It Doesn't Take A Genius

 

"I didn't spend my life defending this country to let a bunch of pansies squander it away."

--Don Bolduc

Mad Dog has never claimed to be the sharpest blade in the drawer, but he does appreciate some simple things:  For any democracy, especially a republic, to be a democracy, the citizens must believe in voting.

Without accepting the notion that by voting people can elect folks to represent their concerns and point of view, there can be no democratic government, no republic.

This, of  course, requires that citizens believe their votes are counted and tabulated honestly and without manipulation. Mad Dog has worked at the polls and seen how mail in ballots are accounted for and how they are processed, in a procedure he can only describe as "scrupulous."  There is no monkey business in vote counting or voting machines in Hampton, New Hampshire. But what happens to those tabulated votes once they are reported up the chain, Mad Dog acknowledges is beyond his observation.

At some point, we rely on others, not our own personal observations. As Alex Jones' lawyer once asked, "Unless you were present at the morgue, how do you know any children actually died at Sandy Hook." Yes, Mr. Lawyer, we do have to invest belief in some things we cannot verify ourselves, personally. 

But I still believe children were killed at Sandy Hook and I still choose to believe Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in 2020. 

When President Trump said that he would not accept the results if voters voted him out of office--as in, 

Q: President Trump will you accept the vote if you lose? 

A: "We'll see." 

And when he said he could not possibly lose, then he was saying, one would have to accept, that he had no intention of leaving office, no matter what. No matter the verdict of the voters.

Only Donald Trump's opinion about the validity of the announced votes matters. Only he is allowed at the morgue. 

But how can anyone really know if the voters' votes were actually counted accurately, fairly?

That requires some faith. Faith in news reports, faith in voting observers, faith in courts to examine whether or not there is credible evidence--as opposed to simple statements of belief--for "voting irregularities."

Now, there are any number of Trump acolytes--most visibly Kari Lake in Arizona--but also Tudor Dixon (whose name alone ought to be disqualifying anywhere but FOX world)--who say they "cannot" lose their elections and if it is claimed they have lost, then voters ought to know, in advance, the election was stolen from them, which is to say, there is no point in going to vote because the decision, at least in MAGA minds, is already a fait accompli. Ipso facto, if I run, I win. Why bother with all the expense, time, effort of actually holding an election?

This attitude has been dignified with a category name: "The Big Steal."

This is, of course, what January 6th was all about.

If you somehow KNOW that Trump actually got more votes than Joe Biden and not only that, if you KNOW that he won key states, then it is entirely justifiable to launch a revolution against the Big Steal.

This is a form of simple faith. If you BELIEVE, then all things are possible.

Evidence is a dirty word. For the true believer all that matters is faith, or the word from the only source that matters: Der Fuhrer. 

This sort of rationale is routine in some African countries, where the losing side simply refuses to believe the votes were counted honestly.

In America, we have shaken our heads when viewing videos of post election mayhem in third world countries, those "shithole countries" Trump so despises, countries where you see crowds rampaging through the streets after election results are announced, tires burning in the streets, crowds of young men in rhythmic dance headed toward the Presidential palace to overturn the election. 

Until, of course, we saw much the same thing here in Washington, DC with the Proud Boys leading the charge wearing shirts saying, "Stop the Steal" and "Camp Auschwitz" and "Veteran: Capitol Hill War" and "The Civil War Starts Now."

These folks are true believers in the Trump victory and no amount of evidence or persuasion will ever change their minds. As Lincoln said, "Twelve angels blowing Horns, the clouds parting will not convince them otherwise."

Locally, here in Hampton, we go door to door and we try to perform our civic duty of talking to our fellow citizens. But we work for a Democratic Party organization which wants us to follow a script, even as they say the best sort of campaigning is neighbor talking to neighbor. But they want us to say to our neighbors certain things, to ask specific questions:

1/ We are supposed to ask (and record the answer)  if the citizen at the door intends to vote for Maggie Hassan and Chris Pappas. This is not an attempt to have neighbors talking to neighbors, but to have neighbors reporting on neighbors, perform polling duties, which actually undermines the whole effort to "reach" citizens where they live.

Most people come to the door annoyed. Someone is intruding on their Saturday morning or their Sunday watching the Patriots game, probably trying to sell them something. 

Good canvassers know to begin by making connections: Oh, your daughter went to Winnacunnet with my son. And then move on to "What matters most to you in this election?" 

2/ But that does not satisfy the Democratic bureaucrats, because now comes the second questions the Party wants asked:   canvassers are told  to present a blue post card for the home owner to sign saying they promise to vote for Democrats on November 8th. Will you sign this commitment to vote? 

Thus neighbors talking to neighbors is  transformed into a transaction; this friendly discussion morphs into a sort of sales promotion and the looks on the faces of most homeowners at being asked to sign some card on their porch says it all: "Oh, and here I thought you were my friend."

So the Party brass, the Ray Buckley's squander the opportunity to allow local citizens to engage in conversations which they know will be more effective than the Party line. Our candidate, Maggie Hassan may read from a script, may avoid getting negative for fear of offending, but local folks do not have to do that. Local folks can say "We are not pansies. Bolduc wants to kill Social Security and Medicare. He denies Biden won the election. He doesn't believe in democracy! He says COVID vaccines are a way Bill Gates can get microchips into us. He says facemasks do more harm than good. He says Democrats want schoolchildren to use kitty litter in schools. He wants to ban abortions and IVF." 

Of course, some of us do that, but most do not, which only feeds into the image of a toothless party of pansies. 

Democrats thought, last August, that the decision killing Roe would be the big moment, the thing that swept all Republicans from the field, but that is now so yesterday. Three months later canvassers found abortion was hardly in the top five of what voters said motivated them to vote.

All the outrage, all the certainty that THIS would finally be the thing which defeats the Republicans, gone now. 

"Oh, I don't like that," voters would say about Roe. "But I'm more pissed off about gas prices right now. And the economy and crime."

And of course FOX has managed to sell a lot of people on the notion that crime is rampant--which is statistically untrue--and that President Biden has the power to lower gas prices if he really cared.

So, here we are in the 21st  century, with a republic we may not be able to keep because, well, the Democrats are simply not bright enough to know attack ads win elections and door to door canvassing does not matter, especially when done wrong.

And there is no Democratic Party propaganda machine like FOXNEWS.

And, well, maybe we've just got tired of democracy, which takes so much time, effort and thought. 

We'd rather watch the Patriots game.

New (York) Amsterdam vs Old (Current) Amsterdam

 A week ago, Mad Dog was in New York City, USA. 

Hampton, N.H., USA

Today, he has just got back from 5 hours walking around Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

What he is most struck by in Old Amsterdam is what is not there.

The noise, of course, is the most striking thing. Emerge from a bus at Port Authority or a train at Penn Station and step out onto a New York City Street and you are blown back by a tsunami of sound, mostly auto horns blaring, but car engines reviving and people shouting. To the uninitiated this must sound like a tidal wave of anger, but it's just normal, angry New York.

In Old Amsterdam, there is the silence of bicycles and the low purr of the occasional trolley. The streets, filled with people, are remarkable quiet.

In New York City, you pick your way down the street stepping past or over the bodies of homeless people.

In Old Amsterdam are are no homeless to be seen, not even at the train station.

In New York City, you walk by beggars with their hands outstretched, their pleas invoking instant guilt, but nary a pan handler in Old Amsterdam.

In New York City, the trash bags are piled up on the sidewalks in front of restaurants.

In Old Amsterdam, they apparently generate no trash, or in good Dutch engineering fashion,  they turn it into energy or wound dressings for hospitals.

Every block in New York City you hear angry people shouting at one another, or at least people shouting, angry or not. 

In Old Amsterdam you simply do not hear people raising their voices. People may not display harmony, or even a lot of joy, but they do not display much hostility. 

In New York City everyone belongs to a tribe and they display their team hats, (New York Yankees  or New York Mets) or their Hoboken High varsity jackets or their Harvard sweatshirts. 

They must have teams, at least soccer teams, in the Netherlands, but people do not walk around in jerseys with the names of their favorite players.

Amsterdam is filled with people on the streets, walking, talking, dodging into restaurants or little bistros that make french fries as their sole product, but there is little palpable, visible anger.

New York is all about anger. And joy. More anger than joy, but emotions are raw and very much out there. Amsterdam, people smile, they chat, but nobody much looks ready to engage in mortal combat. In New York people live on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and they seem to like it.

Dutch women do not look bold.

New York women look bold.

Obadiah Youngblood (Not VanGogh)

Dutch women strike Mad Dog as concerned about their looks; false eyelashes are very common. Dutch women in this city dress stylishly, but not daringly, for the most part. It is as if having long blonde hair, high cheekbones and no weight problems is not enough. 

Waiting outside the women's bathroom at the Van Gogh Museum, Mad Dog was fascinated by the cluster of Dutch women who stood in front of a mirror fussing with their hair, striking poses, turning for a left side view, a right side view. It went on and on. Mad Dog could not see the mirror which had claimed their attention, but it was clearly what stopped them for all the preening. It was placed there so they could check themselves out before leaving the bathroom. 

The men's room had one, too: you could see if your fly was down on the way out.

The women's room mirror could show you if you were insufficiently beautiful from any angle.

The Van Gogh Museum is wonderful, by the way. Even if the bathrooms had no mirrors, it's worth going to the Van Gogh Museum to see a hundred Van Gogh paintings, from all along his career is stunning. They also have a flair for display, with Large walls plastered with out takes from his paintings.

You do not see all the Van Goghs you know and love from calendars and posters and that's a downer, but then you realize the reason not every Van Gogh is in that museum is because they are hanging in museums from New York to London to Melbourne to Paris to Berlin. He painted a painting a day at Auvers during the last year of his short life, but even those 300 plus paintings cannot all be in Amsterdam; too many people around the world want the thrill of seeing them.

                                                         ***

The Dutch have their political problems: Geer Wilders stokes hate for immigrants and his followers have occasionally claimed the second most seats in the Dutch parliament. But, somehow, the Dutch quietly seem to do well.

Once, at an Endocrine Society Meeting in the United States a Dutch physician described how they manage patients who become addicted to testosterone medications, a sort of male version of anorexia nervosa. After he outlined all the steps an American physician remarked, "God, they would never let us do that in the States! You'd have the DEA or the sheriff in your office inside of a week."

"Well," the Dutchman said. "Everything's easier in the Netherlands."

Hamsterdam

 When Baltimore police in "The Wire" try to explain the concept of a geographic area where drug sales and use are tolerated, one of them tells an uncomprehending corner boy, "It's like Amsterdam: Everything's allowed there."

Central Park, NYC

The locals, of course, hear this as "Hamster-dam," and that becomes the name for this experimental enclave where the police have herded all the drug dealers, users, freeing the rest of the city from the blight of the drug culture. 

Later, the author of this radical experiment, Major Howard Colvin, a Black police officer who is sick of the hypocrisy, ongoing impotence of the city's policy of "drug war" gives the future mayor a tour of Hamsterdam and he says, "It ain't pretty."  In fact, as the camera follows the future mayor along the streets of Hamsterdam, it looks like something out of Dante's inferno, with parentless children wandering lost among fighting adolescents and adults, druggies staggering, falling down stair stoops, crashing onto the pavement below and bodies lying, ignored on the streets.

Allowing anarchy to devolve into chaos ain't pretty. Civilization, for all its restraints and oppression, may have something to offer, after all.

Mad Dog is currently wandering, like Mayor Carcetti, through the dazzling streets of the actual Amsterdam, its rows of pristine townhouses and shops and it's impossibly tall people.  It looks like the polar opposite of Hamsterdam. 

So far, the major danger is the bicyclists.  "You need to put your head on a swivel," his brother in-law had warned him, and within seconds of setting foot on the street, Mad Dog understood the sagacity of this advice. On the brick sidewalks, along the defined bicycle paths which line the streets where cars and street cars stream by, bicyclists shoot by the pedestrian, like comets,  from every direction. Silent, swift and lethal, the Dutch bicyclist is an ever present death threat. 

And Mad Dog loves bicycles and owns five. 

These Dutch bikes are very civilized, even if their drivers are a menace. They all have fenders which prevent mud splatter and bikers can dress in office attire and arrive for work without a splash on their clothes.

Above, an August Macke painting, A German artist inspired by VanGogh.

At least in Amsterdam, the Dutch look like a fit lot, especially compared to the rotund New Englanders Mad Dog lives among, who drive their cars to go a single block to Dunkin Donuts for coffee. In Amsterdam, as in New Amsterdam, the Dutch walk everywhere they do not bike.

Dutch, heard along the street, has the same cadence as--and many cognates with-- English, so you find yourself trying to eaves drop on conversations only to realize they are not conversations in English. 

Parks weave in and out of the city streets, but mostly what makes Amsterdam different is the concentric circles of canals. You walk a few blocks and you find yourself crossing a canal on a bridge overpass and trying to figure out how many circles from the hotel you have traversed. 

If there are multiple circles of Hell, that idea did not likely derive from Amsterdam, as the place is not Hellish at all, unlike Hamsterdam. 

It may not be Heaven, but it is certainly one of the best cities in the world, at least on short acquaintance.

As in any free society, there are different opinions, and the Dutch version of Trumplings are evident--they even look like Trumplings, with slogan embroidered baseball hats and a bloated, beaten look. Geer Wilders is a sort of messianic Dutchman would be cult leader, a blonde Hitler wannabe, who rails against Muslims rather than Jews, but still sells the same load of the "other" who wold defile and destroy the real Dutch with an alien stain. The Dutch, like the Scandinavians have a part of the body politic which has reacted to the influx of dark skin immigrants with horror and revulsion. It's a changing world and they want to circle the wagons and defend their white, insular world against the dark other.

Today's plan is to visit the Van Gogh museum, which is placed among several other museums, but is the most difficult to gain admission to. Van Gogh was a revolutionary in his time, eccentric and misunderstood and underappreciated, having sold almost no paintings in his life time. 

But he speaks across the ages to us today and Mad Dog can hardly wait to commune with him.

Out Knocking on Doors

 

Mad Dog has long questioned the value of knocking on the doors of voters in his town. Most people fall into one of two categories: 1/ The already convinced, the church choir who need no reminding or encouragement and will vote Democratic no matter whether we knock on their doors or not.  2/ The "undeclared" voter who really does not like having to deal with people on his/her doorstep trying to "sell" him/her a pitch about who to vote for. These people feel violated, intruded upon and get more and more hostile the more you ring their doorbells.

Now, it should be noted exactly how a voter's name gets on the list of nice names to be knocked upon: The computer has identified them as having voted in a Democratic primary, meaning they are either true Blue Democrats or they declared themselves Democratic for purposes of voting in one primary and then, most often, changed back to "undeclared."

It is among the members of this group we often hear, "I'm still doing my research" when we ask the question our Party insists we ask: "Are you planning on supporting Maggie Hassan."

The fact we have to ask this question at all is a problem, as far as Mad Dog is concerned. It transforms this friendly, "I'm just your neighbor urging you to vote on November 8" into a poll, which is asked for the tracking purposes of the Party.  The soft sell of, "Gee, I wouldn't tell you what to think or how to vote, but do vote," into a "So, can I count on you?" This is supposed to be followed by the question, "Will you sign this 'Commit to Vote' card which presents the homeowner with a card which might sign away the mortgage and now the canvasser on the door step looks like a salesman, con artist.

How the Democratic Party organization came up with these procedures is beyond Mad Dog, but it makes him question his faith in the Democratic Party higher ups.  If anyone can pull off these depradations and make it seem friendly and innocent, it is his partner in canvassing, Olivia Ostrich, but Mad Dog suspect 90% of those who try to get away with this only alienate voters.

What Mad Dog would like to say when a citizen says she is still doing her research on Karoline Leavitt who she might prefer to Chris Papas is to simply read her these Professor Google statements:

Here is the person you would be voting for rather than Papas:

KAROLINE LEAVITT

WHAT SHE STANDS FOR

1.   “PRIVATIZING” SOCIAL SECURITY

2.   STOPPING ALL FEDERAL SPENDING OUTSIDE OF DEFENSE AND HOMELAND SECURITY (CANCELING MEDICARE, SOCIAL SECURITY)

3.   REPEAL THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT

4.   REPEAL OF GUN FREE ZONES AT SCHOOLS

5.   OPPOSES ANY RESTRICTIONS ON ANY FIREARMS

6.   AGAINST INFRASTRUCTURE FOR ROADS AND BRIDGES AND AIRPORTS

7.   INSISTS DONALD TRUMP WON THE 2020 ELECTION

8.   RESTRICTING RIGHT TO VOTE, DENYING VOTE TO COLLEGE STUDENTS

9.   “CLIMATE CHANGE IS A HOAX MANUFACTURED BY THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY”

10.                     ABOLISH THE IRS

11.                     ABOLISHING EVERY FEDERAL AGENCY WITH 3 LETTERS (IRS, EPA, FAA,DOD,DHS, DOJ, DOE,FBI)

12.                     BLACK LIVES MATTER IS A “MAXIST TERRORIST GROUP”

13.                     WISHES NH HAD A DON’T SAY GAY LAW

14.                     DEFENDS JAN 6 AS A “PEACEFUL PROTEST”

And for those contemplating not voting for Maggie Hassan:

DON BOLDUC

1.    ABORTION:

         NO EXCEPTION FOR RAPE OR INCEST

 

2.    TROOPS TO URKAINE:

“WE NEED AMERICAN BOOTS ON THE GROUND OVER THERE.”

3.    2020 ELECTION WAS STOLEN

“SO, I SIGNED A LETTER …SAYING THAT TRUMP WON THE ELECTION AND, DAMMIT, I STAND BY MY HORSE. I’M NOT SWITCHING HORSES, BABY. THAT’S IT.”

4.    CALLED CHRIS SUNUNU “A CHINESE COMMUNIST SYMPATHIZER”

5.    ANTI VAXXER

“THIS IS BILL GATES SAYING WE SHOULD PUT CHIPS INSIDE PEOPLE NOW.” (5/22)

6.    MASKS CAUSE MORE PROBLEMS THAN THEY SOLVE

“I BELIEVE THEY COLLECT BACTERIA. WE’VE HAD A HUGE LITTERING PROBLEM WITH MASKS AND RUBBER GLOVES.”

7.    CONFEDERATE STATUES ARE A “SYMBOL OF HOPE”

 That's what Mad Dog would like to do, but the Democratic Party insists on not getting "confrontational."

Which is why Democrats lose.