Harris is certainly not as repellent as Hillary Clinton, and neither is Biden, though you seem to be actively repelled by both of them while you almost seem to admire Trump’s skill (or chutzpah) and obviously admire Vance.

But the “Lamestream Media” wants to make this a horse race to the very end, and Nervous Nellies like you are part of the project. If anything that might help Democrats get out the vote. After all, everyone thought Hillary had it in the bag, and we know how that played out.

Like I said, Andrew, you should really apply for a job with Trump’s campaign, or apparently, his Cabinet. Cause you’re giving him better advice than he’s getting. Or seems to follow.

Or, Donnie can just go along like he has been, like going to the Detroit Economic Forum and telling all the people in Detroit what a terrible city Detroit is. At this rate, he’s gonna win Michigan by 5 points. Not because Trump is so wonderful or because Harris is so terrible, but because no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

Does anybody remember laughter?

– Robert Plant, The Song Remains The Same

It is a truism that a major party’s political convention immediately boosts its standing in the polls for the general election. That was not as much the case for the Democrats in 2020, because they were observing COVID quarantine, and even with Republicans conspicuously avoiding quarantine for their convention, the mood was down, and their clumsy deification of Viceroy Trump didn’t help. And believe it or not, they went even further in that direction this year, and given that Trump almost got shot to death just the weekend before, it almost worked. But then he nominated would-be populist Senator JD Vance (BR.-Ohio) as his running mate, and then everybody realized he had no appeal outside the Trump base, and maybe not even with them.

And then, in the wake of Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance and Trump’s successful Jesus Christ Pose, President Biden actually agreed to do what people were telling him to do: Give up the campaign and switch endorsement to his running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris. And that gave the Democrats a kick, despite her lack of popularity and prominence up to then, because it was no longer a choice between two tired old white guys, either of whom might kick the bucket before 2028. And then, Harris chose as her running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who presents as a regular Midwestern guy much more successfully than JD Vance does, because unlike Vance, he IS a regular Midwestern guy. Not only that, he’s the guy who went on cable TV and casually described the Republicans as “weird”, and that’s somehow shifted the perception of them more than anything the Democrats have tried in over eight years.

And because of all that, whatever very slight momentum Trump/Vance might have had in the wake of their convention has completely evaporated, with Harris/Walz now leading in national polls and competitive in swing states that Biden was losing. And going into the Democratic National Convention, all the delegates that were previously won for the Biden/Harris campaign pledged themselves to Harris. So the question here is did this month’s convention give the Democrats the kick they needed to propel them to national victory in November?

Because to review, there is only ONE question that matters in the general election: Do you want Big Chief Ook-Ook Gorilla (formally known as Donald Trump) to be your absolute monarch, or do you want Trump to go to prison?

Those are the only choices, because Trump himself will allow no others. Because his own pride will not allow him to just peacefully retire like Hillary Clinton or George W. Bush. And because he has committed too many crimes, especially national security crimes, to be allowed to run free. And because he will not stop committing crimes, because he is a pathological criminal. It is patently obvious that Trump is running for president just to stay out of jail, and that means he has to be president for the rest of his life, term limits be damned. And because when the Supreme Court gave us Trump vs. United States, they enabled the President to commit any crime as an “official act” because they knew that if Donald Trump is back in office, he will not stop committing crimes. And when they used language that the president can act in ways ‘incompatible with the expressed or implied will of the Congress’, they are making it clear that the modern Right’s concept of government, Trump or no Trump, is explicitly at odds with the Constitution.

Stopping Trump is the ONLY thing that matters. Every other consideration, like, the fact that the cost of living is skyrocketing under Bidenomics and Kamala’s price controls are not going to help, is secondary. This is about whether we’re even going to HAVE an economy. This is about whether you’re even going to be alive. Or did you forget how many people died in 2020 from Trump Virus? ™

Night 1

It’s hard to say if there was an organizing theme to each night, the way the RNC was organized around one night being “Make America Safe Again” and another night being “Make America Monochromatic Christian Again” or whatever. In this case the DNC seemed to be organized simply around its keynote speakers for each night. It would have been Joe Biden concluding the convention with his acceptance speech, but of course that decision was made. So they gave him the keynote speech of the night, basically to confirm that he IS still the president of the United States and official leader of the Party – but things are moving on.

I wanted to listen to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ speech, but I couldn’t get through it. Actually, from what I’ve read of AOC and seen of her interviews, she’s one of the sharpest people in politics right now, but her voice creates a certain amount of dissonance. Basically she sounds like one of those squeaky Gnomes from World of Warcraft. Really, imagine her saying “You have a great day now!”

During the evening, Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow brought out a gigantic prop, which was an oversized copy of the 900-page Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” document drawn up by conservatives. In fact, the DNC brought this up a lot. In fact, they even had Kenan Thompson from Saturday Night Live come on with the book Wednesday and interviewing people on video call to ask if they knew about some of its provisions, like eliminating civil protections for LGBTQ people. In fact, the DNC did a lot more to highlight the prominence of the Project 2025 mandate in their event than the RNC did the month before. Why is that, anyway?

They had several union guys come on to testify that Trump is a “scab” (which he is) and would be bad for labor, as anybody who heard his conference with Elon Musk could confirm. Most of the union guys who spoke were all wearing T-Shirts to the convention. This is a trend I can get behind.

However they also had a brief surprise moment where Kamala Harris made an appearance on the convention floor to give a brief speech. Given how this resembles Trump’s need to monopolize his own conventions, this is a trend I cannot get behind.

The other big event other than Biden himself was the speech from multi-accomplished former Trump opponent Hillary Clinton. Which, given the circumstances, was very much an “I told you so” thing, even if she was fairly gracious in saying that this was Harris’ moment to break the glass ceiling. Clinton still comes off as Pantsuit Palpatine to me, but it is testimony to Trump’s cosmic scale of evil and incompetence that she seems that much better a choice in retrospect.

At the end of all this, they had Joe Biden’s family members (not Hunter) come on to give remarks, and then President Biden come on for his bowing out speech. And the massive crowd held it up with cheers like “Thank You Joe!” Eventually, he proceeded, and you could see why it’s been decided that Joe is too old for politics, like the fact that he couldn’t look at the right camera most of the time. But his speech was at least as good as the last State of the Union, and when he recited the poem ending, “America, I gave my best to you!” that was a truly great moment.

Night 2

The main event in what passes for actual business in a major party convention is the roll call of the various states and territories, announcing their delegates and formally nominating the president and vice president. That was Tuesday. It is of course a total formality (like the entire national convention) when everything is decided in advance, but parties still keep this tradition because it allows people to come up and promote their state with speeches like, “Mr. Secretary, from the great State of Nevada, home of Reno, the biggest small town in the world, home of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste suppository, and home of Las Vegas, the only city in the world where the hookers give out discount coupons.”

But this time, in addition to the secretary announcing the roll call, the DNC had an innovation: A DJ, who was dressed in a shiny blue suit and giant sunglasses like a gay Paul Shaffer. If that isn’t redundant. And this meant that each state got its own theme music, like Florida getting Tom Petty’s “Won’t Back Down”, Idaho getting the B-52s’ “Your Own Private Idaho” and of course, Nevada getting the Killers’ “Mr. Brightside.” The DJ party also set the stage for the surprise appearance of Lil’ Jon introducing the delegation for Georgia. The Democratic National Convention: Turn Down For WHUT?

The headline speakers of the night were both Michelle and Barack Obama, very appropriately, because while they are now old enough to be among the party elders with Biden and the Clintons, they remain as effective as ever on the podium. So after an emotive, call-and-response speech by Michelle, she introduced Barack, and by that point, the crowd were in his words “fired up” and “ready to go.” And not only did Barack Obama, like Biden, give an effective testimonial on the values and accomplishments of the Democratic Party, he peppered the speech with remarks (and at least one visual gag) belittling Trump. To me, Obama’s money quote was “We do not need four more years of bumbling, and bluster, and chaos, we have seen that movie before, and we know the sequel is usually worse.”

Which kinda brings up the question of what we would call Trump’s second term in office.

Trump 2: Electric Boogaloo

Trump II: The Wrath of the Con

Trump: The Secret of the Ooze

Abbott & Costello Meet Trump/Vance

Night 3

This night was the set up for Tim Walz to accept the Vice Presidential nomination. And the main attraction other than Walz himself was former President Bill Clinton, who is like Obama considered one of the great orators of the Democrats. Well, he was. Sorry, but good ol’ Bill’s voice is almost as shot as Robert Kennedy Jr’s, even if he’s clearly more on the ball than either Biden or Trump. Although I did like the part where he mentioned that Harris’ career in customer service made her the only presidential candidate who’s been in McDonald’s more than he has.

At least most of the speeches Wednesday were fairly brief, compared to Night 1. These included the aforementioned Thompson, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Andy Kim, New Jersey Congressman and Senate candidate most famous for volunteering to clean up the broken glass in the Capitol after the January 6 insurrection, and former Mike Pence staffer Olivia Troye. Along with the numerous other celebrities like Stevie Wonder who appeared, you had a central speech by Chicago’s own Oprah Winfrey, and while she pointed out that she was an independent, she made it very clear who she was voting for. In big, booming PRO-NOUN-Ci-A-TIOOONNS. Basically, Oprah was there to BE Oprah, and she did a very good job of that.

Before they had Tim Walz on, they brought on the players from the Mankato West High School football team where he’d served as an assistant coach, helping win the state championship in 1999.

Walz continues to come across as more approachable than most people in politics, including both Biden and Harris, let alone any of the Republicans. And in his speech, he continued to lean into his background, invoking his players as he gave a literal pep talk, saying that the Democrats are in the last play of the fourth quarter, down by a field goal, but they’ve got the ball. Like most of this convention, his speech did what it had to do.

To me, the two things that sold Tim Walz to me at least as much as his speech were: one, his son openly going crazy to see his Dad accept the nomination, and two, after the event, the Minnesota delegation stayed around for several minutes to wave giant cardboard Tim Walz heads, which I believe is a They Might Be Giants reference.

Night 4

And then of course we had the night for Kamala Harris. And there weren’t quite as many big names and they didn’t speak for quite as long. You had Senators Bob Casey and then Elizabeth Warren. The kind of person who would raise a cheer for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Al Sharpton came on with another one of the great visuals of the week, introducing four of “the Exonerated Five”, who had been arrested on suspicion of a violent rape in New York in 1989, at which point the media-seeking Donald Trump took out full page newspaper ads demanding the death penalty. The men were at one point convicted but then released years later when DNA evidence traced the act to a completely different man. But Trump has never apologized for his action, because reasons.

As cap off to the continuing parade of Republicans coming to the DNC to commit heresy against Our Lord and Savior, we had former Republican Congressman – from Illinois – Adam Kinziger come on. He said, “You never thought you’d see me here, did you?” And he told his fellow Republicans, “The Democrats are as patriotic as us.” (At which point the crowd chanted ‘U-S-A!’) And he made the direct point: The Republican Party is no longer conservative. It is a party in service to “a small man pretending to be big … a perpetrator pretending to be a victim.” There is a distinction between conservative and Republican because “Donald Trump has suffocated the soul of the Republican Party.” And he mentioned Ukraine and foreign policy, which a lot of observers have noted were not big subjects in the previous three days. And he said, “Democracy knows no party.” Well, the Constitution doesn’t, anyway.

We had another visual with Marine and Arizona Senate candidate Ruben Gallego appearing with a bunch of other veterans – including disabled Senator Tammy Duckworth – to present a contrast with Trump, who has praised our enemies and called veterans “suckers.” And after a bunch of other brief speeches, and testimonials on gun violence, and celebrity appearances, including Pink, they had Harris come on around 9:40 Central Time. And while I am not a big fan of her slow, almost preachy delivery, she hit all the right points.

She pointed out that not only is she now in a blended family (with Doug Emhoff and his children) but was raised by a single mom after her dad left and was raised partially with the help of a lot of other people who were not blood relatives. And that’s a situation a lot of Americans can relate to.

Harris made her case that in her California career, prior to becoming a US Senator, she was a prosecutor, and “for my entire career, I have had only one client, The People.” And this eventually placed her in contrast to Trump, whose only client has been himself.

She pointed out that Trump in the first half of his term did try to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, an Obama policy that was actually popular. She promised a middle-class tax cut (we’ll see) and she pointed out that Trump’s plan for a broad based tariff on goods is a “Trump Tax” that would pass down to all consumers. (Would that Democrats would admit that ALL taxes on production get passed down to the consumer. But it’s not like the Trump Republican Party is in position to argue that.)

She pointed out that in this country, pregnant women have developed sepsis and conditions that will prevent them from ever being able to give birth again, specifically because their states no longer allow abortion, which is a direct result of Dobbs vs. Mississippi, the Supreme Court decision that Trump frequently brags would not have been possible without his Court appointments. She also says that Trump is planning on a national abortion ban and other agendas like ending the Department of Education – which Trump has not explicitly endorsed, but many of his political backers have.

Harris said: “And let me be clear: After decades in law enforcement, I know the importance of safety and security, especially at our border. Last year, Joe and I brought together Democrats and conservative Republicans to write the strongest border bill in decades. The Border Patrol endorsed it. But Donald Trump believes a border deal would hurt his campaign. So he ordered his allies in Congress to kill the deal. Well, I refuse to play politics with our security, and here is my pledge to you: As President, I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that he killed, and I will sign it into law.”

She pointed out that while she, and Biden, have sought to preserve America’s strength and alliances abroad, “Trump, on the other hand, threatened to abandon NATO. He encouraged Putin to invade our allies. Said Russia could ‘do whatever the hell they want.” She acknowledged the rights of both Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza.

She said, “Our opponents in this race are out there every day denigrating America, talking about how terrible everything is. Well, my mother had another lesson she used to teach: Never let anyone tell you who you are; you show them who you are.” She wound up saying “It is now our turn to do what generations before us have done, guided by optimism and faith: to fight for this country we love, to fight for the ideals we cherish, and to uphold the awesome responsibility that comes with the greatest privilege on Earth—the privilege and pride of being an American. So, let’s get out there. Let’s fight for it. Let’s get out there. Let’s vote for it. And together, let us write the next great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.”

It worked.

Conclusions

You may have noticed that I generally don’t have a high impression of Democrats. I am not a liberal. I vote Democrat only to stop Republicans. But that’s okay, I don’t need to have a high impression of Democrats. The problem is my impression of the American voter is even lower. After all, Trump DID win once, and 2020 was a lot closer than it ought to have been, with Republicans winning a lot of downballot races and then taking back the House in 2022. If things are as close as they were in 2000, we will get another Bush vs. Gore, and this Supreme Court is that much more nakedly biased towards Republicans than that Court was. If it doesn’t go there, Republicans can still try to move a contested Electoral College result to the House of Representatives, where according to Constitutional rules the votes are by state delegation, meaning Republicans will have a majority.

The only way to prevent that is actually to do what Biden did: win enough states by wide enough margins that the Trumpniks can’t whine and bitch and steal the election result in all of them. And even then, Trump tried to take the government by force, though I assume that will be harder now that Biden-Harris are running Washington and not Trump.

So if it seems like my analysis of these speeches is on the optics and how all of this is perceived, it’s because that’s the whole point. It all comes down to perceptions. For better or worse, a Harris Administration is not really going to have different policies than the Biden Administration. So what changed, and why the change? Because everyone thought that Biden was lost and confused at the Trump debate, and he probably was, but that could be because he was actually trying to make sense of Trump’s continual Gish Gallop instead of staying on message. This whole change is about perception. The idea that the implementation of policy is going to be different under a young, female Kamala Harris as opposed to a visibly aged representative of last century’s career politicians.

And in the sense of optics, I return to one of those quotes from Harris’ speech: “Never let anyone tell you who you are; you show them who you are.” Because that’s how a senile career criminal like Trump could smear Biden as crooked and senile, and do it so well that people are actually blaming him for everything bad that happened in his term, including Roe vs. Wade getting overturned. The fact that Harris was under the radar for most of Biden’s term actually turns out to be an advantage here, because Trump was so invested in branding Biden and forcing him to play his game that he never considered Harris and now she has the opportunity to set the agenda, and she has.

In that regard, it’s that much more remarkable that the DNC went as smoothly as it did given that they basically had to redo the whole thing from scratch after primary season while making sure that the delegates already pledged to Biden moved over to Harris. The professional, dramatic presentation with lots and lots of celebrities indicates that the kind of people who know how to put on a show were very helpful in regard to arranging things. You could say this is just another example of liberal Hollywood and liberal musicians showing their bias for the Democrats. Or, you could say this is the media doing penance for foisting Donald Trump on us in the first place by taking a multiple-bankrupt investor and presenting him as an actual billionaire through the premise of “reality TV”, two words that do not belong in the same galaxy, let alone the same concept.

As of the weekend, most of the polls state by state are still within the margin of error, and RFK Jr. has decided to endorse Trump. Not like the Fauci-engineered-mind-control-nanobots-in-the-vaccine-for-George-Soros crowd were going to be voting for Harris anyway. But every vote matters. If Harris is going to have a chance to stop Trump, she needs to keep the initiative and keep Trump on the defensive. Fortunately this Democratic National Convention shows that she and her team know how to organize an agenda, and that is good news for the coming stretch, and hopefully for a future Harris Administration.

Well. Let’s see who ELSE is up this late.

Technically, this election is not over, because a lot of the urban areas in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia do not have all their votes in, but the problem is, Joe Biden is going to NEED those votes. At the very least, he’s going to need Pennsylvania.

So while there is not – yet – cause for despair, there is great cause for anger and depression.

This is NOT 2016. The Democrats had a candidate people liked, or at the very least didn’t have Hillary Clinton’s negatives. They had a huge amount of early voting, which is at this point the only thing that can save the election. Most importantly, it is that much more damn obvious what an evil incompetent Donald Trump is, and it ought to be obvious that we will not have an economic or coronavirus recovery as long as he’s president, because if he’s that half-assed about dealing with it now, how’s he gonna be when he no longer has to worry about the voters?

And YET, the Democrats didn’t get Texas, they didn’t get Florida. Nor was I expecting them to. But they didn’t get Ohio or Iowa, and they may not get North Carolina.

Worse, the overall weakness of the national results indicates that Democrats probably will NOT get enough Senate races to take that chamber.

And of course while Biden did the responsible thing and declared optimism at the eventual result, Trump – waiting until almost midnight Pacific time – decided to have a little news conference in which he declared that he was going to contest the election in the Supreme Court to keep votes from being counted, since apparently all the votes not yet tabulated are after Election Day even though they were in fact submitted by Tuesday. The childishness of this argument is demonstrated by the fact that the Trump campaign IS still contesting Arizona, where Biden is leading. But then, with Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, who knows?

The only good thing about this is that, as pundits are saying, Trump has been telegraphing this approach for some time, and likewise the Biden campaign has been taking all this into account, which is why they focused on taking the Great Lakes and Pennsylvania from Trump rather than going for big but tough prizes like Florida. Likewise the talking heads on TV have been warning us for some time that it is not uncommon for election results (statewide and elsewhere) to not be resolved overnight, Your Favorite President’s decrees to the contrary.

It’s just that it shouldn’t have come to this point.

I can sort of understand Latinos in Florida coming in so big for Trump, since Cubans and Venezuelans actually ARE familiar with one-party socialism, and unlike either duopoly faction in this country, actually understand why it’s a bad thing. It’s just that right now the party closer to that endgame is the one that wants to control the economy and the borders, with a Maximum Leader who swims in corruption and praises dictators, including Communist ones. What I don’t understand is all the white and black (but really, mostly white) people who by now should really know better.

What the result shows even now is that a critical percentage of Americans – perhaps more than last time – are either too stupid or too fanatical to acknowledge the evidence of their own eyes, even with Trump Virus on track to kill over a quarter-million people in this country before the end of the year.

Even if you don’t like the Democrats, or even if Biden ends up winning, that is a very, very bad thing for this country.

Well… I’m gonna do a few things around the house, and then get to bed.

Wake me up when November ends.

So, as Halloween rapidly transitions to Dr. Tongue’s 3D Election (Ooh, scary, kids) we have some things to keep in mind.

At FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver has all but wrapped up his own analysis of pre-election polls with his site giving Trump only a 10 percent chance of winning the election. It used to be at least 15%. “And if nothing changes at all in the polls, Biden’s chances of winning will nonetheless increase slightly by Tuesday morning in our forecast. That’s for two reasons: Trump is still receiving a tiny boost in our forecast based on economic conditions and incumbency, currently amounting to an 0.2-percentage-point shift. But this will fall to 0 percent by Election Day. Uncertainty in the forecast will also be slightly reduced when we actually make it to Election Day. ” Furthermore: “At the same time, though, a 2016-style polling error wouldn’t be enough for Trump to win. …I’ve taken our final polling averages in 2016 and shown how they compared to the actual results. And then I’ve shown what the results would be based on this year’s polling average if the polls were exactly as wrong as in 2016 in exactly the same states.

“Takeaway? Joe Biden would win. In fact, he’d win 335 electoral votes, including those in Florida, Georgia and Arizona. A lot of these wins would be close — he’d win by around 2 points in Arizona and Wisconsin, by and less than 1 point in Florida, Georgia and Pennsylvania, so he’d have to sweat a bit, but he’d win.”
Silver’s caveat: “And note that, with his 10 percent chance, our model is specifically referring to a legitimate win; we do not account for what we call “extraconstitutional shenanigans,” by Trump or anyone else, such as trying to prevent mail ballots from being counted.”

If you watch MSDNC, Steve Kornacki has been showing a national Electoral College map showing some states in the bag for Biden (the West Coast besides Alaska, Nevada, most of the Northeast besides Pennsylvania) and some in the bag for Trump (most of the Rocky Mountains besides Colorado and New Mexico, most of the Deep South) and other states (Arizona, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida) as toss-ups. Without the toss-ups, Biden starts with a base of 232 electors. Trump starts with 125.

In a way this is telling, because it helps explain why Democrats, with 16 years between Bush v. Gore and the Trump election, didn’t do a damn thing to reform the Electoral College, because in large respect it still favors them. When it doesn’t, it’s because the Republican can win certain key states with lots of electors (other than California and New York, of course). This is also why Republicans think that dirt does vote, and why they’re so easily impressed by a 2016 election map that showed a sea of red states despite losing the popular vote by 3 million or so. Republican votes are spread out, except in Texas and Florida, and Trump won because some of those states Hillary Clinton was counting on, and normally would be able to count on, broke Trump’s way.

Of course this means the two campaigns have to focus on those states. Everyone’s been looking at the huge early vote in Texas, and thinking, ‘Oh, THIS is the year Texas turns blue.’ Well, they say that every election, they said it when Beto O’Rourke was running against Senator Ted Cruz, and every time it never actually happens, partly because of voter suppression schemes like Governor Abbott restricting ballot access to one station per county. However, the fact that Texas has already exceeded 2016’s total vote indicates the scheme isn’t working. Still, I feel safe in predicting that Trump is going to keep Texas.

Winning Texas is not the point, and I suspect Team Biden knows it.

The point is to be just competitive enough that Republicans will lose Texas unless they spend time and money shoring up a territory that would have been considered totally safe not long ago. And given that the Trump campaign has pissed away its campaign budget like a cokehead pisses away Atlantic City casino money, that means they have to perform triage and decide where they have to fight, because now they have to fight everywhere, but can’t.

The Republicans can keep Texas, and Florida, and maybe even Pennsylvania, but they would have to lose Minnesota and Wisconsin. If they do that, they may lose Iowa. They focus on those places, they may have Pennsylvania, Ohio and the Great Lakes, but they could lose Arizona and maybe even Florida.

They lose Florida, it’s probably over. They lose Texas, it’s REALLY over. As in, 1932 over.

Remember this: Officers study tactics. Generals study strategy. Real generals study logistics.

But again, none of this could matter, because Trump has one advantage that he didn’t before, which is that he IS the president and could use the office to cheat his way out of a lawful election in the same way that he’s bullshitted his way out of everything else.

MSN reproduced a guest column at CNN’s website (Fuck You, CNN) from Russian genius and Putin refugee Garry Kasparov in which he finds his former situation very much like this one:

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/win-or-lose-with-trump-prepare-for-the-unimaginable-after-the-election-opinion/ar-BB1azpu8?ocid=ientp

“Normal people don’t like to imagine terrible events, which is why autocrats consistently surprise them. (As when I wrote here back in April that it would seem logical to someone like Trump to try to sabotage the US Postal Service if he thought it could help his electoral chances. Unimaginable, until it happened.)

“You could make a very long list of things pundits insisted autocrats would never do that they eventually did. I made such a list myself, about Vladimir Putin. In my 2015 book, “Winter Is Coming,” I called it the “Putin would never” list. It included things like taking over private media companies, arresting Russia’s richest man for dabbling in politics and invading Georgia and Ukraine.

“Doesn’t Putin realize how bad this looks?” became the experts’ refrain after he crossed line after uncrossable line. As if he cared how things looked. Why should he? Dictators don’t ask “Why?” They only ask, “Why not?” They don’t stop unless someone stops them. No one stopped Putin.

“For years, my colleagues and I in the Russian democracy movement warned that Putin was building a dictatorship. Even when it was crystal-clear that Russian democracy and civil society had been gutted, the free world fiercely resisted acknowledging that truth.

“Putin laid bare the huge disconnect between autocrats and normal people — the autocrats’ ability to do things that simply don’t occur to people with a sense of decency and a respect for norms and traditions. Autocrats are aware of the consequences they might face for the damage they do, but they believe they can avoid those consequences by staying in power, forever if necessary. Trump might have been indicted several times over were he not protected by his office, and a sense of impunity tends to make one sloppy.

“Trump no doubt believes that he has more to lose by leaving office than by fighting — lawlessly or not — to stay. The oligarchs and thugs he so admires surely agree. They won’t easily let go of such a lucrative investment — one of their own kind in the Oval Office.

“Putin and Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, to name two, have surely reaped many benefits from Trump, beyond political ones. It will take years to untangle the web of his financial dealings and how the treasure and might of the United States was exploited to serve the President’s personal interests and those of his cronies.”

Which is why Trump really has no reason NOT to get his goons to intimidate voters, get his judges to throw out massive amounts of legal votes just cause they can, and get his handpicked Supreme Court to flat-out ignore all precedent and declare that the original intent of the Constitution is that Donald Trump can do anything he wants, not cause he’s the President, but because he’s Donald Trump. And then he’ll spend the next four years flashing that retarded toad grin and campaigning for TRUMP 2024: “Sure you’ll be dead of coronavirus by then, but before that, YOU’LL STILL GET TO MAKE LIBERALS CRY!!”

And that’s why pretty much everybody thinks the only way to shut down that possibility is to prevent it from happening in the first place, and that’s means you need a Democratic blowout. Problem is that the demographics in that sea-of-red Midwest will keep even the most wild Biden victory from being a 1984-level blow-out where Reagan was re-elected and Walter Mondale only won his home state of Minnesota. And now the polls in Iowa and Pennsylvania are tightening up: https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/iowa-poll/2020/10/31/election-2020-iowa-poll-president-donald-trump-leads-joe-biden/6061937002/ “J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., said while men are more likely to support Trump and women to support Biden, the gender gap has narrowed, and independents have returned to supporting the president, a group he won in 2016.

“The president is holding demographic groups that he won in Iowa four years ago, and that would give someone a certain level of comfort with their standing,” she said. “There’s a consistent story in 2020 to what happened in 2016.” But, she said, “Neither candidate hits 50%, so there’s still some play here.”

So given that Election Day itself still hasn’t happened, we have to hope that the early vote for both candidates is at least as much a factor as the Tuesday vote, and that said early vote favors Democrats.

Probably the only hope there is that Trump’s lookit-me-Mommee need for attention and his subsequent compulsion to keep holding rallies even after getting infected with Trump Virus himself have created supersoaker events that have, according to a Stanford study, led to 30,000 coronavirus cases traceable to the rallies with over 700 deaths. This includes people who were subsequently infected by contact with attendees, but it’s hard to say how many of them were Biden voters.

Oh sure, I shouldn’t wish death on anybody, but it’s not like anyone put a gun to these people’s heads and told them to go out and catch coronavirus just to show the rest of us how butch they are. Indeed, if anybody’s using weapons to threaten voters, it’s these guys.

And yet, with Trumpniks being so afraid of losing their object of ego identification, and Trump so afraid of indictment, you have to expect these people to fight like the cornered rats they lick, both at the ballot box and in the courtrooms. So a lot of these states – especially the ones both candidates need, like Pennsylvania – could be subject to legal hassles for weeks or months. Like Florida in 2000.

Christ Jesus on a pogo stick, is this gonna come down to fucking Florida AGAIN?

Well, that would make 2020 that much more 2020, wouldn’t it?

Yeah, I’m just gonna keep reposting this until everyone gets it.

Yeah, What ABOUT Ukraine?

I predict that tonight’s Big Speech will go one of two ways.

Either:

blahblahblah Mexico will pay for it whinewhinewhine Witch Hunt blahblahblah Liddle Chuckie Schumer blahblahblah

Or:

“I’m the King, nobody can stop me, I just declared martial law, Pelosi’s in jail, Hillary’s in jail, and we’re nuking Mexico in five minutes.”

So just in case I don’t get to talk to you again: so long, and thanks for all the fish.

The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don’t alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views, which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.

-Doctor Who, “The Face of Evil”

Well, it’s only been one week in the reign of King Donnie, First of His Name, and prior to all the stupid shit that happened just on Saturday January 28, the Trump Administration became noteworthy for a set of events that happened in the wake of Donald Trump’s inauguration, starting with the fact that his speech was  written by either special advisor Steve Bannon or Walter Kovacs.  But after the speech, the press reported, in accordance with aerial photographs and other evidence such as Washington Metro subway passenger figures, that attendance at the 2017 inaugural was considerably less than attendance at Barack Obama’s 2009 inaugural ceremony. In response to media feedback, White House press secretary Sean Spicer, at his first press briefing, insisted to the media that Trump’s inaugural was the “largest audience ever to witness an inauguration – period”. The day after that, Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway appeared for an interview with Chuck Todd on NBC’s Meet The Press, and not only insisted that “there’s no way to really quantify crowds” but when Todd insisted that Spicer’s claim was a “provable falsehood”, Conway responded, “Don’t be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. You’re saying it’s a falsehood, and … our press secretary, Sean Spicer, gave alternative facts to that.” To his credit, Todd stated what had been obvious before Trump ran for president: “Alternative facts are not facts.  They are falsehoods.”

The Trump Administration’s blatant confrontation of the press when corrected is of a piece with their antagonistic relationship to the rest of the Washington establishment. On Saturday January 28, while everyone was screaming about Trump banning legal immigrants from Middle East countries and sparking a confrontation with a New York court that suspended his executive order on a national basis,  it was less reported that on the same day, Trump signed an executive order rearranging the National Security Council so that his “chief strategist” Steve Bannon would be included along with National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, while excluding the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of National Intelligence. Bannon is the same guy who publicly stated that “the media here is the opposition party.”  All of this was parallel to the hostility Trump expressed toward the CIA when evidence kept piling up about Russian partisanship in the 2016 election.

In some respect this is all typical of the modern “conservative” contempt for information in general, especially the institutions that America traditionally relied on for information. Not that there isn’t some objective evidence for suspicion.

But what we’re dealing with is not the Administration’s enemies being caught in a lie, but the other way around. We are not dealing with alternative facts in the sense of facts that are not considered or emphasized by mainstream media. We’re dealing with “alternative facts” as in things that did not happen and claims that are not true, because partisans want to rewrite reality. Or as some liberal critics call it, “alt-facts.” In the same way that “alt-right” does not mean an alternative to the oldthink of establishment Republicans so much as an alternative to being right.

But this makes sense given that most of the Trumpets I’ve talked to are really not stupid per se, just possessed of a stubborn, blind faith that would make Torquemada look like a postmodern atheist. And the more that faith contradicts the reality, the more clear it is that such faith is based on a pre-existing concept of reality that was in place even before Donald Trump entered the picture. It was often said of Barack Obama that he was something of a Rorschach test (to his critics and especially his fans) in that they projected what they wanted to see on him. That is no less true of Trump “conservatism.” Again, that’s how David Duke, and Sheldon Adelson, and Christians and Ayn Rand fans can all think he’s their guy, and how each is inevitably going to be disappointed, at least to the extent that they do not deny evidence.

But given that Trumpets are immune to airy fripperies like “facts,” “logic” and “evidence”, alt-facts really aren’t needed for them. As we’ve seen, alt-righters and other Trumpets have a lot more experience in lying to themselves than Sean Spicer has in lying to the Washington press, and they’re actually more subtle about it. The goal of the disinformation campaign is to convince the rest of the unconvinced public that Trump’s opinion, changeable as it is, is the new normal and must not be questioned.

Because the one area in life where Donald Trump has demonstrated competence is in avoiding the legal and social consequences of his otherwise perfect incompetence. I had said previously that on some level, Donald Trump must be aware of this, and ran for President because that was the only way he could justify his own self-image to himself, by attaining the one position that actually would make him all-powerful and unaccountable. Living in a world without consequences for failure, Donald Trump is himself uncertain of any reality beyond social construction. And it’s an attitude that has gotten him this far. Thus when he receives any objective data that contradicts his fantasy, he at first angrily rejects it and then becomes obsessed with remaking reality through the media, as though agreement constituted fact.

This would explain an odd contradiction in Trump’s posture versus his behavior. He accuses the press of lying, he accuses intelligence agents of being Nazis,  and yet when asked where he got his information, candidate Trump said he watches “the shows” –  that is, the same media he bitches about as being “fake” and biased. Why does Trump refuse intelligence briefings when that would give him more information than anyone else in the world? If he thinks that the press are a bunch of liars, why is it that he spends so much time watching TV news shows?

The Left loves to refer to the Trump team’s strategy as “gaslighting”  – explained in the Wikipedia entry as follows: “Sociopaths and narcissists frequently use gaslighting tactics.  Sociopaths consistently transgress social mores, break laws, and exploit others, but typically are also convincing liars, sometimes charming ones, who consistently deny wrongdoing. Thus, some who have been victimized by sociopaths may doubt their own perceptions.” But gaslighting is not needed for Trump cultists and others whose sense of reality, however wrong, is secure. Gaslighting is used to undermine a target’s sense of reality and then to replace reality with the fantasy of one’s imagination. Yet this mindset may reveal a crucial vulnerability.

If Trump is simultaneously paranoid and not prone to examine his information sources, that is a critical weakness in that he cannot verify his own knowledge. If he is a narcissist, he cannot help but obsess over even negative media, as long as the media is about him. And if Trump is simultaneously “gaslighting” and prone to projection and overcompensation in all aspects of his life, that implies he is vulnerable to gaslighting and manipulation himself.

So if for instance, someone Photoshops a picture of Trump’s head onto the body of a guy wearing lingerie, Trump is less likely to say, “oh, some schmuck on social media doesn’t like me” and more likely to say “WHERE DID YOU GET THAT????”

At the same time, Trump has survived the most prurient sexual allegations about him, because they play on the image that the “base” has of him. The key is that the new info does less to present Trump as transgressive (in a rebellious or macho sense) and more to present him as small, petty and impotent.

That is why it is very important that the press keeps maintaining the point that Trump and his crew lie about his inauguration attendance, and that he is lying when he says he won the popular vote (‘if you don’t count illegals’) because remembering the facts that Obama had a higher inaugural turnout, and that Clinton got more votes, serves to remind both Trump and the nation at large that MOST AMERICANS ARE NOT ON BOARD WITH HIS BULLSHIT.

And given the ineffectiveness of rumors, it would be better if Trump’s enemies were to find real data on him, specifically his financial activities, as his financial status seems to be at the core of his self-image. The key here is to make him choose between revealing a legal but humiliating truth and preserving his public image by cover-up, even to the point of being prosecuted over it. Hell, the only reason that this didn’t work on Bill Clinton is that he was both popular and competent.

But then again, no. For such a strategy to work, there would have to be an organized campaign of media manipulation. And neither the American press nor the American intelligence community would ever do something so unethical. I mean, the only reason they would even think of it is if Trump had done something to actively antagonize them.

 

 

 

Shortly after Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump, she had met with some of her campaign donors and told them that a decisive factor in the result was the decision of FBI Director James Comey to resume inquiries on her use of email on a private server while she was Secretary of State, 11 days before the election.  This despite the point that Comey had already told the Department of Justice on July 5 that there should be no criminal charges brought on the case. While some pundits have considered Clinton’s statement (and similar opinions from campaign chairman John Podesta) as defensive rationalizing, I think it’s on target. Given the margin of victory and Clinton’s lead in the polls, Clinton had reason to believe that simply bringing up the matter again, even to Clinton’s apparent favor, “stopped our (campaign’s) momentum” and undercut her advantage with white suburban women. Before the election, a Clinton spokesman had even said that by “dribbling these out every day WikiLeaks is proving they are nothing but a propaganda arm of the Kremlin with a political agenda doing [Vladimir] Putin’s dirty work to help elect Donald Trump. The FBI is now investigating this crime, the unanswered questions are why Donald Trump strangely won’t condemn it and whether any of his associates are involved.”

It turns out that there is some outside support for the theory.  According to a CIA statement on December 9, “Moscow was not only interfering with the election, but that its actions were intended to help Trump, according to a senior U.S. official. The assessment is based in part on evidence that Russian actors had hacked Republicans as well as Democrats but were only releasing information harmful to Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton.”

As a result of such information, President Obama has ordered an investigation of the elections, but it wasn’t just the Russians who brought up Clinton’s emails. Obviously Comey did too, and no one believes he is compromised by the Russians. Whether he had motive to bring Clinton down, he had the ability to do so, because what Bernie Sanders called Hillary’s “damn emails” remained a weakness that the Clinton campaign did not minimize and largely did not recognize.

Along with numerous other issues (that I’m sure many books will be written on), Clinton’s campaign was undermined by her persistent use of private email services for her communications as Secretary of State. She never used an official (state.gov) email address. Her email accounts were not disclosed to senior State Department personnel. The State Department’s policy as of 2005 (Clinton joined in 2009) is that employees must “generally” use department systems to conduct official business. Furthermore the Department had issued numerous warnings with regard to cybersecurity owing to known attacks on State Department posts. On March 2011, the Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security sent a memorandum directly to Secretary Clinton,  saying: “Threat analysis by the DS cyber security team and related incident reports indicate a dramatic increase since January 2011 in attempts by cyber actors to compromise the private home e-mail accounts of senior Department officials.” The State Department confirmed that former Secretary of State Colin Powell had used a private email server, although Washington staff had also confirmed that at the time Powell was in office, other employees did not have Internet connection on their desktop computers and that the Department “was not aware at the time of the magnitude of the security risks associated with information technology.  By Secretary Clinton’s tenure, the Department’s guidance was considerably more detailed and more sophisticated.”

Emails sent to Clinton’s private address were first discovered in 2013, when the hacker “Guccifer” hacked the email account of Clinton family associate Sid Blumenthal, including communications about the 2012 attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.  Blumenthal did not have a State Department clearance when he received material that has since been classified by the State Department.   

By contrast, Army intelligence analyst Chelsea (ne‘ Bradley) Manning has been given a 35-year sentence at Leavenworth for providing information to WikiLeaks (the same site that helped leak some of Clinton’s State Department emails) and former CIA Director David Petraeus has had to plead guilty to a misdemeanor for providing his mistress classified information.   (Of course, as President-elect, Donald Trump had entertained the possibility of appointing Petraeus HIS Secretary of State, and when he recently went on a victory-lap tour of the heartland, and the crowd yelled ‘Lock Her Up’ in their now stock-chant against Hillary, Trump said flat-out: ‘No, forget it.  That plays great before the election.  Now we don’t care, right?’)

Only after Clinton left her position at State did the Congress pass the Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments of 2014, specifically forbidding an executive department employee from using personal emails for government business unless submitted for archive.

The best that could be said in this case is the Clinton team was able to operate that loosely with electronic security because the rules were that undefined, which is not exactly a defense of the way things were run, by either party. The worst that can be said is that the Clinton team’s relative nonchalance on the matter of electronic security made it that much easier for the Russian hackers to compromise their communications and make the emails an even bigger politcal issue than they would have been. I mean, I’m glad that Democrats think that a government official’s emails are a security interest now. But do they think that rival powers only spy on us when it’s an election year?

The thing is, if the election turned out to be that close, and the emails were a long-term weakness that Republicans were able to exploit, and the press kept going for them, why didn’t Clinton and her team consider the matter serious enough to decisively address? No, it wasn’t fair that she got taken out largely by a “nothingburger” issue, especially given Trump’s far greater level of corruption, which he has gone out of his way to emphasize since becoming president-elect. No, it isn’t fair that Republicans made her connection to Goldman-Sachs an issue when Trump is making at least two Goldman-Sachs veterans members of his Administration. No it isn’t fair that she lost only because of the Electoral College. But Clinton, like Trump, like Al Gore, and like every other candidate, knew what the terms of getting elected were, and it reflects on the candidate if they can’t meet them.

Hillary Clinton failed as a candidate by the obvious test that she failed to prove to enough people that she was a better president (or at least more ethical than) Donald Trump, which should be the easiest thing in the world. But to look at it another way: As weak a candidate as she was, she was going up against DONALD TRUMP. And were it not for the Electoral College system, she would have won the presidential race with a clear majority of votes. It makes you wonder how well she would have done if she had felt as threatened by Trump as she was by Bernie Sanders. But this is just the most obvious example of how the mainstream Left falls into complacency in its sense of superiority to the Right spectrum of opinion, even if that superiority is akin to the comparison of a 300-pound chainsmoking couch potato to a paraplegic with an IQ of 70 and delusions of being God.

As it stood, the Left based its case on screaming, “We HAVE to elect Hillary Clinton! Hillary is the only way to stop Trump! If we don’t elect Hillary Clinton, the gates of Hell will open up and swallow the Earth!” and a lot of the country went: “…fuck it, let’s see what Hell looks like.”

Post-Election Post