Category Archives: Political Rants

Political Rants

Smash and Grab.

This is another one of those “while you were looking over there …” moments. It’s not surprising – Trump is denying the results of the 2020 election, refusing to concede, refusing to cooperate with the transition to a Biden Administration, filing bogus law suits, and so on. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic is going through the roof, infecting many, many thousands of people each day and getting worse. These are enormous stories that demand coverage, but because our media tends towards myopia, we really only hear about these stories, while other important stuff falls through the cracks. This is in fact what is happening right now, as the Trump administration enters its final days, reaching for its final opportunities to remake our federal government in its own contorted image. Here’s some of what they’re doing.

First, Trump is placing some of his political hacks into posts deep within the bureaucracy of key federal agencies, as reported by the Washington Post. By placing Trumpists in these posts, the president is extending his influence far beyond his tenure. These appointees will benefit from Civil Service protections, which means it will be difficult for the Biden Administration to root them out from posts where they can actively sabotage any attempts at progressive policies. The Post cites the example of Michael Ellis, a former aide to Devon Nunes, as General Counsel at the National Security Agency, a non-political post. Ellis is the guy who came up with the secret server where transcripts of Trump’s calls with foreign leaders have been secreted away. This and other similar postings are deeply problematic.

In addition to that, the Trump administration is commencing a kind of fire sale of public lands, rushing to put the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on the auction block, inviting oil and gas companies to pick out their favorite patches of the now-endangered wilderness area. They’re hoping to take bids on the refuge lands before inauguration day so that claims may be locked in. And according to the Texas Tribune, leases on half a million acres of public land in the Gulf of Mexico have been handed out to oil and gas companies in recent days. The pace of these transactions has been increasing and is likely to get even more frenetic as this grisly administration rolls to a stop.

The combined effect of these efforts and Trump’s stonewalling of the transition is to defy the will of the people as expressed in the November election. Trump is a lame duck, like it or not, and as such his ability to implement massive changes should at least be mediated by the process of preparing for a new administration that does not agree with his policies. We need to demand that they stop this last minute smash and grab, and we need to do it now.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

First Day.

The dust is settling on election 2020, at least for some of us. The Trump team is still in full-blown denial, and most of the rest of the Republican establishment is rolling right along with them. In the parking lot of a landscaping company in Pennsylvania, presidential lawyer and confidante Rudy Giuliani scoffed at the idea that the networks would project the winner of a presidential election … like they have for my entire life and probably longer. Rudy seems to think only the courts can decide elections, but to be fair, I think his mind might have been on the porn shop next door when he was saying that. Strange, strange man.

Unfortunately, Rudy isn’t the only one smoking crack these days. I found this in my daily briefing from the New York Times (The Morning, November 9):

Democrats are almost certainly fooling themselves if they conclude that America has turned into a left-leaning country that’s ready to get rid of private health insurance, defund the police, abolish immigration enforcement and vote out Republicans because they are filling the courts with anti-abortion judges. Many working-class voters — white, Hispanic, Black and Asian-American — disagree with progressive activists on several of those issues.

First off, the framing of some of these issues is straight out of the GOP election playbook, though I’ve heard conservative Democrats use some of the same language. “Get rid of private health insurance” is their way of saying “single payer” or “Medicare for all,” which in point of fact is a pretty popular policy proposal, and I believe none of the Democrats who supported M4A were defeated at the polls last Tuesday. Now, if the candidates tromped around their district saying only that they wanted to abolish private health insurance, the voters might have reacted differently – hard to say. (If they’ve had the same kind of experience I’ve had with private insurers, they might be tempted.) And “abolish immigration enforcement”? Seriously? That’s in the same category as Trump’s cries of how Democrats want “open borders.” No one on the Democratic debate stage said they want to abolish immigration enforcement.

Generally, though, the New York Times appears to be making the same mistake as these neoliberal Democrats in that they seem to think the electoral challenge they face is an ideological one. The fact is, many of the left’s core policies are pretty popular. The primary problem Democrats have is that they don’t know how to organize their base. Doug Jones, Democratic senator from Alabama and no liberal, complains that the party invests in candidates, not in voters, and that is in essence what AOC has been saying. The House leadership seems obsessed with preserving its own party-internal primacy; their entire electoral strategy is based on serving their big donors and not making a difference for their constituents. My guess is that they’re relieved that there likely will not be a Democratic senate, as that would put them on the spot to actually pass something that would have a good chance of becoming law.

Let’s face it, Democrats. If we keep making this same election post-mortem mistake, we will keep losing. Listen to the younger leaders in your party, for chrissake.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Who won.

Well, wasn’t THAT a cluster fuck.

As I write this, the presidential race has not been called, but it is clear that the Biden campaign substantially under-performed expectations and that they dragged a lot of down-ballot races down with them. Even if Biden pulls it out, which he may have done by the time I post this, the Senate is basically lost – a tremendous lost opportunity in a year when Democrats had a lot of advantages going in to the election. Add to this the loss of a number of House seats – maybe ten – including, quite probably, Anthony Brindisi’s NY-22 seat to former Congresswoman and Trump acolyte Claudia Tenney. That is a terrible outcome by any measure, and I have little doubt that Republicans are high-fiving all over the place at having separated their fate from that of President Trump, with the help of a feckless Democratic party.

There’s no question but that incumbent presidents are traditionally hard to beat. More often than not, they fend off challengers, largely because of the enormous advantages conferred by that office. So as re-elects go, if Trump is successful in clinching an electoral college win (which at this point seems highly unlikely), this would be a remarkably poor performance for an incumbent who was ultimately allowed to retain his office. Then again, he is Donald Trump, and as such, the worst president not only in modern times but in the entire history of the United States. He has presided over a ham-fisted response to the coronavirus pandemic that has resulted in more than 230,000 dead Americans and a major economic contraction the dimensions of which have not been seen since the 1930s. By rights, the man should have been easy to beat, and even Biden should have been able to take this race in a walk. What went wrong?

I’m not the only one to point this out, obviously – far from it – but the Biden campaign was essentially a content-free enterprise. He is the UnCola, the antithesis of Donald Trump (except with respect to his old white man-itude), and his running mate the antimatter counterpart to Mike Pence. But that’s essentially selling a negative, right? What is the affirmative case for electing Joe Biden and, more broadly, the Democratic party? The activist base of the party, both affiliated and non-affiliated, has a clear idea of what they want to get out of a Biden administration – namely, something far more progressive than Biden would opt for without being pressured. But if elections are about convincing large numbers of people to vote in certain ways, that necessarily must include potential voters who are not activists and who do not think about politics and policy on a daily basis. What did Biden and the Democratic congress explicitly offer these people? What was their case for election, aside from “we’re better than Trump”?

There will be plenty of time to ponder the meaning of this race. The sad thing is, that will be time when we will not have the governmental power to slow down the climate crisis, protect people from COVID, improve access to health care, keep people in their homes, and more. And as Dylan once put it, lost time is not found again.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.