The Democratic Party of the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas held their caucuses today. Saipan is the principle island of the Northern Marianas, famous as the place where Lee Marvin was shot in the ass by a Japanese machine gunner in the early stages of the American invasion of the island during World War Two, something no one made fun of to his face. Saipan is also where at the close of that battle more than a thousand Japanese civilians blew themselves up or hurled their children and then themselves off cliffs onto the rocks below rather than surrender to the Americans, making for some of the most disturbing footage of World War Two, but I am digressing horribly. Continue reading
Author Archives: Brick Wahl
Bernie’s Castro crush
Bernie’s old Castro crush won’t hurt him much in the Democratic primaries, and nothing can help him win Florida on Tuesday anyway. Florida is a closed primary, which mean only registered Democrats can vote, and Bernie doesn’t do well without independent voters, especially as so many of his fervent Millennial supporters are registered as independents. But if he were the nominee he could now certainly kiss Florida off, and the last time a Democrat was elected president without Florida was 1992, and before that you have to back all the way back to 1960 with JFK. But in 1960 Florida had maybe a third of the population it does now, even Iowa was bigger. Florida was not a must win for either side back then, it was just another ten electoral votes to be worked into various possible combinations to get to 270 electoral votes. By 1992 Florida was much bigger, with 25 electoral votes, and though Bill Clinton lost the state to the first President Bush, Clinton was a southerner and took enough southern states to make up for Florida. But Bernie is not a southerner.
Facts
So a self-identified progressive guy, a real bright guy at that, is arguing his point and as proof he uses an article taken from a well known conservative website. I point out that it is a conservative website and therefore the information would be slanted. He was shocked I doubted the story. Facts, he told me, have no political bias. This from a guy who insists the big corporate media is biased. He won’t believe anything he hears on MSNBC because they are so biased–even all the pro-Bernie analysts and staffers they have on regularly, apparently–but he will go to conservative news sites to get his news. I’m sure he doesn’t all the time, but I was a bit troubled by the fact that he thinks a story on a right wing site and a left wing site are the same thing, as facts have no political bias. Apparently on television all facts are biased, even if they are progressive. But something he saw on Facebook has to be true, even if it was written by conservatives with an agenda.
The logic escapes me. It’s not like there is any shortage of progressive news sites.
I’m hoping this is an isolated case.
Republican Debate
I’d spent the night watching a couple hockey games, then after the Kings retook the lead in the west with a win over Montreal, I switched to MSNBC for news of the debate. Everyone was talking about Marco Rubio’s weak performance and Donald Trump’s yuge penis. I was bewildered and curious, but tripping on a Benadryl and seizure med cocktail I drifted off as Chris Matthews was babbling about Lawrence of Arabia. The movie, I think. Clever boy. Dreamless hours passed. I woke with a start to Joe Scarborough’s theme music. Born on the Bayou, I think, choogling on down to New Orleans, and several very sleepy journalists were talking about Marco Rubio’s weak performance and Donald Trump’s yuge penis. The BBC’s Katty Kay, in a perfect Received Pronunciation redolent of Oxford and the tonier restaurants, told us she was so mortified by the debased and phallic (her terms) content of the GOP debate that she had to fight the urge to shower to wash off the filth. She was so fraffly bothered you’d think she was back on the sub-continent in the wrong train car. The flies, the heat, the filth. For a moment I was almost proud of The Donald and Little Marco, but it was just the Irish in me, and it subsided later, in the shower, scrubbing and scrubbing. I never realized what a clean freak a Democrat could be.
Generations
The Millennials today will have their presidential election year about the time they morph into grumpy middle aged people who actually vote. 2024, maybe, or more like 2032, when today’s eighteen and twenty-nine year olds are thirty four and a thoroughly disagreeable forty five, respectively. As for the geezers, well, some of us will be there for it, and some will never have our year, we’ll be memories. The luck of the draw. But it won’t be the baby boomers’ world by then anyway, thankfully, we who voted more for Nixon and Reagan than Gene McCarthy and George McGovern, we who helped sweep the Reagan Revolution into power and helped it dismantle the New Deal. This mess we’re in today is as much our fault as the establishment we railed against way back when. We can’t blame it all on the Greatest Generation. Half of us voted for Reagan, even icons like Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Johnny Ramone were card carrying Republicans. (You gotta serve somebody, Bob said. Keep on rockin’ in the free world said Neil.) And a lot of us Baby Boomers will wind up cranky old Republicans, chasing left wing Millennials off our lawns. No, we fucked up, sold out, gave up. The New Deal generation never let the US descend into income inequality hell like we did. They had their priorities right. And it’s hard to imagine that Millennials won’t eventually do something about getting those priorities right again, once they get off their aging asses and vote. Continue reading
Come the revolution
When I was a college kid in the seventies, surrounded by intellectuals of radical or wanna be radical temperament, there were a lot of Revolution jokes. Come the revolution this, come the revolution that. Come the revolution, you will no longer have to wait in line at the falafel stand. Some the revolution, we will not pay the landlord, that landlord will pay us. Knock knock. Who’s there. The revolution. The revolution who. The revolution will not be televised. No one said they were funny. But everyone said them. Continue reading
A little early for the Revolution
Someone read a blog post of mine and told me it just show who frightened I was of a Bernie Sanders victory. That was weird, I mean why the hell would a Hillary supporter today be frightened? Had the guy even looked at any of the poll data? Bernie’s campaign is doomed. It’ll run for a while, and with fervor, but Bernie has lost the support of the majority of voters. He simply cannot find enough voters to win him the delegates he needs to win the nomination. He peaked in New Hampshire, as predicted (in fact as I said all along, and said beforehand he would, it was so predictable), and collapsed afterward, as predicted. The only surprising thing for me* was that his collapse is happening so much faster than expected. I mean look at Massachusetts. He is behind. He is behind so much–somewhere between 5 and 10 per cent–that the results while not certain for Hillary and very uncertain for Bernie. Bernie should be up 20% there now. Massachusetts is the state where, outside of Vermont, he should be massively popular. Which he is, actually, voters love him. Love him even more than Hillary, who is also very popular in Massachusetts, but those same voters will tell pollsters, over and over, that they would prefer Hillary as president because Hillary has the experience and skills need that Bernie lacks. The problem for the Bernie campaign in Massachusetts now is that after the New Hampshire win Bernie was about 20 points higher than he is now. So any Hillary win, or even a very close Bernie win, will be seen as a Bernie loss. He has to win by a solid margin for it to be seen as anything other than proof of weakened momentum in the most liberal part of the country. The fact that he is desperately struggling to hold Massachusetts is just indicative of just how much Bernie’s momentum after his big New Hampshire win has collapsed.
Bernie Sanders’ ad campaign for Hillary Clinton
Apparently the Bernie Sanders campaign actually outspent Hillary on TV campaign ads in South Carolina. He also had 200 paid staffers working there. That is a huge investment of money and resources. Ironically, his expensive advertising campaign actually worked in Hillary’s favor, as Bernie’s numbers dropped as his advertising blitz went into effect. Those must have been some commercials. And I read a couple weeks ago that those 200 paid staffers were knocking on doors in African-American neighborhoods to read people quotes from Dr. Cornel West about Bernie Sanders. That in itself must have cost him votes, as West is notorious for his unrelentingly vicious attacks on President Obama. I suspect Bernie’s campaign in South Carolina will become a textbook case on how to spend lots of money to get people to vote for your opponent.
Trump, Cruz, Rubio and William F. Buckley
So I just saw a replay of that portion of the GOP debate in Texas where it degenerated into complete anarchy, kind of like the examination scene in A Day At the Races, but instead of the Marx Brothers you had three obnoxious assholes who want to be president. Then I switch stations and it’s an old Tonight Show. Johnny Carson is talking to William F. Buckley, and Buckley is using words I’ve never heard before, big huge words. It’s 1980 and he’s lecturing Johnny on conservatism which, he doesn’t know yet, is right on the cusp of its golden age. He was Mr. Conservative back then, the smartest guy in the world, a conservative so intellectual he could hate communists in iambic pentameter. They’d bring him out to argue with Gore Vidal or trade bon mots with Truman Capote. But today, after watching that debate, it’s like William F. Buckley was from another planet. Do they even have conservatives like him anymore? What happened? Was it Rush Limbaugh that made things so stupid? I like to think so, but it’s certainly more than that. Still, you could imagine Rush on stage here with the three stooges, pitching in, shouting at Cruz, calling Rubio names, yelling louder than Trump. But not William F Buckley. I can’t see him on that stage, I can’t see him asking questions, I can’t even imagine him in the same room. But I do wonder just what Bill Buckley would say, watching Trump, Cruz and Rubio on PBS yell insults at each other. Maybe he’d say the superstition that the hounds of truth will rout the vermin of error seems, like a fragment of Victorian lace, quaint, but too brittle to be lifted out of the showcase. Not that I have a clue what that means, but at least he didn’t say sweat.
William F. Buckley watching the debate at Cato the Elder’s elysian pad.
Marco Rubio
I remember catching part of one of the early GOP debates and realizing that Marco Rubio scared the hell out me. He was too electable, and he could take big bites out of a potential Democratic majority in just the right places (e.g. Florida, New Mexico, Colorado and Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania) to give the GOP enough electoral votes in November. I breathed a sigh of relief, though, as he was stumbling and obviously wasn’t in this for the long haul this year. I said–either in a Facebook post or on my blog, I can’t remember–that the threat of Rubio won’t be this year, but in four years, or eight. Now he comes in second in South Carolina (after a weak fourth place finish in new Hampshire) and is obviously here to stay for a while. Two thirds of Republicans in South Carolina voted against Donald Trump. Rubio, Cruz and three losers split that two thirds. One of the losers, Bush, a hundred million bucks in the hole, drops out and his supporters despise Trump. Kasich can’t stay in much longer and it’s hard to see his supporters flocking to Trump either. Carson’s supporters I don’t know about. But as this race goes along, and as Trump still leads in polls nearly every upcoming race through the end of March, I’m wondering if half of that two thirds of Republicans will shrug and follow Trump, giving him the numbers he needs to win the nomination, or will they wait till Cruz and Rubio battle to the death and throw all their support to the winner. If either can hold on, and begin to win primaries by the end of March, then they could beat Trump. And we might be left with Marco Rubio, and I think Democrats who laugh at him underestimate his potential appeal to lots and lots of people who otherwise would vote for a Democrat. Cruz is not a genuine threat. He’s too doctrinaire, roo mean, too strident, and too unlikeable. Trump is not a genuine threat, he’s just loathed by too many people. Rubio, though, might have a Reaganesque appeal, in which case we Democrats have positioned ourselves too far to the left to win. If Rubio could appeal to moderate independents, a Democrat, any Democrat, could lose. A conservative Republican president is not something I like to think about. Hence Marco Rubio is the biggest threat to Democrats, liberals and progressives that the Republicans currently have. Let’s hope Trump keeps winning.
Brick's Politics 