As long as there is a woman candidate as good or better than any of the men running I have no intention of voting for a man in the Democratic primary. It’s time for a woman president. Twitter and Facebook seem to have forgotten this in the collective rush to support any man running. This has suddenly become the most testosterone charged nomination race I can remember, and it’s not the candidates’ fault, it’s social media. People will vote for anybody, it seems, and give money to anybody, as long as it has a cock.
Category Archives: 2018 elections
Blue Wave
Thrilled to see we won the House in a blue wave, despite James Carville. Did better than I thought in Senate, and way better with governors. Can’t wait to see state house results. I thought Nelson would and Gillum might win, sad, thought Kemp’s suppression would work, it did (decisively), and thought Beto would lose by 6 percent at least, maybe even ten. The Dems are back in the Midwest, Texas Mexican-Americans are finally voting like California Mexican-Americans (it’ll be azul in a decade) and they are a force in Arizona and Colorado, and I think it was Indians who nearly elected a Democrat governor in South Dakota. There are a hundred women in the House, millennials voted in vast herds, California is bluer then fuck, and while a Nazi was the only surviving Republican in Iowa’s congressional delegation, a Democrat won in Oklahoma and Kansas isn’t Kansas anymore.
Basically we kicked Trump’s ass from here to the Florida state line. That squishing you hear is the worm, turning.
It’s not young people not voting, it’s old people not dying
It’s not that young people are voting less, because they aren’t. Indeed they vote more (and less Republican) than their elders did at same age in some elections. Difference is life expectancy, meaning old people now live two voting cycles longer. There’s your Trump margin.
2018
Right now I’m guessing that the Democrats will gain some seats in the House but nowhere near enough to take the majority, and I think we will wind up with less Senate seats then we do now. I didn’t think this a month ago, but the way we’re headed is that we’ll win big in blue states, bigger than ever. And that’s about it. Don’t expect any big shift in governorships and state legislatures either, except that blue states on the coasts will get bluer, a deep California blue. But though the GOP will be crippled going into 2020 by their own civil war, the Democrats could come out of 2018 with less seats than they have ever had. Still, it’s highly doubtful a Republican will be elected president in 2020, even though they will dominate every other level of government in the country. Ain’t politics funny. As for 2018, we lost that this summer. Too late to fix now, and the red states will come out of this summer redder than ever. Purple is a fleeting color, and it already flit.
A mere piece of paper
My right to speak, worship and defend myself do not come from a piece of paper, as glorious as the Bill of Rights is.
They come from God.— Kurt Schlichter on Twitter (@KurtSchlichter) March 6, 2017
We’ve got ourselves a genuine constitutional crisis when Trump supporters begin thinking of the Bill of Rights as a mere piece of paper. “Natural rights”, as they call them, trumps the constitution every time, or at least the amendments to. Kirk Schlichter is a senior columnist at Townhall.com and a Trump true believer, every word as gospel. He doesn’t seem the least bit religious in his daily deluge of tweets. Instead it seems an excuse to dispense with constitutional niceties when they conflict with Donald Trump. He’d disagree, I’m sure, quite colorfully, but that must be the impression that all but the true believers get from him. And as the Trump administration descends into chaos, Schlichter’s tweets have taken on a ferocious, humorless intensity, very militant, often offensive, jibing with Breitbart and hinting at the increasingly crazed talk of civil war you see on InfoWars. He’s an impressive writer for what he’s doing, taut and angry, with nearly a hundred thousand followers, old friends of mine among them. He’s a masterful propagandist on Twitter, and Twitter is the social media battlefield now. Trump made it so, and battle lines surge back and forth angrier and angrier by the day, by the hour, in huge numbers. Schlichter is in the thick of it, hurling himself into the breach like John Bell Hood at Antietam, matching every thrust with a counter thrust, every insult with a sharper insult, every attack on Trump with an attack on Obama or Hillary or the press or Sweden or anybody. Just keep attacking. It’s impressive.
But look at the war of words over the long term. This political struggle is turning into a generational battle, Baby Boomers vs Millennials, with GenXers in between. The Boomers have another ten years of dominance in Red States and red counties before age and disease start thinning their ranks. You can do extraordinary damage in a decade. Schlichter and a zillion other Schlichters could be complete Bannon acolytes by then. All those old fashioned Tea Party principles gone the way of Barry Goldwater, replaced with this scary new economic nationalism. Imagine the battle lines then, long since hardened into trenches and barbed wire. A lot can happen in ten years. The country descended from peace into fanaticism and war in the ten year span from 1850 to 1860. You couldn’t have seen 1860 coming in 1850, and could scarcely have remembered 1850 in 1860. And all they had then was telegraphs. But telegraphy had shortened the news cycle from weeks to a couple days in that ten year span. The sheer velocity of news upped the intensity to crackling levels and the killing began. John Brown launched his raid because he knew that telegraphy gave him the possibility of starting a revolution overnight. He didn’t. But he certainly rushed the southern states headlong into secession.
So do I see a civil war happening again? No, I adamantly do not. It’s a comparison you hear more and more, however, and will hear even more so as the politics gets fiercer. But the differences in 1860 were much more stark, two civilizations existing under one constitution, each hating the other. We are nowhere near that now. We never will be. That was decided for us way back in 1865. Nor will we have revolution, that possibility ended with the election of FDR back in 1932. Besides, as Trump’s boomers fade from the scene everything will mellow out nicely. This is a scarily intense interregnum, the most conservative generation since the 1920’s–the baby boomers–wielding their maximum ballot box power just as their economic security plunges to an all time low. Thus the stark differences that have sundered the county now, these two huge camps of Americans who can’t agree on almost anything, even besmirching the Super Bowl with crazy political talk, and people talking idiotically of guns and revolution and civil war. All the time technology changes the news in minutes. Our never ending, never even slowing down news cycle, frantic as the electrons its made from, gushing with updates and breaking stories arriving by the second. The potential for vast and sudden change seems in there. It’s a perfect medium for extremism. I read David Duke’s vicious screes supporting Trump and hating Jews and realize that thirty three thousand people see those every time he pushes the enter button. For a second I get nearly metaphysical, wondering what all this means.
Well, it mean this is going to be a helluva fight, for one thing, and that 2018 is all important. So vote. If you love your Bill of Rights and constitution, you must vote. Resisting is all well and good, but voting wins.
Kurt Schlichter with what looks like a damn fine cigar.
Brick's Politics 