Category: Politics

“Why is this night different from all other nights?”

“Because our country is misruled by a retarded sociopath who doesn’t care if we live or die.”

“Oh.”

Wednesday morning, April 9 – Passover – Bernie Sanders announced that he was suspending his presidential campaign. Supposedly he is “negotiating” with Joe Biden, but has not endorsed him. Nevertheless with all other candidates out, Biden, former Senator and Vice President, is the presumptive Democratic nominee.

Look, this shouldn’t come as a big surprise in the long run. Not just because Sanders was too easily baited and branded as a “socialist” when that word doesn’t mean the same thing to most Americans that it seems to mean to him. But the reason for that common impression is that America is, on the whole, conservative. Not in the “we hate abortion and gays” sense but in the broader sense of a play-it-safe, work-within-the-system temperament. And sad to say, most Americans seem to prefer a male President to a female one, an older presidential candidate to a younger one, an Anglo-Protestant or Irish Catholic to an atheist or ethnic Jew, and somebody who thinks that America is a fundamentally good place that just needs to be kept on track as opposed to a radical who just wants to burn the motherfucker down.

This isn’t like 2016. If you don’t like Joe Biden, you can’t say you didn’t have enough choices. But voters in the main rounds didn’t like what they got. Kamala Harris? Too pushy, too hard on criminal suspects “of color.” Elizabeth Warren? Too lecturing, too vague. Pete Buttigieg? Too young, too gay. Amy Klobuchar? Too Klobuchar.

And yet, the Left is not happy. They say Joe Biden is “sundowning.” He’s got all kinds of baggage from his time in the Senate, including grilling Anita Hill in the Clarence Thomas hearings. Trumpniks are still going to shout “BURISMA” like it’s a magic word that strikes you with lightning and gives you superpowers. And, supposedly, along with all Biden’s documented cases of inappropriate touching of women, there is a former Biden Senate aide, Tara Reade, who is now saying that in one of their office meetings he pushed her up against the wall and went up her skirt, penetrating her with his fingers. Reade is a Sanders supporter who told reporters she was “deliberately holding interviews only with left-wing outlets” and her story is considered a “credible accusation” mainly by the hard Left, the Trump Right, Reason Magazine, and other people who have a vested interest in making Shinola out of shit.

Y’all notice that this “credible accusation” was never brought up until Biden secured the nomination?

Y’all realize that Trump had two years of Republican control in the Senate AND the House, and they could’ve used that time to investigate and prosecute Hunter Biden to their hearts’ content, and it was only after they lost the House and Biden was announcing a presidential run that Hunter Biden working for Burisma became the biggest, most scandalous injustice of 2019? (Y’know, OTHER than Trump getting impeached over it?)

And even this week when Sanders made his announcement, Trump pandered to you, going “OH poor Bernie!! He woulda gotten the nomination, but the system is RIGGED!”

This is why liberals fail. You keep reading the Republicans’ script and thinking it’s yours.

“The system is rigged”? Yeah, I’ve been telling you, the system IS rigged, but that’s NOT why Bernie lost.

I mean, all’y’all saying “I’m only voting Bernie in the general”, if more of you had bothered to show up for the primaries in South Carolina and Super Tuesday, maybe Bernie would be going to the general. Just saying.

As it is, when you threaten not to vote in November, the mainstream liberals and NeverTrumpers will look at you and go, “it’s not like you’re voting in enough numbers now.”

I mean kids, if being a senile potential rapist who used his office to get his kid a cushy job automatically disqualifies one to be president, you may want to sit down in a strong chair while I explain who the president is now.

Because who the president is now, and what the Banana Republican Party is now, is bearing on our current situation.

The day before, Tuesday, was the primary for Wisconsin. Even given that people were telling Bernie to drop out, the vote needed to be held because this is actually a state election in which one of the state Supreme Court races is at stake. But coronavirus has shut down a lot of states, and a lot of state Democratic parties had agreed to postpone their primaries. There is already talk of making the Democratic National Convention virtual. Earlier this year, Mike Dewine, the pro-life, conservative Republican Governor of Ohio, had postponed their primary at the last minute, and that created a certain amount of controversy. So in Wisconsin, Democratic Governor Tommy Evers agreed with the Republican-controlled legislature that the state contest would proceed as scheduled. But that was before people got a grip on how bad coronavirus was and why social distancing was necessary. So Evers tried to postpone the election, the legislature refused to let him, and they took the case to the state’s conservative-majority Supreme Court (who have a justice race on the ballot).

The Wisconsin Supreme Court decided – by video conference – that it was safe for people to go out and vote. The Governor immediately took the case to the US Supreme Court, and the Court decided – by video conference – that it was safe for people to go out and vote. In addition, SCOTUS decided that there would be no extension for absentee ballots.

Mr. Trump was asked about this in one of his lookit-me-I’m-the-president press conferences, where a reporter asked, “You voted by mail in Florida’s election, last month, didn’t you?”

“Sure,” he replied. “I can vote by mail.”

“How do you reconcile with that?”

“Because I’m allowed to,” Trump said.

Incidentally, Trump also announced that the federal government is ending support for national coronavirus testing as of April 10. Good Friday. [NPR just announced that the government is reversing course on this and continuing the program after all.]

Now, it’s gonna be bad enough with the Supreme Court as a 5-4 majority of relatively young and healthy conservative justices for the foreseeable future, but it is getting increasingly obvious that they will take up and throw down decisions with little regard for how partisan or ridiculous they look, precisely because they are the ultimate constitutional authority. Under John Roberts – who is relatively sane – the Court is getting that much more into enforcing the Trumpnik line of We Can Do Whatever We Want To This Country, Just Because We Can. You let Trump win a second term, he WILL get at least one more justice appointed and the results will be that much more ridiculous, and all the “anti-socialists” who mourned how the Chavistas used the courts to twist Venezuela into their image will suddenly define their take on this attitude as “strict constructionism.” And all the liberals who told us the Constitution is a “living document” that changes according to political norms will find out why others told them that was a bad idea.

And as with Brett Kavanaugh, you can bet that any sexual assault accusations against the Republican nominee will be taken a lot less seriously than Democrats are taking accusations against Biden.

What was all this jazz about “Vote Blue, No Matter Who”?

What was this about “Not Me. US”?

You “progressives” are no more serious about “no matter who” than the mainstream Democrats were when it looked like Bernie was gonna win this. I mean, I’d voted for Bernie in the caucus. Both this one and the last one. And I told people how bogus it was that some mainstream liberals were thinking it would be better to throw the election to Trump rather than let a self-declared socialist become president. But now that Bernie voters are in that position, they think Biden is no better than Trump.

I mean, everybody was asking how Biden was getting so much of the older black vote. Because those people remember Nixon, they remember real segregation, and they know what the stakes are, you entitled prigs. You let Trump get re-elected, he’s gonna make Nixon look like a fuckin’ hippie.

But now that the stakes are more obvious than ever, you “progressives” are telling the rest of us that you’re not going to vote for the designated NotTrump candidate, because you think he’s not worth forcing on the country – knowing that you’re forcing four more years of Trump by default?

Really?

REALLY?

NOW DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHY I’M A LIBERTARIAN, YOU DIPSHITS??

Anybody who thinks Joe Biden isn’t good enough for them, you have lost all right to talk shit to me about voting for Gary Johnson in 2016. EVER again.

Cause I didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Given the results to the country, I would regret it more, except that my state ended up going to Hillary without my vote. The reason she lost with a majority of gross votes is because the Electoral College measures results state-by-state, and that’s where third-party votes or “I’m just gonna sit this one out” made a difference in states that Hillary “should’ve” won but didn’t. I don’t think the results will be quite the same this time, cause we now KNOW what we’ve got to lose, and I don’t think that Biden will let Pennsylvania, at least, go for granted.

I do know that the same people who wailed about the Electoral College in 2000 had sixteen years to anticipate Bush v. Gore repeating itself, and they failed to press for the necessary reforms. Not necessarily killing the Electoral College altogether, which is near-impossible and might not be advisable for federalist reasons. But at the very least, working within each state to make the results proportionate within the state, not winner-take-all, and not tied to party affiliation, which would actually be closer to the original intent. No, like “third” parties, Democrats put all their chips on an all-powerful presidency without dealing with the lower levels of government, and now that the presidency and the courts are in the hands of the enemy, Democrats are getting marginalized just like the third parties.

See, Democrats, this is why people don’t want to deal with you, even lots of people on the Left. It’s bad enough to be self-righteous, but self-righteousness is tolerable if you actually know what you’re doing. If you don’t, where do you get off being self-righteous?

What we need is a straight-out reform of the political system, and since Banana Republicans want to make this country more of a Banana Republic, we need Democrats to do what we want. We need ranked-choice voting. We need mail-in and absentee voting. If it’s good enough for our troops, it should be good enough for civilians. We need, ultimately, to nationalize voting in the same way that we have a national post office, so that you don’t have one community with state-of-the-art polling technology and a neighborhood station versus another community where you have to drive miles to vote at Uncle Zeke’s General Store and Town Hall.

No one has trusted you to do any of this, because you didn’t do it when you had the chance. Third-party people told you that we needed to reform elections, and you went, “Oh, don’t worry. Just give us the government, and then we’ll listen to you. Maybe.” Well, we can’t wait anymore, because if it isn’t blindingly obvious to you (and it isn’t, cause you’re Democrats) the Republicans will not give you another chance at power if you don’t win this year. They have the White House, they have the Senate, they have more and more of the courts, and anything the House wants is gonna be flat-out ignored by Mitch “The Bitch” McConnell. You will still be allowed to exist, like a pet bird or house servant in the manor, but the people you claim to champion will be ground deeper and deeper into the dirt.

So here you are, Democrats. You want the rest of us to goosestep in line behind the political hack? You want “Vote Blue, No Matter Who?” Well, FUCK YOU, cause you’re stuck with it now. You’re going to go out and vote for Joe Biden along with black voters and NeverTrump right-wingers and the rest of NotTrump America who cannot wait four more years for your perfect candidate that you will probably not even nominate anyway. You are going to get Biden over.

And then you are going to LISTEN TO US for a change.

Otherwise don’t cry to us when Jerry Falwell Jr. crowns Donald Trump Jr. king.

I have changed my mind.

I have seen the light.

After years of screaming out Donald Trump, Viceroy of Russian North America, I have learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.

In fact, I have not only given up my opposition to Donald Trump, I have decided to endorse his re-election in 2020.

Why?

Because I work in a call center.

I am not going to tell you which center it is, or exactly what it does or the precise details on the calls. Because as much as it can suck, I still need the job. You see, I have “pre-existing conditions” and after 60 days I get medical benefits which I would not get from sucking cocks on Boulder Highway, which is the only other job that I can get with my resume.

The other reason is that most of the time, this call center is not that bad compared to other ones I’ve been at. It’s just that when the calls are bad, they were dredged from the sewer system under the 10^th Circle of Hell.

Anybody who has ever worked in a call center knows exactly why Donald Trump won in 2016. Because Donald Trump is the kind of motherfucker who calls a call center. The kind of person who is grateful that I’m a white guy who speaks “American.”

In a lot of these cases it’s a hard guess as to whether the problem is a person who’s been repeatedly stiffed by inattentive staff or a person who had a solvable problem that they have made worse because they couldn’t pick up a clue if you held it in front of them with two hands. But in either case, I get the shit end of it.

And then after nearly two hours of back-to-back-to-back-to-back calls, I can actually feel the muscles in my neck and my eye sockets contracting on themselves, but the queue starts to die down, and I’m starting to relax, and then I get a call from a number I’d seen before – “Hey, James! Remember ME? The worst call you had all day? The guy who raised your blood pressure 100 points expecting you to do the impossible and coming up with every excuse I could to not end the call and prolong your agony? Well, GUESS WHAT? I’m back after 90 minutes and I just talked to another office who told me something completely different so now I’m going to start over at Square One and go over the same harangue I gave you for ANOTHER 25 minutes because I didn’t understand what the fuck you were trying to tell me on the LAST 25 minute call!”

A call, that by the way, would have been about 20 minutes less if I had been given two uninterrupted seconds to explain what the hell was going on with his account.

Why? Why do I get all the difficult people? Because Jesus loves me THAT much, that’s why.

Oh, that’s the other thing, I not only gave up being anti-Trump, I gave up being atheist. I now know that God is real and He is doing miracles for me every day. Because no fucking way could I be under such a sustained, intense and prolonged concentration of screaming bullshit by sheer Goddamn fucking ACCIDENT.

But after about two years of not doing customer phone service, I have to be back in the thick of this, and I remember what it is that turned me off about the Annoying Orange in the first place. My worst callers weren’t all white, they weren’t all Southern, and I have no way of knowing how many of them were conservative, but they all had that attitude of oblivious entitlement. The people who cut you off with “EXCUSE ME” as though they’re being polite and you’re being rude. The attitude that they knew more than you when they really didn’t know jack. The need to spend untrackable amounts of time rambling on over everything yet getting nowhere. Complaining that they had to spend thirty minutes waiting on hold, not considering that maybe that’s because the person ahead of them wanted to waste time for twenty minutes and then complain another ten minutes about having to be on hold, and MAYBE if everyone was a little less piggy the line would move faster. The emotional disconnection from reality, expecting you to have a magic wand and do ten impossible things before breakfast even AFTER they spent 20 minutes explaining – over and over and over and over and over again- that the last five people they talked to couldn’t do the impossible thing either. And even after you’d made it clear to them what the situation was, they WOULD.NOT.GET.OFF. THE.GOD.DAMN.FUCK.ING.PHONE. Instead they would rather rage and whine and scream and cry about the existential unfairness of the universe, which they could do perfectly well by themselves on their OWN time instead of keeping you on the phone while people who could actually be helped were in the queue, because they seem to think the only reason you were born is to be their bartender/Father Confessor/emotional punching bag.

If you’ve dealt with Trumpniks on social media, you know what I’m talking about. And if you’ve seen Republicans at the mic during Congressional committee hearings- you know too.

And just as most of what I hate about Trump is his cult, half of what I hated about Hillary Clinton was hers. The people who normalized a president committing obstruction over an affair, letting him get out scot-free, and had no idea that would ever come back on them. The people who took Hillary’s genuine achievements and made her out to be some kind of Superwoman. They all went, “Oh, look at how BRAVE Hillary was over Benghazi! She had to sit there over eight hours, while a bunch of belligerent rednecks took turns asking Gotcha questions trying to blame her for stuff that wasn’t her fault!” And I was like, “Bitch, please. I work in a CALL CENTER. That’s my FUCKING JOB.”

And if I could, I would ask Hillary Clinton, could you put up with that treatment from Republicans, eight hours a day, every day, for at least two years, AND only get paid ten dollars an hour? Could you put up with that progressive, building level of stress AND the stress of not knowing if you could stretch to the next payday? And if that question was answered, I would then ask Hillary, now do you understand why you lost? Because that’s the kind of job that Democrats were citing as an example of “economic recovery.”

The problem, two years after The Election, is that things are not getting any better under Trump, and for a lot of people – especially his “base” – they’re getting worse.

But this goes beyond just one guy, however much Trump thinks that he is the center of existence. This is deeper. Existential. What it comes down to is that it is becoming increasingly obvious that the vast majority of humans are not actually human beings. We are a species of balding apes that were somehow trained to wear polyester suits and use smartphones, and it seems that our technological and emotional sophistication does not go beyond that. And the pressure of having to live in a civilization designed by smarter people is slowly but surely driving us fucking MAD. I mean really, half the reason Trump won is because a critical part of the population got sick of being on hold and hearing “para español, oprime’ el numero dos.”

We can’t handle all this stuff. We can’t handle all these options. We don’t have time to catch up on all the Netflix shows. All our emails. We don’t have time for all the automated “conveniences” that are supposed to speed things up and make things easier but just add up time and stress because that ends up meaning that you have more things to do. I sometimes think we would be better off letting the bad guys win. Let the bullies, bigots and morons stomp all over the wonders of 21^st Century civilization and bring us to a new age of barbarism. Kill this increasingly inconvenient culture of “convenience.” Go back to houses made of sticks and stones because we as a species are clearly too primitive and emotional to live in a world made by better people.

If there is such a thing as a “collective soul,” then that soul, at least in America, is sick unto death. Put bluntly, Americans want a Zombie Apocalypse. We want a mass die-off and technological collapse to bring us back to basics. But since zombies are scientifically impossible, voting Republican is the next best thing to get us to Doomsday.

Because it’s not like they aren’t doing their best.

Not even counting… all this… but if you believe Democrats – and objectively speaking, I’m not sure why you would – the clock is ticking on global climate change.

And the main thing getting the way of their “Green New Deal” is the Republican Party, of which Donald Trump is only a part. Why? Because either they’re in the tank for fossil fuel companies, or as Good Christians (TM) they think that Man is the steward of the Earth and not just a renter, and in any case, Jesus is going to come back and make everything cool.

Now, whenever I see some Chicken Little liberal tell us that the world will be destroyed if we don’t go whole-hog on the socialist agenda, I just remember the soothing words of George Carlin:

So that would be my message for today. Don’t just re-elect Trump. Re-elect the Republican House majority. Make Trump God-Emperor and the tenth Supreme Court Justice. Just get it all over with.

In fact, if the Republican Party is interested, I even have a slogan picked out for them:

Vote Republican – Because This Species Can’t Die Fast Enough

It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.

-Ayn Rand

Monday, Viceroy Donald Trump had another one of his press briefings, which are clearly less a means of informing the public on coronavirus and more a weak substitute for the redcap rallies where he gets to chew out the press and other cosmopolitans who want to destroy Real America. It doesn’t work as well, because he doesn’t have a crowd, and while the press themselves are allowed to practice social distancing (which means less reporters in the scrum, which I’m sure Trump thinks is a feature and not a bug) Trump has Mike Pence, Deborah Birx, Anthony Fauci and whoever else he can rope in standing with him on the same stage, against the rules of social distancing, which kind of undermines the idea that he takes it seriously.

And what I saw on Monday makes it that much more clear how Donald Trump bankrupted at least four Atlantic City casinos: he would be a TERRIBLE poker player. The transcript reveals several tells: “I want Americans to know that we will get through this challenge, the hardship will end, it will end soon, normal life will return and our economy will rebound very, very strongly”,

“We also have a large team working on what the next steps will be once the medical community gives a region the okay — meaning the okay to get going, to get back; let’s go to work. Our country wasn’t built to be shut down. This is not a country that was built for this. It was not built to be shut down.”

“This was a medical problem. We are not going to let it turn into a long-lasting financial problem. It started out as a purely medical problem, and it’s not going to go beyond that. We’re just not going to allow that to happen.”

And, “Our country was at its strongest financial point. We’ve never had an economy like we had just a few weeks ago, and then it got hit with something that nobody could have ever thought possible. And we are fixing it. We’re fixing it quickly. And I want to just thank the American people for what they’ve been through and what they’re doing. Our country will be stronger than ever before, and we fully anticipate that. And it won’t be that long.”

The tells are that much more obvious in the video, but I won’t ask anyone else to subject themselves to Trump and his Whiny Mafioso With Sleep Apnea voice. But the point is, that wonderful economy Trumpniks have been crowing about makes him invincible (as far as they’re concerned), and without it, he is going through actual physical withdrawal.

I saw an entry on Quora asking what Trump’s real coronavirus notes would be if he’d written them in Sharpie, and I responded “PLEASE BRING THE ECONOMY BACK PLEASE RE-ELECT ME PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEASE I’M TOO PRETTY FOR JAIL”.

So now the plan – if “plan” can be used in association with Donald Trump – is for the economy to be restarted by Easter. This makes sense. Easter is when we celebrate a man coming back from the dead through faith. And since Trump is (for the sake of his job) a professional Christian, he is asking America to test that theory.

In the meantime, the joint Congress managed to pass an $8 billion dollar aid package (no thanks to one Senator – see below), and everyone’s time in Washington has been taken up with trying to create a large-scale “stimulus” plan that is less about stimulating the economy than about keeping people (and businesses) afloat while they’re not allowed to work. And as desperate as they are, Republicans still wanted to gum up the works. Before the Senate passed the stimulus on Wednesday night with a unanimous vote, the Senate defeated an amendment by Sen. Ben Sasse (BR-Nebraska) that would have limited unemployment benefits. At the same time they complained of the features that Democrats wanted to insert, such as providing stronger unemployment benefits than are otherwise available, considering it isn’t the workers’ or even employers’ fault that people are unemployed. There were plenty of Facebook conservatives wailing over real (riders for increased environmental standards for airlines) and fake (funding of abortion) obstacles that Democrats had created to stop passage of the Senate bill, including Nancy Pelosi’s announcement of a separate House bill against the Senate one. As it turned out, much of Democrats’ objection was to a $500 billion “Exchange Stabilization Fund” that the Republican majority had written into the Senate bill, which is totally at the discretion of Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin. Despite everyone (including Trump) being publicly against bailed-out companies being able to use their money for stock buybacks (like they did in the last financial crisis), the language also allows Mnuchin to withhold the names of the companies who do get money for up to six months. And when asked who would be the oversight, especially since his own companies would be eligible, Trump said, “I’ll be the oversight” – which made exactly one person in the room feel better.

As a New Republic article points out,

“In its design, and in the panicky desperation to pass it without argument, the bill resembled a repeat of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, crafted by people who thought the problem with the original TARP was that it included far too much oversight and transparency.”

The Democrats let the Bush Republicans buffalo them with a lot of shit after 9-11, because “In this national crisis, we must all put aside our differences and work together in support of Our President”. It would seem that even Democrats can learn from experience, although again this remains to be seen.

The fact of the matter is, it doesn’t matter if you love the Democrats, you hate the Democrats, or you’re a leftist who thinks that Democrats ought to have put Mitch McConnell’s head on a pike, collectivized the farms, nationalized McDonald’s and turned it vegan. The fact is, the Democrats can only do so much because Mitch McConnell knows the Senate rules and he has the majority. And the reason that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer can actually twist his arm, why Democrats have forced more than one vote since Sunday, why Bernie Sanders was able to push Wednesday to re-insert jobless benefits and why McConnell can’t just pull his usual Fuck You maneuver of forcing a party-line vote that he will always win, is because he no longer really has a majority.

And that is because some of the Republican Senators could not be present on the floor. Why was that? Well, mostly because Senator Rand Paul (BR.-Kentucky) found out he was positive for coronavirus after having himself tested last week. But between getting tested and getting the diagnosis on Sunday, Paul refused to practice social distancing and continued to use the Senate gym and pool. He did say “I believe we need more testing immediately, even among those without symptoms. … The nature of COVID-19 put me – and us all – in a Catch-22 situation. … For those who want to criticize me for lack of quarantine, realize that if the rules on testing had been followed to a tee, I would never have been tested and would still be walking around the halls of the Capitol.” And he topped off by saying, “Perhaps it is too much to ask that we simply have compassion for our fellow Americans who are sick or fearful of becoming so.” And yet before this weekend, Rand Paul was the only Senator to vote against the initial aid package that has since been agreed to in both Houses and signed by Trump.

Thing is, because of Paul’s behavior between testing and diagnosis, other Republican Senators, including Mike Lee of Utah and Mitt Romney of Utah felt obliged to enter self-quarantine (despite being asymptomatic themselves) to avoid further spread. By Tuesday there were four Republicans missing the Senate for this reason – so Mitch no longer has his floor majority.

So now, even Republicans are saying: Fuck You, Rand Paul.

That’s what happens when you pretend this shit isn’t real. It has consequences. And Rand Paul is going to have to practice social distancing from his fellow Republicans for the forseeable future.

As in, AFTER he recovers from the virus.

But like it matters, because it is still easier for Republicans to find consensus with Democrats on an economic package than for non-Republicans to agree with the new foist that we can declare the crsis over with by presidential decree. There are two factors here that Banana Republicans don’t want to address. One, based on the exposure we’ve seen thus far, if we lift the state-by-state restrictions we do have, the virus WILL recur or spread to areas where it has not already. We need a serious nationwide regimen of testing to see who’s got the virus, and we don’t have that right now, because SOMEBODY didn’t think it was important. So we’ve got to make up for time that we don’t have.

The second issue is that because the virus did come from outside this country, and ravaged China, Iran and Europe before us, even if we lift restrictions and even IF we had testing and treatments available (which we don’t), the other parts of the world are still trying to contain the virus. So even if King Donnie, The First of His Name could wave his royal scepter and decree that the coronavirus crisis is over in America, the global economy is still fucked.

I mean, all the professional Christians have told us that playing Dungeons & Dragons is corrupting and destroys your sense of reality, but they’re the ones living in a fantasy world. We’re living in the real world. And in the real world, Clerics don’t have cure disease spells.

And this is the other reason Trump is so desperate and scared, because it’s becoming clear that the magic power of bullshit doesn’t work on coronavirus. You cannot bullshit or bully a virus. You cannot hand your lawyer a check and tell him to give the check to the virus so it will go away and not testify against you. Reality exists, regardless of human perception. Who knew?

And yet, if reality doesn’t conform to their fantasy, Trumpniks will do what Trumpniks do and carry on regardless. It has now made national news that “pro-life” Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has endorsed old folks dying from exposure to the coronavirus if that’s what it takes to get the economy back, telling Tucker Carlson on Fox News, “Those of us who are 70 plus, we’ll take care of ourselves. But don’t sacrifice the country”. This line has since been pushed by other Fox people, such as Brit Hume, commenting on Patrick’s remarks saying “The utter collapse of the country’s economy — which many think will happen if this goes on much longer — is an intolerable result”. And this might just be a coincidence, but Trump’s stance on virus control changed from working with Dr. Fauci to pushing for a return to normal by Easter after he realized how much money he was going to lose by keeping his resorts closed.

I have a Facebook friend who works (or did work) at one of the Strip casinos, and he talked to me on Wednesday about how pissed he was at his Mom and her new husband because they’re both Trump fanatics going along with the new politically correct dogma, and he said basically “Its just insulting thinking I need to keep making shit money while legit risking my health… (Mom’s) husband thinks we are a bunch of pussies. My mom hopes everyone goes back to work on Easter. They have no authority, that isn’t my point, my point is their shit opinions (are) making me dislike them cause they don’t give a fuck about our health”.

We’re getting to that scene in Jojo Rabbit where the Nazis are drafting 12-year olds and senior citizens and giving them hunting rifles and Panzerfausts to stop the Allies, cause there’s no more Jews or Communists for the government to blame.

Because just as Germany (sort of) survived the death of Nazism, the threat that Trump and his people care about is not the death of individuals. It’s the death of their system.

It goes back to what I’ve said about being a libertarian as opposed to a collectivist: A government is a creation of individuals. It is an empty set without its constituents. A government cannot exist without people. The people CAN exist without a government. Yes, they would exist on the level of cavemen and wolves, but they would exist. And if the liberals need to be told that their favorite system of government is not a priori and inherent, that it is the product of consensus agreement and subject to change, then libertarians and “conservatives” need to understand that what we’re calling capitalism is likewise not an inherent condition but is an agreed-to situation and subject to change.

And while libertarians are pointing out that a lot of our budgeting and regulations are largely makework for bureaucrats, and that if we need to dispense with these things in an emergency, we probably never needed them in the first place, liberals and socialists are pointing out that our lack of health care and sick leave is inadequate for emergencies, because they were inadequate for everyday needs in the first place.

Isn’t the common thread that THE WHOLE FUCKING SYSTEM IS BULLSHIT and is not working for everybody?

Isn’t it true that so much of what we think of as “normal” is written up to serve the priorities of administrative classes, in both the public and private sectors, and now that we have (however haphazardly) been obliged to go without “normal”, we are starting to discover that we can survive without it?

And isn’t it obvious that the people squealing most loudly for “normal” to come back are the political-media complex that now controls both Big Business and Big Government? And that public health is NOT their first priority?

The elites aren’t afraid of the Constitution, or elections, because they’ve got that system sewn up on both ends. But they’re relying on capitalism to save them, and the irony is that it will save the public, because that is the last area where we have serious choices that affect the Powers That Be.

Right now, negative action – not participating in the economy – is causing more of a scare to the donor class than voting for Democrats. Those people are learning that WE are learning that they need us more than we need them. The people who are engaging in social distancing have a potential to create real change and have their demands heard, especially since the people who insist that this is no big deal are the most likely to take themselves out through exposure to the virus. And the fewer of them there are, the weaker they will be politically. To survive, they have to participate in the same safety measures as everyone else. And if they want to go out shopping again – why force them not to? Where are they going to shop? If they want us to go back to our workplaces when even our own bosses say it’s a bad idea – how do they force us?

Suppose they brought back the economy and nobody came?

Stay the course. And flatten the curve.

Hi, Trumpniks!

Sick of winning yet?

How’s your 401K?

Boy, it turns out that just because you have a captive political party that lets you do anything you want regardless of evidence, that there are still factors that can make your perfect world a little less perfect. Like markets, and science.

Of course this whole coronavirus thing really started in a lab somewhere in a lab somewhere in China that the Democrats sponsored just to undermine the stock market and make Our President look bad. But if this whole thing was a political hoax, somebody forgot to tell the Chinese, and the Iranians, and the entire Italian government, and the nursing home in Washington state where over 20 people died because our government knew that a global contagion was going on and yet the Trump Organization refused to accept World Health Organization-approved coronavirus tests.

And so since all these outside factors were contradicting the whims of our Dear Leader, the stock market continued to tank in the last ten days, wiping out virtually all the gains it had made since Donald Trump was declared president.

And as bad as that was, things got worse when Russia and Saudi Arabia decided to break their agreement on oil prices and boost production, dropping prices and thus market demand, along with the rest of the market.

Putin and bin Salman? They’re Trump’s two bestest buddies in the whole world! Well, next to Kim Jong-un, of course. I mean it ought to figure, both of these guys are probably best known for ghastly assassinations of political dissidents who fled abroad, so it stands to reason they’d stab each other in the back. The good thing of course is that the price of gas is low. But of course that’s due to the simple market factor of gas not being as necessary since no one has anywhere to go. If they really wanted to make a killing, the Russians would find out how to corner the market on toilet paper.

So perhaps realizing that it might help if Trump said something besides “just go to work, you’ll be fine,” the Trump Organization got its mini-brain trust of Stephen Miller and Jared Kushner to help draft a speech that Trump read on Wednesday, which among other things didn’t help because of the extremely flat affect he has on camera when he isn’t allowed to just be an off-the-cuff insult comic. Not only that, he didn’t look well, after he was repeatedly photographed with people who have turned out to have the coronavirus. Of course he has been sniffing and wheezing his way through public events since at least the Hillary Clinton debates. But now we have to ask, was Trump sniffing and wheezing his way through that speech because he has coronavirus, or just because he’s a 73-year old man with sleep apnea and an Adderall addiction?

But what really didn’t help was when people actually went over the details of what Trump said, and apparently he wasn’t supposed to say the Europe ban “will not only apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo, but various other things as we get approval”. But this was a prepared text on teleprompter! Did somebody insert the wrong lines into the text just to trip him up? Did he riff? Oh, that Trump! He’s such a card!

I mean, eventually on Friday Trump did finally announce a national emergency, which he said was “two very big words” (for him), and he did announce various initiatives to coordinate with Walmart and a few other companies. Of course some of these companies didn’t know exactly what the plan was. And Trump still seemed to have a bit of an issue with cleanliness, and not touching the mic at the outdoor press conference, and not shaking hands, and all that. But the idea that he was at least trying to act like a president and take the situation seriously did inspire Wall Street to gain 900 points, which sorta made up for losing so much in the previous four days.

Here’s the thing, not only did Trump’s surprise block of European travel royally piss off EU nations, it did that much more to undermine the stock market on Thursday because of that throwaway line about trade and cargo! And when the travel restrictions were officially imposed over the weekend, the end result was American travelers from Europe being channeled into one of 13 designated airports where an already over-worked Customs and TSA staff will be obliged to get them in line and answer questions. (Of course they won’t be tested for coronavirus, because we don’t have the technology that frackin’ South Korea has.) Twitter and other media reported vast crowds of people in line for the process, returned from Europe, all crammed together in one place. Coughing and sneezing. Talk about social isolation.

Hey – I wonder what THAT’s gonna do to the stock market on Monday?

Who woulda thought that containing a global pandemic could be so complicated??

I mean, are you guys really this clueless or is this intentional policy? Because if it is, and all this chaos and suffering is on purpose, what does that say about your morality and ultimate goals?

Liberals keep saying, “the cruelty is the point,” but this is cruelty you’re inflicting on white and affluent people!! It’s almost like you hate everybody!

See, there’s a difference between Donald Trump and the coronavirus. Viruses aren’t racist. Viruses don’t care if you’re Chinese or Italian or American. They can’t be stopped by your magic wall (anymore than it stops ladders and bolt cutters) and they can’t be stopped by Mike Pence’s prayers. A virus is a factor of science, and as Neil DeGrasse Tyson likes to say, “the beautiful thing about science is that it works whether you believe in it or not.”

And just as the virus is not impressed by balderdash, bluffing and bullying, apparently the markets are not either, because the people there have to predict trends for a living. And even if the United States continues to stick its collective head up its collective ass (without hand sanitizer) the rest of the world will look at the evidence and their governments will set their own policies that affect us whether we like it or not.

But hey, maybe I’m wrong about Donald Trump. I’ve been wrong before. Look, Donnie. You know I don’t like you. And maybe things seem kinda negative right now, and I know you don’t like to hear any bad news. That is of course, part of why things are like this. But just remember: Where you are now is because of what you did to get here. And you’ve gotten this far on balderdash, bluffing and bullying, and nothing has touched you yet! Not even coronavirus! (Or so your press flacks have told us.)

It’s ALWAYS worked!

Just like it always worked for Hitler. And Saddam Hussein! And the Soviet Communist Party! And all your other role models!

So now that you’ve restored the confidence of the markets, you can get out there Monday and get yourself back on track. All you need to do is pay attention to the world around you and not make things any worse. And what are the odds of THAT?

Just remember, Donnie:

You are GOLD!
(Gold!)

Always believe in your soul

You’ve got the power to know!

You’re indestructible-

Always believe it!!

Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn
World serves its own needs
Don’t mis-serve your own needs
Speed it up a notch, speed, grunt, no, strength
The ladder starts to clatter
With a fear of height, down, height
Wire in a fire, represent the seven games
And a government for hire in a combat site

REM, “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

So, now that an NPR world news story about Wuhan, China has pretty much transformed the world in about a month, let me give you my personal experience with the coronavirus scare.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been experiencing notable shortness of breath, not just “fat guy out of shape” shortness of breath but “if I stand up or walk for any period of time I get headaches and almost black out” shortness of breath. This was accompanied by various aches, not just headaches. And yet when I took my temperature, it was usually under 99 degrees and often under 98. And while I haven’t traveled and have no reason to believe I was in contact with a coronavirus case, I fit several of the risk factors: Over 50? Check. Existing respiratory issues? Check. Other pre-existing conditions? Check!

It got bad enough on Tuesday morning to where I politely asked my manager to let me take the rest of the day off – which because of the existing scare they freely granted – and I ended up spending the rest of the day trying, and failing, to get a coronavirus test.

I went straight to my doctor’s office. They told me they don’t do the test and referred me to Southern Nevada Health District. I couldn’t reach anybody on their phone line (for some reason). So I drove all the way out there, and even though there are big signs above the desk saying that if you’re experiencing respiratory issues to let someone on staff know, when I explained the situation they told me I had to get diagnosed by my doctor first. They gave me a handout list of various clinics, but when I went to the one in my area, they told me they don’t take my insurance.

I was told by my employer that Quest Diagnostics does have a test, and when I read their site it said that they don’t do the test directly for patients but rather collect samples from the doctor’s office. So I called my office again, and scheduled an appointment for Wednesday. And when I did, I was told by them that they don’t actually have a coronavirus program set up but they’re supposed to be doing that eventually. So I asked to be examined for what I did have, and since I have no fever, swelling or communicable issues, I was told that I am suffering an exacerbation of my existing asthma. I was already prescribed an inhaler which I normally don’t need, but I’ve used it more in the past five days than I have in the past five months. I did get a five-day prescription of Prednisone and Azithromycin, which have not solved my issue completely but made it less intense.

And if this is where I am WITH insurance, imagine what it’s like in the rest of the country, such as the New York school districts that stay open because otherwise kids wouldn’t have lunch, or with my friend who has his own diabetes, respiratory problems, and heart disease, and who is on public assistance and needs to travel everywhere on the bus.

The problem with coronavirus (COVID-19) is that even if more people have died from the flu (which seems to be no big deal, apparently) the coronavirus is potentially more threatening, largely because it takes longer to manifest and it is therefore easier for asymptomatic people to spread the virus.

This is what I got this week when I searched “are covid 19 tests available”:

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)

“CDC has developed a new laboratory test kit for use in testing patient specimens for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes COVID-19. The test kit is called the “Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time Reverse Transcriptase (RT)-PCR Diagnostic Panel.” It is intended for use with the Applied Biosystems 7500 Fast DX Real-Time PCR Instrument with SDS 1.4 software. This test is intended for use with upper and lower respiratory specimens collected from persons who meet CDC criteria for COVID-19 testing. CDC’s test kit is intended for use by laboratories designated by CDC as qualified, and in the United States, certified under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) to perform high complexity tests.

On Monday, February 3, 2020, CDC submitted an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) package to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in order to expedite FDA permitted use of the CDC diagnostic panel in the United States. The EUA process enables FDA to consider and authorize the use of unapproved, but potentially life-saving medical or diagnostic products during a public health emergency. The U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services declared the SARS-CoV-2 virus a U.S. public health emergency on Friday, January 31, 2020. FDA issued the EUA on February 4, 2020. IRR began distribution of the test kits to states, but shortly thereafter performance issues were identified related to a problem in the manufacturing of one of the reagents which led to laboratories not being able to verify the test performance. CDC is remanufacturing the reagents with more robust quality control measures. New tests will be distributed once this issue has been addressed. CDC continues to perform initial and confirmatory testing.

Serology Test for COVID-19

CDC is working to develop a new laboratory test to assist with efforts to determine how much of the U.S. population has been exposed to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes COVID-19.

The serology test will look for the presence of antibodies, which are specific proteins made in response to infections. Antibodies can be found in the blood and in other tissues of those who are tested after infection. The antibodies detected by this test indicate that a person had an immune response to SARS-CoV-2, whether symptoms developed from infection or the infection was asymptomatic. Antibody test results are important in detecting infections with few or no symptoms.

Initial work to develop a serology test for SARS-CoV-2 is underway at CDC. In order to develop the test, CDC needs blood samples from people who had COVID-19 at least 21 days after their symptoms first started. Researchers are currently working to develop the basic parameters for the test, which will be refined as more samples become available. Once the test is developed, CDC will need additional samples to evaluate whether the test works as intended.”

Short answer: NO.

What we are witnessing is on one hand a challenge to libertarian premises and on the other hand a justification of them. On one hand, we can see that a coordinated response to public crises is necessary, or at least would prevent a lot of unnecessary suffering and death. On the other hand we can see that a coordinated government is not what we have, and we now know the consequences of not only handing over government to the worst possible people, but depending on a government that was not that dependable in the first place.

The people of the Soviet Union were no less in need of a wise hand during the Chernobyl disaster, and that is what they did not have. And while China is praised in some quarters for taking harsh but necessary measures to contain the virus in the short term, and the spread in Wuhan itself now seems to be contained, the Communist Chinese had at first downplayed the initial reports, including from one Wuhan doctor who later died of the virus. And as the disease left China, it had arguably its worst effect in Iran, where several government officials have turned out to be infected, or killed, because they were so determined to downplay the seriousness of the outbreak that they did not take their own precautions and engaged in casual contact with patients.

(Side joke: What’s the difference between the US and Iran? One country is technically a democratic republic but is actually run by a cabal of old fundamentalist whackjobs who want to start World War III in hopes that the Messiah will appear in the Middle East. The other is Iran.)

And the American apocalypse cult that used to be a main political party has been making much the same public front, with its Leader frequently shaking hands, touching mics and getting exposed to various people who have since tested positive for coronavirus.

Yet the designated official “anti-socialist” and “pro-business” party has been the primary barrier to private efforts to address epidemics through its control of government, even as it uses policy to deliberately hamper public efforts at disease control. There was an article in The American Conservative (no less) pointing out that before Trump took over, the US Army decided to help kickstart funding of development of a Zika virus vaccine to be licensed for commercial use, working with manufacturer Sanofi. However Health and Human Services withdrew its commitment to the project once the virus began slowing down.

“In 2017, Eric Sagonowsky of FiercePharma reported that “the collaboration [between Sanofi and the government] had come under intense public and political scrutiny this year as critics demanded pricing guarantees if a commercial vaccine grew out of the taxpayer-funded research.” These pressure groups typically fail to mention the immense costs of bringing life-saving treatments to market due to an onerous Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approvals process. It can take manufacturers a decade and more than $2 billion to bring a medication to market, and excessive FDA testing requirements hinder patient access to care.

“Currently, hundreds of COVID-19 patients are being treated with the antiviral drug called Remdesivir, which has had promising initial results but is not yet FDA approved. While the agency is allowing seriously ill patients to take the medication through their “compassionate use” program, this is only permitted on a limited, last-resort basis, and the drug remains unavailable to most of the population. Producers of novel treatments may need to wait months to bring life-saving therapies to market and face the real risk of getting FDA rejection letters if, say, new evidence were to come to light on the drug’s efficacy after the application was submitted.”

Another piece, on Reason Magazine’s site: “As the Times reports, Seattle infectious disease expert Dr. Helen Chu had, by January, collected a huge number of nasal swabs from local residents who were experiencing symptoms as part of a research project on flu. She proposed, to federal and state officials, testing those samples for coronavirus infections. As the Times reports, the CDC told Chu and her team that they could not test the samples unless their laboratory test was approved by the FDA. The FDA refused to approve Chu’s test on the grounds that her lab, according to the Times, “was not certified as a clinical laboratory under regulations established by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a process that could take months.”

“In the meantime, the CDC required that public health officials could only use the diagnostic test designed by the agency. That test released on February 5 turned out to be badly flawed. The CDC’s insistence on a top-down centralized testing regime greatly slowed down the process of disease detection as the infection rate was accelerating.”

And yet, when we knew that the Obama Administration had contained Ebola in the United States to two fatalities (both African patients treated in America), Trump’s advisor John Bolton closed the National Security Council’s task force on global pandemics and the Administration cut most Centers for Disease Control funding on pandemics. As the global situation became more serious and cases were announced in America, Trump continued to downplay the threat, fearing (correctly) that a public response would lead to a downturn in business, when business growth has been his main public justification for staying in office and running for re-election.

It has in fact been the business community at all levels that took the initiative in fighting coronavirus in America, weeks before the Trump Organization finally announced a national emergency. It has been businesses that closed buffets, closed athletic events, removed audiences from taped media programs, all to encourage social isolation in order to tamp down the spread of disease. This ought to make sense. As arrogant as the upper class might be, they still have to run businesses and address the current moment and weigh the consequences of one decision over another. Some have had to lay people off because they simply can’t afford the overhead. Others have decided to have some level of paid leave because they are trying to keep employees in expectation of recovery after the worst passes. Most businesses are assisting in social isolation because losing customers in the short term can reduce the chance of having fewer customers in the long term – either due to preventable deaths or the hit to reputation that comes with customers knowing that the businesses could have helped prevent spread of disease and refused to do so. Businesses by and large deal in a world of consequences. Governments don’t have to.

The Trump Administration is what you get when you combine class privilege with the government’s monopoly on force. Trump himself is the natural result of a system that pretends to capitalism but actually relies on social capital – what Randians would call “pull” and we in Las Vegas call “juice” – in order to avoid the checks and balances that are supposed to be inherent in the capitalist system, in much the same way that party solidarity has destroyed the checks and balances written into the Constitution. Trump has never actually been the CEO of a corporation, because he has never run an incorporated business. The Trump Organization is a group of entities of which Donald Trump is the sole or principal owner. For that very reason, its financial returns are private. The Trump Organization is a family outfit, in every sense that applies. Trump has never been responsible to shareholders. Trump has a record of stiffing his creditors when his bills come up, raising the question of exactly how profitable and healthy his businesses are. And yet, someone more powerful has always covered his tab – his Daddy, Roy Cohn, his friends in government, Deutsche Bank, Vladimir Putin – and he’s always been able to avoid the consequences of his own mistakes. Trump’s survival up to this point is a measure of how the system traffics in deceit, and in retrospect, his quest for political power makes sense as a drive to the only position that would make his conduct literally unimpeachable.

When such a person is elected President of the United States, the present moment is what you ought to expect.

When Senator Lamar Alexander reviewed the impeachment case and made it perfectly clear that he knew how guilty Trump was and also made it perfectly clear that in professional solidarity he and the other members of the Party of Trump refused to hold their Leader accountable, I and many other people observed at that time that everything that would happen to America from that point on would be primarily their fault.

Now more than ever.

Seriously, what the fuck? MSDNC fired its handsy, Irish Catholic gaffe machine this week, why couldn’t the actual Democratic Party?

We know the story by now: Joe Biden was left for dead. He put all his chips on South Carolina. But (largely thanks to veteran congressman Jim Clyburn) the state came out for him in a big way, and everyone else’s vote take was underwhelming. So Pete Buttigieg dropped out and endorsed Biden. And then Amy Klobuchar, because Amy will not be one-upped by Pete on anything. And then Monday, Biden was at a Texas rally and got a surprise endorsement from Beto O’Rourke, complete with gratuitous Spanglish.

And Biden went on to win not only the states he was expected to win, but Texas, where Bernie Sanders was polling strong, and Minnesota, where Klobuchar’s endorsement helped break Sanders’ previous lead. (Don’t say I never gave Amy Klobuchar credit for anything.)

After Nevada, Bernie Sanders was the candidate to beat, but Biden performed so much better than expected this week that he actually overtook Sanders’ delegate lead. Now a veteran Democratic pollster says, “It’s done unless Joe makes some horrible mistake.”

Pfft. What are the odds of that?

Biden: Can at least have credit for staying power. His strategy all this time (conscious or not) is that that lots of Americans like the idea of Donald Trump – the straight-talking, politically incorrect populist – but unlike his cultists, realize he’s a Russian gimp who makes Biden look like Bill Nye the Science Guy. And he conveys himself in a positive way that neither Trump nor Sanders do. A point I kept hearing over the weekend after South Carolina is that Biden is a kind man, a decent man. Well, yes. He would certainly be a welcome change of pace after four years of Andrew “Dice” Trump.

(Seriously, I thought Trump was going to start his last State of the Union speech with ‘I got my tongue up Nancy Pelosi’s ass, see?’)

Biden also has the same thing that Hillary Clinton had in 2016 that sank Sanders the last time: party backing. It matters tremendously that everyone came out to endorse Biden, and to do so when they did. Exit polls indicated that a lot of Super Tuesday voters made their decision for Biden after his South Carolina victory and party endorsements.

I would have no problem voting for Joe Biden. But he’s still vulnerable. Banana Republicans are still trying to hang Hunter Biden over him. The same people who pretend Trump has no mental problems will pick on every mistake Biden makes (and it’s a matter of WHEN and how MUCH, not if). And his main problem remains his attitude that we can just wind back the clock four years and the Republicans will be a normal party again, which they haven’t been for quite some time. But as I’d said, the broader picture is that if the Democratic Party is settling in behind Joe, he at least has a very strong back bench to help him, including people who are not only more on the ball but more willing to accept that the political reality of our “two” party system has irrevocably changed, and will act accordingly. People like Pete Buttigieg. I very much got the impression that in the last few days of campaign appearances, Joe was letting Pete try out for the role of Vice President, which would make him a good auxiliary brain. Of course I’m sure that would make “progressives” hate him and Biden all the more.

Warren: The fact that Elizabeth Warren has not done as well as a lot of people, including me, thought she would has itself been the source of some media discussion. The best comment on it being from Reason Magazine: “Indeed, the media stumped for Warren so hard that Vox‘s Matt Yglesias recently had to write a post explaining to people why she was losing “even if all your friends love her.” By your friends, he meant friends of people like you, a reader of Vox.“

So – you’re convinced that your candidate is the objectively best choice for president and you just have to get around the trivial matter that the entire rest of the country doesn’t agree?

Hi. Welcome to the Libertarian Party.

There have been several pre-post-mortems of Warren’s campaign in the media, and they usually come to the common point that by emphasizing “progressive” politics while at the same time going back on some pledges – like not taking PAC money – Warren has alienated both progressives and mainstream Democrats rather than being a point of common agreement between the two camps. This means that any hope of her riding in as a compromise candidate to a brokered convention is probably futile, since that would require her to have a base that would take her as a second choice – when she didn’t even place second in her home state of Massachusetts.

I like Elizabeth Warren. I think Warren is a perfectly good politician and would make a fine president. I just don’t see anybody voting for her.

Sanders: Sanders is hardly beaten. But he’s in trouble. David Faris had a pretty good summary in The Week Wednesday. He started, as many analyses do, pointing out Bernie’s colossal mistake in praising Cuba’s education program, however qualified that praise may be.

Look, praising the Soviet legacy is not an unforgivable sin in America. Just look at Jane Fonda. Or Donald Trump. But Trump notwithstanding, that’s not a guarantee of political success. Socialists are being too cute by half if they think they can create a distinction between “good” socialism in Canada and Europe and “bad” socialism in communist countries, and then collapse that distinction by defending communist Cuba and socialist Venezuela. For one thing, what you have with Left parties in Canada and Europe is simply a more distributionist model of capitalism, because you cannot have the benefits of “socialism” without a capitalist system. And that is because you cannot redistribute income if there is no income to redistribute. That requires profit motive, that requires surplus value, that requires capitalism. And as I’ve said already, if you can point to other countries (including Costa Rica) that have welfare systems and social programs without putting priests and gays in prison, why do you not point to those countries as examples of success instead of Cuba? It makes the rest of us think that the one-party tyranny is not a means to an end but the end in itself.

It’s exactly the sort of thing that makes mainstream liberal hysteria over Bernie seem justified. The fact that Bernie is still a better choice than the Putin-Trump ticket says less for Bernie and more against what used to be the Republican Party.

But Faris also points out Sanders’ several other strategic mistakes, notably the fact that he has failed to reach out to potential fellow-travelers as well as Biden has. It’s one reason Warren is still in the race. It all comes down to the idea that there are two very strong constituencies in the Democratic Party – the (temperamentally) conservative mainstream liberals and the “progressive” leftists, and they both have enough force to make things difficult for the winning nominee going into the general election. But some of that potential force that Bernistas bring to bear was undercut by the results of Super Tuesday. Nevada and California disproved the liberal canard that Bernie can’t win non-white votes. But however much he has gained with Hispanic voters, he still hasn’t appreciably improved among black voters, at least those above their 20s. And that leads to another issue. As Esquire put it, “The Bernie Sanders Youth Revolution Was Nowhere To Be Found On Super Tuesday.” Voter turnout did increase over previous primaries, but mostly with the old white and black people who favored Biden. For example, Bernie’s percentage of the youth vote in Virginia went from 69 percent in 2016 to 57 percent this week. And this calls the best bluff that the Sanders wing has. It was thought that if Sanders was strong enough at the Democratic National Convention and party insiders pulled tricks to get a white-horse candidate to replace him, that huge voter base would just stay home and hand the election to Trump. Now if Bernistas say that they’re not going to vote in November, mainstream Democrats can just say, “Well, it’s not like you’re voting now.”

Bloomberg: As a lot of people predicted, Bloomberg dropped out after Tuesday. Not only that, he did endorse Biden, which on paper gives him a lot more campaign money. This is another strategic mistake of Sanders, who said he wouldn’t take Bloomberg’s support if he wins the nomination. But on the whole, Bloomberg’s campaign makes socialism look better than capitalism, because he proved you don’t need to be a government bureaucrat to spend hundreds of millions on a political vanity project that won’t do anything good for anybody.

Ironically, it also disproved Sanders’ central thesis that big money is the central focus of politics, since not only did his small-donor base make him competitive this year and 2016, both he and Bloomberg dwarfed Biden’s campaign spending and Biden still won most of the Tuesday states.

But really, the night was best summed up by anchor-in-exile Brian Williams on MSNBC, who made an off-hand remark to Rachel Maddow: “Perhaps if voting were central to our democracy, we’d be good at it.”

“On the shoals of roast beef and apple pie, all socialist utopias flounder.”

-Werner Sombart

As Bernie Sanders becomes more and more popular and apparently more likely to win the Democratic nomination – assuming Joe Biden’s campaign doesn’t catch up by Super Tuesday – I see the same kind of question popping up on Quora and other discussion sites. The question is something along the lines of “why has socialism become so popular?” or specifically “why has socialism become popular along millennials?”

Well, I’m a libertarian, and a confirmed anti-socialist, so I think I can answer the question. But it’s going to go into some detail. There are three broad answers as to why socialism is getting more popular.

Socialism has lost its power to scare.

For socialism to be a bad thing, it must be worse than the system we have. “Conservatives” and most libertarians will point to Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela as an example of where socialism will lead. We will say, “If we went to a socialized healthcare system, the government would be in charge, we wouldn’t have any choices, and with only one provider, the government would be rationing urgent procedures!” And millennials will look at us and go, “Oh. You mean like what we have NOW?”

What we have is itself mandated by Big Government. During World War II, the federal government instituted wage and price controls and then allowed employers to sponsor health insurance programs to compensate for the wage increases they were no longer allowed to offer. So, a huge part of our country is run on the basis of a wartime policy which no longer has a reason to exist. Like much else in the government. This second-hand socialism means that government doesn’t have to cover the costs of healthcare like the United Kingdom does, but it also means that individual insurance is mostly dependent on the employer, if the employer offers it at all. In this system, your only “free-market” choice is to switch jobs. And if you do, you don’t necessarily know what your healthcare plan is going to be. You also don’t know if your job gives you medical insurance after 90 days, or six months, or the beginning of the year. And even if you like your policy, you don’t know if the employer is going to go through negotiations and change the plan, or change the provider. And then you have to find out what prescriptions and providers are actually covered, often after the fact.

As John Oliver recently put it, “the American healthcare system gives you so many choices in how to get fucked, it is truly the Kama Sutra of healthcare.”

Not only that, the fact that the healthcare system is based on private insurance is another flaw. Among other things, it’s one of the reasons that employers do have to negotiate prices for coverage, because these are largely dictated by the insurance giants. I’ve gone over this before, but let me do it again: While the Affordable Care Act is considered the government’s most unacceptable advance of socialism by many right-wingers, Obama with the ACA was trying to save the insurance-company paradigm of healthcare.

The comparison to other forms of insurance comes up, but what it amounts to is that with most forms of insurance, there is a difference between the “risk pool” and the total number of policy payers. The risk pool is the number of people who might be expected to collect on a policy. You don’t expect to crash your car and need auto insurance the same month you start the policy. You don’t expect to collect on your life insurance policy as soon as you start it, and if you do, the insurance company may investigate your estate.

But with healthcare, since private insurance is expected to cover all healthcare, including preventative medicine, the risk pool is functionally identical to the pool paying in. You buy insurance because you EXPECT to collect on it as soon as you get it. Insurance companies cannot survive on this principle. Forget “healthcare is a human right” – it’s just economics. Which is where the insurance companies came up with the bogosity of “pre-existing conditions” so that people couldn’t get coverage on the basis of the very conditions they needed coverage for. Otherwise the insurance companies would not be profitable.

The Affordable Care Act solved this issue – sorta – by simply obliging everybody to buy insurance and expand the payer pool whether they wanted to or not. However this does not make healthcare actually affordable, because forcing everybody to buy a service does not automatically decrease prices and in fact gives business an incentive to increase them. But that was the “socialism” right-wingers object to. And that IS socialist BS when your choice is eliminated, but this was the only way the system could preserve the private standard of health coverage. With socialism.

But since the system is still based on insurance-company coverage, we are obliged to play by insurance company rules, for example, this wonderful concept called a deductible. It’s a little hard to explain, mainly because it’s hard to justify, but basically as a “cost control” some plans require you to take a deductible, let’s say $2500, so that most of your services have to be paid for out of pocket until you pass that threshold, and only then does the plan cover you. Which raises a question I have never gotten a sufficient answer to: If I’m paying for my medical care out of pocket as if I didn’t HAVE a policy until I pass this threshold, then what the fuck am I still paying premiums for until then???

If we’re defending that as capitalism versus a nationalized system, the difference between capitalism and what we have here is like this: If I want to get satellite TV, I may have to sign a 24-month commitment for the equipment, which is bogus in and of itself, but then I don’t HAVE to have satellite TV. And that’s a choice that a lot of people have made. You can switch from DirecTV to Dish, or to cable, and back, or just go to Netflix or streaming services and antenna.

But if I have type II diabetes or some other “pre-existing” condition that obliges me to get regular prescriptions or get sick and DIE, then I can’t just “cut the cord” on my insurance or switch to Netflix.

Like I said, I’m a libertarian. And the reason I switched to supporting national health care is on fiscal conservative grounds: The US spends more money (both public and private) on the health care system than any other developed nation (most of which have ‘socialized’ systems) AND gets worse results. And that’s because, unlike most capitalist endeavors, the system is not geared to consumer demand. It is a cartel to benefit the medical and pharmaceutical industries, and it is set up that way by both Big Government and Big Business. Comparing the free market to American healthcare is not like comparing apples to oranges, it’s like comparing apples to Cadillacs. Most people don’t need Cadillacs. Most people don’t even want Cadillacs. But if you can’t afford a Cadillac, you have other options for transportation. But if the government tells you you either have to buy a Cadillac or you go on foot, and you still can’t afford a Cadillac, you’re fucked.

And if that’s what you’re calling capitalism, you can’t be surprised that socialized medicine is getting popular.

Socialism has lost its point of contrast.

If we on the Right – using innumerable examples in history – can describe socialism as a collectivist system that destroys freedom, human rights and political choices, the Left has a counter for that: Just call their system “democratic” socialism! Depending on the person, this may be more or less disingenuous. After all, even Lenin described his system as democratic. But the real problem with “conservative” opposition to the socialist agenda is that if we are going to define socialism in terms of Soviet-style communism and illiberal politics, we can no longer say that conservatism is the opposite of that. Donald Trump’s signature policy, almost a fixation, is building a border wall. The only other modern politician who likes border walls served in the KGB in East Germany. The Banana Republican Party has abandoned not only its flirtation with libertarianism but fiscal conservatism itself to embrace deficits, tariffs, and then, subsidies to farmers to cover up the natural results of the tariffs. This is all defined by Trump himself as a “nationalist” agenda. The resemblance of “good” nationalism to “bad” (Soviet style) socialism is something that the Left could really use against Banana Republicans, but they won’t, because that would require “democratic socialists” to admit that any collectivism could be bad. It might be a bit much to say that fascism is synonymous with socialism, but there are common roots (at least with Mussolini) common goals, and some common elements.

In fact, if you divorce the Aryan-vs.-Jew mythology peculiar to Nazism from every other type of fascism, you’ll see that all fascism, even original Italian fascism, is nationalist socialism, that is, it uses socialist means towards nationalist and reactionary ends. If you think that the purpose of socialism is to benefit previously oppressed groups of people, of course you see fascism as the radical opposite. But if you see the goal as nationalizing the entire society towards a certain ideology, it definitely qualifies.

This even applies to leftist “real” socialism, if only by default and not ideology. The goal of Marxist socialism of course was to create a total class revolution, but in practical terms it only happened in the Russian Empire at first, and then mainly under conditions that orthodox Marxism did not hold to be ideal for changing the system. Because of this there was a real struggle in the early days of the Soviet Union between endorsing a world revolution or the idea (ultimately championed by Stalin) of creating “socialism in one country.” For obvious practical reasons (among them, losing to the Poles in the Polish-Soviet War) Stalin chose the latter path. This led to various nationalist measures to create a new “Soviet” identity under Russian culture, which involved crushing dissent in Ukraine and other areas. Until the Soviets won World War II, they were simply not able to export their view of the world across national borders, and so their political ideology, internationalist as it was, was practically limited to national ends.

The point is not whether leftists disagree with the assertion that Nazism is a type of socialism. Let’s say I agree with the assertion, although I would phrase it more that socialism is one method of nationalism. The problem is that the new Right presents the argument in a bad-faith way that you don’t have to be a leftist to figure out. To wit: If Socialism Is Bad, and Nazis Are The REAL Socialists, then why are “conservatives” emulating the Nazis?

You might say that what you’re endorsing isn’t Nazism, but why did the Trump Administration change immigration standards based on race, why is the Administration not wanting the public to know about detention policies that lead to the deaths of migrants, and why does the government actively turn away volunteer efforts to stop such people from dying?

Just as the new Right deliberately confuses the definitions of socialism and liberty, they have also conflated the definitions of “democracy” and “republic” so that stopping an agenda that is increasingly unpopular is deemed to be “thwarting the will of the people” – with “the people” apparently being only those people who support the agenda. When socialist Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said recently that the Electoral College should be abolished, Representative Dan Crenshaw (BR-Texas) responded, “We live in a republic, which means 51% of the population doesn’t get to boss around the other 49%.”

Quite so. But that raises the question: Why is it MORE fair for the 49 percent to boss around the other 51 percent?

What we now refer to as the conservatives claim to be defenders of freedom and democracy, but their idea of “democracy” is where a plurality of the most gullible and vicious gravitate to a demagogue because he validates their regressive opinions, so they allow him and his cronies to gang-rape the Constitution and loot the national piggy bank while the majority of Americans who knew better are apparently supposed to just sit and stew because Liberal Tears.

THAT’s what you’re calling democracy. And you wonder how socialism got popular.

Young people have no sense of perspective.

As the prospect of Bernie Sanders winning the Democratic nomination became more likely, lots of people – many of them Democrats – objected to Sanders’ previous support for hard-left movements around the world and even his recent defense of Castro Cuba’s education system. Leftist supporters act as though this isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a problem given that Sanders qualified his statement as not being a defense of the Cuban government in general.

Well yes, it IS a problem. And it’s that much more obvious because the same people who emphasize the differences between Leninist/Chavista socialism and democratic socialism are the same people who praise the Castro government and defend the Chavista government against any alternatives, such as, letting people vote for someone else.

But it comes down to the same factor as the other two points. We choose between the devil we know or the devil we don’t know. In 2016, people chose Trump because they didn’t like the “devil” (Democrats) that they knew. In 2020, people know Trump all too well but they don’t know much about socialism at all, either the “good” socialism that leftists endorse or the “bad” socialism that right-wingers emphasize in history. To choose A over B, or vice versa, and have that count as something other than an aesthetic preference, one must not only be different to but superior to the other.

Young people, frankly, don’t know why we thought socialism was such a terrible thing, nor why it is such a good thing to emphasize business over unions and business over regulations. They aren’t familiar with how Lyndon Johnson tried to have both an escalation in Vietnam and the Great Society, they aren’t familiar with how Nixon succeeded him with policies that were both culturally conservative and economically Keynesian, and that Carter’s policies at least in the short term made everything worse. They don’t remember how the Soviet Union seemed to be humiliating us at every turn. They also don’t know how people reacted by putting Ronald Reagan in office, and how his policies right from the get-go were intended to break unions and break inflation. In a certain respect, Reagan’s willingness to confront the Soviet Union also broke them, ultimately by undercutting their economy. Reagan was rewarded by having 49 of 50 states vote for him in his re-election campaign of 1984. Even after Reagan, those few liberals who did get in had to make concessions to the new paradigm, with Bill Clinton saying “the era of Big Government is over.” It wasn’t, really, but the era of leftist government was.

I had talked with a left-wing Facebook friend about these subjects, and told him my overall theory that just as leftists can’t seem to understand that the right-wing paradigm of today is a response to what went before, that the union-busting business model and anti-inflation fiscal policy were intended for previous conditions that no longer exist, and that while what they see as a golden age really wasn’t so great, likewise right-wingers can’t seem to understand that the economy they crow about really isn’t working for everybody and that they have set the conditions for their own upheaval. Not every leftist corresponds to the Right’s tyrannical caricature of them, but then one of the reasons Reagan succeeded back then is because it was very hard to imagine him as a xenophobic fascist ogre. It is on the other hand very easy to imagine Trump as such. The longer a given group stays in power with its assumptions unchallenged, the more they assume they can get away with whatever they want and not have to care about public reaction.

And that is based on the assumption that The Way Things Are is the a priori Way Things Are Meant To Be rather than a simple chain of causality in which the way things are now is because we previously did things a different way and didn’t like the results.

I mean, if you’re voting for duopoly, your two choices are Spam, Socialism, Sausage, Abortions, Socialism, Drag Queen Story Hour and Socialism, or Spam, Spam, Socialism, Border Walls, Racism, Corruption and Socialism. And if you stand up and go, “But I don’t LIKE socialism!” tough, because they’re BOTH socialism. If you don’t like socialism, you can always vote for the Libertarian Party, which is the only American party that is not explicitly or implicitly socialist. Assuming, that is, you’re serious about not wanting socialism.

But you’re not, are you?

You want a big, heavy handed government that creates the society you want. And the kids who want the socialism that admits to being such just want the same thing that you do: A big, heavy handed government that creates the society they want. It just happens to provide them with more material benefits than liberal tears.

I’m not sure why that concept is so radical.

News You Can Use

Trump’s Decision Somehow Fails To Impress Wall Street

GILLEN NEWS NETWORK

NEW YORK February 27 – Wall Street closed trading today with a loss of 1,190 points, or 4.42 percent, with NASDAQ falling 4.61%, the worst one-day losses in eight years. The market declined due to continuing nervousness over the worldwide spread of the coronavirus (Covid-19) and the loss occurred only one day after White House occupant Donald Trump announced Vice President Mike Pence as the policy czar for America’s coronavirus policy.

During his press conference Wednesday February 26, Trump blamed the steep losses of the stock market Monday on the shambolic Democratic debate in South Carolina, despite the fact that the debate occurred on Tuesday. In order to coordinate public response, the White House announced Thursday that in Pence’s new role he will be approving all responses from government officials on the crisis.

Response from Wall Street brokers was mixed.

Goldman Sachs trader Sol Lieberman said, “Look, we know that Trump has to pacify the witch doctor contingent of this party, but that’s not going to impress people who actually do math and predict trends. For a living.”

The appointment of Pence to his current responsibility drew controversy given that as Governor in Indiana in 2014, an HIV epidemic started that Pence did not respond to until four months after cases were reported. “Before the outbreak, there had been numerous deaths and known risks from the increase in injection drug use in the area for several years. Pence had long been a vocal opponent of needle exchange programs, which allow drug users to trade in used syringes for sterile ones in order to stop the spread of diseases, despite evidence that they work. Such programs were banned in the state when the outbreak started.”

It was unknown what short-term measures the government is going to enact to stop the spread of coronavirus, given that Vice President Pence spent most of Thursday praising Donald Trump at CPAC.

On the Wall Street floor, investor Tom McKinney said, “the market’s still over 25,000, and it’s due for a correction. But still, it’d be good if the government knew what it was doing.”

According to insiders, Trump is said to be furious about how officials in his administration have handled the coronavirus outbreak, and blames downbeat warnings from health officials for a brutal downturn in financial markets.

Public trader Naryanan Mattacharya said, “Look, we all know Donnie thinks of Wall Street as his bulletproof vest. He could bugger a 5-year old on 5^th Avenue and most of the donor class would blame the kid. But if Wall Street tanks, all that changes. He’ll be walking around with his Vienna Sausage d*ck thinking he’s King Sh*t, and then suddenly Bernie Sanders wins the nomination with a 10-point national lead.”

“It’s almost as if F*ckface Von Clownstick did the easiest, laziest thing to smooth public relations cause he doesn’t know what’s going on and spends half the day with his head up his *ss. That must be why his face looks like that,” Mattacharya said.

Gillen News Network – Not The Real News, But Let’s Face It, It’s Probably Better

As genuinely exciting and often substantive as the Las Vegas Democratic debate was last week, the South Carolina debate last night was just an unholy mess.

Bloomberg – slightly better at presenting himself, although that’s not saying much. His best moment, if you want to call it that, was admitting that what works in New York won’t necessarily work in the rest of the country, saying “otherwise you’d have a Naked Cowboy in every city.” This joke went down like the proverbial lead balloon, and those of us who know who Naked Cowboy is probably all agree we’d rather have him running against Trump than most of the people on stage.

Biden – clearly NOT PUTTING UP WITH ANY MORE SHIT and DOESN’T CARE if he yells. It might even work.

Buttigieg – not only told billionaires he’d raise their taxes, but made a case against the Senate filibuster by pointing out how Strom Thurmond used it to defend segregation. He said this in South Carolina.

If there is anything more brave than being an openly gay man running for president, it’s that.

Klobuchar – was asked what the biggest misconception is about her and she responded “that people think I’m boring.”

How can you be in Dunning-Kruger Effect while being made aware you’re in Dunning-Kruger Effect?

Warren – got that much more in Bloomberg’s face, using her own history of motherhood to confront him with the second-hand accusation that he’d told a pregnant employee to “kill it” because her condition inconvenienced him. Bloomberg insisted the incident never happened and when moderators asked how she could prove the woman’s opinion, Warren just said, “her words.” I am not sure this approach helped her or not.

Steyer – I am not sure what he’s even doing here, but between the two billionaires he seems less clueless and less harmful than Bloomberg.

Sanders – really seems to underestimate the threat he created for himself in praising communist governments like Castro Cuba, underestimates the degree to which the moderate Democrats (still the majority) are alienated by that, and how much they can weaponize such comments, because you know damn well if they don’t, the Republicans will. I mean yeah, you’re a Democratic Socialist. As Elizabeth Warren would say, good for you. But if democratic socialism is NOT the same thing as Leninism, it follows that you don’t need to present a Leninist government as a positive example. If you’re going to count EU nations, Israel, even Costa Rica as socialist countries, it follows that you could point to examples of socialism working WITHOUT putting gay people and religious dissidents in prison.

Of course, given Trump’s praise for dictators, and Bloomberg saying at this very debate that China’s Xi Jinping is NOT a dictator, maybe Sanders thought he could get away with it.

CBS: What’s the grade below F? G? H? Gayle King and Norah O’Donnell kept complaining about the candidates not respecting the rules of the debates, which didn’t actually mean they enforced them. Nobody seemed to know what was going on. “This is the last segment of our debate. No, we’ve got time for one more break.” [back from commercial] “That concludes our debate.”

What was the difference between this schoolyard fight and the MSNBC debate? I guess with TV, you get what you pay for.

In the course of Bernie Sanders’ pretty decisive win in the Nevada caucuses, I’d decided to stay home and watch MSNBC, since I had already done early voting the week before. What I saw was pretty revelatory, given that MSNBC is perceived to be the Democrat channel in the same way that Fox News is the Republican channel. (Which is why I and others often call it ‘MSDNC.’)

First, Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist James Carville told Nicole Wallace, “If you’re voting for (Sanders) because you think he’ll win the election, because he’ll galvanize heretofore sleepy parts of an electorate, then politically, you’re a fool … And if people are appraised of this, and they know that, and they want to do it as Democrats, that’s their own business. But I don’t think they have all the facts that they need before they make this judgment going forward.”

Harsh as that was, that wasn’t the network’s biggest own-goal news story. A little bit later, national anchor Brian Williams interviewed MSNBC’s elder statesman Chris Matthews to get his take, and he said, “I’m reading last night about the fall of France in the summer of 1940. And the general calls up Churchill and says, ‘It’s over,’” Matthews said. “And Churchill says, ‘How can it be? You got the greatest army in Europe. How can it be over?’ He said, ‘It’s over.’”

Such was the reaction to this comparison – in which Matthews indirectly compared Sanders’ campaign to the Nazi regime that ended up killing so many of Sanders’ European Jewish relatives – that Matthews (or a network superior) was obliged to open Hardball Monday the 24^th by saying, “I was wrong to refer to an event from the last days, or actually the first days, of World War II.” And then he brought on New York City’s current mayor, Bill de Blasio, to explain his staunch support for Bernie’s left-wing policies.

Now if you’ve been paying attention, Chris Matthews, an old-school, anti-communist, Kennedy liberal, is no big fan of Sanders. Not too long before this, Matthews was part of post-debate commentary in New Hampshire, and told other panelists, “I remember the Cold War … I have an attitude towards [Fidel] Castro. I believe if Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War there would have been executions in Central Park and I might have been one of the ones getting executed. And certain other people would be there cheering, okay?” Also if you’ve been paying attention for years longer, Matthews’ foot-in-mouth speaking style is not limited to calling the 1940 campaign the “last days” of World War II. I mean, given how much he trips over facts and gets people’s names wrong, the fact that he can score points on people like Gary Johnson and Donald Trump is that much more remarkable. He’s like the Columbo of political TV. Either that or his success says a lot more about the qualities of the political elite that he interviews.

And as super-liberal as MSNBC is perceived to be, Matthews is simply the standard. On one side you’ve got Joe Scarborough, Nicole Wallace and Never Trump Republican pundits like Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin who only have common cause with the liberals because they still believe in a definition of conservatism prior to “whatever Trump says, goes.” Then you’ve got Matthews, the middle-brow elder. Then you’ve got Joy Reid, Rachel Maddow and a few other “progressives” who are certainly more leftist than Matthews but no socialist’s idea of a socialist. Most of the real political extremists, like Melissa Harris-Perry, Cenk Uygur and the famous Keith Olbermann, are long gone due to backstage squabbles. So while Matthews is not entirely representative of MSNBC opinion, his senior status makes him a leading indicator of where the network is on Bernie.

Here’s the thing, Matthews’ blockhead insensitivity drew attention by invoking the Holocaust (however accidentally) but I sort of see his point. It just wasn’t the one he was intending to make. Mind you, what I’m about to say is NOT intended as a defense of Matthews. It’s just my take on the comparison.

If you’re a World War II buff, like I am, you can acknowledge the skill and success of the German military without being a fan of the Nazis. When Matthews made his remark about 1940, and Churchill’s surprise that France lost so completely when they had “the greatest army in Europe,” there was a right to be surprised. While France had about half Germany’s population, they still had 5 million men under arms, with about 2,240,000, or 104 divisions, in the north. They were backed up by the Dutch and Belgian armies (over a million men) and the British Expeditionary Force with over 1.5 million men. Germany had about 3 million men available for the Western Front. It actually had less vehicles and heavy tanks than the French army. What they had, and the Allies did not, was a willingness to try a new strategy rather than assuming they would win the same way they did last time – because for one thing, Germany didn’t win the last war, but the Allies eventually did with trench warfare and attrition. And being fundamentally lacking in imagination, the Allies neither adapted to current conditions nor anticipated that an enemy which had every incentive NOT to repeat a losing strategy would in fact refuse to do so.

“In March 1940, less than two months before the German surprise invasion, Parliamentary Army Committee member Pierre-Charles Taittinger led a parliamentary delegation to inspect the defenses in Sedan, a city for whose defense General Huntziger was responsible. Taittinger prophetically reported, “In this region, we are entirely too much taken with the idea that the Ardennes woods and the Meuse River will shield Sedan and we assign entirely too much significance e to these natural obstacles. The defenses in this sector are rudimentary.” He wrote that he “trembled” at the thought the Germans might attack there. General Huntziger dismissed Taittinger’s warning entirely.

“The chief comptroller of the Army asked General Huntziger if he put any stock in Taittinger’s report and the general replied, “Certainly not, the Germans are dead afraid of attacking.” On May 9, less than twenty-four hours before the invasion, Huntziger told his troops that “the German preparations which you have observed are only an exercise. The Germans are not crazy enough to take the additional risk of facing twenty-seven Belgian divisions”—though, to be fair, the confidence of the French High Command was not entirely without justification.” https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/the-super-simple-reason-nazi-germany-crushed-france-during-19484

If you are a student of history, which I guess Matthews takes himself to be, you know what happened next. Using a repeatedly-modified plan from rising general Erich von Manstein, Germany first attacked Holland and Belgium, leading the British and French to believe this territory was the main thrust of the attack, as it was in 1914. They advanced and Germany, taking a risk, forced motorized units through the difficult terrain of the Ardennes, bypassing both the French fortifications on Germany’s border and the main Allied armies to the north. While those armies engaged the Germans in Belgium, German armor units blitzed out from the breakthrough point and cut the coalition off from Paris, eventually isolating them from their supply lines, taking Brussels and devouring Allied units piecemeal, which led to the Dunkirk evacuation of remaining Allied forces and shortly thereafter, the fall of Paris. History also records the lack of leadership and initiative on the other side, one French staff officer describing a general at headquarters, “in tragic immobility, saying nothing, doing nothing, but just gazing at the map spread on the table between us, as though hoping to find on it the decision which he was incapable of taking.”

Not unlike Hillary Clinton’s people in fall 2016, actually.

What did Sanders do that he didn’t do last time? Well, for one thing, he didn’t have one opponent with the entire Democratic establishment behind him, which is one reason Matthews’ reference is not the best. But Sanders did know he needed organization and leadership, based on the hard fight he had in Nevada last time. And he had that. I can tell you from my own experience at the 2016 caucus, the 2016 Clark County Democratic convention, and my volunteer work for Sanders leading up to the caucus this year, that Sanders’ people had numbers, they had a schedule, they had their own apps to keep track of who they recruited. They followed up on the people they contacted (including me). I volunteered largely because I knew they had that level of organization in 2016, and I didn’t see anybody else in Nevada who had that kind of commitment. In many ways, it’s as simple as that. The main thing I’ve heard from various news sources in regard to the caucus is all the Hispanic voters telling reporters that they voted Bernie because he was the only candidate doing ads in Spanish and raising his profile. I don’t really follow Hispanic media in Las Vegas, but I know it exists, and I know it’s huge. This is one thing that the Sanders people tried to do in 2016 but didn’t really succeed at until now. Meanwhile the same experts who assumed that non-white people were not sympathetic to Sanders took it for granted that those votes would go to Joe Biden. Just as they took a lot of stuff for granted in 2016.

Insofar as the comparison to World War II applies, it’s that the “good guys” used tactics that were already flawed at the time without examining how things had changed, whereas the “bad guys” were adaptive and worked in directions that their opponent didn’t anticipate. It was assumed for instance that it would be a strike against Sanders when the Culinary Union refused to endorse him on the grounds that Medicare for All would take away their healthcare plans. However, exit interviews with union workers indicated that many members were thinking of friends and relatives who don’t have their coverage or would lose it if they lost their jobs. And again: it is that much more obvious in retrospect what a colossal strategic error it was for Mike Bloomberg to enter the debates before actually contesting a state race, because not only were his own negatives used against him in the Las Vegas debate, in the process everyone concentrated on Bloomberg and not Sanders, making it that much less likely that there will be a strong alternative to him in the contests to come. And in the contests where Bloomberg is competing, he is coming off a public humiliation without actually getting any votes.

If we continue the Nazi comparison, Western civilization was eventually saved when Nazi Germany ran up against Soviet Russia and was defeated. So for mainstream liberals like Matthews to save their party from socialism, they have to hope that Sanders is eventually defeated by Donald Trump. Which, given that Trump is Vladimir Putin’s bitch, fits the analogy.

I mean, at another point on Saturday, Matthews had a panel where he posed the question, “I’m wondering if the Democratic moderates want Bernie Sanders to be President? I mean, he takes it over, he sets the direction of the future of the party,” Matthews continued. “Maybe they’d rather wait four years and put in the Democrat that they like.” SURE. After all, Trump has outright said, “I have the right to do whatever I want as President.” Maybe he’d let the Democrats survive as a party. Maybe not. Who knows? He might keep up appearances just to keep the liberals from being more scared of him than they are of Sanders. The Democrats might be allowed to survive, if only as the House Negroes of the Trump Plantation.
(Does that analogy offend you? GOOD! Now try not to justify it.)

But really, the problem with Matthews’ analogy isn’t that it doesn’t apply on some level, but that it isn’t the most immediate or relevant analogy to apply. The obvious similarity to Bernie Sanders’ current romp is not with Nazis in Europe, but with Donald Trump’s 2016 political campaign. You know, where the incumbent party had an unpopular candidate that no one would run against because they had institutional backing, while the party out of power had everybody and his Mom running for president, and it was all they could do to get everyone on the same debate stage, and after a few months of that circus, people decided they liked the blunt-talking outsider who wasn’t in the party machine, and he ended up getting victory after victory, albeit by plurality, and where all the non-Trump candidates knew that they had to bow out and unite behind a designated NotTrump, and for various self-centered reasons, all of them refused to do so. And eventually, after talking a big game about populism and “the real America”, all the technocrats and policy wonks and shills of billionaires in the Republican Party had to walk in line behind the radical who actually took all that stuff seriously, and from then on they had to go along with it even if they didn’t agree. And if liberals want the White House back as desperately as conservatives did, they might have to do the same thing.

Maybe that’s why they’re so scared.

For once the Vegas hype machine is justified.

We sure had a Wang Dang Doodle Wednesday, didn’t we? The Democratic debate was definitely the most entertaining yet. Certainly if you’re a liberal, and especially if you’re not. It helped that there were only SIX candidates! Of course, one of the two remaining billionaires who actually IS running in Nevada did not qualify for the debate by Democratic National Committee rules, while the one who is not running did. By rules recently changed by the DNC, Mike Bloomberg qualified after spending literal tons of money to raise his profile in Nevada or South Carolina, while Tom Steyer, who is running in Nevada but is only super-rich, did not. Steyer himself said that the previous rules that the DNC threw out excluded people “of color” like Julian Castro, but the new rule allowed Bloomberg to barge in basically by paying enough cash.

If Bloomberg choosing not to run in Nevada was a big Fuck You to the state, then the DNC changing the rules to let him into the Vegas debate when Steyer was excluded was an even bigger Fuck You. Maybe caucus voters can deduce which candidate the party establishment hates most and push that person over the top on Saturday just to show them, huh?

And so to review:

Mike Bloomberg: What the FUCK was this guy doing there? It wouldn’t be so bad if he could actually debate, which he can’t, or if he were at least an entertaining boor, like Trump was in the 2016 debates, but Mike just stuck there like a sour lemon and assumed that that attitude was proof of his superior qualification.

The real issue is that hoser seemed to think that he could run in a party that, much more so than in 2008 or even 2016, has to at least play to the idea that liberal billionaires and technocrats don’t have all the answers when people in the real world are still working multiple jobs. His presentation is basically that Trump’s success has less to do with the Republican plurality gaming the system to keep their Leader in charge and more the idea that the majority actually LIKES a bossy New York elitist who thinks that his money gives him more rights than anyone else. Whereas the party he now chooses to run in has invested much of its identity in opposing that very concept, especially after Trump took charge and made himself more unpopular than he already was.

Of course since Bloomberg is not running in Nevada, we will have no way of knowing if this debate really affected his trajectory, but we can only hope it hurts.

Warren: Wow. She was the clear winner. Not only did she reserve her (justified) focus for Bloomberg, she had plenty of trash to sling around, even bagging on Amy Klobuchar’s health care plan (or lack of one). And if the whole campaign was one debate, she certainly distinguished herself as the candidate best positioned to push “progressive” policies while still being a member of the party establishment. Of course the context is a little different from that. She is widely perceived to be fighting for her life. The good news is that she IS. If the contests from Nevada on are considered to be the substantial test (especially after the Iowa fiasco made that state a wash), Warren is suddenly a lot more viable.

Buttigieg: He certainly justified why I like him, but I’m not sure he made that case to everybody else. He had some of the best lines, positioning himself as the middle ground between the “extremes” of Bloomberg and Bernie Sanders, especially “let’s put forward somebody who’s actually a Democrat” – which merely points out that Bloomberg and Sanders are NOT. Sanders is an open socialist and Vermont Independent who only runs as a Democrat for the sake of expediency, whereas Bloomberg was and ultimately still is a liberal Republican who’s running as a Democrat because Republicans have hunted their liberals to extinction.

It’s just that when the current political system is based so much on hate – Trump hating everybody, Democrats hating Trump, and some Democrats unsure of whether they hate socialists more than Trump – Pete’s approach may get him drowned. As with Warren, he put words together beautifully, but even more so than Warren, he’s in tough position and unlike her, things may be more rather than less difficult after Saturday.

Biden: He didn’t really distinguish himself, but by the same token, he didn’t negatively distinguish himself. He stanched the bleeding, as they say. I think his best moment might have been when Bloomberg claimed to have a change of heart on “stop and frisk” and Biden pointed out that he basically had to be forced into ending the policy due to legal action from the Obama-Biden Administration. This goes to show what a tremendous strategic error it was for Bloomberg to get into this race: He makes everyone else in the primary, including Klobuchar, look better.

Klobuchar: That doesn’t mean Klobuchar did well. She was called upon to name the president of Mexico and couldn’t, which we can call an honest flub. But then Pete Buttigieg kind of scored an own-goal when he counted that as a case of her not being that knowledgeable. She shot back, “Are you trying to say that I’m dumb? Are you mocking me, Pete?” And then Elizabeth Warren stepped up to take Amy Klobuchar’s side.

Ah yes, the tried-and-true “They’re Picking on Me Cause I’m a Woman” tactic. Well, that may work against men with chivalry or a sense of scruples, but as we saw in 2016, it will not work on Donald Trump. As I’ve already mentioned, both Klobuchar and Warren have the same built-in support base that Hillary Clinton had in 2016, but Klobuchar also has Clinton’s personality issues – namely a sense of oblivious entitlement – that Warren lacks (but that Klobuchar shares with Bloomberg). Not only that, as we saw this week, Warren is much better at maneuvering and changing the debate. So if you’re going to do the politically correct thing (like the Times did) and endorse both Klobuchar and Warren, knowing only ONE of them can be nominated, Warren is clearly the superior.

So that goes to the last candidate on stage. Bernie Sanders. And again, if the goal in promoting Mike Bloomberg is for somebody, anybody, to save the Democratic Party from socialism, this was a tremendous strategic error, because for one thing, on one night, Bernie Sanders was NOT the most unpopular guy on the stage. Most of the debates up to this point have been a game of King of the Mountain as everyone gangs up on the person who has the current political buzz. At one point it was Biden. Then it was Warren. Then Sanders. Then Buttigieg. Now it’s Bloomberg.

Moreover, by being such an obvious and deliberate symbol of corporatocracy, Bloomberg allows Sanders to focus his class-warfare, bottom-up vs top-down arguments in a way that he would not have gotten to do until the general election, assuming he is nominated. Which is now a little more likely.

Because Sanders didn’t even have to do a lot in this debate, just watch everybody pile onto Bloomberg, whom even the moderates like Klobuchar and Biden can see as a bigger threat to their party system. And so if the goal is for everybody is to unite behind the not-Sanders and present a non-socialist alternative to Trump (as if Sanders were the new George McGovern, when Trump is not even as popular or competent as Nixon), well, Mission un-Accomplished. And so, it is that much more likely that Sanders will win the Nevada caucus going into Saturday (especially since Queen Hillary the Inevitable is not in position to lean on the votes this time), which given this state’s demographics will make it harder to argue that he can’t get non-white votes, which will help him going towards South Carolina and Super Tuesday. The problem is that at least one other person had an even better debate, which means that the process of elimination hasn’t really eliminated any of these people yet.

And so, in conclusion:

Hi, I’m Mike Bloomberg, and I just
bought space on this guy’s blog to promote my presidential campaign
after promising him a new pancreas!

BloombergCare: It’s still private insurance, but I’m buying everyone’s policies!