I have low interest in the Grammy's, but I was passing by the television when Long Suffering Spouse was watching it. It was just as the Album of the Year was announced, which went to Taylor Swift.
Swift, as we all know, has been the subject of an insane far right conspiracy theory that GOP pundits right now try to nervously laugh off (if you haven't heard it, listen to last weekend's This Week in which the pundit calls it crazy and then realizes that he's pretty much called the entire GOP crazy, tries to laugh it off, and then goes into a tirade about how all football fans are voting for Trump. Um, crazy much?
Anyhow, Swift, with perfect timing, lingers in her very brief acceptance speech to state she's going to give an announcement that she was going to wait until April to give. Oh my, what could it be? A wedding announcement or. . . the much feared Biden endorsement?
Nope, her new album is being released.
Nicely played.
Swift contrasts nicely with Myley Cyrus, who won her first award.
Not so nicely played are the machinations of one Mike Johnson, who it is now clear is nothing more than a puppet of Trump's. He went on Meet the Press to defend himself, was slammed on that show, and on all the rest of them.
And JD Vance is now pretty much an outright fascist. Perhaps more so than Trump is claimed to be, although he's paving the way for a violent rejection of the United States Supreme Court. Vance is pretty desperately campaigning with Donald for the VP slot.
While we keep harping on it, and yes medicine has really advanced since 1924, Wilson's death at age 67 wasn't surprising then, and really isn't now. He was old, by age 67. Electing a President older than that is foolish.
Alimony, a film, was released.
Like many films of this era, the plot is melodramatic and a bit hard to follows. Apparently, the female protagonist sells her inventor husband's nifty invention to a wealthy oilman who covets her. She leaves her husband due to a made up affair, demanding a huge alimony, which she obtains. However, she wasn't fooled, and goes on to marry him again on her terms, whatever that means.
Questioner: "Why did you leave the Republican Party?"
George F Will: "The same reason I joined it. I am a conservative."
If I were to listen to people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, or some of the Freedom Caucus here in Wyoming, it would be go.
If I listen to lifelong residents here in the state, including some lifelong Republicans whom would currently be classified as RINO's by the newly populist Wyoming GOP, it would be stay. Alan Simpson, who is an "anybody but Trump", former U.S. Senator, and who the Park County GOP tried to boot out as a elected precinct committeeman, is staying.
The problem ultimately is what time do you begin to smell like the crowd on the bus?
Konrad Adenauer of the Christian Democratic Union, West Germany's first post-war chancellor. He worked towards compromise and ended denazification early, even though he'd speant the remaining months of World War Two in prison and barely survived. By CDU - This file was provided to Wikimedia Commons by the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, a German political foundation, as part of a cooperation project., CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16173747
To put it another way, I'd give an historical example. It's often noted that quite a few Germans joined the Nazi Party as it was just a way to get by, or advance careers, etc., during the Third Reich period of German history. When I was a kid, there was a lot of sympathy, oddly enough, for that view amongst those who were of the World War Two generation, although at the same time, there was a widely held belief that militarism, combined with radical nationalism, were something that was basically in the German DNA. The US, as is well known, didn't even particularly worry about letting former Nazis into the country.
The Germans themselves pretty much turned a blind eye towards this, so many of them had been in the Nazi Party. Even post-war German politicians who had spent the war in exile did, as it was the programmatic thing to do.
Since that time, however, that view has really changed. It started to in 1968 when German students rioted and exposed former Nazis in the police. Germans haven't really come to terms with it, but having been a member of the Nazi Party is a mark of shame, and it's become to be something despised everywhere, even if a person did it for practical reasons and wasn't really involved in the party.
And it should be a mark of shame.
Americans have been sanctimonious about that for a long time, but starting in the 1970s lots of Americans became ashamed, in varying degrees, of our own ancestors in regard to various things. Ironically, the backlash to that, symbolized by Confederate battle flags, is part of what brings us to our current crisis.
Ed Herschler, former Marine Corps Raider, and Democratic lawyer, who was Wyoming's Governor from 1975 to 1987. Herschler probably wouldn't have a home in today's Democratic Party in Wyoming.
I registered as a Republican the first time I was old enough to vote. The first Presidential Election I was old enough to vote in was the 1984 Presidential election, in which I voted for Ronald Reagan. The first election I was old enough to vote in was the 1982 off year election. I honestly don't know who I voted for Senator. Malcolm Wallop won, but I very well have voted for the Democrat. Dick Cheney wont reelection that year against Ted Hommel, whom I don't recall at all. I probably voted for Cheney. I know that I voted for the reelection of Democratic Governor Ed Herschler, who was one of the state's great Governors.
A split ticket.
Split tickets were no doubt common in my family. My father would never reveal who he voted for in an election. The first Presidential election I recall was the 1972 Election in which Nixon ran against McGovern, and I asked who he voted for when he came home. He wouldn't say, and I don't know to this day.
I knew that my father registered Republican, but not everyone in my father's family did. My grandmother, for one, registtered Demcrat,somethign I became aware of when we were visiting her, which we frequently did, at her retirement apartment here in town. She was pretty clear that she was an unapologetic Democrat, which made sense given that she was 100% Irish by descent. Most Irish Americans, at that time, were Democrats, and all real ones were Catholic. Reagan, who claimed Irish ancestry, woudl have been regarded a a dual pretender for that reason by many of them.
My father's view, and it remains mine, that you voted for the person and what they stood for, not hte party.
But being in a party means something, and that has increasingly come to be the case.
I switched parties after that 1984 election. I was, and remain, a conservative, but the GOP was drifting further from a conservative center in that period, and as I've noted, the election of Ronald Reagan paved the path for Donald Trump, although I won't say that was obvious then. And also, Democrats were the party that cared about public lands, as they still do, and cared about rural and conservation issues that I cared about and still do. The GOP locally was becoming hostile to them. So I switched.
Campaign image for Mike Sullivan, Democratic Governor from 1987 to 1995.
I remained a Democrat probably from about 1984 until some time in the last fifteen years. Being a Democrat in Wyoming meant that you were increasingly marginalized, but finally what pushed me out was that it meant being in the Party of Death. The Democrats went from a party that, in 1973, allowed you to be middle of the road conservative and pro-life. We had a Governor, Mike Sullivan, who was just that. By the 2000s, however, that was becoming impossible. Locally most of the old Democrats became Republicans, some running solid local campaigns as Republicans even though they had only been that briefly. Even as late as the late 1990s, however, the Democrats ran some really serious candidates for Congress, with the races being surprisingly close in retrospect. Close, as they say, only counts with hand grenades and horseshoes, but some of those races were quite close. The GOP hold on those offices was not secure.
Dave Freudenthal, Democratic Governor from 2003 to 2011.
Before I re-registered as a Republican, I was an independent for a while. Being an independent meant that primaries became nearly irrelevant to me, and increasingly, as the Democratic Party died and became a far left wing club, starting in the 2000s., it also meant that basically the election was decided in the primaries. Like the other rehoming Democrats, however, we felt comfortable in a party that seemingly had given up its hostility to public lands. And frankly, since the 1970s, the GOP in Wyoming had really been sui generis. Conservative positions nationally, including ones I supported, routinely failed in the Republican legislature. Abortion is a good example. The party nationally was against it, I'm against it personally, but bills to restrict it failed and got nowhere in a Republican legislature.
The Clinton era really impacted the Democratic Party here locally. Wyomingites just didn't like him. That really started off the process of the death of the Democratic Party here. As center right Democrats abandoned the party in response, left wing Democrats were all that remained, and the party has become completely clueless on many things, making it all the more marginalized. But just as Clinton had that impact on the Democrats, Trump has on the GOP.
Throughout the 70s and 80s it was the case that Wyoming tended to export a lot of its population, which it still does, and then take in transients briefly during booms. In the last fifteen or so years, however, a lot of the transient population, together with others from disparate regions, have stayed. They've brought their politics with them, and now in the era of Trump, those views have really taken over the GOP, save for about three pockets of the old party that dominate in Natrona, Albany and Laramie Counties. A civil war has gone on in some counties, and is playing out right now in Park County. In the legislature, the old party still has control, but the new party, branded as the Freedom Caucus, which likes to call its rival the UniParty, is rising. The politics being advanced are, in tone, almost unrecognizable.
Like it or not, on social issues the old GOP's view was "I don't care what you do, just leave me alone". That attitude has really changed. Given a bruising in the early 1990s due to a Southeastern Wyoming effort to privatize wildlife, the party became pro public lands for awhile. That's change. The party was not libertarian. That's changed.
Money helped change it, which is a story that's really been missed.
Like the Democrats of the 90s, a lot of the old Republicans have started to abandon the party. If there was another viable party to go to, floods would leave. A viable third party might well prove to be the majority party in the state, or at least a close second to the GOP, if there was one.
There isn't.
So, what to do?
While it'll end up either being a pipe dream or an example of a dream deferred, there's still reason to believe that much of this will be transitory. If Trump does not win the 2024 Presidential Election, and he may very well not, he's as done as the blue plate special at a roadside café as the GOP leader. Somebody will emerge, but it's not really likely to be the Trump clone so widely expected. And the relocated populists may very well not have that long of run in Wyoming. Wyomingites, the real ones, also tend to have a subtle history of revenge against politicians who betray their interests. Those riding hiding high on anti-public lands, anti-local interests, may come to regret it at the polls later on.
The Johnson County invaders of 1892. The Republican Party, whose politicians had been involved in the raid on Natrona and Johnson Counties, took a beating in the following elections.
Or maybe this process will continue, in which case even if Trump wins this year, the GOP will die. By 2028, it won't be able to win anything and a new party will have to start to emerge.
We'll see.
None of which is comfortable for the State's real Republicans.
I have a thread up about reassessing Reagan, whom conservatives worship (they also tend to worship Theodore Roosevelt, oddly, who was a radical liberal, but anyway).
I've never been particularly certain on my views on Reagan, as I've noted here before. I am a conservative, but something about Reagan has made me long uncomfortable. In part, it might frankly just be because he was an actor, and I find actors to be fake. I never bought off on his persona, I guess.
I've noted here several times that Ronald Reagan started the process that gave us Donald Trump.
The Guardian just ran an article on the psychology of our political times, starting off with this:
Many explanations are proposed for the continued rise of Donald Trump, and the steadfastness of his support, even as the outrages and criminal charges pile up. Some of these explanations are powerful. But there is one I have seen mentioned nowhere, which could, I believe, be the most important: Trump is king of the extrinsics.
Some psychologists believe our values tend to cluster around certain poles, described as “intrinsic” and “extrinsic”. People with a strong set of intrinsic values are inclined towards empathy, intimacy and self-acceptance. They tend to be open to challenge and change, interested in universal rights and equality, and protective of other people and the living world.
I'm not sure what I think of The Guardian either, which is a British left wing newspaper working hard to break into the US market. But this article has some interesting points, starting with this generalization:
People at the extrinsic end of the spectrum are more attracted to prestige, status, image, fame, power and wealth. They are strongly motivated by the prospect of individual reward and praise. They are more likely to objectify and exploit other people, to behave rudely and aggressively and to dismiss social and environmental impacts. They have little interest in cooperation or community. People with a strong set of extrinsic values are more likely to suffer from frustration, dissatisfaction, stress, anxiety, anger and compulsive behaviour.
Interesting. And:
Trump exemplifies extrinsic values. From the tower bearing his name in gold letters to his gross overstatements of his wealth; from his endless ranting about “winners” and “losers” to his reported habit of cheating at golf; from his extreme objectification of women, including his own daughter, to his obsession with the size of his hands; from his rejection of public service, human rights and environmental protection to his extreme dissatisfaction and fury, undiminished even when he was president of the United States, Trump, perhaps more than any other public figure in recent history, is a walking, talking monument to extrinsic values.
That is in part what has made the "left behinds" fanatic devotion to Trump so hard for me to grasp. People declaring themselves average patriotic, Christian, middle class, Americans are fanatic in their devotion to somebody who expresses none of those values whatsoever. This is so much the case, that extreme efforts have to be taken to project those onto Trump.
But here's where it gets really interesting:
We are not born with our values. They are shaped by the cues and responses we receive from other people and the prevailing mores of our society. They are also moulded by the political environment we inhabit. If people live under a cruel and grasping political system, they tend to normalise and internalise it, absorbing its dominant claims and translating them into extrinsic values. This, in turn, permits an even crueller and more grasping political system to develop.
If, by contrast, people live in a country in which no one becomes destitute, in which social norms are characterised by kindness, empathy, community and freedom from want and fear, their values are likely to shift towards the intrinsic end. This process is known as policy feedback, or the “‘values ratchet”. The values ratchet operates at the societal and the individual level: a strong set of extrinsic values often develops as a result of insecurity and unfulfilled needs. These extrinsic values then generate further insecurity and unfulfilled needs.
I think there's a lot more that can be analyzed as to these statements, but at an elemental level, there's a large measure of truth to them. Norwegians today are a kindly, non-threatening group. That reflects a lot of things, but one of them is the Christianization of the country in the Middle Ages. That took them from a brutal society where murdering your own children was accepted, to what we have today.
Continuing on with The Guardian;
Ever since Ronald Reagan came to power, on a platform that ensured society became sharply divided into “winners” and “losers”, and ever more people, lacking public provision, were allowed to fall through the cracks, US politics has become fertile soil for extrinsic values. As Democratic presidents, following Reagan, embraced most of the principles of neoliberalism, the ratchet was scarcely reversed. The appeal to extrinsic values by the Democrats, Labour and other once-progressive parties is always self-defeating. Research shows that the further towards the extrinsic end of the spectrum people travel, the more likely they are to vote for a rightwing party.
That' is absolutely the case.
Most voters, and most conservatives alive today, don't recall the country before Reagan. They don't even recall that George Bush, who urged a "kinder, gentler, conservatism" in the race he won for the Oval Office, ran against Reagan in the 1980 GOP contest.
Reagan had a charming smile and a personal "oh shucks" type of presentation. He was running against a widely personally admired man, Jimmy Carter, whose policies had failed. He was also running at a time at which the country was desperate on inflation, and trying to figure out what had happened in the 1960s, and how the Vietnam War had gone so wrong. Hard hat Americans were losing their jobs to Japanese manufacturing. Southerners were grasping to figure out what had happened to the Old South.
It wasn't a really good time in the country.
From the election of 1912 all the way through the election of 1980, the county had been on a much different path. The three-way race of 1912 saw a Progressive (Roosevelt) dragging along a conservative (Taft) against another somewhat Progressive (Wilson). Progressivism, which first really started to come into its own during Theodore Roosevelt's administration, was on the rise and in fact became ingrained in American politics. The Harding, Coolidge and Hoover administrations really didn't change that, but the Franklin Roosevelt administration very much did, ramping it up enormously. The setting on the dial that Roosevelt put the country on was only turned down a couple of notches post-war, and the difference between post-war Republican Administrations and Democratic ones was slight in regard to these issues for the most part, at least until Lyndon Johnson, who tried to set the dial back up. Nixon may have set the dial back down, but by modern Republican standards, Richard Nixon was a liberal RINO.
Reagan started to pull the dial off the settings, much of it in a budget fashion. The mentally disturbed were set out on the streets as state's lost funding from the Federal Government for them. Support for education at the Federal level, a major feature of the World War Two/Cold War Federal governments, started to evaporate.
With this, a sort of fend for yourself individualism came in. The promise is that everything would improve, and everyone's lives with it. And because Reagan did tackle inflation, and he did face down the Soviet Union (which of course is more or less unrelated), things did improve.
But that's stopped.
The left deserves much of the blame as well, as it got goofy, frankly, and started to take on a universalism approach that doesn't appeal to hardly anyone, and which in fact is detrimental to the country.
But Reagan took us down a path that involved hating the government, and incorporated the disaffected into the party to be used, but not really supported. Lots of people ended up being left behind.
There were signs. His political career had been launched by his A Time For Choosing speech in favor of Barry Goldwater, who was in some ways an earlier version of the Anti Republican, Republican. As Governor of California, he had been a proponent of tax cuts, and he cut the number of individuals in California's mental institutions.
But all that is forty years ago. Hating the government has become institutionalized on the right, along with a belief that all those in government service are enemies of the people. A Lord of the Flies type of view towards economics has been accepted. The ignored are angry An acceptance of politicians whose personal lives don't reflect their professed Christianity is now fully accepted, particularly by a public that claims to want to turn back the clock, but doesn't recall what the prior clock settings were.
Changing this requires an change on an existential level. There's no reason to believe that any current Republican, save perhaps for Christie and Romeny, could affect the start of it.
Shoeless Joe Jackson's suit against the Chicago White Sox for back pay went to trial on this day in 1924. The trial was held in Milwaukee.
A delegation headed by Illinois Sen. William B. McKinley and former servicemen present spooled petition to Otto Wiedfeldt, the German Ambassador to the United States in Washington, D.C. to release Hooven Griffis.
Hooven Griffis?
Yes, he was part of a party of men that had sought to kidnap Grover Cleveland Bergdoll, notorious WWI slacker, from a hotel in Germany, take him to Paris and turn him over to authorities so he could be court-martialed for desertion.
The party was caught.
The headlines all speak for themselves.
Mussolini addressed 10,000 Blackshirts in the Palazzo Venezia predicting a complete election victory and stating that they were "ready to kill or die".
Vanity Fair, December 1923.
Hmmm. . . sort of a lot like what we're hearing now.
Mahecor Joof was crowned as the last King of Sine in Senegal, where he'd be allowed limited power until his death in 1969.
How did we end up with two ancient, disliked men being advanced by their parties?
Well, we ended up here as the Democrats quit believing in democracy, favoring rule by the courts, until the courts decided they believed in democracy, and because both parties lied to their rank and file, working class, constituents for a period of fifty years.
We've dealt with this before.
However, it can nearly be determined with precision.
The date of the wounds were:
January 22, 1973
That's the date the United States Supreme Court issued the Roe v. Wade decision, replacing its judgment for that of state legislatures. As the dissent noted:
I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court's judgment. The Court simply fashions and announces a new constitutional right for pregnant women and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes. The upshot is that the people and the legislatures of the 50 States are constitutionally disentitled to weigh the relative importance of the continued existence and development of the fetus, on the one hand, against a spectrum of possible impacts on the woman, on the other hand. As an exercise of raw judicial power, the Court perhaps has authority to do what it does today; but, in my view, its judgment is an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court.
And Democrats concluded they didn't really need to persuade voters anymore, the Courts would impose a new liberal regime on the besotted and benighted public without their participation.
And:
July 17, 1980.
That's the date that the GOP nominated Ronald Reagan for President. Reagan would go on to use the Southern Strategy to draw in Southern (and Rust Belt) Democrats who had lied to as the post World War Two economic prosperity collapsed. Thing is, the GOP didn't really listen to their concerns, just as the Democrats had quit doing.
Seven years in which we went from two functioning political parties and put them on the path to being pure machines, breaking what they claimed to serve.
One of the blogs linked in on our sidebar is City Father, the blog of a Catholic Priest in New York. It's always worth reading.
He's made some comments on the recent GOP primary results which are similar to those I've been making, but his most recent one is much more blunt. A sample:
No one should really have been surprised by this. If the moneyed, zombie Reaganite elite that used to run the party - the rich who undoubtedly believe the country is theirs to rule by right - still believed the party was theirs and that their un-rich, taken-for-granted constituents whom they have for decades brought off with culture-war sloganeering were still in their pockets, then they were likely the only ones who still believed one of their own could be imposed upon their increasingly left-behind and increasingly angry-about-it constituents.
I wouldn't put it quite that way, but he's spot on about the "taken for granted constituents". Indeed, for years I've been saying this about both parties, and while not noted in his post, many of the MAGA Republicans are actually disaffected Southern Democrats and Rust Belt Democrats brought into the GOP over a forty-year period, starting with Reagan's Southern Strategy.
Reagan was treated for years as if he was some sort of a saint. He came to define conservatism. Whatever he was, however, he unleashed the "Tea Party" forces that became the MAGA ones, and they are now the GOP. The old GOP isn't coming back. No new conservative party has yet emerged (one will). The Democratic Party, for its part, has ossified into the left wing, 1970s, version of itself and can't get out of it. Hubris has allowed this all to be vested into two, ancient, men. Donald Trump, as he increasingly evidences the onset of dementia, is going to win the general election. Reagan, and the Democrats having become the Supreme Court fan club, up until recently, post 1973, are to blame for that.
Al Smith, the 1928 Democratic candidate for President. He was honest, and Catholic, which made him unelectable.
Kamala Harris says when she talks to parents on the campaign trail, one of their top concerns is that their daughters won't have access to abortion in college
Charlie Spiering, summarizing a recent Kamal Harris interview.
I come from a sufficiently well-educated family such that my grandmother, Agnes, on my mother's side, had attended and graduated from university.
If you consider that she was born in 1891, that's quite the feat.
Now, I'll admit that my father was the first one to attend university on his side of the family, but his father, and his grandfather, and his great-grandfather, had all been successful businessmen at a time at which you didn't need a college education to be one, or even a high school education for that matter. My father's father, who I never met, was universally regarded by those who knew him as extremely smart.
Indeed, I once was stopped on the sidewalk by an elderly lawyer who knew my father and his father, who asked about the family. My son must have been in high school at the time, and the odd question "is he extremely smart. . . " like all of the members of the family.
I often, frankly, feel that I'm on the bottom end of the family intelligence pool compared to my own father and my kids.
No real college parents anywhere have, as one of their top concerns, that their daughters won't be able to commit infanticide, unless they've drunk so deeply of the left wing Kool-Aid they're perusing brochures from The Young Pioneers.
Democratic campaigns for the Oval Office, or Democratic campaigns in general, are not smart.
They're about as dumb as can be.
From 1914 until 1980 the Democrats were masters at coalition building. The party kept hardhat workers, urban Irish Catholics, Hispanics, and the entire South together, which was frankly quite a feat. It supported unions and working class families, and generally was pretty pro farmer. It had a left wing, but it also had a conservative one as well. Starting in 1968, when it embraced American battlefield defeat to a degree, and then in 1973, when it took the bloody abortionist hand, it took a turn toward the left, and as it did that, it dumped democracy like a hot rock in favor of an imagined Platonic body of robed elders who would tell the people what to do, and they'd like it.
Absolutely everything about the current Democratic message is wrong, including some things that shouldn't be regarded as wrong, but which are in the current political atmosphere. One thing that's definitely wrong is the concept that infanticide is a winning ticket. It isn't. The Democrats have read single issue matters on ballots here incorrectly. Maybe in that'st the only thing on a ballot, you get the voters only concerned about that to come out. Otherwise, people aren't going to vote that way.
Moreover, if Harris is really being told this by the parents of college women, it's because she's talking to the most liberal parents imaginable, and they're going to say crap like that no matter what. Moreover, the college educated are largely voting for Biden already. Biden/Harris need to get votes that they don't already have. The college educated have largely already left the GOP.
What's left of the electorate that is in the GOP is made up of the working class, small business owners (some college educated), and residents of rural regions (including quite a few well-educated ones in those areas). They don't believe "diversity is strength", they aren't interested in tolerating non "Judeo-Christian" religions, or gender mutilation, and they feel that their lives and livelihoods are threatened by out of control illegal immigration. They love their regions, but they're largely incapable of believing in climate change in spite of the evidence. They quit listening to scientist and social scientist of all types because they were lied to about some things, and therefore don't believe any of it. They listen to Evangelical pastors who tell them what they want to hear, and who make their massive departures from Christian doctrine irrelevant by not mentioning them (ever hear any of them criticize Trump for living in an adulterous relationship, which by conventional Christianity he is? Or of an Evangelical Church refusing to marry two people who have been married before?)
When I first started practicing law, a firm partner, a true Christian gentleman, told me about litigation that "this isn't a nice game". It isn't. Politics is even less so, and you have to be smart about it.
There's 0 reason that the Biden/Harris ticket needs to mention abortion at all. Where that's been an issue, they had no role in it. And they're driving Democrats away right now who are Catholic, which includes the Hispanic voters they imagine they'll be gaining. And their absolute incompetence on the border is in fact a good reason to vote against them. A competent ticket would shut up on abortion and would make a very serious effort on the border.
Obama, it might be noted, had a very controlled border. And while he was President before Dobbs, he didn't say much about abortion either.
He won twice.
Pointing out that more IRS agents punishes the wealthy, not the middle class, would help too. Pointing out that Trump has been a personally immoral man, might as well. Pointing out that he was the one who surrendered to the Taliban would as well.
And parking Harris somewhere would be a good idea, if not dumping her entirely.
And that's where you have to say thing that re uncomfortable.
Al Smith was the Democratic nominee for President in 1928. He would have won, but he was Catholic. Yes, that meant a lot of the electorate was bigoted, but it also meant that the Democrats weren't smart in running him.
They would be now, but Smith wouldn't be a Democrat any longer. He'd likely be an independent. He wasn't willing to compromise on his Catholicism, like Joe Biden has, and he wasn't a liar of any kind either.
Kamala Harris is like Al Smith in one fashion. She reminds bigoted voters who they hate. She's a lawyer (regular people hate lawyers), she's the child of two immigrants (MAGA people don't like immigrants), one of whom was Indian and the other Jamaican, making her a "person of color" (a lot of MAGA people really don't like people of color, let alone immigrant people of color), she's married to an entertainment lawyer (oh, oh) who is Jewish (again, MAGA people like Israel, but Jews. . . ) and the children of the couple are from his first marriage, meaning she has low parent street cred.
Are any of those items a reason not to vote for Harris? Absolutely not. Her policies are a reason not to vote for Harris. But will some MAGA people vote for Trump for these reasons? You bet they will, and in a race this close, in a handful of states that matter, that's a problem.
I don't know who would be a better VP candidate. Amy Klobuchar strikes me as one who would be better in every fashion. If you could find an American Christian Levantine politician (and there definitely are some) they'd be absolutely perfect, particularly if the choice was a woman. But what I am saying is that in a race with democracy itself on the ticket, choosing to go with a candidate this old for President, and a VP who is so disliked, is just dumb. And emphasizing the aspects of your campaign that the populist right hates, even if they do so wrongly on some of them, and the nervous middle aren't comfortable with, isn't very smart either. Having the disliked person, even if the dislike is immoral, who people fear might end up President isn't very smart, either.
This isn't a nice game. Sometimes choices have to be made in the candidates and the strategy that aren't very palatable. A lot of Republicans will do what Cynthia Lummis admitted to doing in 2016 as to Trump, and "hold her nose and vote". The Democrats should hold their noses and make some smart choices.
Trump is the one that gave shock and awe to the whole world when he walked across the DMZ line, hand extended, shaking hands with Kim Jong Un, ending Little Rocket Man’s reign
Marjorie Taylor Greene
Kim Jong Un is still the Communist monarch of the Stalinist theme park, North Korea.
He's a bigger problem now, then he was then.
He still has nuclear weapons.
Trump's shacking hands with him probably did nothing more than cause Kim Jong Un to run back to the latrine and wash his hand thoroughly.
What on earth is wrong with Greene's district that they return this person to Congress?
The Democrats, being the party that doesn't lose elections, but throws them away, are doing that right now by putting Vice President Harris on a "Reproductive Freedom", i.e. Infanticide, Tour.
Everything about this strategy is wrong.
First of all, the Democrats do not need to campaign as the party of infanticide, everyone knows they have blood on their hands and wish to continue odd making them wet. Those supporting infanticide have nowhere else to go, and are going to vote Democratic no matter what.
Secondly, the numerous center right voters who would normally vote Republican but who are rational about Donald Trump and what he stands for have been working their way around to vote for Biden/Harris, but being reminded of this, particularly if they are devout or at least adherent Catholics/Orthodox/Muslims will drive them away as it'll make the election about abortion and they can't go there. This section of the electorate is big enough to determine the election.
Finally, Kamala Harris is one of the most dis-likeable candidates imaginable. Joe Biden won the election in spite of her lat time, not because of her. Nobody needs to be reminded that if in the high likelihood Joe Biden dies or becomes disabled in his second term, she becomes the far left successor President.
So, it was at this point, the Democrats lost the 2024 election. The question is, who will win it?
In the 2020 election, there was a raging debate in the Catholic blogosphere about whether a person could morally vote for Joe Biden. Some Catholic pundits said you could, because Donald Trump was otherwise such a danger to the nation. Others said you could not, and you had to vote for Trump no matter how much you despised him, as the Democrats detest life to such an extent.
The one thing that the Democrats did not do, however, is to put infanticide front and center in the election.
They are now.
A good devout highly educated Catholic friend of mine is lamenting that Trump will win, as now, he stated "I'll have to vote for him".
And I myself am a good example. I won't vote for Trump, but I won't vote for Biden either. There were times I could contemplate voting for Biden, but now that a center of the campaign is opting for murder, I truly can't.
Why did the Democrats do this?
The reason is that Democrats like to lose elections.
Well, they don't, but they make stupid decisions, and their decisions, strategically, are even dumber than those of the Republicans.
As radical as the GOP MAGA populists are, and they are, they do tap into some legitimate concerns. Democrats, however, have ceded their position to the radical left wing where it does them no good whatsoever.
This is a good example.
In Wyoming, the Democrats have introduced a pro infanticide bill into the budget session. It'll go nowhere, they know that, why do it?
To make a showing of how far left delusional they are. This keeps numerous well-educated, professional and thoughtful Catholics and Mormons from voting for them.
Good move Democrats.
Likewise, nationally, this will cost the Democrats votes, for no reason whatsoever. Where were pro death Democrats going to go? Into the GOP?
Likewise, having Kamala Harris front anything is absurd. I don't know hat audience she sells in, but it's a very narrow one. Otherwise, her presence on the campaign trail suggests that 1) Biden is too feeble to get out there, and 2) she's going to take over when he passes. Neither of those are a very attractive thought for voters.
Donald Trump pretty clearly confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi in a New Hampshire campaign rally, claiming that Haley was in charge of all the "troops", meaning that she could have called on National Guardsmen to protect the capitol.
Haley wasn't in office at the time.
Haley in turn called on his mental fitness.
More people should be. Trump doesn't act like somebody who okay mentally. He's old, and in the footage of the rally, he does not look well.
January 21, 2024
Trump, on the same day he confused Haley for Pelosi, made reference to having run against President Obama, which he never did.
These are major mental lapses, and now they're coming in quick succession.
The Obama one, we'd note, has occured before. Trump has, openly, mentioned having run against Barack Obama. His first race was against Hillary Clinton, which is the only reason that he was elected, and with a minority of the vote.
Trump lies constantly, but these aren't lies. This is misfiring in his brain, and it's happening frequently. And these aren't the only instances.
Republican voters who are going for Trump, the nearly 50% of the GOP that isn't really traditionally Republican but something else, are going to simply turn a blind eye towards this. Democrats won't, but that doesn't really matter, except perhaps to the extent they emphasize it, which they in fact should.
Right now, assuming that Trump doesn't experience a complete mental collapse before November, which I'd give a 40% chance, and assuming that Trump's health holds out until November, which I'd give a 40% chance, he's going to be elected the next President because of the Democrats wholly inept performance in this election, including their absolute refusal to address many of the legitimate concerns that they've allowed to fester into right wing conspiracies, such as 1) how many immigrants can we really take in; 2) why does everyone have to have a "good job" in a cubicle, 3) why are we ignoring real biology and pretending it's a lifestyle choice. The election at this point is basically over.
That would in turn mean we're about to elect a man into office who is clearly sliding into dementia. Republicans in his inner circle better figure out right now how far they'll let him lose his mind before they declare him unfit for office.
And we better hope his VP choice is made to be somebody rational and not a syncophant.
And you will have the rogue cop, the bad apple, and perhaps you'll have that also with president But there's nothing you can do about that. You're going to have to give the president immunity. I hope The Supreme Court will has the courage to do that
Executive immunity, and for that matter qualified immunity for law enforcement officers, is a completely made up doctrine.
I don't expect the Supreme Court "to do that", and perhaps Trump should be thanked for putting the danger of this absurd concept so squarely in front of the law.
I'll admit that I was prepared to dismiss it when I started reading it, but I can't. It's a well reasoned article.
I don't think it sums up everything that's "wrong" with Iowa, but it gets some things right. This could just as easily be said, about Wyoming, however:
I saw it happen. When I was helping Fritz Mondale in 1984, I noticed Iowa beginning to shift from family farms to corporate agriculture, and from industrialized manufacturing to knowledge-intensive jobs.
The challenge was to create a new economy for Iowa and for much of the Midwest.
I didn’t have any good ideas for creating that new economy, though — and neither did Mondale, who won Iowa’s Democratic caucuses that year but lost the general election to Ronald Reagan in Iowa and every other state, except his own Minnesota.
Yet not until George W. Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004 did a Republican presidential candidate win Iowa again.
When Tom Vilsack was governor of Iowa in the early 2000s and flirting with the idea of a presidential run, he told me he worried that Iowa’s high school valedictorians used to want to attend the University of Iowa or Iowa State, but now wanted the Ivy League or Stanford or NYU. Even Iowa’s own college graduates were leaving for Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and New York.
Vilsack wanted to know how to keep Iowa’s talent in Iowa — a variant of the question I couldn’t answer for Mondale. By this time I had a few ideas — setting up high-tech hubs around major universities, blanketing parts of the state with free wi-fi, having community colleges supply the talent local industries needed — but they all cost money that Iowa didn’t have.
As The New York Times’s Jonathan Weisman noted recently, Iowa continues to lose more than 34 percent of its college graduates each year. Illinois, by contrast, gains 20 percent more college graduates than it produces. Minnesota has about 8 percent more college grads than it produces.
This talent migration has hastened America’s split into two cultures, not just in Iowa and the Midwest but across the nation.
But not entirely.
The thing people like Reich don't get is that much of the country doesn't want to become an upper middle class urban cesspool. Places that people like Reich worship are largely abhorrent in living terms. There's a reason that people look to rural areas and an idealized past.
But people also lash themselves to a dead economy as if it'll come back, even if it means losing track of reality at some point, or even if it means becoming something they claim to detest, welfare recipients. This has happened all over the US.
Something needs to be done to revitalize the main street economy, and people like Reich don't have the answers because at the end of the day, all American economists see things the same way. Everything is corporate, the only question is how much, if any, restraint you put on corporations.
Distributism would cure a lot of this.
If we had a more Distributist economy, we'd have a more local one. For rural areas, that'd mean much more local processing of locally produced goods. There's no reason for the concentration of the meat packing industry, for example. Beef could be packed locally. At one time, my family did just that. And that's only one example.
If the economy was reoriented in that fashion, local industry would expand a great deal. The thing is, of course, not all of those jobs would be the glass and steel mind-numbing cubicle jobs that all economists love.
But here's the other thing. As long as the economy is oriented the way it is, rural states are going to be colonies of urban areas, just as much as, let's say, French Indochina was a colony of France, or Kenya a colony of the United Kingdom. Exploitative, in another word. It's not intentionally so, it is an economic reality.
The problem there is that in those sorts of economies everything is produced for export alone, and everything is precarious. That gets back to my Distributist argument above.
But it also gets to a certain cultural thing in which those deeply aligned with the economy, which includes most people, can't see anything thing else. As long as the economy keeps working, that's okay. But when changes come, that can be a disaster.
Wyoming's very first economy was the fur trade, if we discount the native economy (which is a real economy, and accordingly should not be discounted). Contrary to the popular belief, the fur trade was not displaced, it just was never really very large, and therefore it diminished in importance when other things came in.
The other things were 1) agriculture, which came first, followed by the 2) extractive industries. Both are still with us. Agriculture has suffered to a degree as the naturally distributist industries that support it have been sacrificed on the altar of corporate economics and consolidation. The state, for its part, did nothing to arrest that trend and simply let it happen. In part, that's because the state has always deeply worshiped the thought that the extractive industries will make us all rich and nothing is to be interfered with, including losing local production of the raw resources that are first produced here. I.e., we don't refine the oil as much as we used to, we don't pack the meat, we don't process the wool. . . .
And the extractive industries certainly have made a lot of people and entire communities rich, there's no question of it.
But the handwriting is on the wall. Coal is declining and will continue to do so. And a massive shift in petroleum use is occurring, which Wyoming cannot stop. Petroleum will still be produced far into the future, but its use as a fuel is disappearing. Petrochemicals, on the other hand, are not.
We seemingly like to think we can stop those things from changing in any form. We've tried to through lawsuits and legislation. And yet it turns out that people buying EV's don't listen to our litigation or legislation, any more than they do to Nebraska's Senator Deb Fischer's whining about recharging station funding. Like some who can't face death due to illness, we'll grasp at what we can, rather than adjust.
Part of that is listening to people who tell us what we want to hear. A lot of politicians have tried to gently tell us the truth of what we're facing. Governor Gordon did just recently. When they do that, they're castigated for it.
In 1962's The Days of Wine and Roses the plot follows a man who is a social drinker and introduces alcohol to his girlfriend. They marry, and over time they become heavy drinkers. He finally stops drinking, his wife having left him, and finds her in an apartment, where she is now a hardcore alcoholic. He resumes drinking then and there, in order to be with her.
In the end, however, he reforms and quits. She doesn't. We know how that will end.
That's a lot like Wyomingites in general. We've received the hard knocks and blows. Some of us are going to put the bottle down and face the day, some are not going to under any circumstances.
For some, it's easier to believe that a "dictator for a day" can order the old economy restored and reverse fifty years of demographic change, while reversing supply, demand, and technology to sort of 1970s status. In other words, go ahead and have another drink, it won't hurt you.
Log cabins and cider were the symbols of the Whigs.
The Whig party formed in 1833, making it just a few years younger than the Democratic Party. It was a center left, anti-Masonic, anti Manifest Destiny, pro American System, party, although most articles will claim it was a "conservative" party.
It opposed populist Andrew Jackson, a Democratic populist.
William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachery Taylor and Millard Fillmore were members of the Whigs.
A lot of its policies were very reasonable in a modern conservative context. What it couldn't adjust to, however, was slavery, and the passage of the Kansas Nebraska Act, which nullified the Missouri Compromise, broke it up in 1856. Those members of the party who came down as solidly anti-slavery formed the new Republican Party, which was also a center left, anti-Masonic, anti Manifest Destiny, pro American System, party, with anti-slavery added to it.
The GOP went from birth to the White House in just four years.
The Whigs drew from the Democratic Republican Party that preceded it, but it drew from other camps as well. Not only did the old Democratic Republicans come into it, but Democrats did as well as that party became increasingly populist.
Note that.
The Whigs were a major center left American political party. The Democrats were a conservative, populist party. The Whigs of the 1850s would have recognized the Republican Party of the 1950s as their successor.
Note what happened, and perhaps more importantly, how quickly it can happen.
The classic bromide of American politics is that third parties don't succeed.
Some do.
The Whigs came out of a prior political party's period of turmoil. They consolidated around solid, government backed, economics and a policy of what would amount to anti discrimination for the era. As a result of that, it attracted businessmen, quasi liberals, and (immigrant) Catholics. It won several elections before spectacularly breaking up.
The GOP has been around much longer, but at least in its early periods up to the Great Depression, and then again from 1950 on, up until Ronald Reagan, it was much like the Whig Party it had replaced, but with civil rights added as an element. Ronald Reagan, as much as he is admired by conservatives, began to dismantle that when the Democrats incorporated civil rights into its makeup starting in the 50s and 60s. The Democrats had been struggling with its southern membership, which very much reflected the views of the traditional party, since the 1932 election of Franklin Roosevelt. Southern Democrats stuck with the party as they had nowhere else to go, until Reagan cynically offered them one.
Now that element has taken over the party.
The GOP nearly cracked up in 1912 when the Theodore Roosevelt wing of the party, which wanted to take the party much to the left, and make it much more liberal/populist, bolted. That same year, the Democratic Party began its evolution into a liberal party by running Woodrow Wilson, drawing in disaffected Republican populists.
Note that.
It took twenty years, but by 1932 TR's cousin FDR put the liberals in the Democratic Party permanently in control, Wilson's bid having transformed the party permanently. It took roughly 30, but Ronald Reagan did the same thing with the Dixiecrats he incorporated into the GOP, that having also transformed the party permanently. It took the Democrats 40 years to start shedding the Dixiecrats. It took about 40 years for the Dixiecrats Reagan invited into the Republican Party to start a GOP civil war.
Conservatives gush about Reagan, and with some good reasons. He was the country's one and only really conservative President. Prior Republicans had fit more into the Whig mold. Those who came after him sort of recalled it, like the first Bush, or fit into a new Neo Con mold that real conservatives tended to despise. Reagan's Presidency was transformational, however, in that it inserted certain conservative strains of thought into government, while it never got a hold of the nation's budget, which has become increasingly out of whack due to the tax cuts he and Republican successors introduced.
But what he also introduced, Dixiecrats and Rust Belt Democrats, infected the party and now has killed it. The "Republican" Part of today is the Dixiecrat Party/Rust Belt Democrat Party in a very real sense. It's populist, but not conservative.
There are holdout Republican elements within it, but they have no hope of taking it back. The past three years have proven that. Trump Populists don't care that Trump tried to seize power illegally. They see class enemies everywhere which justify their positions, something Democrats just don't grasp. Democrats like Robert Reich run around wondering when they'll wake up, not realizing they're wide awake.
When the Whigs broke up, it took the GOP only a few years to become successful. The Whig collapse in 1856 was followed by the Republican success of 1860.
That's lesson number 1. New parties can succeed quickly when the old one dies.
Lesson number 2 is that opposing parties become complacent. The Democratic Party after 1912 didn't worry about its southern base and allowed it to go into the Republican Party, which briefly helped the GOP, and then killed it. The Whigs took not only from the collapsed Democratic Republicans but also from the Democrats themselves.
The current Democratic Party is the legacy of 1912 the same way that the GOP is the legacy of 1980. Just as the GOP has gone Dixiecrat/Rust Belt Democrat, the Democratic Party has gone Ivy League Pink. It's nearly as enfeebled as the GOP is right now, it's just not as obvious.
A new party must emerge to replace the GOP, and frankly it now will. Conservatives have no home and need to find one. Centrist, however, have no home as well. People who believed in Reagan's social conservatism aren't the same people who vote for serial polygamist and icky Donald Trump. Democrats that voted for a guy like Harry Truman aren't comfortable with Joe Biden, at least in the expression he's manifested himself. 49%, at least, of the electorate are independents who have already dumped the GOP or the Democratic Party.
The one, and only, thing the Democrats and the Republicans agree on is that you absolutely must not vote for a third party, as that helps the other guy. That thinking insures that the extremes of those two parties have a free ride.
Well, the party is over and on the GOP side, the people have gone home. This election, or the next, a new center right party must form, and will form.
If it formed now, with a Manchin or Christie at its head. It'd take the election, and the GOP would completely collapse. Quite a bit of the Democratic Party would defect as well.
And so we go headlong into the caucuses and primaries, which will start in mere days. The Iowa Caucus for the GOP is on January 15. The New Hampshire Primary Election is on January 23 (although a Democratic spat keeps Biden off that one).
Candidates can be seen from our prior editions, but the big question, right now, is whether Donald Trump will be found to be disqualified from running in the election and the GOP nomination go to somebody else, or whether he'll be the surprisingly strong candidate against incumbent Joe Biden. There are a surprising number of Republicans running, but the race is down to Trump, trailed by Hailey, DeSantis, and Christie. In the Democratic field, only Biden is really a serious candidate.
Trump was found to be ineligible to run in Colorado by that state's supreme court, although that state's Secretary of State bizarrely is putting him back on the ballot until the U.S. Supreme Court either takes up his appeal there or it doesn't.
Maine has likewise found him ineligible to run, which is also being appealed by Trump.
And so a defective process may give the nation two candidates it does not want.
Locally, in the local Senatorial race, John Barrasso, even though he has not yet officially declared, is running against Reid Rasner, who is running a doomed campaign to the right.
No Democrat has declared.
In the House race, nobody has declared at all, but presumably Harriet Hageman will run for reelection.
January 4, 2023
From Reuters:
WASHINGTON, Jan 4 (Reuters) - Businesses tied to Republican former U.S. President Donald Trump received at least $7.8 million in foreign payments from 20 countries during his four years in the White House, Democratic congressional investigators said Thursday.
Of course, it'd be asking too much for Republicans accusing Joe Biden of impropriety due to his son's business dealings to now focus on Donald Trump, or to cease the focus in this area on Biden.
Cont:
Harriet Hageman announced her bid to be reelected with the release of a video:
January 5, 2024
Speaking of videos, somebody made this pro Trump video that Trump apparently shared on his social media:
Worship of a person to this degree is absolutely frightening, when you consider that some actually think this way.
And that Trump would share is appalling.
Cont:
The United States Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the certified Colorado case on February 8, after the Iowa Caucus. It's likely to take up the Maine case as well and combine them.
The 2nd Judicial District in Wyoming dismissed the lawsuit challenging Trump's position on the Wyoming ballot, as well as Cynthia Lummis' today. It might as well be mentioned that if the court in Wyoming had allowed the challenge to go forward, the presiding judge would undoubtedly have stood a good chance of losing her seat when she came up for retention. I'm not saying that was the basis of her decision, but almost any Wyoming jurist would have had to have that in mind. It'll be interesting to see if that decision is appealed, but my guess is that it will be.
January 10, 2024
Wyoming Senator John Barrasso has endorsed Trump.
I suppose this is no surprise, but it is an example of how politicians feel compelled to compromise what they really believe. I suspect that Barrasso has little love for Trump in reality, but feels that he must do to this or give some ammo to his competitor from the right.
Cont:
Not only did Barrasso endorse Trump, he's the first membership of the Senate leadership to do so. McConnell declined to do so recently.
Cont:
I would rather lose by telling the truth than lie in order to win
Chris Christie.
And so the last actual Republican dropped out of the race.
January 11, 2024
January 13, 2024
Cynthia Lummis has now endorsed Trump as well. No surprise.
June 15, 2024
Martin Luther King Day
Wyoming Equality Day
Iowa Caucus Day
On This Week, a Democratic member of Congress noted that Republican politicians who had opposed Trump were now rushing to endorse him, least they meet the ire of the MAGA crowed.
Probably two of the recent Wyoming endorsements fit that category.
Tonight at 7:00 p.m. the Iowa Caucus's will open in frigid weather, apparently not taking note that this is at least technically a day off for a lot of people (it isn't for most people). Gathering at 7:00 p.m. in order to choose a candidate for your party will be weighed, by many, against the agony of going out in the cold.
That's the only hope for those running against Trump.
It cannot help but be noted that the Iowa Caucus, while it probably made sense at one time, emphasizes the antiquated and downright stupid way the US picks its President. States position themselves to be first to pick, which none of them have the right to be. At least caucuses are party elections, not funded (I think) by the state. Most states have primaries which are party elections on the state's dime, which isn't just, and is arguably, in my view, unconstitutional.
To add to things, this year, Trump's ability to even hold office is presently in front of the United States Supreme Court.
Given all of this, I'm going to close this issue out with a few predictions, giving percentages.
I think Trump will take Iowa, and I'd give that a 100% chance. Biden will of course take Iowa.
I'm giving Haley a 60% chance of taking New Hampshire. New Hampshire doesn't like to look like Iowa's lapdog and it is a East Coast state with a history of acting independently.
Irrespective of that, if I'm wrong on the matters noted below, there's a 75% chance that Trump is the GOP nominee and a 100% chance Biden is the Democratic nominee.
Now, here's where some will think we're off the rails.
I think there's a 60% chance the United States Supreme Court will find Trump an insurrectionist unqualified to hold office.
When they do that, if they do, there will be a massive outbreak of right wing violence across the country.
If they do that, Haley will be the nominee.
I feel there's a 55% chance that Trump, who is an old man, who looks unhealthy, and who in my view is showing signs of dementia, will die before the election. He's showing signs of decline every day.
If he dies, and I think he will, Haley will be the nominee.
I feel there's a 40% chance that Biden will pass away of natural causes before the election.
If he dies, and I don't think he will, I have no idea who the nominee will be.
In a Biden v. Trump rematch, Trump will win. I don't want him to, but he will.
In a Biden v. Haley match, Haley will win. The Democrats seem incapable of accepting that they're going with an unelectable candidate.
Assuming that Biden and Trump are the nominees, at some point after Super Tuesday, there's a 55% chance that somebody announces a major third party run. I'm not sure who it will be, but Christie, Manchin and Cheney are all figures in that. My guess is that it will be Manchin for President, with Christie as VP.
Everyone always states that no third parties ever win, even the GOP itself was a third party that in fact won, displacing the dying Whigs. A third party here would displace the dying GOP. I'd give a third party as 60% chance of winning.
Given the furor he stirs up, there are a lot of things I fear this election many feature that I'm not going to post, as I don't want them to look like something I'm endorsing by mentioning them. Indeed, I'm afraid that they'll happen and desperately hope they do not.
This will close this edition. The next one will come out on the morning after, so to speak, of the Iowa Caucus.
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