Xavier Becerra for vice president

Posted on June 23, 2016 by Brick Wahl

A lot of veepstakes talk in the air. Personally, I’m hoping Hillary picks Xavier Becerra. It’s true that Liz Warren (my second choice) would help bring some of the angrier Bernie voters on board. And it’s true that Corey Booker (my other second choice) is a helluva man. No kidding. Rescued a man from a burning house, literally. Hard to top that. But both he and Warren are senators, and we need every senator we can get. And both are also future and exceptionally qualified presidential candidates, and being veep is rarely a path to the oval office without somebody getting shot first. So I’m loathe to pluck someone out of the Senate. It doesn’t help any that both Massachusetts and New Jersey have Republican governors who would not replace either with a Democrat.

Corey Booker’s base is solidly Democratic and already vote at a higher rate than anyone else in that Democratic base….including nice white middle class Democrats. (Indeed, boomer/gen-x black women have the highest rate of voting of all Americans.) And to pick Liz Warren to draw Berniecrats seems a little unseemly. Most of them are going to come over anyway, and a fifth will vote for Trump whether or not Liz Warren in on the ticket. There’s no doubt that selecting the eminently qualified Elizabeth Warren would be interpreted, unfairly and wrongly, as pleading for Bernie votes. Still, that is how many would interpret it, Hillary pleading for votes. Begging even. And a presidential candidate should never beg. Jimmy Carter begged the voters once. He never recovered.

Xavier Becerra, though, not only rewards one of the key components of Hillary’s winning coalition, but it would dramatically increase the amount of Hispanics who will vote on election day, always a weak point for the Democrats. There were already record numbers of Hispanics registering to vote in the primaries this year, such was their fear and loathing of Donald Trump. With Xavier Becerra on the ballot, the son of Mexican immigrants much like a certain Indiana judge, versus Donald Trump, who has called everyone from Mexico to potential rapists and degenerates, the number of Mexican American voter registrations will sky rocket. This would not only help the Democrats beat Trump this year, but would have profound long term implications for political power in the south west. If Hispanics began voting at the same level as whites, a lot of crazed Tea Partiers and redneck sheriffs can kiss their political asses goodbye. At last there would be a price to pay come election day for all that Republican nativist ranting.

Becerra could turn the southwest into an electoral vote nightmare for the GOP. The increase in Mexican-American voters coming out for a second generation immigrant a heartbeat away from the presidency will deliver Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico to the Democrat column, turn Arizona into a swing state and even force the Trump campaign to spend its limited resources in Texas, where the Hillary campaign will make a huge effort if only because the Republicans will have to spend so much money fighting it (Texas with its seventeen media markets is very expensive for statewide TV advertising.) Becerra on the ticket will give an increased edge in Illinois, make things that much harder for Trump in Florida, and dramatically increase fundraising in California. And above all, it puts Trump’s vicious anti-Mexican bigotry (and his prejudice in general) in the front row seat all campaign long. With Becerra on the ticket, Trump will be a racist 24/7.

And besides all that, Becerra is thoroughly qualified, smart as hell, and a nice guy. He was our congressman for years, and come to think of it, he actually knocked on our door once. As did his brother. The man walked the precincts, old school.

Yeah, Xavier Becerra for vice president

End of pitch.

ISIS and the coming end of days all over again.

Posted on June 14, 2016 by Brick Wahl

Moved to https://brickshistory.com/2017/03/01/isis-and-the-coming-end-of-days-all-over-again/.

Bernie Sanders exits, stage left.

Posted on June 10, 2016 by Brick Wahl

That was a helluva speech Liz Warren gave. It’s unfortunate it had to be today, though, and not tomorrow, because I would have loved to have seen Bernie Sanders’ speech at RFK stadium. He was a couple minutes into it, subdued, almost pensive, like an immense weight was upon him. Where was he going with this? How would the crowd respond? I was transfixed. Suddenly it’s a split screen, and Liz Warren came walking out onto a stage, beaming. Bernie, exhausted, was speaking but you couldn’t help but be distracted by the electricity in Elizabeth Warren’s stride. Bernie was telling the crowd that his campaign is doing something different. It is telling the truth, he says, as he has said a thousand times–when the audio switches without warning to Liz Warren and Bernie is cut off mid-sentence. We hear Liz Warren launch into one of the greatest speeches in our modern political history. It was that good. Bernie’s stump speech was forgotten. None of the talking heads even mentioned he had been speaking. They were all about Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. It’s like Bernie was never even there. Bernie Sanders, the man who had upended American politics, who had dominated every Democratic conversation. Bernie Sanders, who is all anyone could talk about yesterday. Bernie Sanders, who held the fate of the nation in his hands. But through the magic of live television it seemed like Warren’s star had risen, instantly, and Bernie’s had waned, just as instantly. Was it intended that way? Who knows. But it did make for exciting television. Will it have an electrifying effect on Bernie voters? No doubt, especially the under thirty young women who had been so loyal to Bernie Sanders and not so crazy about Hillary Clinton. Elizabeth Warren had changed the political demographics instantaneously. Liz will definitely win over the Millennial women for Hillary, a young under thirty journalist said, if not the Bernie Bros. Bernie Bros. She rolled her eyes saying it, as if ill mannered, foul mouthed Bernie Bros were suddenly a relic of an older, more primitive time. Angry young men with no respect for women in a women’s world.

But this was not the way this should be happening. I’d been waiting for hours for Bernie’s speech. It was supposed to be a major speech. All the news networks were waiting for it. It was to be broadcast in its entirety. This was to be one of the most significant speeches by the single most significant politician of 2016. “How Bernie Sanders’s day in Washington got eclipsed by Democratic unity” said the headline in the Washington Post. It had all happened so fast. If only somebody could have worked the timing out, coordinated the two events, but perhaps they just were determined to have Elizabeth Warren scorch Donald Trump before she endorsed Hillary this afternoon. And scorch him she did, beautifully, rehearsed to perfection, leaving a pile of cinders where once a big loutish billionaire had been.

There was a lot of stagecraft today, that was obvious, the Obama White House and Hillary Clinton campaign and Elizabeth Warren’s every move choreographed to perfection, without a wasted motion. Smooth and perfect. Political tai chi. Meanwhile Bernie, good honest Bernie, truthful Bernie, crusading Bernie, is left looking like William Jennings Bryan in Inherit the Wind, somehow immediately dated, a relic from an earlier time when he left crowds spellbound and chanting his name. Bernie’s speech today seemed divorced from reality, said the usually sympathetic Huffington Post, scolding him for pretending his campaign was not over. But you had to scroll way down to find that story, it was buried far beneath Elizabeth’s Warren’s enormous photo and name in huge red letters. Scroll down past Marco Rubio’s picture, and a bit further on, between an article on mosquitos and an article on a hit and run driver, was Bernie’s small picture and smaller font, an afterthought. “It would be extraordinary if the people of Washington, our nation’s capital, stood up and told the world that they are ready to lead this country into a political revolution” Bernie told the smallish crowd, just a fraction of the turnout he’d gotten in Los Angeles only days before. But Tuesday’s Washington D.C. primary, would be the last stop in the political revolution, and he will lose it like he lost the South, by a huge margin. Bernie knew that. He had told President Obama just that morning he understood the math. But he was putting on the show for the true believers spread out on the lawn before him. They cheered, they swooned, they knew the catechism by heart. Stay in the race, they chanted. Some said they’d write in Bernie Sanders on the ballot come November. He smiled wanly. It’d been scarcely forty eight hours since the California primary, but that seemed like another time.

bernie-sanders-floated-elizabeth-warren-when-asked-about-vice-presidential-contenders

The undumpable Trump

Posted on June 9, 2016 by Brick Wahl

Why Can’t Republicans Distance Themselves From Donald Trump? Jamelle Bouie asks in his latest Slate piece. They’re Afraid, he says. Afraid of power, afraid for their careers, afraid of Donald. Which is all true. It’s a fascinating piece (as are all his articles), but I think he missed a key point about what makes them afraid. It’s Facebook. I think that something the media regularly misses (because they spend most of their time on social media with other pundits) but politicians do not miss (because they read social media from their constituents every day) is the power of Facebook to drive politics. Defying Trump can be disastrous for a Republican politician, because it could set off a tsunami–even a series of tsunamis–of incredibly angry, out of control, and crazily inaccurate Facebook posts that can severely damage a politician. When you have a tidal wave of furious Trump supporters calling Paul Ryan a RINO–he the lifelong Republican and they mostly recent converts–you can see just how dangerous a thing Facebook can be if you are on its wrong side.

The Tea Party was dangerous for Republicans, too, but it was an email phenomenon, and as such a Republican could confront it because Tea Partier’s frenzied emails would be seen by relatively few. Hundreds at most. But taking on Trump’s followers can expose you to literally hundreds of thousands of virally angry people, and there is as yet no way to safely contain that. This is anger several orders of magnitude beyond that of the Tea Party. An anger that actually crushed the Tea Party candidate, Donald Cruz. And while the media understands that the media itself has been instrumental in making Donald Trump the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, it doesn’t quite understand that it was not just the media, not all that free television they gave him, but that television in conjunction with Facebook. The impact of an analog appearance on television would expand exponentially in the digital universe that is Facebook. Trump would be everywhere on Facebook, pro and against. He seemed to dominate it. Even progressives were overwhelmed by Trump related posts. While all his opponents were spending big money in traditional campaigns, Trump sucked up all the Republican oxygen on Facebook. Each opponent smothered and died. Trump became not only the presumptive nominee, but became the Republican Party as far as Facebook was concerned.

Now, Facebook also went a long way to propelling Bernie Sanders too, but unlike the ethnically homogenous Republicans, Hillary had a firewall of Black and Hispanic voters who were not in the same Facebook universe as all those angry white progressives. Facebook dominance only works if everyone is Facebook friends with each other. But Facebook connections between blacks and whites are few, and between whites and Hispanics are few. The tsunami of pro-Bernie posts (and they were overwhelming) stopped at that racial/ethnic line. Bernie people never seemed to notice this and the Bernie Sanders phenomenon wound up a white people thing, as you could see from the faces at his rallies. As the campaign went on Bernie began picking up support across color lines from under thirty voters, but this was past the time of that first critical explosion of Berniemania. Hillary’s firewalls had held fast just about everywhere and Bernie’s campaign was on the mathematical ropes after the Southern primaries. The battle lines hardened and Bernie’s revolution never really expanded beyond his base of white progressives. It was that demographic topography of Democratic and Democratic leaning independent voters that limited Bernie Sanders’ success to mostly small states (he won eleven of the states with under thirty delegates, and two of the thirteen with over one hundred delegates), and failed at all to shake the confidence of the Democratic establishment. Only one Senator endorsed Bernie. A handful of congressmen. A few unions. He barely made a dent in the establishment at all. Voters over fifty had little use for him. Hispanics rejected him by two or even three to one. Blacks by four to one. Bernie’s Facebook world was a swirl with passionate intensity, a passion that had not been seen in American politics in generations, but it was mainly among white people under age forty who never noticed that so few outside that demographic were sharing their posts.

But among Republicans and Republican leaning independents on Facebook, there were no barriers to Trump at all. Compared to Democrats, Republicans are an endless flat plain of ideologically very similar people, differing in little but their accents, and you don’t hear accents on Facebook. The Donald’s presence just kept growing and growing, flowing like water in all directions, and it seems now to have no limits within Republican voters. There are no firewalls stopping him. There are certainly no ethnic divisions. Everybody can share everybody’s posts. And as a result, Republican politicians are much more at the mercy of outraged people on Facebook. They can’t hide, like Hillary, in all the places where white Millennials do not digitally congregate, because Trump supporters are anywhere and everywhere. And I think to a large degree this explains the fearful reticence of Republican politicians to cross Donald Trump. Even John McCain doesn’t want to cross Donald Trump. Trump could level him with one tweet, a tweet pasted onto Facebook and posted from one end of the party of Abraham Lincoln to the other. And McCain’s own Arizona Republican constituents love Donald Trump. He has to tread very carefully now. That RINO POW McCain and the Mexican judge both gotta go, someone might post, and the likes would pop up like dandelions after a spring rain.

But has Trump gone too far quintupling down on that judge? Could Trump be dumped? The media seems to think so. You can see the reporters and analysts and the scary bald GOP strategists and the lovely Nicole Wallace convincing each other of this on panel shows. You cannot be a racist presidential nominee howls an outraged Joe Scarborough. But I suspect it is far too late to dump Trump. I think that the press sees more change in Republicans than is real. I think they take the hopeful and logical and thoroughly unracist opinions of some valiant Republican politicians far too seriously. Because a poll today showed that a majority of Republicans do not think that Trump has been racist going after that judge. And it is that majority of Republicans, across that immense flat and seamless plain of Republicanism, and not the press corps and their favorite talking heads, who will be going nuts on Facebook every time faint of heart Republicans try to dump or even distance themselves from The Donald. Facebook dominates the GOP rank and file right now, and any politician who knows how to dominate both the media and Facebook will rule the Republican Party for the foreseeable future. Republican politicians are right to be afraid of crossing Donald Trump. He has too many Facebook friends.

The Donald speaks

Posted on June 8, 2016 by Brick Wahl

The Donald giving a victory speech. Strangely subdued. Emasculated even. He sounds more like the guy in that Volkwagen Passat commercial driving his daughter to school than a raving fascist demagogue. Sad.

Wait..now he is picking up. Accusing Hillary of taking hundreds of millions of rubles in bribes from Putin while secretary of state. China too. Zillions of dollars. Shaking ’em down. Bill and Hillary using the State Department to make huge amounts of money at the expense of the American people. He promises a major speech next week. I wonder if he will have documentation, or just use Joe McCarthy’s list of communists in the State Department.

I knew it, one fifth of Bernie voters will say, he has my vote.

Also, Hillary has caused the mass migration of people from the middle east to America and Europe. From the entire world maybe, perhaps even that Mexican judge, it was all rather vague. Other bad things too, but I was too startled by the realization that Hillary was the change agent in 21st century human migration patterns. Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi.

No PPP! an audience member yells. Yeah, no PPP Trumps says.

I have no idea what PPP means.

Then Trump says you mean no PP.

The audience snickers. I am still bewildered.

Maybe it was another penis joke.

Know Nothings

Posted on April 14, 2016 by Brick Wahl

Know Nothing flag, mid-1850’s.

Native-American didn’t always mean American Indian. That definition took hold in the 1970’s*. Back in the 19th century, at least until the Civil War, it meant native-born American, and American meant White, English, Protestant and especially not Irish. In fact, many people in the 1850’s hated the Irish flooding into American ports after the Potato Famine of the 1840’s, hated them so much they formed a political party, the Native American Party. It was a secret, at first–secret societies were all the rage back then–and if asked a member was supposed to say I know nothing. Hence the common name. (Seriously, that explains the name, as stupid as that sounds.) Later it called itself the American Party, but it wasn’t around long enough for that name to stick. To this day we know them as Know Nothings. Only the Anti-Masonic Party of a generation earlier (they really hated Freemasons) had an odder appellation for a major American political party. Continue reading →

Republican Debate

Posted on March 4, 2016 by Brick Wahl

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.

Trump, Cruz, Rubio and William F. Buckley

Posted on February 27, 2016 by Brick Wahl

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's pad.

William F. Buckley watching the debate at Cato the Elder’s elysian pad.

Marco Rubio

Posted on February 20, 2016 by Brick Wahl

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.

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Politics and current events without memes.

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