Wake me up in January 2025

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Déjà fucking vu: Former “President” Pussygrabber and future President Joe Biden debate in October 2020. We most likely will see a repeat of this you-kids-get-off-my-damn-lawn bullshit in 2024.

Fivethirtyeight.com right now says that President Joe Biden’s average approval rating is only 42.4 percent — and that former “President” Pussygrabber’s is only 38.6 percent.

Yet it’s most likely that these two will face off again for the presidency in November 2024. WTF?

It gets worse. Reports The Associated Press:

Only about half of Democrats think President Joe Biden should run again in 2024, a poll shows, but a large majority say they’d be likely to support him if he became the nominee.

The poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that 26 percent of Americans overall want to see Biden run again — a slight recovery from the 22 percent who said that in January. Forty-seven percent of Democrats say they want him to run, also up slightly from only 37 percent who said that in January.

The ambivalence among Democratic voters comes as Biden is preparing to formally announce his 2024 reelection campaign as soon as [this] week, according to people briefed on the discussions. The president has been eyeing Tuesday, April 25 — four years to the day since he entered the 2020 race — although no final decisions have been made.

Despite the reluctance of many Democrats to see Biden run for another term, 78 percent of them say they approve of the job he’s doing as president. And a total of 81 percent of Democrats say they would at least probably support Biden in a general election if he is the nominee — 41 percent say they definitely would and 40 percent say they probably would.

Interviews with poll respondents suggest that the gap reflects concerns about Biden’s age, as well as a clamoring from a younger generation of Democrats who say they want leadership that reflects their demographic and their values. Biden, now 80, would be 82 on Election Day 2024 and 86 years old at the end of a second presidential term. He is the oldest president in history. …

It’s a strange time in American politics when only 47 percent of Democrats say they want the incumbent Democratic president to run for a second term — but around 81 percent of them say that if he is on the ballot in November 2024, they definitely or probably will vote for him anyway.

We, the people, have, methinks, finally given the fuck up, finally have been beaten down into full submission after having corporate-friendly “Democratic” candidates shoved down our throats by the DINO elite, from Bill Clinton in the early 1990s all the way to Joe Biden.

I’ve never supported Joe Biden — who belongs in memory care, not in the Oval Office — and I never will. Actual Democrat (that is, progressive) Bernie Sanders was screwed royally by the DINO establishment not only in 2016 but in 2020, and my memory is long.

In the 2024 Democratic presidential primary, thus far I’m supporting Marianne “Woo-Woo” Williamson.

I’m not saying that I agree with every word the woman has ever uttered and every deed she’s ever done — and I’m fully aware of how she blithely is ignored and even erased by mediocre (and often corrupt) people dutifully dismissively deeming her to be airy-fairy and seriously unserious — but her platform is closer to mine than Joe Biden’s ever was or evil will be (or even could be, given the constraints that are on corporate whores, who are most of our elected officials in our pay-to-play “democracy”).

And that’s how it’s supposed to be: You support the candidate whose platform, whose values and priorities, most closely match your own.

It never was supposed to be the case that you simply fold and accept whichever corporate whore du jour the party elite shove down your throat, as of course they know better than you ever possibly could.

So as long as she’s on my February 6, 2024, Democratic Party presidential primary ballot here in Nevada (as long as she hasn’t dropped out by then), I’ll vote for Marianne Williamson.

Realistically, the Democratic Party hacks will do everything in their power to make sure that Biden wins Nevada’s 2024 presidential primary election, but if she’s on my ballot, I’ll vote for Williamson nonetheless.

I won’t vote for Biden in the primary, in any event, even if it means voting for no one in the primary.

November 2024, however, could be dicier.

In November 2020, I lived in deep-blue California, where it was obvious that Biden would win the state and all of its electoral votes under our winner-takes-all Electoral College system.* Therefore, it was quite safe for me to vote for the Green Party presidential candidate instead of for Biden in November 2020; not at all was I helping Pussygrabber by not having voted for Biden in California, a state (and its electoral votes, more than any other state’s) that Biden always was going to win.

Now that I live in a swing state, however, come November 2024 there might be more pressure on me to vote for Biden to prevent his Repugnican opponent (I assume that it will be Pussygrabber, not the bumbling, unlikeable, socially retarded Ron DeFascist) from winning the White House.

I’ll cross that bridge if and when I get to it. I’ll examine the polling of my state closely, and if up to Election Day 2024 Biden is leading his Repugnican opponent (again, probably Pussygrabber) in the state substantially, I probably won’t vote for Biden in November 2024.**

If it’s close here in Nevada, however, and it really seems that my general-election vote might actually have an effect on preventing a second Pussygrabber “presidency,” then even I might, in the end, vote for Joe Biden.

I really hope that it doesn’t come to that; I hope that I never feel that I have to vote for Biden for the greater good.

P.S. To be clear, I expect that, as long as he still draws breath and at least can be propped up in a chair, Joe Biden will win re-election. Americans have become wholly politically unimaginative — as well as terrified of taking any political risks, which pretty much is the only thing that can explain why it would be Biden vs. Pussygrabber again in 2024.

And to be clear, yes, it is my opinion that of course a second Biden term would be preferable to any Repugnican winning the White House next year. But of course it doesn’t take much to be better than whoever the Repugnican presidential candidate is.

However, 2028 is just around the corner, and what then?

After another numbing four years under Biden, would the Repugnicans not be at an advantage in November 2028? It seems to me that by November 2028, the American electorate could be fairly starving for something new — maybe even to the point that fascism (such as that of Ron DeFascist) might look good (or at least acceptable).

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*A huge amount of Americans believe that the popular vote determines the presidency — which is why they’ll stupidly tell you that if you didn’t vote for the Democratic presidential candidate, then you helped the Repugnican presidential candidate, even though under the anti-democratic Electoral College, your vote for president effectively is fucking moot in the solidly red and solidly blue states, such as California, New York and Texas.

**Biden won Nevada in November 2020 by 2.4 percentage points. I believe that Pussygrabber will/would do worse in November 2024 than he did in 2020 in all of the swing states, including Nevada (and Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — these four states were the closest four in the 2020 presidential election).

Since Pussygrabber lost the November 2020 presidential election decisively, there not only was the treasonous domestic terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol by Pussygrabber’s brain-dead flying monkeys on January 6, 2021 — which the U.S. House of Representatives’ J6 committee reminded the nation about repeatedly over its several public hearings over several months — but Pussygrabber now faces numerous potential prosecutions.

Criminal indictments might be considered a great thing among Pussygrabber’s base of mouth-breathing knuckle draggers, but a clear majority of Americans who will vote for president in November 2024 do not want the treasonous mob boss back in the White House.

(Indeed, right now PredictIt.org has 47 cents on Biden and 33 cents on Pussygrabber in a Biden-Pussygrabber rematch. [And PredictIt.org also right now has Pussygrabber at 54 cents to Ron DeFascist at 29 cents in terms of which will be the Repugnican Party’s 2024 presidential nominee. Again, if DeFascist doesn’t totally politically self-destruct in the 2024 cycle, he might be a strong contender in 2028, especially after the voters are beyond sick and tired of Sleepy Joe Biden after eight long years.])

Florida Man’s anti-freedom mind-control agenda must be quashed

Associated Press news photo

“Freedom from indoctrination”? No, it’s that we’re to practice the Repugnican-fascists’ blatant indoctrination. Their backasswards, far-right-wing indoctrination is so good and true that it’s not indoctrination, you see, and every other viewpoint is “indoctrination.” (Repugnican-fascist Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a serious threat to our freedom despite claiming to be all about freedom, is pictured with his human props pushing his anti-freedom agenda in April 2022.)

Growing up in the Arizona public school system in the 1970s and 1980s, I was, indeed, indoctrinated.

Among much other bullshit, I was taught, at least indirectly if not also directly, that homosexuality is bad — sick, criminal, sinful, etc. (Mostly, it just wasn’t brought up at all — the erasure of an entire group of people is fun!)

Today, of course, we have same-sex marriage as the law of the land — and he-man Nick Offerman just very effectively played a gay man in a long-term same-sex relationship (with Murray Bartlett of the first season of “The White Lotus”) in the zombie-apocalypse TV series “The Last of Us,” a turn that no television show ever would have taken when I was growing up* — and in many if not most parts of the United States, many if not most of the homophobes who still remain among us keep their ignorant, hateful, bigoted, homophobic thoughts to themselves in polite company.

I was taught in the public school system that capitalism is perfect — Godly, even (in high school I had to take a pro-capitalist course propagandistically titled “free enterprise”) — and essentially I was taught that there is no viable alternative socioeconomic model, and that you’re crazy and/or evil for even suggesting (or even thinking) that there could be or should be (Love it or leave it, Commie!).

Seriously, though — how nice it is for the sociopathic profiteers among us to ensure that our public schools teach that our socioeconomic exploitation, in which millions of us are just wage slaves who in a nation whose beyond-ludicrous degree of income inequality grows larger and larger with each passing year are barely surviving, is the only option available to us.

This degree of mass mind control is nothing if not fucking Orwellian.

American history was taught to me in public school as an ever-progressive** march forward by overwhelmingly white people with a few minor oopsies and boo-boos along the way, but overall, God bless (white [that part always was understood if not always spoken aloud]) America, land of the free!

Conservatism, being all about keeping the stupid white man firmly entrenched in power and dominating the rest of us in perpetuity, still believes that today’s public school students should have the same experience that I did in the 1970s and 1980s. (Well, actually, I’m sure that even the public education that I received in the backasswards state of Arizona in the 1970s and 1980s is too “liberal” for them.)

It’s funny, because despite the right-wing attempt to indoctrinate me with the “right” sexual orientation, I’m nonetheless an out gay man in a long-term same-sex relationship. The years-long attempts to indoctrinate me didn’t succeed; apparently I am immune to such toxic indoctrination. (I’m an atheist, too, so “Christo”fascism, of which homophobia is part and parcel, didn’t get to me either; “God” and “Jesus” to me are on par with other mythical figures, such as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny…)

And for decades I have had deep issues with capitalism — which for the most part is just systemic, legalized thievery that so often results in injury, destruction and even death — and I would much prefer to see a hybrid socioeconomic model in which the essentials of life are not for-profit and in which OK, sure, the non-essentials, including the luxury items, can be capitalized. (And I’m a strong supporter of Bernie Sanders, of course.)

And yes, American history, as it is taught in our public school system, is, of course, whitewashed, to say the least; I seem to remember one U.S. history textbook with the maudlin title of The Pageant of American History or the like. I’m sure that Nazi Germany taught the history of Germany something like this: The nation was forged by strong, manly, God-supported white men! Get in line behind God’s soldiers or die, unGodly bitches!

So of course I oppose Repugnican-fascist Ron DeSantis’ fascist attempts to control what is and what is not taught in the public schools of Florida — in the name of “freedom from indoctrination.” (Indeed, you’re free to believe and to teach whatever you want — as long as stupid, evil white man Ron DeSantis agrees with it. Freedom! Yay!)

If our public schools don’t give our students the tools they need to be well-adjusted and successful in modern life, then our schools are failing them (which, of course, they are, but that’s another blog piece…).

And teaching like it’s still the fucking 1950s is not setting up our students for success. It’s setting them up for failure as future wage slaves to our corporate overlords, believing that the socioeconomic exploitation of them is what God wants and is the only kind of life that they ever can have.

On a related note, Advanced Placement courses are high school courses for the college-bound and are voluntary, and so their curricula should be hands fucking off to opportunistic political swine like the First Amendment-hating and freedom-hating Ron DeFuckingSantis, whose attack on the Advanced Placement black American studies course induced the College Board, which created the course, to water it down.

Of course, what DeSantis would prefer is that black Americans (as well as other non-white and LGBT Americans) just be erased entirely, so I doubt that the AP’s watering down of its black American studies course will please Gov. Florida Man.

As the Advanced Placement cave-in demonstrates, DeSantis already is winning his war to control all American minds.

Obviously I agree with age-appropriate teaching; of course your average kindergartener won’t understand the nuances of human sexuality, socioeconomic systems, the good and the ugly of U.S. history (including, of course, racism and the struggle for women’s rights and for LGBT rights as well as for non-whites’ rights), debates around religion, etc.

But an Advanced Placement student should be mature enough to handle the more adult topics, and further, DeSantis is trying to limit not just what Florida’s public elementary and high schools may teach, but what Florida’s colleges and universities — which are supposed to be bastions of independent thought and free speech — may or may not teach.

Former “President” Pussygrabber, at least, is so juvenile and self-absorbed (he’s the fucking poster child for the baby boomers) that he doesn’t bother to attack our public schools and universities; he’s too busy pettily attacking his legions of enemies (and as it is with every dictator and would-be dictator, it’s very easy to get on his shit list: just refuse to ardently lick his ass) like a petulant, perpetually miffed teenaged girl, apparently unaware that the majority of the nation is way, way beyond his endless grievance bullshit and knows fully well that he lost the 2020 presidential election.

That Ron DeSantis wants to institute mind control not only in the nation’s third-most-populous state, but in the entire nation as president, makes him much more dangerous than is Pussygrabber, in my book.

DeSantis’ goal is to indoctrinate all Americans into believing that any kind of life outside of the fascist hellscape that he has in mind for all of us — with him as our Dear Leader, of course — is our only fucking option.

Thankfully, barring one of the many criminal probes into his many crimes actually taking mob boss Pussygrabber down within the next two years or so (I’m not holding my breath), I expect Pussygrabber to win the 2024 Repugnican presidential nomination.

Why?

Because too many other deluded narcissists within the Repugnican Party apparently also are going to run for the Repugnican presidential nomination for 2024 — including people who have a snowball’s chance in hell, such as Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence — and, because the Repugnicans anti-democratically award all of a state’s delegates to the Repugnican National Convention to whichever Repugnican presidential candidate garners the most votes in that state, in 2024 Pussygrabber would benefit from a crowded Repugnican presidential field, just as he did in 2016.

Could Pussygrabber win in November 2024, though?

Um, he lost the national popular vote by millions of votes not only 2020, but in 2016 as well. History, methinks, is a guide on whether or not Pussygrabber could win back the White House in 2024.

Further, Pussygrabber eked out a “win” in 2016 only because of the anti-democratic Electoral College — and he did even that well only because at that time he was largely unknown, as least as a U.S. president.

Two impeachments, the deadly January 6, 2021, insurrection that he treasonously led, and innumerable investigations into his mob-boss-level criminal activity later, the kind of “president” that Pussygrabber was and would be again no longer is an unknown; we know the treasonous asshole abundantly well.

Therefore, no, I can’t see Pussygrabber winning the presidency in 2024. (Well, maybe he could if he were running against Kamala Harris, who we’re still waiting upon to finally find her political legs, but that’s another blog piece…)

Pussygrabber and 2024 aside, Ron DeSantis must never be president of the United States of America — and so I hope that Pussygrabber beats DeSantis for the Repugnican presidential nomination, because I can’t see Pussygrabber winning (well, “winning”) the White House ever again.

I can, however, see a fascist demagogue like DeSantis, who offers cut-and-dry, “common-sense” “solutions” to our problems and who freely and giddily scapegoats others for his own political gain, winning the presidency, especially when as a president he is unknown, as Pussygrabber was in 2016.

Our freedom of thought, on which all of our other freedoms depend, depends on those of us who truly value freedom — including, ironically, freedom from (fascist) indoctrination — stopping the fascist, anti-democratic, freedom-hating DeSantis in his fucking tracks.

DeSantis is a cancer that must not be allowed to spread outside of the backasswards state of Florida. He must be contained within that fucking swamp.

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*Seriously, though, the only reason I started to watch HBO’s “The Last of Us” is that it received good reviews, and I find the angle of zombification via fungal infection to be an interesting twist on a worn-out genre. (I tried to get into “The Walking Dead” several years ago but just couldn’t; I found the zombie genre to be tiresome already.)

So after two episodes of the establishment of the fungus zombies in “The Last of Us” (an aside: Can you kill them by spraying them with an anti-fungal, such as for athlete’s foot or jock itch?), I was surprised to see this “Brokeback Mountain”-like storyline plopped into the middle of the zombie action, and it actually works.

And while I had known that Nick Offerman would be in the third episode, I’d had no idea of the direction in which they took his character.

I mean, I imagine that plenty of homophobes have stopped watching the show after that third episode replete with man-on-man action, but to me, if you can drop in a gay love story in the middle of a zombie-apocalypse story and do it in a way that’s not too cheesy and actually works, then you’ve reached peak TV, in my book…

**”Progress,” you see, was white people taking over more and more of the nation under “manifest destiny.” The land’s natives had to be dispensed with and their territory taken from them, slaves from Africa had to be instrumental to profiteering, environmental destruction for the purpose of profiteering had to be done in the name of “progress,” etc., etc.

AfterBern redux

That’s about how I feel.

Bernie Sanders is a bit of a sad figure to me these days.

I still get his long e-mails about what a piece of shit the “president” is (no, he’d never use that kind of language, of course, but the meaning is the same) and all of the steep challenges that face us (it’s not always, um, uplifting to read his e-mails).

Thing is, Bernie is fairly political powerless, at least in terms of presidential politics. I give him credit for still doing what he can, but he ran for president twice and I don’t see him running a third time. (Hidin’ Joe Biden ran three times, but he put a lot of years in between his runs: 1988, 2008 and 2020.)

Bernie is, I think, too nice, too conciliatory. I don’t think that that works in today’s political environment, perhaps especially given how craven the so-called Democratic Party has become.

No, Bernie never had to be an asshole like “President” Pussygrabber, but he could have stood his ground more forcefully. Yes, Billary Clinton’s illegal shadow e-mail set-up was something, was not nothing — and although he gave her a pass, the Billary-led Democratic National Committee fucked Bernie over anyway — and Bernie also was way too nice to Joe Biden, and the result of that was that right before Super Tuesday, Biden & Co., center-right corporate-whore assholes all, suddenly closed ranks in order to tank Bernie’s campaign; no way could these sellout turncoats allow an actual progressive to win the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

In politics, probably especially presidential politics, politeness does not pay.

I get it that after the 2016 and 2020 Democratic Party presidential primary contests, Bernie has had to return to the U.S. Senate, so he couldn’t annihilate his bridges in his quest for the Oval Office. But he has been too damned nice, and in today’s presidential politics that is perceived as weak.

You can be strong without being an asshole — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is an example of that. She takes a lot of heat from the wingnuts but she gives it right back — better than it was thrown at her.

I don’t regret that I supported Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020, including having donated hundreds of dollars to him and having voted for him in the presidential primary elections. I believe that Bernie has laid the groundwork for a progressive takeover of the corporate-whore Democratic Party.

Sometimes you have to look at the big picture. Wingnut Barry Goldwater lost big-time in 1964, but few who are knowledgeable disagree that he laid the groundwork for the “Reagan revolution” of the 1980s (which began the downfall of the United States of America).

It’s possible, if not probable, that what’s going to be required for the Democratic Party to ever become progressive again is that all of the center-right old fucks who call themselves Democrats (most of them baby boomers, of course) will have to die off, and year after year they’ll be replaced by younger Americans who subscribe to progressivism.

Indeed, the United States’ youth and young adults, having been set up to fail at birth, and realizing very personally how very fucked up it is to screw over the generations that are following yours, might save the nation that the baby boomers and those older than the boomers have destroyed out of their bottomless selfishness and greed and incredible short-sightedness. From the ashes might rise a United States truly made great again.

And while Bernie Sanders probably won’t live to see that promised land, if it materializes, he was instrumental in its creation. He will have been a founding father of the new nation.

In the meantime, while I still respect Bernie, he is not my boss.

I get Bernie’s e-mails encouraging me to vote for Hidin’ Joe Biden. I will not vote for Biden.

Again, I live in California, one of the bluest states there is; there is no question that Biden will win California and all of its 55 electoral votes.*

Again, if you live in one of the swing states — Arizona, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin* — then I encourage you to vote your conscience, but I have the luxury of not having to worry about helping Pussygrabber get a second term, since it’s a foregone conclusion that Biden will win my state and all of its electoral votes.

(No, I don’t give a fuck about the popular vote, since it doesn’t determine who becomes president. It should, but it doesn’t. Bragging rights about having won the popular vote don’t give you the presidency and the political power that comes with that. Ask Billary Clinton.)

If I had to put money on it, I’d say that Biden will beat Pussygrabber in November, for several reasons, but primarily because of COVID-19 and its socioeconomic effects. The economy tends to be the No. 1 factor in a president’s re-election (“re”-election, in this case), and I don’t see the train wreck that is the United States improving nearly enough between now and Election Day for Pussygrabber to pull out a win, even just an Electoral College win, as he did in 2016.

Also, lucky Biden is benefitting from being able to use COVID-19 as an excuse, valid or not (mostly valid, probably), to not have to run a traditional presidential campaign. Less campaigning means fewer of Biden’s, um, senior moments. Less campaigning means that voters largely will be voting for the Joe Biden of yesterday, not of today.

What would I expect a Biden presidency to look like? Much like the Obama presidency looked like: nice words, little substance, negligible improvement in the average American’s life.

Barack Obama for the most part was a caretaker president, and after the Repugnicans won back the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm election (and kept the House until the 2018 midterm election), there was no way that they were going to allow Obama to have any progressive victories. You don’t even try to negotiate with terrorists like the Repugnicans, but the naive and probably arrogant Obama did so right out of the gate — probably the No. 1 mistake of his presidency — and the rest is history.

I expect a Biden administration to make the same mistakes that the Obama administration did. (After all, stuck-in-the-past Biden thinks that parents still routinely use record players for their children.)

If the Democrats win back the White House, the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House in November, which is quite possible, I expect them, “led” by Biden, to squander their political capital with their bipartisan “Kumbaya” bullshit, just as Obama did when, in the first two years of his presidency, the Dems controlled the White House, the Senate and the House — and utterly wasted all of that political capital when the stars don’t align like that (having control of the White House, the Senate and the House) very often.

Indeed, last week’s sad Democratic National Convention, in which much more love was shown to moderate Repugnicans than to progressive/actual Democrats, doesn’t bode well for a progressive agenda being passed through should the Dems once again win the White House, the Senate and the House.

Were I to vote for Biden, to me it would mean that I supported the continuation of a center-right, Repugnican-Lite, corporate-whoring Democratic Party — when I didn’t even have to, since I live in deep-blue California.

And I’m still not sure which would be the better longer-term outcome: Pussygrabber gets a second term, perhaps demonstrating amply, for once and for all, that the center-right, sellout campaigns of the likes of Billary Clinton and Hidin’ Joe Biden don’t work anymore, inducing the Democratic Party to, at long last, return to its progressive roots; or that Biden wins, and that this center-right, sellout bullshit under the banner of the Democratic Party continues indefinitely. “President Harris” gives me nightmares.**

In the meantime, it’s hard to describe the feeling that I have whenever I get one of Bernie’s e-mails or see him in the news. I still respect him — he is not dead to me, as self-serving, pseudo-progressive snake Elizabeth Warren is — but today Bernie makes me feel like a deflated convention balloon.

And I look to our younger generations to get us out of this abyss. They shouldn’t have to, but it has been forced upon them to, and they just might prove to be our next greatest generation.

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*One of the most helpful graphics that I’ve seen is fivethirtyeight.com’s “snake chart,” which you can see here. The extreme two ends of the “snake” represent the states that are going to go to Biden or to Pussygrabber without doubt. As we progress toward the center of the “snake,” we see which states are less solidly blue or red, and which states appear to be the swing states. The 10 states that I’ve listed above as swing states are the 10 states that make up the middle area of the “snake,” which is the 270 electoral votes that must be won in order to win the White House.

**If Kamala Harris were a progressive, instead of just another centrist corporate whore who takes whatever political positions she deems most likely to help her political ambitions right now, a la Billary Clinton, I’d be happy to have her as president. That she’s a woman of color would be the icing on the cake. But there has to be some fucking cake.

The inevitable impeachment is great news — and no, Bernie isn’t Jeremy

No, Bernie Sanders does not equal Jeremy Corbyn. For starters, while Corbyn is much more unpopular in the United Kingdom than is Boris Johnson, Bernie Sanders is much more popular in the United States than is “President” Pussygrabber.

I’ve long supported the impeachment of “President” Pussygrabber. He’s not our president; not only was he not elected by the most voters, but he is a mob boss. He simply has continued his life-long criminality into the White House, and to his long list of crimes we can add treason. Plenty of treason.*

That said, I’ve also always known that the Repugnican traitors (redundant) in the U.S. Senate never would remove a member of their own wingnutty party, pretty much no matter what he’d done.

Still, impeachment is necessary if we give a flying fuck about such trifles as the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law.

I’ve only sporadically listened to the live coverage of the House impeachment hearings via NPR. I never felt that I needed to attend to every detail, as Pussygrabber is, of course, as guilty as sin — the transcript of his infamous, treasonous, quid-pro-quo July phone call with the Ukrainian president that the White House itself publicly released amply shows that, and that’s only one of his many crimes — and as the Repugnican-controlled Senate won’t remove him, no matter what.

Listening to Pussygrabber’s Repugnican buttboys (perhaps most prominently Sens. Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell and Reps. Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz) lie for him like pathological liars on crack, however, has been interesting. It’s been a veritable gaslighting marathon: What you have seen with your own eyes and what you have heard with your own ears? You’re wrong! Let us tell you what you have seen and heard!

The Repugnicans will get their short-term “victory” — Pussygrabber won’t be removed from the Oval Office before January 2021, when, very hopefully, the American voters will have done the job — but one does have to wonder what the Repugnican Party’s pathological lying in pursuit of defending a treasonous, uber-corrupt “president” will do for it in the long term.

And of course when Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party did not win the UK election this past week, U.S. “pundits” were quick to say that of course this means that no progressive (that is, Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren) possibly could win the U.S. presidency in November 2020.

Except that this isn’t the UK.

There are philosophical and political parallels between the Labour Party and the Democratic Party and the Conservative Party and the Repugnican Party, of course, but we’re talking about two separate nations with different histories that are separated by a wide fucking ocean.

The United States is not in the midst of anything like a “Brexit,” and while Jeremy Corbyn is pretty fucking unpopular — Boris Johnson has a negative favorability rating in most polls, but Corbyn’s negative favorability rating in most polls is much higher** — comparing him to Bernie (or to Warren) is incredibly sloppy at best.

There has been socialism in Europe, but never has there been socialism in the United States (with the exception, perhaps, of some Native American societies). The historical contexts of the two nations are quite different; Americans cannot point to socialism ever actually having failed in the United States because we’ve never actually even had socialism.

And Bernie Sanders — and all of the top-tier candidates for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination — are significantly more popular than is Pussygrabber. Here is a graph from a fivethirtyeight.com piece from just yesterday:

“Trump remains really unpopular — far more than any of the leading Democratic presidential candidates,” notes fivethirtyeight.com, adding:

But Democrats’ net favorability ratings have taken a hit. As you can see in the chart above, even though Biden, Sanders, Warren and Buttigieg are nowhere near as unpopular as Trump, their net favorability ratings have trended downward recently.

This isn’t totally surprising, though, as my colleague Geoffrey Skelley noted a few weeks ago: Many presidential candidates’ net favorability ratings have been negative or close to zero since at least 2008, a sign, perhaps, of the polarized times we live in.

Of course, there is still time for public perception to change (in either direction) between now and November. But if the polls are any indication, opinions of the Democratic candidates seem much more likely to shift than opinions of Trump. That might be because people’s opinions of the Democratic candidates aren’t nearly as entrenched. …

Again, Corbyn is much more unpopular than is Johnson. As elections still so often amount to popularity contests rather than contests of ideas, that is no tiny detail. (Thankfully, Corbyn is stepping down as the leader of the Labour Party.***)

In the U.S., it is the opposite: the top four Democratic presidential candidates all have significantly higher favorability ratings than does Pussygrabber.

And, again, not only has the post-colonial U.S. never been socialist, but a President Sanders (I love the sound of that!) of course very probably could not usher in a socialist utopia.

If he had both houses of Congress in his party’s control, President Sanders could make some significant improvements in the average American’s life — our Americans’ biggest enemies, after all, are not each other or other nations, but are the treasonous corporations that attack us from within — but within the next few decades we are likely to see, at best and at most, a hybrid of capitalism and socialism, in which basic human needs (medical care, food, water, shelter, education, etc.) are covered by a socialist system while capitalism continues its dominance over pretty much everything else.

But, of course, those who protect the status quo — because they personally benefit from the pro-corporate, anti-individual socioeconomic status quo or because they’re just sheeple who think the way that Faux “News” tells them to think (even if that makes them just like chickens that support Colonel Sanders [no relation to Bernie!]) — want us progressives to give up before the game has even begun.

And one of their “arguments” is that Jeremy Corbyn = Bernie Sanders. Except that that’s complete and utter bullshit.

Where Corbyn failed in the UK, we progressives can prevail here in the United States. We just can’t lie down and allow our enemies to keep walking all over us in perpetuity, as they want us to do.

—

*My definition of “treason” is broad, such as dictionary.com’s No. 2 and No. 3 definitions: “a violation of allegiance to one’s sovereign or to one’s state” and “the betrayal of a trust or confidence; breach of faith; treachery.”

**This fact does remind me of the November 2016 U.S. presidential election, in which both Billary Clinton and Pussygrabber were underwater in their favorability ratings. Our “choice” of president was bad (Billary) or even worse (Pussygrabber).

***I haven’t studied Corbyn nearly enough to have a super-informed opinion of him, but clearly, it’s indisputable that he is poison at the ballot box.

And at least we can’t call the ethnically Jewish Bernie Sanders anti-Semitic, as Corbyn has been called, whether he is or not. (Again, I haven’t studied Corbyn much, but the charge of anti-Semitism, whether it is accurate or not, often is bandied about in order to damage one’s political opponent.)

Why AOC & Co.’s endorsements matter

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appear together at a campaign rally in July 2018. AOC has endorsed Bernie as the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nominee. (Washington Post news photo)

Bernie Sanders needed a comeback. He’s been at No. 3 in nationwide and early-state polling* for a little while now, and that heart attack of earlier this month appeared like it just might doom his second presidential campaign.

But perhaps when everything is at stake is when your supporters really step up.

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive rock star, and U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, also a lightning rod for the neo-Nazis who comprise the Repugnican Party because she challenges the status quo (that is, right-wing white-male supremacy), this week endorsed Bernie, as did Michael Moore. (A full list of Bernie’s endorsers is here.)

Michael Moore’s popularity has been, I think, slipping over the years, so his endorsement, while certainly yet another indicator that Bernie is the real and the most dependable progressive in the race, isn’t the prize that is AOC’s endorsement. I mean, AOC has been in Congress for not even one full year yet and already we’re referring to her by her initials.

Why do AOC’s and Omar’s endorsements of Bernie matter? Again, they demonstrate that Bernie is the true-blue progressive. They demonstrate that just as the young members of “The Squad” represent the future, so does Bernie, even though he’s 78 years young.

And, of course, prominent progressive women of color endorsing Bernie blows away the DINOs’ bullshit “Bernie bros” myth; Bernie is just fine on women’s issues and on the issues of non-whites, even though according to the Billarybots, who unfortunately are still with us, he’s “just another” white man.

It’s obvious to anyone who has two brain cells to rub together that Repugnican Lite Joe Biden would be a milquetoast president at best — if he could even win the November 2020 election, which he probably could not (Hi, Billary!) — and it’s also becoming clearer that Elizabeth Warren is a cheap knock-off of Bernie.

Warren has demonstrated brains — plans upon plans upon plans, including, I’m sure, plans for more plans, and lots of political calculation — but she hasn’t demonstrated much heart. Former Repugnican Warren wouldn’t dare to run against Billary in 2016 because she is a cowardly party hack, and now she challenges Bernie, who, in my estimation, deserves the nomination alone for his central role is relegating Clintonism to the dustbin of history, where it belongs, and who recognizes, entirely unlike Warren, that capitalism must go before it kills all of us.

Why does Bernie appeal to so many of us while Warren doesn’t? Because, again, Warren is a political calculator, eerily like Billary Clinton, except that Warren has been smarter than Billary and has realized that she at least needed to co-opt Bernie’s message from the get-go if she wanted to win. (As I’ve noted, Billary co-opted Bernie’s message, but way too late in the campaign, whereas Warren slyly co-opted it before the campaign began.)

It’s true that progressive rock stars like AOC and Michael Moore may not appeal that much to the entire general November 2020 electorate, but, as Nate Silver recently noted, “Sanders’s objective for now is to win the nomination, not the general election.”

Indeed, you win the party’s presidential nomination by exciting and inspiring the base, something that Joe Biden’s woefully outdated Clintonism and Warren’s cold calculations don’t do.

Unfortunately, it will take at least several days to see how Bernie’s good performance in this past week’s fourth debate and his recent endorsements help him in the polls.

But methinks that it’s inarguable that while it looked like he was in danger of slipping off of the mountain, he’s climbing right up it again.

—

*Don’t get me wrong — Bernie’s many competitors who can’t even hit the double digits would love to be in Bernie’s place, with double digits in the polls and with the best fundraising numbers of any other Democratic presidential candidate, but third place in the polls isn’t optimal.

That said, I think it’s entirely likely that Biden will implode soon enough, as he did when he ran for the nomination in 1988 and in 2008, and that this race essentially will be between establishmentarian Warren and actual progressive Bernie.

If it gets ugly, like 2016 got ugly, so be it. The future of the nation and the world is far more important than is any one individual and his or her feelings and those of his or her supporters.

Will Bernie break our hearts?

In the video grab above, Bernie Sanders leaves a Las Vegas hospital yesterday after what first was reported on Tuesday as “chest discomfort” during a campaign event and then later was confirmed to have been a heart attack. This bad news came after it was reported that Bernie had raised more money than did any other Democratic presidential candidate in the third quarter. Bernie’s campaign says that he is doing well and that he intends to participate in the next primary debate, which will be on October 15.

News of the apparent heart attack that Bernie Sanders had on Tuesday while campaigning his heart out in Nevada predictably raised the question of his age (he is 78 years old now, and if elected, would enter the Oval Office at age 79, making him the oldest president we’ve had).

Two stents were placed in one of Bernie’s coronary arteries, he was released from the hospital yesterday, and his campaign says that he intends to participate in the October 15 debate in Ohio.

Will this sink Bernie?

I don’t think so. It gives those who weren’t supporting him anyway a(nother) “reason” to justify their self-defeating snubbing of the most consistently progressive presidential candidate that we have, but those of us who steadfastly have stood by Bernie will continue to do so.

As long as Bernie does well in his public appearances and has no more significant medical incidents, I expect this to blow over. It’s early October, after all, and the first voting isn’t until February 3, when the Iowa caucuses take place — and this is the United States of Amnesia.

And I think it’s fair to ask the question if it’s OK to stigmatize someone for having had a medical event after which one can, with medical attention, live normally and capably for many years. I know that if I had a heart attack but most likely still had several decent years of life left, I wouldn’t want to be written off.

Good news for Bernie from this past week is that in the third fundraising quarter of this year, he raised more money than did any other Democratic presidential contender — $25.3 million.

Close behind him was Elizabeth Warren, with $24.6 million, and poor Uncle Joe Biden raised only $15.2 million — he was eclipsed even by Boy Scout Pete Buttigieg, who raised $19.1 million. (Unlike Bernie and Warren, the center-right Buttigieg [like Biden] takes contributions from Big Money, though, so don’t take that fundraising figure as grassroots support for him that doesn’t actually exist.)

If fundraising is a measure of excitement for your campaign — and I think that it is for those few who, like Bernie, don’t take money from corporations and lobbyists and other power players — then Biden should be shitting his Depends. (Ah, c’mon; I had to go there…)

On that note, Biden continues to drop in the polls. Right now his nationwide polling average is around 27 percent, and Warren is nipping at his heels, with an average of almost 24 percent.

Bernie is at third place, with 16 percent, and after Bernie, at a rather distant fourth place, is Buttigieg, with around 6 percent. (Poor charisma-free Kamala Harris, who yet has to make a compelling case as to why she should be president, is at fifth place, with around only 5 percent.)

As I’ve noted about a million times before, I expect Biden to tank, as he did when he ran for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 1988 and in 2008, and, as long as Bernie’s health holds up, I expect 2020 to be a race between Bernie and Warren.

It can’t be a direct comparison to the 2016 Bernie-vs.-Billary race, because while Billary only “found” progressivism rather late in the game during the 2016 cycle, this time around, from the get-go, Warren deftly has mimicked Bernie’s progressive angle while at the same time not pissing off the Democratic Party establishment hacks.

Warren, it seems to me, has a very good chance of winning this thing (the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination, I mean).

Unfortunately, Warren also has a good chance of losing in November 2020 — I still believe that Warren’s No. 1 weakness is that she so easily can be painted by the Repugnicans as just another clueless, weak egghead from Massachusetts, as was Michael Dukakis in 1988 and John Kerry in 2004.

Perhaps only the increasingly obvious and absolutely undeniable mega-corruption of the unelected Pussygrabber regime (including a copious amount of treason) can overcome this “swiftboating” tactic that has worked pretty well for the Repugnicans in the past.

P.S. With his hectic campaign schedule and his famously impassioned speeches, one might wonder why it took this long for Bernie to have a heart attack. Just sayin’…

I’m thinking that Bernie might want to slow down. He has, I think, built up enough political capital that he can relax just a little, at least for a little while.

Biden should tank, so Bernie probably doesn’t have to worry about Biden, and Team Bernie should, I think, emphasize the fact that he was an avowed progressive decades before Elizabeth Warren, who was a Repugnican as late as the 1990s, decided to join the club.

It’s a fair criticism — it is true, and it is, to me, anyway, at least a bit concerning.

Politico: Bernie Sanders has made 2020 presidential announcement video

Bernie Sanders apparently is about to put out the official signal.

Politico reports today:

Bernie Sanders, inching closer to a second bid for the White House, has recorded a campaign video in which he says he is running for president in 2020, according to two people familiar with the spot.

It’s the latest sign the independent senator, the runner-up in the 2016 contest for the Democratic nomination, is nearing a presidential announcement.

Another hint that Sanders is getting closer to a launch: As Politico reported this week, the Sanders team has been interviewing people for top staff positions. Chuck Rocha, a political consultant who advised Sanders’ 2016 campaign, is expected to join him again if a second bid materializes.

It is unclear when, or even whether, the Sanders video will be released. It’s possible that Sanders could launch a 2020 campaign with an exploratory committee and then formally declare his candidacy later, a route other presidential candidates, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, have taken. …

I long have assumed that Bernie would run again. As I noted recently, he’d be crazy not to.

Bernie didn’t go away after his surprisingly narrow loss to Queen Billary in 2016. He has remained in the spotlight, introducing such progressive legislation as Medicare for All, most notably (most of the top-tier candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination signed on to Bernie’s Medicare for All bill), and he released three books after the November 2016 election and has traveled to numerous states since then.

Bernie remains popular — he remains the most popular elected official in the United States — and takes second place only to Joe Biden in reputable nationwide polling of 2020 Democratic Party presidential preference.

If Joe Biden runs, once he starts running his center-right mouth again, the voters will be reminded of why they passed him up on his first two runs for president in 1988 and in 2008, I predict, so Bernie is a strong contender for the nomination.

Not only that, but fivethirtyeight.com’s Nate Silver recently noted that past elections indicate that the more candidates who run in a presidential primary, the more difficult it is for party establishmentarians to ensure that their favorite candidate emerges as the nominee. Silver concludes:

… But the past electoral cycles where the field was nearly as big as this one shouldn’t exactly be comforting to [establishmentarian] Democrats, and it should be particularly worrying for next-in-line candidates such as Biden.

Democratic voters like a lot of their choices and feel optimistic about their chances of beating Trump in 2020. The large field is both a sign that there may not be consensus about the best candidate and a source of unpredictability.

Indeed, 2020 won’t be 2016, in which Bernie and Billary were the only two viable candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination. Recall that no other high-profile Democrat, including Elizabeth Warren, dared to run against Queen Billary in 2016; Bernie was the only U.S. senator who had the balls to do that.

So while Bernie isn’t polling at No. 1 (yet), again, Joe Biden, with his stale Clintonian pro-corporate centrism, is, in my book, a weak candidate given the Democratic Party base’s ongoing shift to the left. Billary either didn’t see that shift or believed that she safely could ignore it, and instead offered only rehashed Clintonism (always served cold) — and look how that turned out for her.

And (along with what Nate Silver stated) with so many Democratic candidates running, of course Bernie stands to gain from not having to face just one establishmentarian opponent, as he faced only Queen Billary in 2016, but in 2019 and 2020 he faces several establishmentarian opponents who are splintering the establishmentarian vote, including five other sitting U.S. senators.*

And, of course, because Bernie won 22 states and 46 percent of the democratically earned delegates in the 2016 primary battle, he starts off already fairly strong. Indeed, unlike the other, weaker candidates who already have announced, Bernie hasn’t had to jump in yet because he already has a sizable base of support.

Finally, the Democratic National Committee that rigged the game for Billary in 2016 — both Elizabeth Warren and Donna Brazile have said that the DNC indeed rigged the game for Billary — is not the same DNC of today.

Former DNC chair and Billarybot Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was incredibly corrupt, resigned in disgrace, and new chair Tom Perez is much more decent and fair; Team Bernie got some important DNC reforms, most notably the reining in of the anti-democratic “super-delegates” who helped Billary “win” (by making her appear to be inevitable [like with the Borg, resistance reportedly was futile]) before we peons even got to participate in a primary election or caucus; and Clintonism, for the most part, died when Billary tanked in November 2016.

My guess is that once Bernie’s second presidential bid is official, not only will his poll numbers go up and Biden’s and (most) everyone else’s will go down, but his pre-existing army of supporters from 2016 will flood his campaign coffers with individual donations (I sure will!).

We Berners aren’t dead; we are diehards and we’ve just been waiting for Bernie’s bat signal, and once it is illuminating the sky, it’s on.

—

*Those five senators are Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren.

Booker, Gillibrand and Klobuchar indisputably are establishmentarian party hacks, and Harris, in my book, is just co-opting Bernie’s positions in order to try to siphon off some of his support.

I have lived in California for more than 20 years now, and Harris never has been a remarkable progressive. She never has taken a position that wasn’t politically safe for her. (She publicly opposes such things as lynching — as though that were a bold, controversial stance, as though a majority of Americans support lynchings and as though lynchings still were commonplace. [Next, she’ll boldly come out against slavery!])

And Elizabeth Warren — I’m falling out of love with her. Not only is she not campaigning well, including the “Pocahontas” stuff, but she was too much of a party hack to oppose Billary in 2016 and she won’t call herself a democratic socialist, but either truly believes that capitalism can be reformed (it cannot be) or is just too fucking cowardly to embrace democratic socialism, as she was too cowardly to face Billary in 2016.

Liz Warren is more of an establishmentarian Democrat than anything else. (Also, of course, she used to be a Repugnican as late as the 1990s. Oh, yeah.)

Should Liz Warren drop out? (Probably)

When I recently saw this news image on The Washington Post’s website, my heart sank:

The Post reports that it’s Elizabeth Warren’s registration card for the Texas state bar. “Warren filled out the card by hand in neat blue ink and signed it,” the Post reports, adding, “Dated April 1986, it is the first document to surface showing Warren making the claim in her own handwriting. Her office didn’t dispute its authenticity.”

Past reportage that I have seen has indicated that Warren once had ticked off a box indicating that she is of Native American heritage, but if that indeed is her own handwriting above, um, yeah…

The accompanying Post news story to the news photo above begins, “Sen. Elizabeth Warren said Tuesday that she was sorry that she identified herself as a Native American for almost two decades, reflecting her ongoing struggle to quiet a controversy that continues to haunt her as she prepares to formally announce a presidential bid.”

As scandals go, it could be a lot worse. It’s not a photo or photos of Warren in blackface, for fuck’s sake. And she wasn’t recorded bragging about having force-kissed anyone and having grabbed anyone’s genitals.

But for Democrats, especially intelligent ones (hi, Al Franken!), there usually is much less forgiveness and much more punishment than there is for Repugnicans.

I just don’t see Warren getting past this “Pocahontas” bullshit. It is, methinks, going to stick. Forever. At least if she’s running for president.

Not long after I thought that it’s probably all over for Warren, Sacramento Bee opinion editor Gil Duran posted an editorial titled “Elizabeth Warren Is Smarter Than Anyone Running for President. She Should End Her Campaign.” He writes:

Elizabeth Warren would make a great president. She’s smarter than anyone else in the race. She advances bold and unapologetically progressive ideas. She’s a truly fearless and earnest leader, not a cautious and mealy-mouthed politician.

But her candidacy would be a disservice to her ideas. The Washington Post’s cringe-worthy revelation that she claimed American Indian as her racial identity on official documents — despite denying she’d ever done so — should end her White House quest.

Days before her planned announcement, Warren’s once again apologizing for fudging her racial identity. It’s a devastating scandal for a campaign, with questions of character wrapped in explosive racial issues. It’s painful to watch.

I believe Warren when she says she grew up with stories about her family’s native roots. Many of us grew up with similar tales. …

He concludes:

… The vast inequalities American Indians face today are a festering wound of injustice in need of moral and economic redress. To fix such injustices, we need leaders like Warren who aren’t afraid to take on powerful forces, tackle inequality and reject the dismal status quo.

But presidential politics is a ruthless blood sport, and I doubt she can overcome this scandal. Her actions raise serious questions about her character and alienate people of color. She took Trump’s DNA bet and lost. If she runs for president, we’ll hear her apologies more than her ideas. How many more damning documents exist?

I believe Warren has an important role to play in American history. Maybe it’s not the one she really wants, but it’s the one we need. She should spare us this humiliating spectacle and continue to lead from the Senate.

For the very most part, I agree. That Warren very apparently affirmatively wrote that she’s “American Indian” on an official document does indeed raise valid questions about her character. Whether she ever actually gained anything by having claimed Native American heritage is irrelevant; she wants to be president, so this is a fair question of her honesty and character.

(Yes, indeed, “President” Pussygrabber is a thousand times worse than Warren ever could be — there is no comparison — but do we on the left really want to lower the bar to Pussygrabber’s level?)

Even if the whole “Pocahontas” fracas had never existed at all, Elizabeth Warren very most likely would have been torpedoed because she’s intelligent. (I don’t know that I agree with Gil Duran’s assertion that she’s “smarter than anyone else in the race,” but she’s definitely in the top tier where brains are concerned.)

History has demonstrated amply that American voters, many if not most of them not being all that bright themselves, usually don’t want egghead presidents — at least not presidents who act like eggheads.

It isn’t fair, and anti-intellectualism — a pillar of fascism — so often is dangerous, but it is what it is.

Warren has yet to hit double digits in any fairly recent nationwide poll of Democratic Party presidential preference that I have seen, so I’m not sure if she has a real idea of what she appears to be up against. I don’t believe in giving up, but when the fight is futile…

Warren is to make a big announcement on Saturday, presumably her official presidential announcement (on the very last day of last year, she announced the formation of her exploratory committee).

Her announcement on Saturday probably should be that she has decided not to run after all, but the Boston Herald reports that she plans to travel to several early-voting states after Saturday, indicating that she plans to stick it out, at least in the short-term future.

I still like and respect Elizabeth Warren — her having claimed some Native American heritage, in my book, is a bit weird* but not unforgivable — but I agree with Gil Duran: This is painful to watch.

—

*I don’t know. Being white is kind of boring, and maybe she wanted to try to spice things up a bit. I just don’t know. But Elizabeth Warren is no Rachel Dolezal…

Good luck, Liz (you’ll need it)

Updated below (on Wednesday, January 2, 2019)

Boston Globe photo

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts celebrates her election to a second Senate term in Boston in November (above), and yesterday she declared her intention to run for the White House. She’d make a good president, but match-up polling has her barely beating “President” Pussygrabber in November 2020, while both Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, the clear front-runners for the Democratic nomination, both beat Pussygrabber in the match-up polling by double digits. 

I guess that maybe Elizabeth Warren deserves a political Brownie point or two for having gone first this time around, that is, for being the first upper-tier Democratic Party presidential candidate to have formed an exploratory committee for 2020.

But I just can’t forget that in 2016 we pretty much heard crickets from her, and she isn’t polling well right now; she has yet to hit double digits in any nationwide poll of Democratic presidential preference taken over the past three months.

By comparison, both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders have hit double digits in all of those polls.

Bright and shiny new object (to lift from Claire McCaskill) Beto O’Rourke only sometimes hits double digits in those polls, as does Billary Clinton when she stupidly is included in them. (I put the chances of Billary running yet once again at maybe 1 percent or 2 percent. Oh, I’m sure that she’d still very much like to be president, but even she probably doesn’t want the embarrassment of running again and failing spectacularly again.)

According to the nationwide polling, right now it’s really down to Biden and Bernie, but I’m not one to say, anti-democratically, that someone shouldn’t run, even if he or she doesn’t have much of a chance, as is the case with Warren. If you qualify to run for president and wish to run for president, knock yourself out; the voters will sort you out.*

As I’ve noted, Warren as of late unfairly has been attacked, and it’s been rather sad to watch her implode instead of explode, perhaps especially over her Native American DNA campaign.

I don’t think that she did anything wrong by pushing back against “President” Pussygrabber’s perpetually calling her “Pocahontas,” but apparently the whole episode backfired on her in the court of public opinion.

I think that Warren would make a good president, but I also think that as a presidential candidate she’d be smeared as just another Massachusetts egghead, a la Michael Dukakis and John Kerry. It’s not fair, but all is fair in love and war and politics.

Also unfair is the fact that while I always thought that Billary Clinton’s and the Billarybots’ claim that Billary faced sexism/misogyny always was bullshit — voters haven’t liked Billary primarily because she is unlikable and untrustworthy and reeks of corruption, not because she is a woman — I think that as a presidential candidate, Warren would face actual sexism and misogyny.

That’s not her fault, and you easily could argue that she shouldn’t be punished for it, but the larger issue is whether or not she can beat Pussygrabber in November 2020.

A Morning Consult poll taken in August showed Warren beating Pussygrabber in a hypothetical match-up, but by only 4 percentage points, while that same poll showed that both Bernie and Biden beat Pussygrabber by 12 percentage points each.

Recall that months before the November 2016 election, Billary Clinton led Pussygrabber by only single digits in most polls. By the time Election Day arrived, she was ahead of Pussygrabber by only a few percentage points. We all know how that ended up.

Unless the match-up polling changes, it would be too risky to make Warren the 2020 Dem nominee, especially when both Bernie and Biden do much better in the match-up polling against Pussygrabber.

(In that August Morning Consult poll, by the way, both Cory Booker and Kamala Harris lost to Pussygrabber, by 2 points and 3 points, respectively. They are non-starters, in my book. I mean, sure, go all-out for craven identity politics, but then also ensure that Pussygrabber gets a second term! Woo hoo! Smart!)

I’m OK with Warren being the 2020 Democratic vice-presidential nominee, but with both Bernie and Biden also being from the Northeast, should one of them snag the presidential nomination, as I expect to be the case, I don’t know that either of them would pick another Northeasterner as his running mate.

In the end, Elizabeth Warren might remain in the U.S. Senate for the remainder of her political career, which wouldn’t be a bad thing for the people of the nation. The Senate has few progressive fighters like she.

In the meantime, I’m focused on the Democrats nominating the most progressive candidate possible who also has a very good chance of beating “President” Pussygrabber (polling against “Pussygrabber” by at least double digits is where my own comfort zone is).

That candidate right now is Bernie Sanders. He fulfills both requirements, while no one else does. Everyone else is either not progressive (enough) or probably can’t beat Pussygrabber, or both.

Update (Wednesday, January 2, 2019): Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi has written another thoughtful-as-usual piece on the unfair treatment of Elizabeth Warren by the corporately owned and controlled media.

I agree with most of what Taibbi has to say, and I too am concerned that the corporate media aren’t reporting the news so much as they are trying to influence the outcome of the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primary contest. (As I’ve noted, it would be no shock that the corporate media bash a candidate who promises to rein in corporations!)

That said, when I get behind a presidential candidate, over time I give him (or her) a lot of money (in proportion to my income, anyway), my time and energy (OK, mostly that’s blogging, but still…) and my emotional investment. Therefore, the candidate’s viability, as best as it can be discerned, matters to me.

Fact is, Warren isn’t looking great right now. (Yes, that might change, but right now… [I make no predictions as to who the eventual Democratic presidential nominee will be, but I can and I do look at and report what the current polling indicates.]) Even among those of her own party, Warren can’t get double digits in the nationwide polls. If she doesn’t excite her own party, how can she excite the national electorate?

That aside, Bernie Sanders (who gets double digits in the nationwide polls) generates more enthusiasm within me personally, perhaps because he remains necessarily critical of the Democratic Party where appropriate and when necessary, and also because yes, I do at least somewhat believe that it’s his turn.

He did a great job in 2016, given what he was up against, winning 22 states and garnering 46 percent of the democratically earned delegates to Queen Billary’s 54 percent. Had the Billarybots within the DNC and elsewhere within the establishmentarian party machine not rigged the process, who can say that Bernie wouldn’t have won the nomination?

Any other candidate who had done as well against party juggernaut Billary as Bernie did would be the heir apparent right now, but because he’s a democratic socialist instead of a Democratic Party hack, Bernie’s accomplishments in 2016 (and before and afterward) largely are ignored.

That’s some fucking bullshit, and I think it’s (past) time that we reward him by making him the presidential nominee this time.

Taibbi writes about “electability,” and yes, ideally that should be for the voters, not the corporate media, to decide. Yet there is a synergy between the voters and the media; both influence each other, for good and for ill, and there probably is no way around that.

Team Warren, in an e-mail it sent to Warren’s supporters today (I’m on her e-mail list), spoke about “commentators [who] spend more time covering Elizabeth or any woman’s ‘likability’ than her plans for huge, systemic change to make this country work for all of us.” (The e-mail makes it pretty clear that Team Warren views claims that Warren isn’t likable to be rooted in sexism.)

I never have seen Warren as anything other than likable (I gave her another donation today), but electability is, it seems to me, a valid concern, as long as it isn’t rooted in something like personal sexism, racism, homophobia or xenophobia, but is rooted in political dynamics, such as recorded in reputable polls.

Taibbi, quoting another writer, suggests that “Democratic voters should ignore such punditry, and simply vote for whichever candidate they would most like to be president.”

Well, I would most like Bernie Sanders to be president, and I am supporting him again for 2020, but, truth be told, I also want “President” Pussygrabber out of office as soon as possible — yes, I also want to win — and, as I already noted here, with Bernie, I believe, we get that two-fer.

Elizabeth Warren remains my second choice, and if she grows in popularity within the Democratic Party to the extent that she poses the largest clear and present danger to Pussygrabber’s “re”-election, then she might even steal me from Team Bernie.

—

*Well, a corrupt Democratic National Committee aside, that is. The corrupt DNC most definitely tipped the scales for Billary in 2016, but some reforms have taken place since then, so we’ll see how 2020 goes.

Beto O’Verrated

To those who found Barack Obama’s generic — and ultimately unfulfilled — campaign slogans of “hope” and “change” to be appealing, Beto O’Rourke’s “sometimes saccharine call to summon the nation’s better angels” (per The New York Times) appeals. Let’s smother this one in the crib, for God’s sake.

Jesus fucking Christ, I hope that Betomania doesn’t last long.

Indeed, Beto O’Rourke is the white Barack Obama, the candidate with the initials B. O. who is whatever you want him to be, just a blank, white wall upon which you project your probably-futile dreams of hope and change.

“Will a soon-to-be-former congressman, with an unremarkable legislative record and a [U.S.] Senate campaign loss, upend [the Democrats’] best-laid plans?” asks The New York Times, acknowledging that O’Rourke is quite substance-free.

Even O’Rourke himself apparently doesn’t know what the fuck, if anything, he stands for. Reports Politico:

Asked if he is a progressive Democrat, O’Rourke told reporters, “I don’t know. I’m just, as you may have seen and heard over the course of the campaign, I’m not big on labels. I don’t get all fired up about party or classifying or defining people based on a label or a group. I’m for everyone.”

If you’re for everyone and everything, then you are for no one and you stand for nothing.

I get it: O’Rourke campaigned in Texas, where if you’re one millimeter left of center you must deny it at all costs, claiming against credibility that you’re entirely non-ideological.

So O’Rourke is a left-leaning coward in a red state or he truly has no moral compass other than saying whatever he thinks he should say to win your vote — even if that means that, as he has done so far, he really says nothing at all.

We’ve been here, done this, with Barack Obama. (The New York Times reports, unsurprisingly, that “veterans of former President Barack Obama’s political operation (and Mr. Obama himself) [are offering] their counsel [to O’Rourke] and hampering would-be rivals who are scrambling to lock down influential supporters and strategists as future campaign staff.”)

I, for one, won’t be punk’d again. (I voted for empty suit Obama in 2008, but not in 2012, after he turned out to be, at best, a centrist caretaker, not a bold and progressive leader.)

O’Rourke has pulled only single digits in the nationwide polls of Democratic Party presidential preference taken over the past two months, with the exception of one poll, which put him at 15 percent, but in all of these polls he has come behind Bernie Sanders, who in all of these polls has come behind Joe Biden.

It’s safe to say that for right now, anyway, according to the reputable nationwide polls, it’s Biden at No. 1, Bernie at No. 2 and O’Rourke depressingly at No. 3, with everyone else in single digits.

(The MoveOn poll referenced in the editorial cartoon above that recently put O’Rourke at No. 1 was, to my knowledge, an entirely unscientific online poll that easily could have been rigged by the Betomaniacs, but even the MoveOn poll has Biden, Bernie and O’Rourke all in the top three.)

Worse, reportedly there is chatter within Team Biden about a desperate, twice-run-and-twice-lost Joe Biden making O’Rourke his running mate, as though one unappealing candidate plus one unappealing candidate somehow equals two appealing candidates.

Also, of course, even though I’ve railed against identity politics many times, I think that it would be a big mistake for the Democratic Party to run two white guys on its 2020 presidential ticket. (Only about one in three Americans is a white male.)

I’m for Bernie Sanders, who, ironically, is an actual Democrat, plus a non-white-guy vice-presidential candidate, perhaps Elizabeth Warren or even perhaps Kamala Harris, who, although she’s an empty slate much like O’Rourke is, at least won her election to the U.S. Senate.

As Matt Taibbi recently correctly pointed out, the corporate media hacks are busy trying to destroy Elizabeth Warren, trying to orchestrate her demise and then pretend that it was a naturally occurring event and not an event that they actively caused (perhaps probably to protect the corporations from which they draw their paychecks).

That said, Bernie would benefit should Warren not run or drop out (as he would, I’m sure, inherit most of her supporters), and it always has bothered me that while Bernie had the balls to run against Queen Billary in 2016, Warren sat it out — hardly courageous of her.

While the corporate media are unfairly savaging Warren, in the end it might mean a President Sanders — a wholly unintended consequence, I’m sure.

In the meantime, again, I very much hope that the ill-conceived love affair with Beto O’Rourke flames out as quickly as it flamed up.

P.S. I saw this on CNN, after I posted the above:

Former Vice President Joe Biden holds the pole position in the first CNN/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll among likely 2020 Democratic [Iowa] caucus-goers, with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke joining him as the only possible candidates in the field with double-digit support.

The new Iowa Poll finds 32 percent of likely caucus-goers saying they back Biden as their first choice, 19 percent Sanders, 11 percent O’Rourke, 8 percent Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, 5 percent California Sen. Kamala Harris, [and] the rest of the 20-person field testing below 5 percent support.

The top three candidates in Iowa, including O’Rourke’s third-place ranking, match the top three in a national CNN poll released Friday. Early results nationally are often driven by name recognition, but in Iowa, the campaign is already underway, with several of the tested candidates having made multiple visits to the state, and at least one having already visited all 99 of the state’s counties.

The field will, I believe, shrink soon enough, as the second- and third-tier candidates realize that they can’t possibly compete with the top-tier candidates.

There will, methinks, be jockeying for the veep slot, though, mostly among the second-tier candidates, including Harris, Cory Booker and maybe Warren.