Lex Anteinternet: Go Donna! In a week of revelations, Donna Brazile...

 Donna Brazile almost ordered a hot cup of Joe.

Amongst the Brazile bombshells of last week, which we earlier discussed in Go Donna! In a week of revelations, Donna Brazile exposes the Clinton Campaign was a real shocker.

 Donna Brazile, Chairman of the Democratic National Committe for the final portions of the 2016 race.  Photo by Ron Aira. Copyright holder Brazile & Associates LLC. - The uploader on Wikimedia Commons received this from the author/copyright holder.

She almost decided to replace Clinton as the candidate with Joe Biden. 

Joe Biden. The DNC chairwoman also decided to replace Queen Hillary with a Go With The Joe You Know ticket.

She didn't, of course, and its really hard to imagine that actually happening.  Still, it shows the extent to which the Clinton campaign was a mess to note that it was even considered.

Pluses or minuses of Biden, it's interesting that his name was thrown out independently as a candidate who could rescue the Democrats, but he himself chose to reject those efforts.  Had the DNC thrown him in there, I wonder if he would have even accepted.  It certainly would have amounted to a rejection of the democratic process within the DNC.

Still, if it had happened, I suspect we'd have a President Biden now.

Go Donna! In a week of revelations, Donna Brazile exposes the Clinton Campaign.

 Donna Brazile, Chairman of the Democratic National Committe for the final portions of the 2016 race.  Photo by Ron Aira. Copyright holder Brazile & Associates LLC. - The uploader on Wikimedia Commons received this from the author/copyright holder.

One of the very real disappointments for me of this past election cycle was when Donna Brazile, whom I've always liked, replaced Debbie Wasserman Schultz, whom I've never liked, as head of the DNC.  That effectively made her a mouthpiece for the Clinton campaign and I just couldn't understand it.  Brazile always seemed to me to represent the old rational Democratic party that took a moderate/liberal view towards things, not a wackadoodle approach, and which had actual working people's interest at heart.  The Clinton campaign, in contrast, always seemed to be about power for the aging 1970s Boomer section of the Democratic Party that's holding on to power within it with cold dead skeletal hands.  So to hear Brazile act as an apologist for Clinton, well, it was just too much.  I lost respect for her.

Well, not much of that respect is back.

Lost in the mix of last weeks turbulent news cycle ist hat Brazile is out with her election postmortems, in the form of a book and an article, and its really a bombshell.  Far from defending Clinton, she goes after her in spades.  Political has an article in advance of her upcoming book entitled:

Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC

When I was asked to run the Democratic Party after the Russians hacked our emails, I stumbled onto a shocking truth about the Clinton campaign.

Wow, even the title is a shocker.

The article starts off:

Before I called Bernie Sanders, I lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music. I wanted to center myself for what I knew would be an emotional phone call.

What caused that level of emotion?

 Chair of the Democratic National Committee for part of the 2016 campaign, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Well here's a hint, slammer her predecessor Schultz:

Debbie was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party—she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was. How much control Brooklyn had and for how long was still something I had been trying to uncover for the last few weeks.

Everybody gets slammed from there. Wasserman Schultz is shown to have been disinterested and ineffective.  President Obama left the party financially broke. The Clinton campaign stepped in and bailed out the debts, but took over everything.  Brazille relates:

Right around the time of the convention, the leaked emails revealed Hillary’s campaign was grabbing money from the state parties for its own purposes, leaving the states with very little to support down-ballot races. A Politico story published on May 2, 2016, described the big fund-raising vehicle she had launched through the states the summer before, quoting a vow she had made to rebuild “the party from the ground up … when our state parties are strong, we win. That’s what will happen.”

But it goes further than there:

The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

I had been wondering why it was that I couldn’t write a press release without passing it by Brooklyn. Well, here was the answer.

 Basically Brazille has accused the Clinton campaign of operating to purchase the DNC during the 2016 campaign.  This isn't illegal, but Brazile feels it was unethical. And it confirms suspicions that existed during the campaign and which emails pirated by the Russians suggested.

Clinton had taken over the party before she was the nominee.  People who accused the Party of all but being a Clinton organization before the rank and file had made up its mind about who was to be its candidate were right.

So then, why is anyone still listening to Hillary Clinton now?

 Vermont's Senator Bernie Sanders. While pundits never gave Sanders a chance, just as they didn't give Trump a chance, he did much better than expected, just as Trump clearly did.  While its still widely believed that Sanders was doomed to go down in defeat against Clinton, Brazile's revelations raise some doubt about that in an election year of wild surprises.

Pundits keep talking about a "civil war" inside the GOP, but maybe a recent cover of Time, showing a huge GOP elephant holding a tiny Democratic donkey got it right.  If the GOP seems to be two parties, an old establishment party holding out against an insurgent Trump populist party, the Democrats seem to be Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and a five white upper middle class kids in their 20s who have time to protest everything and to back anything that's edgy. That's not a party, that's two odd stamtische, one in Greenwich village serving Free Trade Green Tea and another in Washington D. C. serving Domaine de la Romanee-Conti 1990.  Those people need to go.

Will they?

That's another question entirely.

As is one lingering question. Would Brazile have made these revelations had Clinton won?

Echoes of political disruption near and far

And, after just coming into office, Gen. Kelly engineered the canning of Anthony "The Mooch" Scaramucci.

Well, good riddance in my view, if for no other reason than that he's yet another graduate of Harvard Law School, which he credits with his success in business.  Harvard (and Yale) law schools seem to be the golden ticket, which they should not be. Graduate from a law school and you ought to be required to try at least a dozen small claims cases.  If you haven't, the bread line for you.

While having gone to Harvard Law School is reason enough, in my view, to get the axe, an additional reason centered on his volatile personality and in particular the language he used in an interview with a New Yorker reporter.  That latter event unfortunately says something about the nature of a lot of language in the law, I fear, as lawyers are pretty bad about using off color language amongst themselves.  Of course, American speech has coarsened enormously over recent years anyhow, so this is yet another example of how the public tends to be shocked by language used in one camp that they may very well, in some circumstances, use themselves.  There was a lot of "we can't even repeat this" in the press, but quite frankly language of that type, no matter how disgustingly vulgar, is pretty common.

Not that the wealthy Scaramucci is destined for the breadline.

Of interest, the Italian American Scaramucci was raised in a Catholic family but has been married twice.  His second wife Deidre Ball. filed for divorce from Scaramucci after a few years of marriage and having one child with him, and while being second with another, citing her dislike of Donald Trump as a reason.

Closer to home Cindy Hill resurfaced on the front page of the local paper again when her defamation suit against Tim Stubson was dismissed. That it would be dismissed was widely regarded as inevitable by anyone with a legal background so that's no surprise.  She, however, was not taking it gracefully as she was complaining in print about the judge who rendered the decision and indicating in a less than graceful way that she'd appeal the decision to the  Wyoming Supreme Court.  No doubt she will, where the decision of the lower court will be affirmed.

Stubson's comments, which appeared on Facebook related to his reasons and that of those in his camp regarding the bill that was found unconstitutional that basically deprived her of power. That bill was at the center of a full scale war in the GOP between what we might term the old guard and radical tea partyers.  That war seems to have died down and the tea party camp basically lost, or at least they've been fairly quiet for some time.  Stubson would be Congressman now but for LeLand Christensen, or put another way LeLand Christensen would be Congressman now but for Stubson, as they split the majority of the GOP vote, Christensen taking 22% and Stubson 17.7%.  That opened the door to Liz Cheney getting the nomination with 39% of the vote. That presumes, of course, that which ever, Stubson or Christensen, would have picked up the balance if the other had not been there, but I suspect that they would have.  Cheney, of course, having one will basically be Congressman for life and Wyoming never turns out an incumbent in Congress or in the Governor's seat.

Afraid of Democrats? A telling comment

On one of the weekend shows this past weekend a poll was noted in which a sizable percentage of Republican voters were noted as "being afraid" of Democrats.  I did a google search and didn't find any such poll, so it might be a fairly limited one.

Anyhow, in that segment the Democratic reaction was interesting and telling.  Democrats, apparently, didn't poll as being afraid of Republicans, although a google search will turn up piles of things that Democratic voters are worried about in regards to (presently) Republican President Donald Trump.  It's telling, as in their answer they tend to acknowledge that the party now holds some really radical views that people are afraid of and then they rush off to economic issues.

The Democratic Party is the worlds oldest political party and its evolved enormously over the decades.  Andrew Jackson would not recognize the current Democratic Party. That's probably a good thing too.  But a lot of Great Depression voters wouldn't recognize it either.  Shoot, the party that existed when I could first vote is hardly the same party it is today.

But, in spite of that, the Democrats define themselves in terms of the Great Depression.  Put under any stress at all, the party goes right to the idea that it is the party of hard working blue collar Americans, wearing chambray shirts and newsboy caps, working in a steel mill in Pittsburgh in 1933.

The mythical Democratic Voter.

But it doesn't.

Somehow over the past fifty years the Democrats have gone from a party that discovered Civil Rights (after the GOP had the lead in it) to one that has deeply unnatural views about human beings and which angles towards radical concepts regarding human nature.  Most people, being natural people, don't hold those views and that's why the Democrats have been taking a pounding.

It's interesting how this tends to show up in regards to repeated Democrat recent defeats, when explored on the weekend shows.  Average conversations tend to go like this:

Bob Moderator:  Okay!  Where here today on This Day With The Press to interview Senator Susie Greenwich Village and Representative Bill Manhattan.  How you are you folks today?

Village:  Just great Bob!

Manhattan: Fantastic Bob, and let me give a shout out to the Brooklyn Dodgers!

Moderator:  The Dodgers are in Los Angeles now Bill.

Manhattan:  Oh, well, I believe in a fully inclusive nation and while I represent the great people of my district in New York State, I still love the people of New Mexico.

Moderator:  Los Angeles is in California.

Manhattan:  I love them too.  Particularly their native daughter Linda Ronstadt.

Moderator: She's from New Mexico.

Manhattan:  Oh.

Moderator: Well, Congress folks this past week the Democratic Party took another pounding in a special election in the 875th District of Georgia.  You folks were expected to win but lost by a margin of 172.34%  Our post poll, poll revealed that people down in Thudpucker County aren't too happy with Donald Trump, but that the Democratic Party's recent bill to declare that there's just one gender and declare a national day celebrating that, and their bill to make cheerleader squads and infantry battalions gender neutral, and in fact equivalent to each other, offended folks. What do you intend to do about that?

Village:  Well, Bob, what we have to do is to emphasize our inclusiveness. We're the party for employing everyone, that steel mill worker in Pittsburgh, that worker in the Curtiss biplane factory in New Jersey, that single mother employed as a Liberty Ship builder in Newport News. We're for them folks.

Manhattan:  That's right Bob.

Moderator:  What about these social issues voters?

Village:  Oh, we think they should have jobs too.  Yes, we're for jobs.  Our plan it to have jobs by having jobs.  And good jobs. . . like in steel mills and cigar factories.  .

Yeah.  That's going nowhere.

And frankly, a lot of rank and file voters have good reason to fear the Democrats.

Somehow, the Democrats have gone from a party with a strong ethnic base in the North to one that is very strongly centered on a WASP base and which is deeply radical in regards to opposing a lot which is plainly apparent in human nature.

We know that there are men and women, and that men and women, when they get together, produce children. But the Democratic Party doesn't know that and in fact, in some instances, is deeply and fundamentally opposed to that idea.  The Democrats have radically altered the meaning of marriage, or rather they've adopted the radically altered definition of it.  They're well on their way to so embracing the concept that any sexually driven concept is okay that they've gone from a party that would have simply opposed common discrimination against people with same sex attraction, a view that the majority of Americans have held for a long time, to one that requires people to embrace any such drive.  The point at which this rationally stops is no longer apparent by any means.  They have fully embraced the idea that while its natural for the NFL to be all male, combat, the most physical and dangerous of any human activity, and one which has been all male since day one, must now be gender neutral.  This has gone so far that the Army is now issuing standards for female soldiers encountering "transgendered" men in showers, something that would have caused a criminal sanction in any earlier time.  

And the party continues to embrace a view of life that's deeply hostile to life itself, basically adopting a view that killing at either end of it is okay.  

No wonder, therefore, voters who are rooted in any Faith at all, or who simply are grounded in an actual understanding of nature, fear the Democrats.

And that explains a lot of why we are where we are.  Commentators and politicians keep saying we need to embrace our shared values and come together. But that presumes that we share values.  It isn't at all clear that we do.  Indeed, its become pretty apparent that the Democratic Party has become hostile to traditional values in a major way and no longer will allow a voice for them.  And wouldn't if it were in power.

So, no matter how bad the alternatives are, that means a lot of formerly Democratic voters are going to go elsewhere, and quite a few of them will regard themselves as having no choice but to do so.

Why would that be a question?

 Vietnamese refugees being evacuated from Saigon in 1976.  This photo is closer in time to the Allied victory in World War Two and the Roosevelt/Truman administrations than it is to our current era. . .just like the formative years of the leadership of the Democratic Party.

Following the defeat of the Democrats in the election just held in Georgia, some are questioning whether Nancy Pelosi ought to be deposed from her position as a leader in the party.

Seriously?  They need to ask that?

She should have been deposed 20 years ago.

Now, I don't blame Pelosi for the Democratic loss in Georgia.  Any one state's election is, after all, a local election and Georgia has been in the GOP camp for some time.

But Pelosi bears about as much of a relationship to the average American voter now as . . . well. . . . Hillary Clinton.  Or Chuck Schumer.

Pelosi is 77 years old.

Schumer in comparison is practically a baby at 66.

Hillary Clinton is 69.

Pelosi, Clinton and Schumer have been in politics their entire lives. Their connection with the old blue collar base of the Democratic Party, in terms of actual work, is non existent.  She first held a position in California's Democratic Party in 1976.  In contrast Clinton has had much more in the way of "real work", but it's notable that she worked for Congress as part of the effort to impeach Richard Nixon.  Schumer became a member of the New York Assembly in 1975.  In short, these politicians formative years all have a lot to do with the ERA, Post Vietnam, Watergate era of Democratic politics.

A person may not be defined by their formative years, but then maybe they can be as well.

The ERA is not a consideration for current female voters.  Indeed, the rabid feminism of the that era, outside the leadership of certain current movements, has no relationship whatsoever to the views or concerns of young female voters today.   The Vietnam War is over and even the hand wringing over the results of the war are over.  Nixon is dead.

CH-54 landing in Saigon, April 30, 1975. At the time this photograph was taken, Hillary Clinton had already worked on the Nixon impeachment effort, Chuck Schumer was already in the New York Assembly, and Nancy Pelosi was already involved in California's Democratic Party.

It's time for the current leadership of the Democratic Party to move on too.

Exercising the 1950 Soviet Option. Democratic blundering just keeps on, keeping on.

Senate Republicans, as we recall, held up, or actually prevented, the vote on Barack Obama's final Supreme Court nominee.

Now some Democrats are taking a similar position in regards to Trumps nominees of all types, and at least the New York Times has declared war on Trump's nomination of Justice Gorsuch.  Consider their editorial of February 1:

So what can Democrats do? 

First, they need to make sure that the stolen Supreme Court seat remains at the top of the public’s consciousness. When people hear the name “Neil Gorsuch,” as qualified as he may be, they should associate him with a constitutionally damaging power grab.

Second, Democrats should not weigh this nomination the same way that they’ve weighed previous ones. This one is different. The presumption should be that Gorsuch does not deserve confirmation, because the process that led to his nomination was illegitimate.

Wow.

So is that the approach the Democrats should take?

Only if they're as dense as a box of rocks.

But, so far, the Democratic leadership has been showing itself to be rather granitic in outlook.

Gorsuch isn't what many feared.  Hes a solid textualist and quite frankly an excellent nominee.  Fans of democracy, which Democrats and Liberals generally, frankly, are not (they prefer a Liberal, Imperial, Court), should rejoice.  Gorsuch himself notes that a good Justice should never like all of his own opinions.  Basically, his view is that the law is to be applied as written, and if people don't like the law, they ought to get in touch with their representatives and change it.

You'd think people in favor of the franchise would think, yeah!, nifty!

Well, the Democrats don't think that, as truth be known, they don't really trust voters to "do the right thing" as they see it. No, they trust the courts to tell people what they ought to think and make it the law.  Right now, they truly believed they were on the verge of an extreme liberal revolution in which the Court would hold there are no genders of any kind, there are no borders, etc., and we were on our way to a genderless, self defined society.

Well, we aren't.

And that's what they think was "stolen" from them.

And now the plan, at least on some nominations, is to sit around and do nothing.

Which was the Soviet Union's plan when the United Nations met to consider the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950.

The USSR had a Security Council veto.  But it walked out of the UN in protest of action being considered and more particularly as Red China was not admitted, at that time, to the UN. And, accordingly, the UN adopted a resolution to enter the war on South Korea's side, the one and only time that's ever been done by the UN.

The USSR could have stopped that, by showing up.  It didn't, as having a snit seemed like the thing to do over its view about Chinese admission.

Which is what the Democrats are now doing.

If they don't act, as a minority, the result will be. . . .well the result will be that the Republican Senate will give Trump everything he asks for without any Democratic input.

The Republican, or at least Trumpist, dream.

Why would they do that?

Well, why would they pit two elderly white candidates against each other, one of whom was detested on a wide scale, insult Catholics and Jews, and all that?

Should they make sure that the "stolen" seat remains in the public consciousness?  They should, by showing up. But they also ought to keep in mind that the public isn't that impressed by the Court.  Generally, the public thinks it knows best and the Court doesn't. The public also thinks that a collection of elderly jurists is unlikely to know what people under, oh, . . .let's say 60, think about what they want to the country to look like.  In other words, most people don't think Justice Kennedy is a cool hipster.  Maybe they think that about Ruth Bader Ginsberg. . . . 

So, in a fight over Gorsuch, what the Times implicitly suggests, is that the public ought to be reminded of all the decisions that have taken votes away from legislatures in the name of redefining society.  And that will appeal to the Times' readers, as they fear the American electorate.

But maybe the Democrats ought to consider that it really isn't 1973 anymore.  And maybe they ought to get outside a bit, if only to the zoo or park, where nature is.

The anti democratic court was likely the deciding factor in the 2016 Presidential election.  The Democrats don't seem to realize that.  For the first time since the late 1960s, really, Catholics voted somewhat as a block. Hispanics, most of whom are culturally Catholic, defected from the Democrats in surprising numbers.  45% of women, including vast numbers of young women for whom 1973 doesn't stand out to their demographic any longer like 1776, 1793 or 1917 does to some demographics, did so in larger numbers.  The anti democratic Supreme Court was responsible for a lot of that, and those voters, who want to keep a say and who have a more realistic view of life and nature than the Court, and the Democratic Party, acted accordingly.

The Democrats pointing that out is a good idea. . . . for the Republicans. 

Stabbed In The Back. . . . a self deluding thesis

First of all let me note the following.

Russia is not our friend (Romney, who was widely derided when he was the Presidential candidate for noting that, was close to correct, to a degree).  

And the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee's emails, their attempt to do so on the Republican ones, and their general behavior in these regards is so abominable that it must be addressed.  Indeed, while I haven't researched it, I wonder if it technically amounts to a causi belli, although it will not come to that.

Anyhow, some history.

By the fall of 1918 the German war effort was shot. They were incapable of winning the war.

Everything the Germans had calculated on, and gambled on, had failed.  The United Kingdom did not collapse due to a submarine blockade before the United States effectively fielded an army in Europe.  The Micheal Offensive did not break the Allied lines and take Paris, throwing France out of the war.  The introduction of poisonous gas had not proved to be a battlefield tide turner, or even particularly effective.  The surrender of the Russians under Lenin did not turn out to release a flood of men and supplies as German avarice required the deployment of German assets to keep on at nearly full strength.  Backing the Communists in Russia had helped turn the tide in the East but then had gone right to the German navy yards were it was having the same effect as it had in Russian ones.

They had lost.

They still hoped to secure a satisfactory diplomatic resolution, and in fact they actually did, but it wasn't the one they hoped for.

And soon, psychologically, they refused to accept it.

Which is just what the Democrats are doing about the 2016 election right now.

What German society did is well known.  By November 1918 they had no choice at all but to accept Allied terms. Those terms, in spite of the way they have been repeatedly portrayed, were not really all that harsh. A big part of this is that Germany had slid into a revolution at home, which strangely gets underplayed in the English language histories.  Just as in Revolutionary Russia, in Revolutionary Germany idle sailors betrayed their employers and became an unruly dangerous uniformed mob. As things disintegrated at home the Germans had to deploy its army on its own territory against its own people, a situation which would keep on keeping on after the war with the Allies ended.

By the late 1920s, however, they'd convinced themselves they hadn't actually lost the war at all, and certainly not through their own actions.  It was somebody else's fault. And that somebody became, in their imaginations, the Jews, a fairly absurd proposition anyway you look at it. But an absurd proposition that was used to launch the political career of a figure who emphasized the very worst elements of German culture and who attacked the best elements of it.

What does that have to do with the Democrats?

Well, the Democrats lost this election through their own ineptness, just as the Germans lost the Great War through their own fault and miscalculations.  I would have thought they would have won, but not because of their great campaign, but because Trump seemed to be incapable of winning. The Democrats, as we've explored already, ran a person well out of her own time, who wasn't likeable, emphasizing, where they emphasized anything, failed positions, while insulting some of their base.

Now, and here's where the stab in the back comes from, we know about some of those insults due to leaks.

It is now known that the Russians penetrated the Democratic National Committee and swiped their emails.  That's a criminal act, but we also know that t he Russians tried the same with the Republicans and failed as the Republican firewall worked. Why didn't the Democratic one work? 

And the Russian release of information, it's worth noting, did not release anything that wasn't true.  It's hard to complain, or should be hard to complain, about the truth of your own views being released.  If DNC operatives detested the Catholic Church, for example, they detested us.  The Russians letting us know that doesn't mean it isn't true. Rather, they were embarrassed by the truth.

But not so much, apparently, that they now feel they need to change at all. They don't.  They've propped up the same old, same old for their leaders and they, or at least those organs that support them, are crying about the Russians. "Stabbed in the back".  Donna Brazile and Leon Panetta were both on over the weekend  on the news shows addressing the email situation and neither of them would acknowledge that the problem, for their campaign, wasn't that emails were stolen, but what the stolen emails said.  Brazile went so far as to claim the emails were "weaponized" but if they were weapons, they were handgrenades with the pins pulled out before they were tossed out the cyber window. The real problem with them is that they let voters see how the Clintonites actually thought.

I think that its time to put Putin and his cronies in a corner.  We can't pretend that it isn't a crime, and frankly it creeps up on being nearly an act of war. 

But that doesn't mean it actually influenced the election.  I highly doubt that, to say the least.  At most they tended to confirm what the confirmed already thought.  That doesn't excuse it, but nor will there be any excuse for the Democrats to run repeat elections in 2018 and 2020, which right now is exactly where they are headed.

Whining, crying, panic in the editorial room of the New York Times, and waiting for that shoe to drop

Following the flood of analysis following the recent election of Donald Trump I stopped doing my after action reports.  There's just too much writing on the topic and I'm sure everyone is sick of it. Still, some things do and will call out for commentary and I can't help myself.  So, a collection of things will be posted here.

The Delusional Whining.  Not a day goes by, it seems, where one of the large newspaper organizations doesn't seemingly confirm what Republicans claimed about them, they're relationship to the Democratic Party equates with Pravda's relationship with the Communist Party.  It's absurd.

The New York Times and similar organs are just screaming with "Trump Not A Democrat?  Will he appoint the ghost of William Jennings Bryan to the Supreme Court?"  Get real.

The absolutely babyish reaction to a President who isn't a Democrat and who isn't an establishment Republican has just been fantastically juvenile.  And it probably is serving to cement the views of somebody who seemed to relish taking them on.

The irony, I suppose, is that the NYT and print media has been in a decline of disastrous proportions for a long time, so for the most part, its message is not only not getting through, it's symptomatic of a big city Democratic Party that things everyone in the world lives in a big city and is a Democrat.

Nope, nothing wrong here.  The item in the last paragraph is very nicely demonstrated by the Democratic reaction to the election, now that it has time to absorb it.

It isn't absorbing it.

The Democrats failed to gain either house in Congress.

They lost the Presidency.

They now control only 18, yes that's right, 18, of the State Legislatures.

18.

And they now hold 17 of the 50 Governorships.

Yes, 17.

The Democrats have been sort of smugly sitting back for years thinking "demographics is history", which assumes a linear demographic trend (very much in doubt) while the actual trend was a decline into extinction.

A party normally experiencing this would really clean house. The Democrats are doing the polar opposite.

And in the Senate, they're going with Chuck Schumer as a spokesman constantly.  You know, the New York Democrat who sounds just as abrasive to people who don't live in New York as all the other New York politicians (yes, including Trump). Good idea that. After running one ersatz New Yorker, Clinton, against an expat New Yorker, Sanders, and getting beat by a Manhattanite, sticking with annoying Schumer is the obvious choice.

Couldn't they even perhaps have considered Amy Schumer?  She's at least as left wing and isn't annoying.

Nancy Pelosi is actually retaining her position in the House.  Schumer hasn't been sent packing.  Amazing.  By comparison the GOP cycled over last year in the House. . . and its in control. Problem with losing the House and Senate again?  Apparently not.  "We'll just keep on keeping on with the leader whose been so freaking successful so far.  Go Team!"

This has caused one on line journal to state:

What does a professional sports team do after 6 straight losing seasons? Among other things, it usually fires the coach and looks for new blood, new leadership, and new strategies.

But not if you’re the minority House and Senate democratic leadership... Or the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party shortly before the collapse of communism.

Instead, the failed, and increasingly geriatric leadership holds onto its fading power with increasing tenacity.

The highest ranking elected Democrats are now... drum roll... Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (who has served in Congress for 35 years since 1981) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (who has served in Congress for 30 years since 1986. 

Some conservative cyber screed?  No, that was the very liberal Huffington Post.

The Washington Post recently ran a headline that stated:

The next generation of Democratic leaders is, um, nonexistent

Well, as they say, you don't want to abandon a gasping drowning horse as it sinks under the waives in the middle of a stream. . . oh wait, it's a river. . .

Well there's more hope at the Democratic National Committee, right?

Actually there is.  And if they were smart about this one, they'd choose the guy who made sort of a pitch sub silentio for it the other day . . .Barack Obama.

President Obama didn't come out swinging for the fences for it, but he did sort of express some interest, for those paying attention, and he'd be a really good choice. A widely liked politician (he'd have beat Trump if he could have run for a third term), who isn't 150 years old.  But he won't get it

There are some other good choices however.

One of them isn't Keith Ellison, however.

I know very little about Ellison personally but he's the wrong choice.  In interviews he sounds like he's straight out of the party circa 1973. Another one of those guys.

He is younger, young even in Democratic political terms, as he's only 53 (hey! now suddenly I'm young too, go Keith!).  But he's the wrong choice.

Why?  Well his 1973 rhetoric for one thing, and the principal thing. It's not 1973 anymore.

And then there's the fact that he's drawing flak for having represented the Nation of Islam as a lawyer years ago.  Ellison is a convert to Islam from Catholicism, which is quite rare and a bit odd, but he's never been a member of the Nation of Islam which isn't conventionally Islamic.  Nonetheless he's drawing some flak from some Jewish groups. And oddly, he's now getting flak from Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, whom he's denounced for years, who is calling him a coward.  This is the sort of stuff the DNC doesn't need.  Close attention to religious affiliation hasn't been a factor, supposedly, since 1963 but I'd question if that's fully true now (I doubt it) and picking somebody whose drawing these odd problems so early on may not be a really good idea.  Chances are some Democrats will feel that it has a "look. . .see how diverse we are" feel to it but it isn't likely to come across the way that they think, particularly when the GOP looks at least as diverse anymore. The Democrats look 1973 diverse. . the GOP looks 2016 diverse. Diversity isn't necessarily liberal.

Speaking of 1963, I see where television is going to run something on Jackie Kennedy, with Jackie played by Natalie Portman.  I'll not watch it, but apparently it touches on Jack's personal behavior only barely, or so I read.  When we're talking about guys with unsuitable behavior for the Presidency, how come JFK keeps getting a pass?  Seriously.

Anyway, if you want to send a message that the election meant nothing, picking the same old crew in Congress and a guy who sounds like he's from 1973 as the DNC chairman would be a really good approach to that.  "Let's run the same winning team with the same winning message we have since 1973, team, because demographics his history. . . hey. . . why isn't there anyone in the stands?"

The Post Clue Era.  Amongst those on the liberal left who are recreating, Weimar Republic style ("we didn't loose the war with the Allies, we were stabbed in the back. . . let's try it again") the recent election is the press itself about the press.

Recently, for anyone paying attention, there's been a news story about there being fake news on Facebook.

Gee, really.  What a shock.

This isn't news.

Everyone with a critical eye knows this. This as been known from approximately 30 seconds after Facebook came into being.

This does allow, however, comfort to the liberal downtrodden, as in "Oh, they don't disagree with me, they were befuddled by fake news. . . I need not change".

No doubt some votes were changed by fake news, but I'll bet not much.  Most of the fake news I saw, and it was from the left and the right, was obviously pitched to the already committed.  And its still going on.  News like that just goes to those whose minds are made up already.

And speaking of made up minds. . .

Picking up the loaded gun.  Speaking of not getting the point, one lesson the Democrats really should have taken from this election was to knock off the talk about gun control.

President Obama wisely basically didn't talk about gun control. 

That's because he is smart.

This didn't keep the NRA from picking on him anyhow, which I was convinced was a poor strategy.  Perhaps Clinton did as well, as she went gun control in the primaries and stuck with it, in an oatmeal fashion, in the general election. Well, the NRA put in an all out effort and it can take big time credit for the results, whether you like them or not, this past season.

Which is likely to mean a big roll back on what gun control there is.

Indeed, the NRA must push on this.  It would have anyhow, but as a practical matter, it must.  The NRA was consistent on Obama being the worst thing ever, second only to Hillary Clinton, for years.  Having assisted in getting in a Republican President when many, including  me, thought that was a mistake, and there being a GOP House and Senate, it it rest on its laurels its doomed.  In truth, Obama did nothing much on gun control until the very end of his presidency, at which time there was no point in him not trying to do something, as he was never going to get any NRA love anyway.  But, for the NRA, you cannot decry a person for eight years as hideously awful and then allow his successor to pretty much do nothing, which is pretty much what Obama was doing. So the NRA has to argue for roll back on gun control and national right to carry.  It has to.

One of the reasons that the Democrats should stay away from this entire topic as they don't know what they are talking about. Voters who vote on gun issues do know what they are talking about.  Democrats, when they speak about gun control, come across as ignorant or liars.

They probably don't know that. But when they speak about guns, if they do at all, as opposed to gun control, they generally demonstrate a profound ignorance on the topic.  And when they speak of gun control they tend to speak about stuff like "common sense gun safety" which means, to anyone listening, "I don't know anything about guns, but I'm going to assume that you will agree to me that we can make all guns Nerf Guns and that this makes sense".  When they do that, they come across like somebody who is trying to lie.

Most of this is, again, because the Democratic Party is heavily urban and it thinks of all guns being snubnosed revolvers from the movie Shaft, that early 70s things again, or it thinks of every gun being a true, selective fire, assault rifle (which are exceedingly rare and heavily regulated in civilian hands).  Most firearms users, and the numbers are growing, don't see firearm that way at all.

Anyhow, if the Democrats had brains, they'd not try to talk about "common sense" gun control or "gun safety" or any of that baloney.  They'd be a lot better off taking some other approach, if they really want to discuss this at all.  If they must discuss it, frankly, they'd be a lot better off just stating the truth, which his "I don't ever get outside of Greenwich Village and I think the only legitimate activity of a decent person is reading Vanity Fair".

No matter, I'm sure they won't listen.  Indeed the NYT (remember that journal, its noted above?) just published an article about lawyers and law firms volunteering their time on gun control.

Yawn.

That's not going to do diddly except make lawyers look even more like left wing weenies than they already do.  Indeed, just recently I heard a young person disparage the entire profession of the law in a way that was graphic, but suggested that all lawyers were a bunch of wimps in the most dramatic fashion.  Some people don't credit the opinions of the young, but I do.  People's opinions on professions and activities change over time.  A lot of older lawyers even now imagine that they're Al Pacino in With Justice For All, just as an older generation yet thought all lawyers were Atticus Finch.  Apparently we're now looking more like Zippy the Pinhead however and the smiling firm portraits in the article do sort of come across like "look at us. . . we're afraid to go outdoors!"

Gritting my teeth and waiting for the shoe to drop.  All this might lead some to think I'm a Trump supporter.  For regular Democrats, they probably have concluded I am, and for the Greewhich village crowd that seemingly runs the party they're probably hiding under their cafe tables with their tofu sandwiches and free trade coffee by now, crying.  But actually, I'm not.  As noted way back during the election, I voted for a third party candidate, and an obscure one at that. 

Which means even though, unlike the NYT I accept the election, and unlike the Democratic Party, I actually know it occurred, I'm not a Trumpite now or before. And I'm gritting my teeth on the upcoming Secretary of the Interior nomination.

So far, I've seen Trump's picks for various posts as mixed.  People crying in their free range, free trade, buttermilk about picking various generals about things haven't impressed me.  I haven't thought those picks bad.  I'm okay with his pick for Secretary of Defense.  That position used to be called the Secretary of War, and a former Marine Corps general who probably isn't impressed by the attempt to ignore physics and nature in the military is plenty okay by me. Likewise I'm okay with Kelly for Homeland Security, although I wonder why we need a Department of Defense and a Department of Homeland Security (I know, let's have a. . .um. . War Department!)

And I'm not going to freak out, or even get particularly excited, or even interested, with Nikki Haley at the UN.

I'm also okay with Jeff Sessions for Attorney General.  I know he's taken flak, but Trump would have had to pick the Barrista at the 9th and Centre Metro Station in Greenwich Village to please his opponents on this one, so why bother?

Betsy DeVos at the Department of Education bothers me a bit, but I'll wait to see how that plays out.  It wouldn't surprise me if some corrective actions are needed there, but that isn't a department I pay much attention to.

And picking Ben Carson to anything strikes me as a really poor idea.  I guess we'll see.

Scott Puritt at the EPA, strikes me as a poor choice.  No surprise, but a poor choice.  I'm worried about what that will mean.

And I'm really worried about the Interior.

So far, for potential Interior picks, the only one I liked was Matt Mead and he's taken his name out. And yes that does mean I don't want Cynthia Loomis, who is another Wyoming politician who turned her backs on the views of her constituents on public lands.  Boo.

Frankly, the pick I may be most comfortable with is Donald Trump, Jr.  I know that wold be a shocker, but he actually is the most measured of the potential candidates.  And he might be campaigning for it.

Now, I'm sure that people will say Trump can't pick his son, but why not?  That great American skirt chaser, um President, John F. Kennedy, made Bobby Kennedy the Attorney General and hardly anyone things that was improper. Appointing Bobby that is, not the skirt chasing.

Well, apparently the skirt chasing was okay as well.  The copy of People magazine wondered in here in the wife's grocery bag with an article on what Jackie "knew" reports that she grew up in a family where her father did that, and Jack's father did that, and '"that's what men did.'

Yes, that's bulls**t. But even now?

Anyhow, we're staying tuned.

Lex Anteinternet: The tumult and the shouting

 The day after the election I posted this:

Lex Anteinternet: The tumult and the shouting: I wonder if there's any chance that Facebook shall return to normal tomorrow or later this week. . . . to the extent it was normal. Hm...

I knew better, but I did sort of hope.

By this point, after the oddest election in anyone's memory,  I think most people are so burnt out and tired they'd like a political break.  I know that I would.  Indeed, I'd planned on more post election commentary, but I'm so tired of it all already that I haven't done it, and likely won't much.  I can hardly even stand to listed to the weekend political shows right now.

None of which, I'll note, stops the real diehards.

Maybe that's part of the problem.

We've endured eight years of comments from people who thought Barack Obama was the worst thing ever.  While some are now denying it, a lot of that commentary got extreme rather quickly, and quite a bit of it bordered on racist.

Not racist, but an example of this, is that I have a dear friend who was just appalled by President Obama's election as he was so much further to the left than my friend, who took up calling Obama a Marxist and who meant it.  Whatever he was, President Obama was not a Marxist, nor a closet Muslim, nor a Kenyan.  It was all too much.

Now we're going to see four years of the same thing, I fear, with Donald Trump.  One liberal friend of mine seriously takes the position that Trump, in order to make good his suggestion that he'll work with the left (which I don't recall Trump making) needs to surrender on the Supreme Court. That's a little like Custer demanding a Sioux surrender at Little Big Horn as a show of good faith.  It isn't going to happen as its absurd.

I've now seen a Facebook meme with a photo of a tired US soldier in World War Two claiming that those who voted for Trump are traitors, having betrayed the cause the soldiers fought for by voting for an implied fascists.  Oh come on.  That's the same thing as calling Obama a Marxist.

Enough for awhile.

Lessons Learned: No Dynasties

One clear message from this election is no more Bush's and no more Clinton's.  Enough is enough.

Political insiders believe in dynasties  They think that because you are the son, wife, cousin, or whatever, of somebody who was in office, the public likes you.

Not hardly.

The public things you are trying to become royalty.

In the history of the American republic there's been only two exceptions to this.  The Adams and the Roosevelt's.  We got two of each, and that was it.  I don't know about the Adam's, but with the Roosevelt's there were others who did indeed have serious opportunities to rise to high office, but in the end they backed off.  The family is still around today, and still as smart as it ever was.  But it doesn't run for office.  There are living descendants of Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt.  They don't run for office as they know better.

Indeed, there are living Theodore Roosevelt's and living Franklin Roosevelt's.

The Bush's and the Clinton's should have visited them this year.

No matter, I'm sure that there are those in the beltway looking at what Chelsea Clinton and various young members of the Bush family can be positioned for right now.

Lessons Learned. I guess there weren't any.

I'm tempted to stop this series of posts, and likely will slow them down or halt them for awhile, somewhat.   There's been a flood of post election commentary and so there's hardly any point in doing any more, which doesn't seem to mean that anyone is stopping however.

Nonetheless, in the spirit of warning those who will not learn from history, I cannot help but note that part of the Democratic and left of center commentary has been a howling scream of "we did nothing wrong and we intend to keep on doing the same".

It's truly been amazing.

There has been, to be completely fair, a fair amount of post election analysis in these quarters that's pretty biting, quite analytical, and likely correct.  But there's also a lot that's flat out delusional.

In that category, there have been some who have been floating suggestions along the lines of "if Trump really wants to work with us, like he says, he'll (fill in terms of surrender to the Democrats here).

First of all, I haven't heard him saying that at all.  Indeed, I think the great self delusional element in much of the post election analysis is that Trump isn't going to keep on keeping on in the direction he's been going.  He will.

So, I don't think he's really that worried about working with Democrats.  He really doesn't have to.

He has to work with Republicans, but they also have to work with him and they know it.  Republicans now will have no excuse at all for not doing things they've paid lip service to, but have not done.

Chief amongst the more off the rails suggestions I've seen is that if Trump really wants to show that he can work with Democrats (a doubtful proposition) he should renominate Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.  That's largely the same in nature as suggesting that if Lincoln really wanted to show the South that the nation was one again, in 1865, he should allow slavery to continue.  I mean, seriously?  There's no freaking earthly way that's going to happen, and indeed it should not and could not.

Now, as noted, I'm not a Trump fan (and I wasn't a Clinton fan either), but a person like Trump doesn't get elected to go in and say, "oh, I guess everything is okay here".  Not hardly.  And cherished items such as a left wing Supreme Court were the very things that probably served, in this instance, to torpedo the Democrats chances this year.

Indeed I think a good case can be made for the proposition that the turning point for the Democrats in this election was the Obegefell Decision.  Like it or hate it, it was on legal ice so think that a person could have taken a steam bath in it.  As such decisions are inherently anti-democratic, and that decision certainly was as well as being legally anemic, celebrating it the way the White House did, combined with major Democratic figures announcing that they no longer stood by the things they'd said, when they had to say them to get elected, a few years prior may very well have doomed them.  So essentially saying that the Supreme Court should be turned over to the hard left for a generation, maybe, as a peace offering is really out there.

It's not the only such suggestion that's out there, however.

A less obvious one is the suggestion that the Democrats blast into the future by putting their party in the hands of the same sort of thinking that got them where they are now.  Basically their decision is akin to the "once more over the top" thinking from World War One.  "What, we've been mowed down. . . huh. . . well, let's try it again"

There's a popular suggestion that Keith Ellison be put in charge of the party.  Have you listened to him?  His stated comments, so far, sound pretty much like a repeat of failure.  The New York Times, in an op ed, suggests that Chuck Schumer, one of the most detested Democrats outside of the East Coast, will be given a leadership role. Really, NYT, wouldn't a better suggestion be that Schumer simply keep quiet?  Outside New York, he's not exactly super popular.

In fairness to the Times, however, Schumer was mentioned as an inevitability, along with Sanders, who at least deserves a voice.   They urged the party to look towards younger leaders and I'll note that at least Ellison, who is a few months younger than me, actually fits that definition by Democratic terms.  Not in human terms.  53 years old is not young.  But when the two candidates who ran for the Democrats this year in the primaries have a combined age of over 140, well, I guess its youngish.