More Thoughts On Biden's Stunning (And Infuriating) Victory

As I wrote a few hours ago, I have mixed feelings. First, I harbor a lot of resentment at party elites. Yes, they were correct. But if you think it through, the path to defeat Trump was always to rebuild the "blue wall" from Minnesota to New Jersey. But party elites decided to let the nomination battle play out organically until southern leaders decided to hit the override button and rescue Biden’s campaign. They decided that only Biden can rebuild that wall. They were correct, fine. But I will always have rude words for Jim Clyburn. I will never understand why party leaders in South Carolina and Georgia have to be at the helm when we might never win those states again in my lifetime.

Same for Charles Schumer, who failed to convert the all-time voter turnout record for Biden into at least a tied Senate. He has to step down as minority leader, and finally some of his fellow senators agree.

I am furious at how Trump’s projection sometimes worked. Often, the public and media would see through it. But in the case of Cuban and Venezuelan Americans in Dade and Broward counties, it was a brilliant cynical move. Donald Trump, a man who sees himself as an authoritarian and would love to declare himself president for life if given the opportunity, was able to convince hundreds of thousands of hispanics in Florida that Biden was too similar to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez. Oh yeah, he is just like them. And that worked. A rare Trump projection that worked right where and when he needed it to work. Bad guys only need to get it right once. We good guys need to block them at every attempt. We failed to block this tactic in south Florida. Spanish language radio and social media in Florida is now an arm of the Republican party, much as it was in the 1980s.

The DNC feared that Bernie Sanders would lose Florida because he would be called a socialist in Miami. However, they failed to protect Joe Biden from the same fate. Pete Buttigieg is a little corporate shit, but he was correct when he said that the GOP would label any Democratic nominee or policy as “socialist.”

But what makes me mad and sad most of all is what the Democrats -as weak and as useless as they are- cannot control. Trump became more popular since 2017. When Charlottesville happened, I and many others thought that Trump just saw himself as president of the 63 Million people who voted for him. We figured some of his voters would die before 2020, and some new, teenage voters would vote with their parents. We thought those should cancel each other out, and Trump ought to to match his 63 Million vote total, but no more. He didn’t do anything to overtly court independents and Democrats to his side. He was never a positive, friendly president. He was angry and negative, which was reflected in the national mood. And of course, he did nothing but harm and insult the 21 states that Clinton won. But this week, Trump got 4 million more votes. 4 fucking million! A Los Angeles of new voters. After everything that has happened. After all the insults and early morning tweets. After all the blatant racism and white nationalism. And in the middle of a pandemic and an economic depression that is ongoing. He gained in popularity. That disgusting, indecent man.

[Update, November 5: Trump now has 5 million more votes than he had in 2016!]

[Update, November 6: Trump now has 6 million more votes than he had in 2016! A Los Angles and a Houston!]

[Update, November 10: Trump now has 7 million more votes than he had in 2016! An incredible 71,469,850 votes and counting]

[Update, November 30: Trump now has over 10 million more votes than he did in 2016! A staggering, scary 74,077,537 votes and still counting!]

And some brothers defected to Trump! A small wave of black men didn't vote at all in 2016 but voted for Trump in 2020. In fact, an estimated 1 in 3 college educated black men in Florida voted for Trump. What would Malcom X say? I know what I say. Ladies, do not give any sex to a man until there's a Federal law legalizing abortion or until Kamala Harris is president, whichever happens first. Actually, all women should make that vow. Yes, it's going to be a long wait.

I will never be comfortable with the fact that 48% of voters would rather burn down the republic than share it with women and brown people. It's been this way for decades. This is just a reminder that nothing has changed. We have made zero progress. Half the nation wants the other half dead. Try to sleep well after being reminded about that fact.

The Most Explicit Example Of Extrajudicial Murder In Some Time

I didn’t think we’d see a video more explicit than Eric Garner but here we are. There are some striking differences here. First, there was the extended interaction between the police and the witnesses. It went on and on. In the Garner murder, the cops did not interact with witnesses at all. Second, there was no attempt to save Mr. Floyd’s. The arriving medics knew he was expired, and I think the medics and the cops wanted him to stay that way. Third, that’s urine. We see a man pee his pants and die while under the full weight of a law enforcement officer, funded by the city of Minneapolis. And fourth, there wasn’t one instruction from the officers to Mr. Floyd as to what he had to do to make the torture stop. Usually, cops will be brutal, but they will also bark orders. Those orders help protect them from prosecution and lawsuits. Incredible that didn’t happen here. This was murder. It was like the end of Do The Right Thing. It didn’t seem real until everyone noticed that Mr. Floyd had stopped breathing. As the Asian cop (Officer Tou Thao) put it, they tried to get him into their cruiser for 10 minutes, so they were going to snuff the life out of him for 10. This was murder. And I have no expectations of either of these officers ever losing their freedom or their pensions.

We need to demand radical change. We need to show up in numbers and threaten to burn City Hall down. In every city. We need full civilian control of the police. Here in New York. Over where you are. And in the Twin Cities.

The Worst August Of Trump's Presidency

I have shared this before: August can be terrible. I love it. It’s summer. But in modern world history, it’s awful.

August 2017 was a total disaster for Donald Trump. August 2018 had some major setbacks, some obstruction, and some foreshadowing of future news regarding Trump’s racism. But this August has been the worst August of Trump’s first term. There are still 8 days left to this August. And there will be at least one more Trump August.

Let’s start with how this month began, with the aftermath of two gun massacres and this - this sick, twisted, bizarre photo. This is perhaps the most obscene thing a US president and his spouse has ever done. It was this moment that we should have realized that Donald J. Trump had lost his mind. But we needed some more insanity to draw that conclusion.

It came the following week, with news that after a conversation with Senator Tom Cotton months ago, Trump became mildly obsessed with a plan for the US to purchase Greenland from Denmark. Once Trump publicly admitted the news leak (relatively rare for him), the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin declared that Trump had “lost it.” She finished her piece with this:

..the media and Congress should stop pretending Trump is fit to govern. He’s not. He needs to go as soon as possible, by whatever legal or electoral means possible.

But wait. There would be more. Donald Trump believes that he has done more than any president before him. On Israeli relations, he naturally thinks that he has had the most success. He also naturally thinks that any service he provides to Israel should translate into American Jewish voter support. So when he saw poll numbers showing that he will receive fewer votes from practicing Jews in 2020 than in 2016, he decided to launch a fierce, anti-semitic attack. Just as he weaponized racism against Democrats of color last month, he did it again to American Jews this month. And just in case there was any doubt or confusion as to what he meant, he repeated it, more clearly, the next day. Even the Donald Trump from 2018 might have tried to explain away his remarks via tweet, or called the video footage “fake news.” But this time, he doubled down on his bigotry and showed it off to the whole world.

When Trump launched racist attacks against Freshman Democrats of color last month, pundits tried to analyze and explain them. Even this blogger saw his racist attacks as a campaign strategy. But this month, there’s no explanation needed. Trump dropped an atomic bomb of hatred and bigotry. The Washington Post’s Dahlia Lithwick wrote:

So, Donald Trump, who just in the past two days refused to visit Denmark because it wouldn’t sell Greenland, tossed an anti-Semitic canard out to see how it landed on American Jews, retweeted a conspiracy theorist who claims Trump is the king of the Jews, reversed himself on gun policy and payroll taxes, and mulled ending birthright citizenship by way of executive order, just keeps on trucking. No check in sight.

Within the same 22 hours or so that he slandered nearly 5 Million Americans, Trump angrily canceled his state visit to Denmark. It confirmed that Trump didn’t really want to go to Denmark in the first place, even though he invited himself to visit just a few weeks ago, leaving the Danish royals, Danish government and the US State Department very little time to set up the visit and associated events.

Last year, I wrote in this blog that the Trump presidency is unsustainable. He will complete his term (or terms), but his presidency and the Republic will crash and burn before the end of his tenure. To my amazement and surprise, significant journalists are now reflecting this point of view, 30 months into his presidency. In the same piece quoted above, Dahlia Lithwick writes in terms I haven’t seen her use before. She has called Trump unfit many times, but this was -to my knowledge- the first time she acknowledged that Trump is seriously hurting us. In previous months, Trump’s tweets, erratic behavior, insults towards allies and canceled trips (how many now? two?) were analyzed as distractions from his policies and destruction of government agencies. Allies would invite him to visit less often than previous presidents, and when he would visit, they would treat him to comfort food and parades. The advice was, ignore the drama, focus on the administration’s policies, resist the administration in the courts, and wait for Trump to go away. Then, we should all encourage the next Democratic president to restore some normalcy, clean up Trump’s mess, and begin the long process of repairing the Republic.

But now, in August of 2019, there is this realization that we were sadly mistaken to wait for the next Democratic president. Trump’s presidency is destroying us. It isn’t just the policies. It’s everything he does. We need a president to be a leader and a healer. Trump only wants to pour gasoline over everything. His slander, insults, rage, temper tantrums, excessive personal time, his ignorance and his inability to think about the future are taking a serious toll on the public. The Trump presidency is destroying our national morale. It is destroying our mental health and national psyche. It is bringing a recession sooner than expected. It is making us lose sleep. It is making us drink more. And it is even, possibly, making us commit suicide more than before - especially the poor white people who voted for him. We’re in the Trump maliese. It makes the Carter malaise look like a wonderfully stable, fun and happy time. I will insist to the end that it was, dammit.

Dahlia Lithwick’s piece was prompted by an article by Matt Ford in The New Republic. It goes into detail about just how American life is much more difficult under Donald Trump. Simply put, why are we doing this to ourselves? I thought his last point was incredibly strong. Life is too short to live another day with this lunatic as our president:

He largely spends his days as president in unstructured “executive time” where he fields calls from outside advisers and ingests massive quantities of raw Fox News coverage. The work of solving the nation’s problems, except insofar as it rallies his supporters and keeps him in office, is a largely secondary concern. Soon after Trump took office, White House aides tried to persuade him that the national debt would become unsustainable in the future. “Yeah, but I won’t be here,” he reportedly replied. Trump’s time may be limited, but so is ours.

Which brings us to a third piece written within 24 hours of the previous two. James Fallows of The Atlantic explains that Trump would simply be unable to hold employment for 30 months if he were on a corporate or non-profit board, a company executive, or perhaps his best example, an airline pilot.

It took 30 months, but Trump has finally gone full lunatic. It started with twisted photos from Dayton and El Paso three weeks ago, and it continues with Greenland, full anti-semitism, and erratic economic policy. He rocked the markets again today. Just a president pouring gasoline on everything. The House should have opened impeachment proceedings in February. They were warned. They must open formal impeachment hearings immediately, even if it is only to strengthen the guardrails to keep this president -and the republic- from falling off a cliff. Trump's wear and tear on the citizenry is finally showing. We've very tired, and we’ve had enough. The House shouldn’t be in recess. it should be working on articles of Impeachment six days a week.

The final Trump Tower press conference on August 15 2017 was incredible. But so was this press gaggle on August 21 2019. The two together show a man who is not just unfit for office, but incredibly unhinged, angry and dangerous to us all.

If you drink, please continue to do so. Responsibly, of course.

Racism Will Win

It has won before. It is winning now. And for what? Well, I see it as two things.

First, we need to acknowledge that this is a long, slow, final rage from the American white majority. Racism still sells, and it might just work for one more presidential term. It might not work this time. But it did work in 2016, along with many foreign-produced memes.

Second, and more crucial to Trump, the rage, the racism and the “two minute hate” is entertainment. Trump has turned politics and government into a sick reality TV show. What are the Trump chants? Lock her up. Send her back. What does he direct his supporters to do? Attack Baltimore. Attack cities. Attack people of color and immigrants. And if anyone accuses you of being a racist, remember, it is you who are the victims and it is they who are the real racists.

Trump has made racism the center of his 2020 campaign. He has poured gasoline all over the fire he started.

And his 60 Million supporters love it. For them, it is entertainment. It’s a great show. It’s a show about insulting, enraging, “triggering” and “owning” the libs.” For them it is fun. The price of admission is burning down the republic. But in their mind, they’d rather burn it down than share it with brown people, queers and women. So it’s a double win. They have fun and leave nothing behind for future generations. My generation has a name for such people: Boomers. More on that later this year on this blog.

Trump Is Toxic

Donald Trump is toxic to the Republic. The Republic has been dying for decades now. Americans had progressive improvements to their standard of living taken away from them beginning in 1973. Bush v. Gore (2000) dealt an enormous blow to our electoral system, and manipulated the course of US history. 

But Trump seems to have taken the United States on an accellerated path to ruin.

Here's some quick bar napkin math. In 9 months we have lost an FBI director, the White House Chief of Staff, a cabinet member, and we've reached a point where the Senate is not going to let any bills reach the president's desk. Add to that a disastrous travel ban, a threat of a military transgender ban (that we'll probably never hear about again), repeated threats of a nuclear strike on North Korea, and a promise to build a wall that will never be funded.

An aside about the Republicans in Congress. The GOP is not a normal political party. Apparently they care about their own power and the transfer of as much wealth as possible to their political contributors. I find among them precious little interest in the welfare of this nation. In its current incarnation, that party is entirely unfit to govern the United States.

On July 15, chaos began to manifest in plain view. Trump gave an incredible speech at the Boy Scouts of America Jamboree. In any other administration, it would be a shocking turning point. The Secretary of State allegedly mulled his resignation over that speech. In Trump's administration, it was just another bad day at the office before things really got chaotic the following week, with the unexplained, dramatic ouster of Sean Spicer and Reince Preibus. 

Then, the last 8 weeks, we had the white nationalist invasion of Charlottesville (and the laying of blame on those who tried to defend the city), the disbandment of two presidential councils, word that the Department of State is in shambles, and a dramatic, historic 15 minutes on August 15 which will likely lead to European leaders asking Trump to never visit their nations as president again (Merkel and May are on the verge of just that). That unhinged press conference should have destroyed him. But no. He wasn't done.

Then came the end of summer. Hurricane Irma ripped through the US Virgin Islands and put the Florida Keys in a pool of sewage. And then, barely two weeks later, Hurricane Maria tore through Vieques, Culebra, and Puerto Rico. But Trump paid no attention to that storm in its first four days. He instead attacked black professional athletes in the NBA and NFL. He didn't make rescue and recovery in Puerto Rico a priority until he saw the situation on television. That's another thing that historians will have to track, if there's a nation left after he and Pence are gone. Trump gets most of his information from US cable news. And when the news about him becomes sour, he holds a campaign rally. One time he told an adoring crowd of white people that he would be good to black Americans. That went down well. 

The lost weekend while Puerto Ricans died should have destroyed Trump. But no. His administration cannot be killed. It just limps along. Donald Trump has done something that no president has done since Nixon. He was worn down national morale. But he has also done something Nixon and Reagan wouldn't dream of doing. He has energized the white nationalist fringe, who now march unmasked -at least for a little while. He is ruining the classic, optimistic American mood that has kept us going despite so many aspects of American life worsening since 1973. The first 9 months have brought a white house in turmoil. In 9 more months, we could have a flaming constitutional crisis. This is not sustainable. 

Tomorrow, Donald Trump goes to Puerto Rico to view recovery efforts. I hope the boos are constant and loud. He might not hear them. But the news media will. As we have seen, Trump has very poor communication skills to say the least. When he ad libs, disaster strikes. 

Trump has his supporters. A solid 35% of American adults fully support him. He is their racial antidote for 8 years of Obama. Millions of Americans are perfectly content to accept a dictatorial right winger, who'll promise them safety and a healthy economy in a white supremacist, nationalist context. As for Congress, and especially the House of Representatives, I wouldn't want to put much faith in their saving us from Beloved Leader Trump. That leaves a free press and and an aroused citizenry. Maybe that'll be enough. 

Uncle Tim contributed to this post.

No, Starbucks In Not Organizing Discounts For Undocumented Immigrants

The above image is a hoax advertisement created by a 4Chan user. It made the Reddit and Facebook rounds the weekend of August 4.

But hey, if it riles the Trump base, go with it. Where would he and his supporters be without conspiracies? And where would they be if they couldn't whine about how they're constantly being victimized?

Breaking Wind

When I was about thirteen and entering high school, I tried to read Ms. Mitchell's racist screed. Needless to say, I failed, but not before I found myself wishing that Lincoln and the Union had let the racist bastards secede and be done with it. Gone With the Wind is more like breaking wind. Soon, no one will care about the film anymore.

I Am A White Supramacist

I have benefited from a system that has given me breaks, but has derailed, blocked, imprisoned, and killed others. I have played with toy guns outside, and I wasn't shot. I have talked back to authority figures, and I wasn't shot. I have walked down dark stairwells, and I haven't been shot. I have fallen down, and I have been given extra chances, time and again. And so, I have to acknowledge that one of the reasons I have made it to age 41 is because I am not a black man. And because I have benefited from this biased system, and I have paid into it, and I have voted for politicians who maintain it, I am a white supremacist.

Destroy this system.

A Video From Sadly, No!

Sadly, No! Productions presents “Officer Barrett and the Jungle Monkey". H/T to Sadly, No! (naturally)

Now A Few Words From Our Sponsors

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National Vanguard was a Virginia-based organization that disbanded a year ago (Virginia, what a shock!). They have been replaced by European Americans United, based in Sacramento, CA. They even sell copies of Heidi and t-shirts. That's right.....Heidi...a classic for Aryan children everywhere.

Did Clinton Give Her Appalachian Supporters A 'Permission Slip' To Act On Racial Prejudice?

This is not a question to be asked lightly. Hillary Clinton's campaign has done nothing remotely close to George H.W. Bush's Willie Horton ad of 1988. Her campaign has not explicitly said that a vote for Obama will result in the rapes of white women or hordes black hoodlums in our streets. But if we examine what her campaign did say explicitly, then we can draw the conclusion that racist impulses in Appalachian voters were, shall we say, encouraged. And that is not a charge to throw around lightly, either.

Let me try to explain.

I was openly wondering why there was such a difference in results between Kansas and Kentucky. Kansas was a big victory for Obama. Kentucky was a landslide victory for Clinton. Both states are over 90% working-class caucasian. Both states are in the heartland (Kansas more so). Both states are predominantly Christian, specifically Protestant. Both states are almost assured to vote for John McCain this fall. But both states have independent voters, who have tended to favor Obama in the primaries. So what happened? My girl chimed in: "There's a big difference between Kansas and Kentucky."

Indeed there is. What is it with Appalachia? I found two great posts from Driftglass and LowerManhattanite. Both are outstanding, even if Drifty is a little bitter. But he has history on his side. The inherent racism of white Appalachia is well-documented, and it is a shameful history. It is the birthplace and legacy of Jim Crow.

Enter Senator Hillay Clinton's campaign into West Virginia and Kentucky. For months (since March, I believe) Clinton, her advisors, spokespeople and campaigners have been making the argument that Senator Clinton is more electable against John McCain in the general election. The reasons for this argument seem clear. Clinton is a major brand name. Middle America hardly knows Obama. Clinton is a more conservative Democrat, known for taking a stand against violence in video games, a stand for the war in Iraq, and a brief stand against flag burning. More electable, sure. But when the campaign entered West Virginia and Kentucky, the 'more electable' argument underwent a subtle transformation. Analysts can point to a single Clinton quote in Kentucky back on May 7th:

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

Clinton only said "white Americans" once, but it was enough to plant the theme that she was on the side of "hard-working", white voters, while Obama, somehow, was not. Essays and books have been written that decode the use of "working" or "hard-working" in addition to the word "white people" or "white Americans." It implies a lot in just a few words. White people work hard. People who don't look like them presumably don't work hard. Cenk Uygur explains further:

The second way they gave their voters permission to be racists is by using thinly veiled code words like, "I'm looking out for people like you." The very thin veil on these code words was lifted when Senator Clinton flat out said she was looking out for "hard working white Americans." And presumably Obama wasn't. And why is that? You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand the implication that he wasn't looking out for people like them because he wasn't one of them.

So, when the voter in Kentucky stepped into that booth, he didn't necessarily think, "I'm going to vote against Barack Obama because he is black and I'm racist." He thought, "Hillary Clinton is looking out for people like me. Obama cares more about his own people. And besides which he's going to lose in the general election because who would elect a black guy as president?"

This is the art of encoding and decoding in communication. It was subtle and effective, not blatant and egregious. Clinton's campaign didn't run a TV ad darkening Obama's face (a-la OJ Simpson on various TV networks) or try to make white voters frightened of Obama. It was more of an arm around their shoulder - a reminder that Clinton can be trusted because she connects with poor and working-class white people who don't have college degrees (Obama's support among college-educated whites is very strong, by the way). It was almost as if Clinton's campaign was saying, "Look, we know Obama's support among blacks is very strong. They side with him because of his race. It's OK for you to vote with Clinton because she is white. They are doing it, so we can do it too. And since we are the majority in this country (the silent majority, perhaps, like Reagan's supporters), we know we can override their votes and beat their candidate. It's white people like you who will decide this election."

Ampersand, over at Atlas Blog, compiled an excellent sampling of how the Clinton quote was interpreted, and it is clear that it worked as intended. Elrod has a similar summary of how "hard-working" plus "white" made her comment a classic, southern 'dog-whistle' moment. We coffee-drinking, urban, liberal intellectuals aren't making this up. Clinton delivered a specific, encoded message to the white voters of Kentucky on May 7th. She gave them a green light to vote against the black man on the basis of racial prejudice.

That's a much different message coming from a Clinton, a member of a family that might not have enjoyed two terms in the White House if it wasn't for a solid base of support among African Americans. Listen to the Clinton quote again, straight from Clinton's teleconference with USA Today. Note how she makes sure to say "hard-working." It seems to be a carefully-chosen word by her campaign.

One of the problems I perceive with this tactic is that black Americans are not voting for Obama solely because he is black. The driving force behind Obama is his charisma, the promise of dramatic change, and the fact that he is slightly more liberal than Clinton and against the occupation of Iraq. Those qualities have attracted more votes than Clinton nationwide. But Clinton's strategists and managers must have thought that they had an opportunity to exploit a large population of people who deep down, don't want to see a black man become president. They tapped into it, and it has worked in Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia, and Kentucky.

To her credit, Clinton later told CNN/Time that she regretted that remark. But that was after she had won Kentucky.

Cenk Uygur and E.J. Escow explain this conclusion, that Clinton gave voters in West Virginia and Kentucky permission to vote on their racial prejudices.

Keith Olbermann and Dana Milbank discuss the Clinton quote the week it happened.