They Just Don't Like Us

There will lots of post mortem exams for Democrats to explain the thumping they took in 2024--lost both House and Senate and the Presidency.

Toxic 

But, for Mad Dog, the simple truth is: They just don't like us. Voters may or may not like Trump, but they will vote for him so they can vote against Democrats.

Listening to Hispanic voters interviewed on NPR, who said they don't like boys playing in girls sports, don't like people who don't work, or who sneak into the country or those who defend them, Mad Dog thought: So the vitriol from FOX and the Right really did get absorbed.

Americans really do not like Democrats. We are not likeable because we throw our arms around people other Americans do not like. Drug addicts who litter the streets of Manchester with their syringes and needles. We don't feel sorry for them. We don't like them.

Republicans don't like a lot of people, and they don't care if people do not like them. And, in the end, the folks who care too much about not offending, wind up offending more people than those who don't care who they offend.

 The photo/video of the frozen Joe Biden standing next to a laughing Kamala, who was flanked by her husband and next to him a man with shoulder length hair, wearing a dress, a transvestite or something, was enough to send a chill to Mad Dog's marrow--beyond cringe worthy. What was that man doing in a photo opportunity during election season? What message was the Democratic party sending America?

What does that do to the Honduran immigrant, naturalized U.S. citizen, church going man, when he sees Joe Biden embrace all that? As the man said: the Democrats are the party of freaks and weaklings, the party of people who talk about being afraid, or who talk about many genders--they want his little girls playing soccer against girls who used to be boys.  This immigrant wants to assimilate into a culture with clear cultural and gender identities, not the Weimar Republic.

The people who are seen to be creepy weirdos are not the guys who talk about immigrants eating pets, who bed porn stars, or say their daughters are so hot they would date them if they weren't their fathers. 

The creepy weirdos are now the Democrats.

Everyone Has An Answer

 

But Mad Dog has no answer.

Why did 20 million fewer voters turn out to vote for Kamala Harris than they had for Biden? Actually, that may not even be true, but whatever the number, she got fewer votes than Biden and that difference may or may not have beaten Trump who got about the same 72 million.

The numbers matter.

The breakdown and analysis of the numbers matter: More Hispanic males and Black males voting for Trump likely means something. More white suburban females voting for Trump likely means something. 

Clearly, however you slice and dice it, there were more Americans who voted for Trump in what appeared to be a free and fair election.

Bernie Sanders says this is because Democrats have abandoned the working class.

Seth Moulton says this is because the Democrats have tried to please every special interest group--transgenders for example--which alienates the great majority of working class White voters who see Democrats kissing up to Indians (Native Americans), transgenders, gays, People of Color, what have you but nothing addressed to whitebread, "ordinary" Americans, who are actually still in the majority. 

It's not Just This Guy

Arab Americans in Michigan say she lost because of Gazza and losing Michigan, but even if she had won Michigan she lost Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, so Michigan didn't matter.  In fact those last three no Democrat had any business winning in the first place, they are all Confederate states or Confederate diaspora states.

Re-elected by their adoring constituents 

And it's true, the Deep Blue states of New England and the West Coast stayed blue as did Colorado and New Mexico. 

So, if everyone has a reason for the demise of the Democratic Party, why should Mad Dog be left out?

For Mad Dog, the reason for the apocalypse is that Democrats do not have an entertainment/political propaganda juggernaut like the Republican FOX/Rogan/Breitbart/Storm Front/erstwhile Rush Limbaugh.

No matter where you go in America, you can hear workman, roofers, carpenters, garage mechanics, working men listening to radio right wing and loving it, laughing along and getting indoctrinated.

Of course, people choose to tune into FOX, for the most part. They know what they are going to hear.

And liberals tried putting Al Franken on the radio once to offer a liberal alternative, but, truth be told he wasn't very funny and he didn't last long.

There was a reason Joseph Goebbels was so important to Hitler and the Third Reich: he was the minister of propaganda and without a marketing wing, the National Socialist Workers party would have been just another crackpot cabal on the fringes.

Bad Optics: Not What We Should Be Selling

Mad Dog once tried to launch a rendition of "Spitting Image" the British puppet show which lampooned various politicos, but, despite lots of puppets and an effort to launch on youtube, he got all of about 15 clicks.

So, clearly, Mad Dog does not have the Rush Limbaugh karma. Or maybe it's the message. Or maybe just not funny enough, or not enough Koch brothers money behind it, or something.

But, from all Mad Dog can tell, door knocking and telephone banks cannot penetrate the minds of Americans. Something else has already done that and continues to do that, so you hear FOX phrases coming at you from a wide variety of citizens. 

Mad Dog may be wrong, but he thinks it's entirely possible it's not that the message conveyed is wrong or unattractive--it's the delivery of that message, the media which has destroyed Democrats. "It's the media, not the message," or perhaps, "The media IS the message."

Mad Dog suspects  until Democrats master the airwaves, the podcasts, the social media X sites, they will watch Trump and his progeny dominate political power.

We sure won't be beating him with blogs and the New York Times.

Delicious Defeat

 

How perverse is it that even seeing Donald Trump get 51% of the popular vote, and facing 4 more years of All Donald All the Time, there are a couple of things Mad Dog secretly relishes?

Every once in a while, at one of the monthly Democrats Club meetings a guest speaker would introduce herself and add, "My pronouns are she/her," and it took every fiber of his restraint to throw nothing at her.

Reading a New Yorker article about a gender fluid person whose pronouns were "they" and the New Yorker dutifully described "them" going to town to get a haircut and how "they" ate an ice cream cone and he would tear that issue into tiny pieces.

As Dave Chappelle said, "I completely support everyone being whoever they want to be but my question is to what extent do I have to participate in your self image?"

And he agrees with the Massachusetts Congressman, Seth Moulton, "I have two little girls. I don't want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I'm supposed to be afraid to say that."

And he can now reiterate that when Ray Buckley opened the New Hampshire State Democratic convention with 15 minutes of Native Americans playing traditional tom toms to show how inclusive Democrats are, but there was no Lee Greenwood singing, "Proud to be An American,"  and he thought, "Oh, this ought to win over a lot of plaid shirt and suspender HVAC guys in Claremont and Salem," he was dismissed as intolerant.

The fact is, he forgave all that because the alternative--Trump--was worse. 

But 51% of his fellow Americans were offended enough to vote Republican.

Humankind Cannot Bear Very Much Reality

 

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

--T.S. Eliot

One thing you can say for T.S. Eliot: He did make one very true observation about humankind's inability to deal with reality.

Actual Hard Times: Reality

But, of course, Eliot was writing in the wake of a horrific world war, when men with half their faces blown away were wandering the streets, when reality was hunger, outdoor plumbing, rampaging infectious diseases and truly hard times.

The really astonishing accomplishment of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon and Joe Rogan and Rush Limbaugh and all the Rupert Murdoch cabal is they have been able to turn a reasonably prosperous reality into a nightmarish landscape of pet eating Black immigrants, a mostly invisible invasion from the "shithole countries" (i.e. dark skinned countries) of rapists, thieves and murderers.

Despite the best economy since the 1960's, the millions who voted for Trump cannot abide the price of eggs. 

Here in New Hampshire, when you ask people about the big issues in the election you hear, "The Border," followed by "the economy."

What's Wrong With This Picture?

What border and what economy are they talking about you may ask. Most of the people I heard from had not seen an immigrant in Hampton, N.H. And about half of them were living in modest apartments, possibly in strained financial circumstances, but many were, by any measure, wealthy.

Out of 10,365 votes cast in our town, Trump lost by only 659 votes.  And he had no ground game. Not a single door knocker. Nobody driving voters to the polls. You could see Democrat canvassers in the streets every weekend and toward the end every day and nary a Trump door knocker. The only visible presence were Trumpies holding signs at Lafayette and Exeter, the main intersection, and not that often, and of course lawn signs all along the roads with simple one word messages: Trump: Safety/Kamala: Crime. 

The Trump campaign folks must have been laughing at the Harris campaign from the 20th century. By some invisible means, the Trump message got through to all those folks we spoke with who stood behind their screen doors and told us the Border was their main concern. 

And they all hate the government. The government steals their hard earned money (i.e. assesses taxes) and gives it to undeserving pet eaters.  The government is visible. 

When they have to pay $800 a month for some life preserving medication, that is not the government. The only face on that outrage is a sympathetic pharmacist who offers you a coupon for a month's free supply.

The fact is, Trump, Inc. sold over 51% of the nation on the idea that we have turned into a "shithole" country and it's all the government's fault and you can keep your government hands off my Social Security and Medicare.

The idea that democracy is just one long argument and nothing can get done and we are better off handing over everything to smart, rich guys like Elon Musk, Trump and other men who have fought their way to the top against all odds--never mind the fact they were born on third base--and they can do our thinking for us and we can lead our lives. 

It's pretty much the old scene from "Gone With the Wind," where Ashley and Scarlett look out over the fields worked by hundreds of slaves, and the world is in harmony and there are no arguments.

Keep It Simple

The slickest trick of all is Trump and his little band of conspirators regard their supporters with contempt, but they have convinced the contemptables it's Kamala and the Democrats who who hold them in contempt and it's the Republicans who have their backs. 

This America, Man

 

The opening scene of the five seasons of the TV show, "The Wire"  is a Baltimore street, a teenager lying in a pool of blood, a bullet in his head, and Detective Jimmy McNulty sitting on a stone stoop with a local Black teenager, contemplating the body--and there are exchanges about all the injustices in the world, but, the scene ends with the teenager telling McNulty, to explain the way things have played out: "This America, man."

And this is what happened November 5, 2024. After all the talking heads, the experts, the pundits with their predictions and polls, it was always going to come down to whether there are more of them, the Trump voters, or more of us, the anti-Trump voters.

Clearly, right now at least, there are more of them. 

This America, man.

The Daily Show, in one of its segments without Jon Stewart, did a wonderful montage of pundits explaining why Harris lost: One pundit says she was done in by her failure to win over the Palestinian sympathizing voters in Michigan, while another says she was done in by alienating Jewish voters by sympathizing too much with Palestinians, and it continues on with each analyst bringing up his or her pet cause which, if only Kamala had embraced would have spelled victory, and then another pundit saying just the opposite in the next clip.

As the vast sea of readers of this blog knows, Mad Dog's premonition was a Trump victory, and not a close one, based on his looking around and seeing so many Trump fans over the course of his own week, and as he did canvassing for Harris on the weekends.  Each of us is always looking through a key hole, so Mad Dog was careful not to claim he knew enough from what he could see locally. The soldier on the front line knows only what is happening in front of him, not across the whole front.

But Mad Dog was not surprised on November 5th.

Mad Dog makes no claim to be able to explain it, apart from saying that White people feel aggrieved, and think too much has been given to anyone who is not White;  and Hispanic males love a macho man; and Black men--well, who knows what's going on in the heads of Black men? But clearly they feel aggrieved and maybe there's a certain Stockholm Syndrome operating--if I just embrace this guy who holds power over me, maybe he'll not hurt me and make me one of his boys. 

One of the most common reactions of white patients when they find they are charged $600 for their insulin is to remark that their neighbor, who is Hispanic, not working and on Mass Health gets his insulin for free. (And none of these white voters thanked Biden for eventually getting insulin down to $35.) They had no idea Biden had anything to do with that. They were just angry about their neighbor's free ride. Mad Dog asked once, "Did you ever think to ask why you don't get your insulin for free? I mean, why be angry at the guy who gets it for free, rather than the company that makes it so expensive for you?" 

That was met with uncomprehending stares.

On Trial in Mississippi for Murder of a Black Man

Heather Cox Richardson is correct in making the obvious point Trump has managed to sell a false bill of goods--the economy we have by every measure we have of economy (unemployment rates, effective wages, inflation) hasn't been this good since the 1960's and yet Trump sold the idea it has crashed and burned, not been rescued by Joe Biden with his government sponsored bail outs during the pandemic so business did not collapse and workers got paid.

But even in a good economy, apparently, there are a lot of people living paycheck to paycheck who are uneasy, angry and want a strongman to help them out.

Mad Dog met a man a few days before the election who worked for an HVAC supply company which laid him off, along with all the other 20 employees, early in the COVID pandemic as their revenues tanked, but the company paid him his full salary and his health insurance for 2020-2021. And he told his wife, "Hey, I'm going to take the year off! This is great!"

So Mad Dog said, "Well, then, you really did benefit from a government program!" 

And he looked back at Mad Dog, uncomprehendingly: "No, that was the company that did that."

And Mad Dog said, "And who do you think gave that company the money to do that when the company had no income?"

This citizen Trump voter had no idea what the answer to that question might be.

This America, man.

President Trump in His Own Words

Everyone has an Uncle Frank in his life--that guy you might love, sort of, who is a Trump fan and can't wait to vote for Trump for President.

You might want to send that person this clip, just as you might send someone you love a favorite song, a moving download you know they'll love.

This one's from Jimmy Kimmel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oy0zq8YzY9w&t=832s 

Enjoy.

Loathing in New Hampshire: I Worked Hard

Knocking on the doors of Hampton villagers, we urged a seventy something lady to vote. She stood behind a glass storm door in an upscale house on Great Boar's Head peninsula.

My trusty sidekick dealt with her guard dog, who managed to wriggle through the half open door, a five pound, 16 year old lap dog of some indeterminant breed no bigger than a New York City subway rat. 

Great Boar's Head

"I already voted," she told us. She was maybe 90 pounds, soaking wet and looked at us through watery blue eyes warily, a faint smile.

She's working hard

"Okay," I said, turning to go, but for some reason I turned back and I asked her what the big issue for her was in this year's election.

"The border," she said.

"Which one?" I asked. 

"The Mexican one."

"Oh."

They worked hard

"And the economy," she added when I looked like I did not quite understand why that border should concern her.

 And then she added the reveal:

"I worked hard for what I got," she said.

They Worked Hard

There it was. I worked hard, and you want to give all my money to welfare queens, illegal darkies who sneak across the border, and are now living in plush hotels on taxpayer money, raping people, eating cats and pet dogs like mine, and I've had a hard life.

The thing is: she hadn't.

Hard times

Those women Dorothea Lange captured on her photographs during the Great Depression, those ladies had a hard life. But they would vote for Franklin Roosevelt, not for Trump.

Not Hard Working

Vulgarians At The Gate

Early voting in Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania shows massive turnout in Red counties, which means Trump is likely to win those states and with them, the election.

Of course, there is no such thing as one man/one vote in America: The votes of largely rural states like the Dakotas, Montana, Arizona count way more than the votes of inner city folk in New York City or Baltimore.

So the will of "the people" will not get us our next President. A thumb on the scales, obsolescent, special interest anti-democratic scheme will make Trump, once again, a minority President, just as it did the last time he got "elected." Hitler never got a majority of votes. But he got enough.

It's only four years.

But it will be an aggravating, stupid, mean spirited, nasty four  years. 

And for those of us who may have, at best 10 years left, it's a crummy swing of the pendulum.

We have always been the home of the free, land of the brave, but we have also been the land of lynchings, and eradication of the buffalo and subjugation of the Indians and our boys died fighting Hitler's hordes, in racially segregated army units, and we massacred Vietnamese in their villages rather than allow them to become communists (destroying villages to save them) and we shot down students at Kent State with the townsfolk saying they had it coming to them, just after a summer of peace and love event at Woodstock, and we loved our gangsters like Al Capone, and Bonnie and Clyde, and we have had our assassins who got Lincoln and Martin Luther King, but we elected Obama twice and we have been all those things.

So now we'll have Donald Trump. Again.

This America, man.

The Confabulation Candidate

 

As a medical student, I was confronted with patients who had a form of dementia which deceived the unsuspecting--you could ask a man what he ate for breakfast this morning, and he would confidently tell you, "Ham and eggs, two slices of toast with blueberry marmalade, orange juice and coffee, black, two sugars."

Meanwhile, his daughter, standing behind him with her arms crossed, was rolling her eyes, shaking her head and she would pull you aside and say, "He had oatmeal. Nothing else."

That was called, "confabulation." People who cannot recall, who have big lacunae (holes) in their memory and brain will often just run out a convincing sounding string of details which have nothing to do with real memory, or with reality at all.

There are a variety of ways dementia may reveal itself, but details, the inability to recall details, connects many of them.  Dementia may hide behind cliche` and common expressions, "Well, he's someone you can trust. He's a man of principle."

This morning, making our rounds in Hampton, N.H., my stalwart partner, Ms. McM, and I walked up a driveway looking for a Marie O'B, who was on our computer list as a Democrat who had voted in the last primary, and who we were trying to remind to vote in the election less than 3 weeks from now. There was a sign for a Democratic candidate on the  front lawn, so we thought we were at the right address, but in the window above the garage door was a large Trump sign.

Obadiah Youngblood

Standing over a lawn mower below the sign, in his driveway, a white bearded man wearing a beat up black leather cowboy hat and overalls looked up from abusing the starter cord of his machine, and watched us approach, fingering the starter cord as if he wished it was a trigger on a shotgun. He did not know who we were, or what we wanted. Ms. McM was wearing a KAMALA 2024 baseball hat. It was not clear if he noticed the hat, or if he would be able to read it, if he had.

"We're looking for Marie," Ms. McM told him. 

"Yeah, well, she's in the house," he said, eyeing us warily.

"I'm confused," I told the man, trying to sound friendly. "You've got a Democratic lawn sign, Mike Edgar for state legislature, but you've got a Trump sign, too."

"Oh, well, that's Mike," he said. "Mike and me go way back. His wife did my physical therapy, back in the day."

"So, we can't count on you to vote for any other Democrat?"

"Naw. I'm for Trump. All the rest is liars and lies."

"So, when Trump was President, did you like what he did?"

"Yeah."

"What, in particular, did you like?"
"Oh, well, just all of it. He was just so much better. No bullshit. Just did what he said he'd do. I didn't like the other guys, going way back, even before that. You know them. Just liars."

"But Trump did what you wanted?"

"Yeah."

"Which was what?"

"All of it."

We walked over to the front door, leaving the old man who knew his own mind, but who could not actually come up with any details,  to work on his lawnmower.

"Oh, that's my father," Marie told us. "An obstreperous bastard."

We asked her what the issues she cared most about might be. "Childcare," she said. "And getting Trump out."

Hampton Academy

She is a pretty woman, still in full bloom, dark hair, peachy skin and dark lashes, and she told us she had gone to Hampton schools, from pre school through high school, now a single mother with two kids below school age, and she had to live with her father because there is no affordable housing in town and she said she makes a solid six figure salary. But daycare alone makes owning a home unfeasible. Her parents do not want to do day care for little kids. She has a daughter and she is incensed Trump has made abortion illegal. "He's taken away freedom."

My partner said, "You ought to come to our Democratic Party Committee meetings, first Tuesday of every month, 6 PM. Lot of kindred spirits there for you."

"Oh, well, if you could make it kid friendly, I'd come. But no way I can do anything after work, except tend to the kids."

We walked off down her driveway. Her father was now limping along behind his lawnmower, carving wobbly lines in the lawn, still trying, no doubt, to remember exactly what it was President Trump had done for him.

Navalny, Putin, Trump: Connected Dots

 

The New Yorker put Alexis Navalny's image on its cover this week and I thought: Donald Trump is about to take over the government in three weeks--there's an election going on: Why would you be thinking about a Russian dissident, even if he was murdered by Vladimir Putin?

This man who died 8 months ago, in Russia. He's not of the current moment.

Right now, we've got our own problems, right here in the U.S. of A.

I resisted reading it. 

But after I got done with Adam Gopnik's typically trenchant analysis of the Trump problem--"No matter how deranged his behavior is, though, it does not seem to alter his good fortune."--I slid by the article on whether birds can talk to each other, and another on Kamala Harris's chances, and there was "Prison Diaries," and I said, "Okay, I'll read just the first entry, and then move on to the Cartoon Caption Contest."

But, after the first entry, I was hooked.

Nalvany's voice, even in English, is clear and beguiling--it's like reading Dostoevsky  as read by Andrei  Codrescu, droll, chatty, absurdist, intoxicating.

"The first is frequently to be found in self-help books: Imagine the worst thing that can happen, and accept it. This works, even if it's a masochistic exercise. I can imagine that it's not suitable for people suffering from clinical depression. They might do it so successfully that they end up hanging themselves."

Nalvany is in prison, and not one of those white collar prisons for rich aristocrats who fudged their book keeping and wound up scamming banks for a few tens of millions of dollars, a Russian prison where you sit on a wood bench under a portrait of Putin for hours so you can engage in "disciplinary activity."

But he is not one to feel sorry for himself. He says he made his choices and accepts the consequences, unlike the Ukrainian parents who were "Just living their lives. They had jobs. They were family breadwinners. Then, one fine evening, a vengeful runt on television, the President of a neighboring country, announces that you are all 'Nazis' and have to die because Ukraine was invented by Lenin." So, "Right now, dead civilians are lying in the streets in Mariupol, their bodies gnawed at by dogs."

As he sits in prison, more and more charges are brought against him, as the opaque Russian state moves against him, which is to say, Putin moves against him. 

"Some people collect stamps. Some collect coins. And I have a growing collection of amazing court trials."

Finally, Navalny realizes how much Putin and his cadre really fear him: they move him to a gulag in the far north, the Artic Circle. It's not enough to have him deep inside a stone prison 300 miles from Moscow; he has to be really far away for Putin to feel safe, where the temperatures outside are -26 degrees F.

"Today I went for a walk, got frozen and thought of Leonardo DiCaprio and his character's dead horse trick  in 'The Revenant.' I don't think it would work here. A dead horse would freeze in about fifteen minutes."

I have never seen that movie, but I am sure I know exactly what that trick was.

"Here you need an elephant. A hot or even a roasted elephant. If you cut open the belly of a freshly roasted elephant and crawl inside, you can keep warm for a while. But where am I going to get a hot roasted elephant in Yamal?"

Navalny died almost exactly 3 years after he returned to Russia and was arrested as soon as he landed. 

His fate was sealed the moment he stepped off that plane.

Vladimir Putin was never going to allow him to live, much less to speak to the Russian people. 

One wonders why Putin bothered to prolong the agony, but as you read Navalny, you understand. Drawing out the process plays into the narrative.

Putin is not a ruthless king, nor a Stalin who simply shoots people in the head. In Putin's Russia, they pretend there are laws and processes and they even have lawyers. But all that is just for show. 

I know what you are going to say--how different are we here in the USA? After all, Jeffrey Epstein died in prison and nobody asked any questions. Donald Trump was President.

Someone asked Donald Trump about what he was willing to do as President: Was he willing to order to have people killed?  "Oh?" Trump said, "You don't think American Presidents kill people?"

Of course, President Obama had ordered the killing of Osama Bin Laden and celebratory crowds gathered outside the White House to congratulate him.

Donald Trump does not ask about the law. He asks about the judge. 

Putin, of course, is the law. But Trump can, in fact, exert his will through others now. He has a Supreme Court which no longer even pretends to care about the law, about precedent, which has made separation of church and state unconstitutional, which declared billions spent to support candidates as simply free speech, which embraces the idea we have the best government money can buy, which, in his second term, has said it will reverse gay marriage and is open to considering allowing state laws to forbid inter racial marriage. (The last oddity is especially odd since it was floated by a Black justice who is married to a White woman who seemed to embrace this idea; odd, of course, unless he is looking for a way out of his marriage short of divorce. Having your marriage set aside without the cost of divorce lawyers may have some appeal. Or maybe this was simply a sly appeal to Black men who Trump has been courting.)

                                          

When Hitler invaded Poland, he claimed he was defending Germans living within its borders, and the same for Czechoslovakia.  Autocrats are always rescuing some down trodden group, sometimes on horseback, riding shirtless. Putin is rescuing Ukraine from Nazis, although nobody has yet claimed he has crossed the border on horseback, shirtless. Trump is the father of in vitro fertilization and the protector of women. And like most strong man wannabes, he is, well, strong, or at least he talks as if he were strong, and, well, a man.

But there will always be Trumps, Putin's, Hitler's, Orban's, Mussolini's, and, for that matter, Jim Jones's around. 

Tough Guy

                                 

                                 

Not Such a Tough Guy: Sic Semper Tyranis

The only real question is whether there are enough true believers to drink their Kool Aide.