Watching the news, it’s fascinating how France and the US are dealing with their respective terrorist attacks. In France, the attacks are discussed in terms of radicalized Islam vs the French Republic. The enemy is ISIS and its supporters. But in the US, the attacks are discussed almost purely in terms of American presidential politics, and the enemy is either the Republican party or the Democratic party. It has yet to sink in who it is we are fighting. For Republicans it seems to be all of Islam, while for Democrats it seems to be the National Rifle Association. The fact that both Democrats and Republicans (aka conservatives and liberals) are both quite divorced from reality here is never mentioned, because to the next terrorists–and there will almost assuredly be more attacks–Democrats and Republicans are exactly the same. We’re all targets. As far as they are concerned this whole political debate, and the furor all over Facebook, is quite irrelevant. Continue reading
Category Archives: Republican Party
Ben Carson
Ben Carson is not an idiot. He’s not stupid. He’s not even a fool. He’s wrong, sometimes as wrong as you can be, and he is incredibly unqualified to be President, but he is not an idiot. He can’t be. He was a neurosurgeon, though that barely explains it. Because Ben Carson was a neurosurgeon like John Coltrane was a saxophone player or Jimi Hendrix a guitar player. Like Wayne Gretzky was a hockey player or Rembrandt a painter. He was one of those guys who was so brilliant at what he did it does not even seem real. He was what Einstein was to physics or Chomsky to linguistics. He was the Leonardo Da Vinci. In fact in all likelihood he was much better by several degrees of magnitude at what he did than anything you will ever be able to do no matter how hard you try. He was one of the greatest surgeons in the entire history of medicine. A thousand years from now they will speak of Dr. Ben Carson’s surgical feats with awe.
So he’s not stupid. Best not to pretend he is. And he is definitely an egomaniac. But when you are that good you are allowed to be an egomaniac. In fact you are allowed to be anything, anything except president. Because he’d be an awful president. But not even that detracts from his brilliance.
The point of all this being that when we criticize Ben Carson by calling him stupid, all we’re doing is looking stupid ourselves. Let’s not fall into that trap. Like the trap Ben Carson has fallen into thinking that a genius is a genius at everything. They aren’t. A genius can be just as dumb as anyone else at something they’re not good at.
Dr. Ben Carson in the operating room.
The polls and Donald Trump, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Mixed Up Republicans
I keep hearing that Donald Trump is sweeping America. A lot of Democrats are freaking out. There’s no reason to. You just need to remember that while Trump is leading the Republican candidates with–by far–the most support, that support is still just a minority of Republican voters. Let’s look at some numbers:
There are about 170 million registered voters in the United States. About 55 million of them are registered as Republicans, 72 million as Democrats and 42 million as independents. The latter don’t count right now, because they are not included in the polling during the primaries. Well, they do count in those theoretical match ups (Trump v Hillary, Carson v Sanders, Stassen v McCarthy) but those are so hypothetical, and there is so much time before November of 2016, that they are pretty meaningless. The only polls that have any significance now–and even that is pretty weak–are polls showing the percentage of party member who say they will vote for a certain candidate. And there are two types of those. There are the polls of registered voters by party nationwide, and polls of registered voters by state. The national polls give a general idea of how a candidate is doing, the state polls give an idea of how a state’s primary or caucus vote would break down were the primary election or caucus held today. Caucuses, though, are so obscure and complex and unrepresentative that accurate polling of their results is almost worthless. You can poll Iowa and get an idea of which candidate people prefer, but that does not mean that is how the caucus results will turn out. Any of the polls you see on Iowa may or may not have any relation to the outcome on caucus night. Iowa caucuses are notoriously surprising. (Personally, I think Bernie Sanders will win. No clue on the Republican side.) Polls in New Hampshire and South Carolina will be more accurate, but still, you have to see a series of polls to see if they compare. If they trend one way or the other, you’ll get an idea of how the primary results might well turn out. Continue reading
Convergence
Wow. Twelve declared Republican presidential candidates as of today, and another four expected. Sixteen total. That’s seems nuts.
But thinking back to my college days when I had dreams of being another Theodore White and read every campaign history I could lay my hands on, I remember doing a rather long paper on the 1976 presidential election campaign. It’s probably stuffed in a box around here somewhere. That was the first election after Watergate, and the Democrats had blown the GOP to smithereens in the previous midterms. Watergate, you’ll remember. If you were a Democrat and breathing you were elected that year. And as 1976 approached, the excitement was too much for many Democrats and fifteen of them declared themselves candidates for president, and another sixteen considered but decided against it, which means at one point over thirty Democrats were picturing themselves in the Oval Office, signing bills and giving orders. I’ve seen no list yet of the Republicans who were thinking about running this year but changed their minds. But if the last four Republicans expected to announce this year do join the herd, they will have officially beat by one candidate the Democrat’s total in 1976, which I believe was the most ever. That was a helluva campaign on the Democratic side, the 1976 nomination race. Fast paced, fluid, full of surprises. The histories–I remember reading two of them, though the titles escape me–read like fast paced novels. The underdog, a peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter, won in a happy ending that made Americans feel warm all over. It was the most exciting election since 1968, the histories of which (An American Melodrama was one) also read like a novel, though a tragic one, full of death and betrayal, the ending just sad. Continue reading
Cuba libre
Alpha 66 is not happy.
The U.S. embargo of Cuba is pretty inexplicable. We have close relations with Viet Nam. We may have more direct connections with North Korea than we do with Cuba. Why have we continued this ridiculous embargo and non-recognition so long? Fidel tossed Batista (and the Mob) out in 1959. That was 55 years ago.
Because of Florida, that’s why. Specifically because of Florida on two days every four years. One of those days is the Republican presidential primary. The other is the day we vote for president. By an accident of political geography, it’s been impossible for a presidential candidate to say that as president he would lift the embargo and exchange ambassadors with Cuba without committing political suicide. Continue reading
Republicans can’t live forever
Scanning Google News this morning I saw this:
Half of Republicans back limits on carbon emissions, poll finds.
That’s a shocker of a headline, considering how the GOP leadership talks. They’re still pretending that this global warming thing is no big deal, that it’ll blow over. But it looks like the GOP rank and file is not so deluded (or bought) and is beginning to turn around. I haven’t seen the polling data, but my guess is that it’s probably not so much a change of heart among GOP global warming deniers. It’s just that the old timers are dying off and the younger ones being more realistic. The GOP is a very old party as far as member age goes, and they are experiencing a rapid die-off of their original Reagan voters. It will probably begin changing its ideology quickly as the old timers disappear. This happened to the Democrats too, with the end of the New Deal generation. As the FDR voters began dying off, the conservative vote grew in proportion. The New Democrats, far more accommodating to the Reagan Administration than the New Dealers ever would have been, replaced them. We know how that turned out. But now it’s the Republican’s turn to die off…though it’s taking longer as old people live longer now than in 1980 (a whole election cycle longer, in fact.) Periodically in American history there will be these decisive “sea change” elections when the population dramatically changes party and ideology. 1932 was one, 1980 another. Generally things change again as that original sea change generation dies off. We’re on the cusp of that now. Obama’s re-election was proof that it was beginning. Millennials are the most leftist generation there has been in this country since 1932, far more leftist than the vaunted baby boomers (that is, those of us born between 1946 and 1964 and who split close to 50/50 between liberals and conservatives). Within a decade it will be the Millennials’ turn to reset the American political landscape for the next half a century, and that is catastrophic news for conservatives. All those rotten hipsters we are decrying all the time, they’re gonna be the salvation of the country. They will be the ones who demolish the Reagan Revolution and reduce income disparity and get this country back on track. It ain’t gonna be us baby boomers. Half of us voted for Reagan, twice.
Say what you want, but they never voted for Reagan.
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Four days after the 2014 midterms
There’s an excellent piece by Jamelle Bouie in Slate today, The Disunited States of America, about the midterm voters versus the general election voters. It’s longish, which means, sadly, few will finish the piece before they begin attacking it in the comments section. Which is too bad, because Bouie does a fine job explaining the natures of midterm voters and non-voters and how that difference has set us up for a gridlocked, dysfunctional Congress term after term. Basically, the proportion of older, white, male, well off, conservative voters is significantly higher in the off year (that is, midterm) elections, with everyone else piling in for the general. Which means that the presidents will likely remain Democrat over all, and the senate will slowly shift blue as conservative Republican senators elected in off year elections are beaten six years later as the GOP base gradually, well, dies off. Gradually at first anyway. Once they hit their eighties they disappear as a voting block. That is happening now, though it won’t start becoming noticeable in a big way, I imagine, in four years. That’s the thing about life expectancy, people don’t live much past it. However, the House of Representatives, gerrymandered all to hell, will stay red for a long time. Continue reading
The day after the 2014 midterms
I hate to be a downer to all the panic stricken and paranoid out there, but there is a Democratic president, you’ll remember, and therefore not a damn crazy thing the GOP does will be made law. None of it. So relax. And the senate map in 2016 is worse for the GOP than this year was for the Demos, Demo turnout will be much higher. If we had kept the senate this year–and there wasn’t a chance of that, look at the map–nothing would get done because the GOP held the House. And now nothing will get done because the GOP holds both houses. Obama is a lame duck now and as always in a lame duck presidency nothing significant gets done legislatively the last two years. There will be a lot of speechifying by Republicans trying to outflank each other on the right, and a lot of executive orders coming out of the White House. Standard operating procedure anymore.
If anyone told you the Democrats could hold the Senate this year they were either deluded or lying. There was not a chance in hell of that happening. All you have to do is look at the map of states with senate races, and compare it to the map of states who gave their electoral votes to Romney. If they voted for Romney, it wasn’t too likely that the voters would pick one of Obama’s senate allies. And considering that so many Democratic voters can’t get off their asses in a midterm and bother to vote–though they are all over Facebook now, those people, shrieking–the odds against a Democratic candidate were that much longer. This is always the case in midterms. Older voters go to the polls, younger are too busy, apparently. White voters go the polls, other colors are too busy. Men go to the polls, more women are too busy. Older white males are the core of the GOP. You can’t blame them for voting for their party of choice. You should turn your ire against those that couldn’t be bothered. A few seats in battleground states, in Maryland, in Colorado, would have stayed blue, but Democrats are lazy voters. Continue reading
Shutting down the government and eating their own
A couple weeks ago while looking over the comments on Politico and Yahoo News–both popular with the Tea Party–I saw the war cry “Primary the French Republicans!” I could figure out that the noun “primary” had been verbed into a shorthand for running a Tea Party candidate against a traditional Republican in the primary election–a tactic that has worked already in the past four years. But I couldn’t figure out what the hell a French Republican was, not in the context of American conservative politics.I googled around and found the source. I’ve linked it below. You can see what it is that has split and terrified the mainstream Republican conservatiuves….the Tea Party have turned jacobin, radical, declaring war on anyone in their own party ranks who they consider not extreme enough. They’ve taken Barry Goldwater’s slogan from his acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican convention–“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”– and turned it into an argument against anybody who quails at the notion of defaulting on the federal budget and shutting down the federal government. Obamacare is the road to socialist (even nazi) ruin, they say. Obamacare means the beginning of the end of American liberty. Hence the Goldwater quote–which probably doomed the Goldwater campaign from the start, just those two sentences–applies, if you think like a Tea Party member.
Brick's Politics 