Re: Badass

I’ve had a remarkable exchange with an acquaintance over Valerie Plame’s campaign ad that I posted yesterday.  He was MOST offended by the ad, first complaining about her “careless driving” (while demonstrating CIA driver skills training) and then saying he could never vote for her because she was “wasting fossil fuels” and “making climate change worse” by driving a Camaro backwards.  No shit, that’s what he actually said.  He’s a Warren/Buttigieg aficionado, so that tells you something about the mind set.  Then, he actually suggested that she should have been driving a Tesla in the ad.  I spit my sweet tea all over my keyboard when I burst out laughing at that, but then came to the conclusion that we’re f*cked if this is the mindset of liberal Dems.

Can you imagine the derision if Plame had been driving a Tesla while showing that she’s a skilled, trained CIA operative?  It would be just like the memes of Obama riding a bike:

Or Michael Dukakis in a tank:

There are dozens of examples of GOP derision of Dems as latte sipping pantywaists.  No, it’s not fair, and it’s not honest, but politics ain’t beanbag.  Liberal Dems need to understand that Democratic candidates in red states don’t need THEIR votes, they need the votes of people who usually vote Republican and who are unaffiliated.  You’re not going to get those votes riding a bike in Mom jeans and a bike helmet or driving a Tesla to be “environmentally responsible”.  You get those votes by being tough, not dancing around tough issues and parsing your words.  Plame understands that.  Warren and other Dem candidates don’t.

Normal unaffiliated people are attracted to strength.  Plame gets that.  Dukakis (or his campaign chair) didn’t.  Fortunately, Obama’s speaking skills and intellect overpowered his nerdiness.  Warren polls well among like kind because she speaks their language.  She doesn’t speak to Joe Six Pack, and doesn’t have a prayer in the swing states.  “Having a plan for that” is not enough.  Candidates have to inspire.  Obama got that.  Biden gets that. Plame gets that.  Jon Tester of Montana gets that.

Are issues like climate change important?  Goddam right they’re important.  But we’re going to make zero progress by running a candidate who can’t beat the Russians and Cheeto Jesus in the rust belt.

Non-Trumpists know that Trump is a complete disaster, morally bankrupt, narcissistic, and a tyrant.  Sycophants ignore all that and worst of all, support his trade and economic policies which are a disaster for businesses large and small, especially farmers.  His trade war with the world, especially China, is destroying US markets at a scale virtually never seen in modern US history.  Farmers are feeling much of the pain inflicted on US business with their revenue from exports to China dropping by more than half, from $19.5 billion to $9.2 billion in 2018.  Farm bankruptcies have increased 13% since 2018 alone.  The US lobster industry has been virtually destroyed with Canada taking almost all of US Chinese export market share, generating a boom to its lobster fisherman.  US exports are down 84% since Trump imposed the tariffs.

Trump’s idiotic trade was is doing irreparable damage to US export markets all while he sycophants in red MAGA hats scream about scary dark skinned people and cheer on tax cuts for billionaires while being unable to pay their electric bill.  The brainwashing is complete, but it seems that farmers are waking up to a cold grey dawn of reality.

Remember when the rumor was floated that Robert Mueller was going to be swept up in a sex scandal?  Remember when it went nowhere?  Remember when rumors floated about Pete Buttigieg that also died on the vine?  Meet Jacob Wohl, a young smartass from California, cut from the same cloth as James O’Keefe, another young smartass who’s become known for botched stings and false reporting on Democratic politicians.

If it’s even possible, Wohl is worse than O’Keefe (or at least more criminal).  He has partnered with a shadowy 53 year old political operative named Jack Burkman whose checkered past goes all the way back to the Clinton impeachment.  He claims that Don McGahn, Trump’s former WH counsel who spent 30 hours with Mueller, introduced Burkman to Wohl.  McGahn told the Washington Post he’s never met him OR Wohl.  Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s on staff advisor liar, warned the Post to watch out for Burkman.

Like all dirty tricksters, truth doesn’t matter to Wohl and Burkman, so they have been cooking up all kinds of fake scandals to attack Trump enemies, but they’ve all been botched, including doing a “press conference” on the fake Mueller scandal with Burkman’s fly unzipped.  LOL.

And it gets better – Wohl, who started his career as a securities salesman, has been trailed by financial scandals and investigations the last several years.  On Wednesday, he was arraigned on felony securities fraud for selling a fake real estate fund.  The charges stem from an investigation of the fund from 2016 leading to the charge this week.

The lesson keeps repeating itself.  Dirty tricksters like Wohl and O’Keefe base their entire existence on lies for political gain.  Those lies often land them in scandal at minimum, and sometimes criminal charges.  Amazing that many on the side that claims morals and family values have devolved into supporting lies and criminality in their tribe.  Worse, there are some who are neck deep in it.  It’s a head shaker.

Kirstin Gillibrand, once a strong voice for women’s rights, both military and civilian, quietly ended her run for president yesterday after failing to qualify for the next debate to be held in Houston.  After she took Hillary’s seat in 2009, she became a firebrand in the Senate, and grew into a possible candidate to be our first woman president.  The talk started early and gained momentum as Gillibrand became known for speaking out in hearings about justice and civil rights.

Then she made a gigantic mistake that pissed off a whole bushel basket full of progressives including yours truly…she aided conservative trolls by amplifying a coordinated attack and kneecapped Al Franken, another strong voice in the Senate who was voraciously anti-Trump.  Franken was also well known for speaking out in hearings, dismantling the likes of Jeff Sessions and other Trump apologists.  He was hated by rightwingers like Steve Bannon and Sean Hannity.  AND, Roger Stone, who we’ll talk about in a moment.  This is when talk of Franken running for president in 2020 also started.

When Leeann Tweeden made her accusation against Franken on a rightwing radio talk show, anyone paying attention knew it was bullshit.  Tweeden, a rightwing talker herself, is famous among the testosterone set as a semi-nude model whose USO performances and magazine photo spreads have always been sexually suggestive, to put it mildly.  As Jane Mayer reported in the New Yorker, Tweeden blatantly lied about Franken’s behavior and about the photograph of him supposedly  “groping” her in an obviously posed photograph with others in the room during a USO tour in 2006.  The entire attack was Trumped up (pun intended), but the damage was effective, and in those days of Me Too, sensitivity to these kinds of allegations was extremely high.  Others piled on, and Franken was under withering attack.

Many people didn’t catch on (or ignored) the evidence of obvious coordination of Tweeden’s attack on multiple fronts including Roger Stone tweeting about Franken’s “time in the barrel” BEFORE Tweeden’s accusation.  Yeah, THAT Roger Stone.  Alex Jones also got in on the act, “predicting” a Franken sex scandal.  In the following days, rightwing media everywhere blew up the accusation into a full blown scandal.  Keep in mind that all of this was activity was on the coattails of an actual scandal, Roy Moore’s 40 year record of pursuing and abusing young girls.  He lost his race for Senate, with Alabama voters electing a Democrat for the first time in about a thousand years.

This is when Gillibrand blundered.  Seeing an opportunity to eliminate a possible 2020 primary opponent, she jumped on the conservative bandwagon on national television, calling for Franken’s immediate resignation.  Pass go, pass investigations, pass an ethics hearing, go straight to home.  Under pressure in the growing din, many other senators, men and women, jumped in, demanding Franken leave.  With little support and the rightwing noise machine at full volume, Franken capitulated and resigned.  In the cold light of today, though, almost all those senators, except for Gillibrand, admit their haste calling for Franken’s head was unwise and unfair.  Conservatives, of course, remain giddy that their attack worked like a charm, hurried along by Gillibrand’s complicity.

Unfortunately for Gillibrand, though, millions of Democrats were turned off by her attack.  She violated the peoples’ trust, using a serious accusation against Franken as a political tool.  It IS critical that women be believed when they go public with stories of abuse both recent and long past.  It is just as critical, though, that these accusations be truthful, and especially in the case of public figures like Franken, investigated and fair.  Gillibrand denied Franken fairness for her own gain.  That’s obvious.  In doing so, though, she seriously damaged the Me Too movement and ended up dooming her own prospects of becoming the first woman president.  Now she’s dropped out, failing to get out of single digits or raise enough money.

Good riddance.

Last night, CNN persisted with their silly lightning round “debate” format encouraging 0% candidates to attack the few actual serious candidates.  Whoever thought that was a good idea was wrong, dead wrong, because it gave idiots like Bill De Blasio, who has ZERO chance of being nominated, an amplified voice to attack the front runner.  To illustrate the point, here is a chart I built that plots each candidate’s average national poll average from realclearpolitics.com against the minutes they talked during this round of debates as timed by the Washington Post.  To be clear, though, what’s illustrated here is total airtime, not the subject of that airtime.  For example, over HALF of Biden’s airtime was spent defending himself from attacks most of who are polling at less than 5% nationally.  The blue bars are national average poll percentage.  The orange bars are airtime spent in this round of debates.  Have a look:

This chart illustrates how goddam stupid the DNC is allowing 0% candidates on a national debate stage.  What it doesn’t illustrate, and it’s an important point, is that these 0% candidates used their time to attack…wait for it…Barack Obama.  It was shocking how, to get at Biden (and to be fair, Harris did it, too) these candidates attacked policies of the Obama administration.  The burning dumpster in the room, Donald Trump, was almost completely ignored while Joe Biden fought off withering attacks on his record of 50 years of public service.  The entire episode was shameful, set up by CNN as some silly cage match, and enabled by the incompetence of Tom Perez and the other leadership of the DNC.

During both of these most recent debates circular firing squads I followed several debate threads.  Almost every one of those threads, which were of DEMOCRATS, had a number of “Sleepy Joe” and “sleepy old white man” comments that were surprising.  And what was shocking were that many of those making those comments supported Warren or Sanders.  Let’s look at some of the ages of some well known people:

Bernie Sanders – 77
Joe Biden – 76
Elizabeth Warren – 70
Charlie Watts – 78
Mick Jagger – 76
Keith Richards – 75
Ronnie Woods – 72

I saw the last four guys outperform most 20 year olds onstage last Saturday.  So let’s be fair here.  If you’re a Bernie or Warren supporter, attacking Biden for his age is hypocritical and a Trump talking point.

But I digress from slamming the DNC and CNN for yet another disastrous night for Democrats that HURT not helped them mount an offense against the worst president in US history.  It’s long past time for the DNC to stop being stupid, get 75% of those people off the stage so we can have a serious discussion about the future of our nation and strengthening actual candidates so they can aim their fire where it should be aimed, Donald Trump, not each other.

I have this sinking feeling that the Dems are really going to blow it.  They’re going to lose to the worst president in US history because the DNC is leading the candidates over a cliff with the idiots at CNN giving an assist by running tonight’s debate like it’s some kind of lightning round for a grand prize of a Hillary 2016 T-shirt.  Holy Jesus, what a shit show.  It was like a pop quiz for some Bible verse memorization contest.  If the DNC thinks this kind of bullshit will engage new voters – well, we’re screwed.  Just screwed.

I tried finding a movie to watch after the flag waving at the beginning, but ran back across it, glued to it by becoming so appalled that, like a car accident on the freeway, I just couldn’t look away.  It was worse than the freeway car accident, like that slow fire that starts under the hood that nobody can extinguish; you KNOW what’s going to happen in the end.  We’re doomed; doomed.  I can only hope that the adults tomorrow night do better, but with the morons moderating playing speed questions, I fear it will be Shit Show 2 of Round Two of the series of Shit Shows.

I have no words.