One of the lies Trump and his sycophants repeat ad nauseam is that simply because of him, the economy is “booming” and growing like “never before in US history”.  That’s complete bullshit of course, and NO economic performance number supports Trump’s boasting.   Trump’s greatest accomplishment has been fortunate to have followed Barack Obama who bucked huge political obstruction to kick start the economy by pumping billions into rebuilding industries and extending unemployment benefits to out of work Americans.  Anyone who has studied Economics 101 knows that a key tool for bringing an economy out of a downturn is INCREASING government spending to get people back to work.  Obama fought the Repubs tooth and nail, and succeeded.  Trump is the beneficiary of that courage, as our economy is simply on the same trend line established by Obama policy.  In fact, Trump is trailing behind some measures established by Obama because of his idiotic trade war.

Here are a few examples:

US GDP Growth

S&P 500

Job Growth

Remember when Trump promised 6% GDP growth?  To bring coal back? To increase manufacturing jobs?  None of those promises have been kept.  None.  Essentially, the economy has continued its up and to the right trend more in spite of Trump rather that because of Trump.

Even though it’s denied by Trumpists, truth does matter.  And the truth is that the economy left by Obama is strong enough to so far resist Trump’s destructive infestation of the White House.

A disgruntled former Breitbart employee came to her senses and leaked hundreds of Stephen Miller’s emails.  You won’t be surprised to learn that he’s a racist pig privately just as much as he is publicly.

Trump says dreamers are “hardened criminals” as SCOTUS hearing begins.

Rick Gates testified today that Trump lied to Mueller about him “not recalling” talking to Stone about WikiLeaks when he in fact did multiple times.

Trump ordered to pay $290,000 in legal expenses to the Scottish Government after losing battle to stop a wind farm.

Trump claims that Ivanka created 14 million US jobs by herself.

There are too many lies to even keep up.

Dems love to carp about Repubs and their purity tests on taxes, social conservatism, articles of faith on everything from religious freedom (so they can be assholes to people not like them), and voter suppression.  Most of that carping is done nose-in-the-air about how ignorant conservatives are, and how purity tests ruined the GOP.  Then, Dems blindly apply their own intolerant purity tests on their side:  Cases in point – Obama should have waited his turn (2008); Sanders wasn’t Democrat enough (2016 and 2020); Biden’s actions over 40 years ago disqualifies him today; Biden’s too old, too frail, sleepy (amplifying the right’s latest personal attack); male Dems who dare to favor a male candidate over all female candidates are “misogynist” (yes, I’ve been accused of that regularly).  Now the purity tests are already being applied to Bloomberg – he’s “a fool”, “a tool”, “not a democrat”, on and on and on.

I get it.  Dems want the perfect candidate with the perfect file cabinet full of perfect plans (that will never see the light of day).  They demand that their chosen candidate pledge to turn the entire system immediately on its head to fix everything the Repubs have done wrong since 1995.  AND, all candidates who don’t promise to do that are denigrated as “fools” and “not true Democrats”.

And that intolerance is a formula for LOSING.  I watched in disbelief in 2016 as the Dems pushed everyone out and followed the most unpopular Democratic candidate in US history over the cliff because it was “her turn”.  I watched as they dismissed all other comers because they weren’t pure enough.  Apparently, they’ve learned nothing because here we go again in 2019. The second most popular candidate in Iowa can’t get out of single digits nationally.  The most popular candidate in Iowa can demonstrate NO scenario where she can win the electoral college.  I know Dems that muse about a Warren/Buttigieg or Buttigieg/Warren ticket, neither of which would get within 50 electoral votes of a tie with Trump.

National elections are certainly about the vision of a future for our country.  They are a time for introspection and big thinking.  But they are also opportunities for gigantic disasters and averting disasters.  We are where we are today because the Dems were stupid in 2016, ignoring all the signs of loss with a weak unpopular candidate.  We have an opportunity to avert another gigantic disaster, but only if the Dems stop being stupid and start applying grade school level arithmetic.

It’s a hard truth.

Right now, Democrats are doing what Democrats always do: They form into a circular firing squad and snipe at one another to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  Currently, the Dems have three viable 2020 candidates – Warren, Sanders, and Biden.  Buttigieg, as great as he is, can’t get out of single digits in national polls, and let’s face it – it’s not his time and he should prepare to run for governor or Senator from Indiana and then come back in 10 years.  His time is in the future.  There have been no votes cast in any primary yet, but the intramural feuding is well underway with Warren supporters smearing Biden and amplifying Trump’s idiotic conspiracy theories, Biden supporters saying Warren is unelectable, and Bernie supporters hating everyone.

Warren is sticking to a Medicare for All plan that doesn’t have the slightest chance of ever seeing the light of day, wants to fund it by taxing billionaires, vows to shut down the US oil industry,  and is threatening businesses that she’s going to jail CEOs.  Sanders vows to also shut down the US oil industry and tax billionaires; he’s more circumspect on healthcare policy.  Biden is staying down the middle, making the electability argument as his main selling  point.

Let’s be blunt here.  As much as you’ll hate to hear it, big sweeping policy changes and turning industries and healthcare on their heads is NOT a winning strategy.  Dems have only one choice, and that is Trump, not Trump.  Period.  Short of him being removed by impeachment (which I believe is a slim to zero chance), or him keeling over from his artery clogging diet, getting him out of office through the ballot box is the only viable chance to rid ourselves from this metastasizing tumor sitting in the Oval Office.

The New York Times published their latest poll this week that pretty much sums up what Real Clear Politics has been reporting for months – Biden is the clear choice for the best chance to beat Trump:

This is the summary of the latest poll.  Sanders is second, Warren a distant third, yet Warren is catching up to Biden in the early primary states, though she is the worst of the front runners to face Trump, and her rhetoric is making it even harder for her to compete.

Before you say it, yeah, yeah, yeah.  I know, I know – Biden is old, failing, sleepy, confused, (insert your insult here _________).  What’s really weird is that none of those adjectives are used on Sanders or Warren even though he is older than Biden and is ACTUALLY suffering from a heart condition, and Warren is only a few years behind both of them.  The issue here, and the ONLY issue here is beating Trump.  Biden, especially if strengthened by a younger vibrant VP candidate is the highest probability candidate to beat Trump.  Warren and Sanders are not.  Period.  Want to lose suburbanites, and middle of the roaders?  Threaten to take away their healthcare and triple the price of gasoline.  It’s stupid, and a losing strategy.

As much as all of us hate it, this is NOT the election for sweeping policy changes.  This is the election of winning.  That is the only goal.  The choice is Trump, not Trump.  If you think things are miserable now, imagine if this SOB got another 4 years.  He has already destroyed the State Department and the Justice Department.  After he packs another 2 or 3 ideologues on the Supreme Court and hundreds of lunatics in the federal court system, he would have virtually destroyed our democracy.  The risk is too great to lose this one – the cost is too high.

The Dems just have to stop the infighting and focus on the only goal for 2020 – beating Trump.  It’s arithmetic.

Yesterday a friend of mine got caught in a huge traffic jam on a local street.  The cause of the jam? The line of cars trying to get into a Popeye’s Fried Chicken drive thru to buy their chicken sandwich.  Also yesterday, there was a fatal stabbing outside of a Popeye’s fried chicken in Maryland during an argument over…wait for it…a goddam chicken sandwich.

If you’re around a Chick-fil-A around lunchtime in Texas, you will be caught in a traffic jam with hundreds of people sitting in dozens of cars willing to wait for almost an hour to buy THEIR goddam chicken sandwich.  This willingness, though, is in large part owed to conservatives  making some kind of statement in support of Chick-fil-A for their anti-diversity politics and support of Trump.

In the meantime, we’re only a few weeks away from the madness of Black Friday (which now starts on Thanksgiving morning) as millions of Americans stupidly storm into big box stores to do battle with one another to buy a cheap made in China flat panel television which they can neither afford or fit on a wall in their home.

Insanity has now become normalized.  More Americans are engaged in Dancing with the Stars and The Voice than they are in participation in their own government.  They go nuts over shit they read on Facebook and Twitter, while ignoring the real world of what’s going on around them.  AND, our system of consumer protections has been decimated.  Lying about products, politics, people, and policy is now OK and our courts have been packed with ideologies who believe that is just fine.  The President of the United States has amplified this cancer by lying himself over 14,000 times in 3 years.  He’s tweeted over 11,000 times, most of those tweets either lies, attacks against his enemies, wild conspiracy theories, or promotion of his own businesses.  His education department is making it worse by destroying decades of progress in public education and assuring that millions of Americans swim in debt created by a system designed to entrap them for profit.

We are living in the age of lies.  The masses, whose wages have been stagnated for 0ver 30 years and whose education system is broken, now live in a distopian television fantasy world, reduced to fighting over goddam chicken sandwiches, flat panel televisions, and casting meaningless votes for people who have no business dancing on national television.

We are lost, and with few viable government protections left, Trump has accelerated the downward spiral to an outright freefall.  I don’t have a solution for it, and don’t even know where to start.

A three judge panel in the Federal Appeals Court in Manhattan just ruled that Trump must turn over 8 years of tax returns to the Manhattan DA, which is investigating Michael Cohen paying bribes to Stormy Daniels and others.  Trump, who lied for 2 years that he would release his tax returns after they were “audited” is fighting tooth and nail to keep them secret, and we can all guess as to why – they’ll likely add to the mountain of criminal evidence piling up on his doorstep.  I continue to believe, and Trumpists continue to deny, that Trump, once out of office (one way or the other) will spend the rest of his life trying to stay out of jail.  The closer we get to that, the more dangerous he will become until we get him out.