How the Dems Bring On Defeat: Or Why the Dems Deserve to Lose

This morning Mad Dog found his way to Manchester, but that was the easy part. 
He was headed to a caucus, which is the first step toward selecting delegates to this summer's national Democratic convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but the meeting was held in a small theater/pub called Chunky's Cinema, not to be confused with Chucky Cheese, where Mad Dog found himself wandering around, asking if anyone knew about the Democratic party meeting, only to be met with blank stares.

Eventually, by stopping and asking enough locals, "Oh, you mean Chunky's!" Mad Dog staggered into the theater.

He was there to vote for Erica DeVries, a Hampton Democrat, who has been talking up Amy Klobuchar for months, and who would be an Amy delegate to the convention, God willing, and if the creeks don't rise.

Ms. DeVries is disciplined, understated, tolerant of the grumpy old men who frequent the Hampton Dems meetings and she is persistent. She says just enough and with enough intellectual sparkle to motivate Mad Dog to drive 40 miles to find Chunky Cinema aka Chunky Cheese.

The meeting began with the clerk reading off the official Democrat Party statement of rules and procedures for the voting. About sixteen candidates were vying for eight spots, but then came the crunch, caucus voters were allowed to vote for only four males and then for four females. Any caucus voter with the temerity to vote for five men or for five women and three of the other gender would see his or her ballot disqualified, destroyed, burned and fed to the iguana lizard Chunky keeps in the lobby next to the popcorn.

Now caucus rhymes with "raucous" but the folks in this room were anything but; in fact, they sat there silently nodding ascent to the rules as laid out.

Mad Dog, of course, felt his blood boil and at the moment when the clerk asked if there were any questions, he leaped to his feet, waving his arms madly. 
This is the question Mad Dog wanted to ask, that question you formulate in the car, driving home, the thing you should have said instead of the incoherent rant which explodes from your mouth like a horrid belch:

Madame secretary, clerk, I rise to ask this question as a Democrat who has been proud to be part of this party because of what it has stood for since at least the 1960's. Martin Luther King said he yearned for the day his three little daughters would be judged by the content of their characters rather than by the color of their skin. Today, I imagine he would hear what we've just heard in this room and ask, "Why is a vote disqualified because we have judged someone by his or her gender, rather than by the content of their character?

That is not what issued forth from Mad Dog's mouth, which was closer to:
By whose authority are we told that we should hold against a candidate a characteristic which he or she cannot change? Why is gender a qualification or a disqualification?

Silence ensued, as the clerk shuffled through her papers at length and finally said she could not find an answer to Mad Dog's questions in the papers she had given which set for the official Democratic Party gospel.  This provoked Mad Dog even more and he roared, "Well, maybe someone else in this room can explain this outrage!"

"Well, we want our delegates to look like our people," the clerk hazarded.

Mad Dog, with a mighty exertion of uncharacteristic self control did not shout, but mumbled to Pat Bushwick, a New Hampshire House of Representatives delegate seated next to him, "Well, if we wanted that we'd restrict our delegates to old white men, and may a few old women."

This idea of an individual being nothing more than a representative of some group is the Achilles heel of Democrats.  As speeches by the candidates for delegate proceeded, Mad Dog scratched off his list anyone who said, "Oh, I'm a [insert race, country of origin, profession, son of] so, for me, this is personal."

God almighty! Must Democrats always describe themselves as a member of some (preferably disadvantaged or formerly reviled) group?  

Why not simply say: Look, it doesn't matter who my parents were, or what trials I've been through, or how much chemotherapy I've received or whether I'm tall or short or male or female or blue eyed or brown eyed. What matters is my ideas. And my big idea is that Trump is that demon in the soul of America. He calls out the rage, the hate and the fear in ourselves. Amy Klobuchar calls out our better angels. She's not calling for a revolution and that's good because most people aren't looking for a revolution; they'll be simply satisfied with pushing the reset button and getting rid of Trump.

Which, is pretty much what Erica said, at least the last two sentences.

And that's all Democrats need to do. We don't need to "look" like America. What does America look like anyway? Who has the presumption to try to arrange on stage "representative" Americans. 

Marketing is fine for election ads, but when we talk to each other, we need to hear ideas and whether these come from the mouths of some old white male gomer or from some young Black female, it should not and does not matter.

We are not Hollywood producers, picking out types from the photo arrays in the casting department's books. We are looking for something you cannot see on TV or on Twitter. We are looking for actual ideas.

This is why Adam Schiff is so effective. He is an ordinary looking fellow.  He is not a female person of color and he does not tell you to agree with him because he's from a background like yours.  He simply proposes ideas and he has faith that you are smart enough to respond to the idea, not the advertising. 

Mr. Schiff and Ms. DeVries have not spoken of some ideas which have troubled Mad Dog lately, but they are the sorts who would be receptive to talking about them.
For example: What is a country, anyway?  Is it the lands, the borders, the laws, the people? 
Another question: When the founding fathers built the experimental vehicle for the government of this country did they have democracy in mind? That is, did they want "the people" to control the government and the economy or did they want only the right sort of people to rule?

To Mad Dog at least, it appears the founding fathers were very fearful of the people, the rabble, mob rule by passions rather than aristocrats with large plantations or farms.

Obadiah Youngblood, study for "North Hampton Salt Marshes"

To this end, they built the Electoral College. And they made sure each parcel of land would count as much as how many people might live there. So empty Wyoming has two Senators, the same number as populous New York or California.

By 2040 70% of Americans will live in the biggest 15 states. The other 30% will be spread out over the other 35 states. That means that 70% of the PEOPLE will be represented by 30 Senators, while the 30% left in those empty states will have 70 Senators voting for their interests in the US Senate.
Tumble weed and prairie get more votes than human beings in Philadelphia.
And, of course, since the Senate controls the Supreme Court, the Court is controlled by those empty spacers.

Obadiah Youngblood, Water Street Bridge, Exeter

This means that going forward the election of minority Presidents, who lose the popular vote will not be the exception, but the rule.

Plaice Cove, Hampton

Those are ideas to think about. And it shouldn't matter whether the representative you choose to represent you is male or female, Black or White, tall or short, blue eyed or brown eyed, gay or straight, first generation or the descendant of Mayflower pilgrims.

So when the Democratic Party mandates an affirmative action rule for selection of the delegates to its national convention it abrogates its basic principles. In the case of college admissions, one might argue we are righting a system which manifestly resulted in the exclusion of colored folk from college, but Mad Dog's memory of Democratic national conventions is there were plenty of women and colored folk on screen.  

Ezra Klein's blog about identity politics begins to shimmer in Mad Dog's mind's eye: We may be up against a Trump base which is all about white, native, Christian identity, but the way to defeat this is not to embrace an identity test of our own, but to open our arms to people whom we judge by the content of their characters, period.

It's the ideas which count, not the optics.

The Structural Flaw Of Our US Constitution

Ezra Klein published a really succinct, lucid and important article in the NY Times explaining the dilemma which faces the Democratic Party today.

The Republicans are a cohesive, homogeneous army of older, rural white men and women who can take concerted action and win elections, whereas the Democrats are a coalition of people who are unlike one another.

But beyond that, the founding fathers were not sold on democracy and put in place structures to prevent rule by popular will.

As he points out by 2040 70% of the US population will live in the 15 largest states and be represented by 30 US Senators, while 30% of the population in the remaining states will be represented by 70 Senators. If those numbers sent your head spinning, think of it this way: One third of the nation, mostly rural, white and conservation will have an unbreakable lock on the US Senate to make it serve their narrow interests.

And that means the Supreme Court will be locked into a conservative mindset.

And the Electoral College, which reflects the same geography and tumble weed over population, will ensure that "Republicans consistently win the presidency despite rarely winning the popular vote, where they typically control both the House and the Senate despite rarely winning more vote than the Democrats..Down that road lies true political crisis.

In the past, Mad Dog has half seriously suggested we divide the nation into the Coasts and some selected states like Minnesota and Colorado and New Mexico and allow the Confederacy and Cowboy states to form their own slave owning states. 

But, as Klein suggests the truth is even the Blue states are liberal, urban patches with Alabama in between. Pennsylvania is the prototype--but Virginia, California, Washington and Oregon follow the same pattern. 

Business is doing well in America. Tech is doing well. Finance, too. But politics is rushing headlong into oblivion.

Elizabeth Warren and Sophistry

When Elizabeth Warren launched her prepared slam in the Democratic debate, that the males on the stage had lost a total of 10 elections, whereas she and Amy Klobuchar had lost none, Mad Dog groaned.

Of course, Warren got a laugh and multiple pundits declared she won the debate with that (excuse the expression) trump line. People Mad Dog respects, were, inexplicably delighted with this crack.

But Mad Dog was confused, perplexed, astonished:  Elizabeth Warren has run only twice.  She won a grand total of two elections.

How many times have Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg stood before the public and run?

What Warren was doing was dealing in percentages rather than absolute numbers.

This is like the baseball rookie who gets two base hits his first two times at bat and is batting 1.000 and claims he's a better, more successful hitter than Ted Williams who only bats 0.400.

Hampshire College issued a bumper sticker which said: "Hampshire College Football: Undefeated Since 1969." Of course, Hampshire College has no football team.

Or, as Cederic Daniels' wife told him in "The Wire":  "You cannot lose if you do not play."

But of course, that wasn't the worst moment for Senator Warren that night: She refused to take Senator Sanders' prof-erred hand at the end of the debate.

As many ways as Mad Dog has  tried to assess this the only conceivable interpretation is that Senator Warren knew/believed Bernie Sanders had said a woman could not/would not be able to win a Presidential election in the current climate of 2018 when he was speaking. 

Mad Dog would like to know
1/ Were Warren and Sanders the only people present for this exchange?
2/ Did Sanders set up any ground rules on which he relied before speaking, such as: "This is not for public consumption," or "I'll deny this if you ever said I said it, but the truth is..." ?
3/ Why Warren would bring up a two year old comment as if it represented Sanders thinking today?

The same argument applied, in my mind, to the attack on Brett Kavanaugh for being a dissolute, depraved 17 year old, as if once you are a drunken frat boy, you can never change your life, behavior, attitudes once you pass through your 30's and 40's and "mature."

Mad Dog may  not vote for Mr. Sanders in the primary because:
1/ He is too old
2/ Everything emanating from Washington DC about Sanders suggests his office was so disorganized as to be dysfunctional; he never listens, only speechifies at his colleagues and so is ineffective 

But Mad Dog, who once was enamored of Ms. Warren finds he cannot vote for her either, because: 
1. She has shown herself to be too rigid and unwilling to answer the basic question: Why not agree to Medicare for All Who Want It if that is all the Congress will give you?
Why not say, "Look, I'd like MFA but I'd accept, a first step in that direction, if people are not yet convinced they'd be better off with the government than with their current union negotiated deals?
2. She has appeared sanctimonious over Mr. Sanders impolitic remark about the challenge of electing a woman President.  Or, worse yet, she may have violated a confidence and then been unwilling to forgive a lie.

Either way, Mad Dog has scratched Warren, Sanders off his list.
Pete is off because he cannot win as a gay, and has not won as a gay in Indiana.
There, I said it, and I will not disavow it. He'd be my choice, but as far as I can tell, he'd lose the majority of Black voters and likely a good part of the Rust Belt.
Biden is off because, even if his stammer is the explanation, he appears too infirm and mentally dull.
Styer is a non entity rich guy who hasn't paid his dues and we already have one of those in the White House.

Which leaves Amy Klobuchar, who may be a little too Bella Abzug, may not be a winning personality, but she might be tough enough to face down Mafia Don. 

Deconstructing Trump

Reading "A Hill To Die On," the part about Paul Ryan's story prompted me to Google Ryan--where-is-he-now?  

Apparently, he moved his family to a Washington, D.C. suburb, and got himself a pay off as a member of Fox board of directors. 

The usual story.  Twenty years in Congress and they put you on the day shift, with a pay off from the guys who run things. For a lot of men who are from small towns and feel insignificant, they get accustomed to all the ego stroking in Washington, DC and they stay there, even after they retire or are defeated.  How you gonna keep them on the farm once they've see DC?

But what I had forgotten, if I ever knew it, was the story of Ryan's conflict with Trump.  Trump would call him several times a day when Ryan was Speaker, but when a story came out in some Washington insider book quoting Ryan as saying Trump knows nothing about how government works, Trump responded: Ryan was a "lame duck failure" and "They gave me standing O's in the Great State of Wisconsin and booed him off the stage."

Well, same old same old Trump.
But then I thought: What was Trump referring to?

A little more Googling and it turns out Ryan had criticized Trump for his belligerence on the campaign trail, for stoking passions rather than dealing in ideas, in March, 2016 at a Wisconsin rally and got booed.  In October, in Ryan's hometown, Trump mentioned his name, at a Trump rally, and boos rang out.

I'm not even sure if this is the whole story, but the whole story is nothing that has to do with anything Trump says. It's just the daily Tweet barrage. You don't think about any of it; you just let it wash over you. It's the pubescent kid trying to establish he is the big dog, belittling a rival.

What was Trump actually doing?

A/ Trump was saying "people in Wisconsin" liked him better than they liked Ryan.
     --"They" liked me but booed him.
B/ Trump was saying that antipathy toward Ryan was deserved.
     --He's a failure
C/ Trump was saying his own popularity was deserved.
     --"They" gave me standing ovations.

Of course, the first question is: Did any of this really happen?
And the answer is, yes, Ryan did hear some boos, but also applause, in his March appearance on stage. And yes, there were some boos from the Trump rally audience in October at the mention of Ryan's name.
Nothing close to being "booed off the stage." But such exaggeration is always greeted with laughter by Trump's supporters. "Given 'em Hell, Donald!"

And what of the "they"? 
Who, exactly is "they"?  Is they all the people in Wisconsin? Just people of voting age? Just people who actually vote? Or just people who come to political rallies, or in the second instance, in October, Trump fans who come to Trump rallies? 

The Trump "they" is that diffuse idea of "everybody." 

Now you've got the equivalence of the audience as the general public, as a rowdy crowd as the voice of the people.

"They" are the people who enjoy watching Trump beat on somebody.

Well, there were always crowds at lynchings, crowds at the guillotine. 

There is one thing Trump was proved right about: When Ryan exhorted the folks in that Wisconsin "Fall fest" event to reject Trump's vitriol and to think about "ideas" instead, he was politically wrong.  Trump was tapping into anger, diffuse, inchoate anger among folks in the Rust Belt and Ryan was telling them to cool off when their passions were running high.

A lot of this is done on instinct, and neither Ryan nor Trump could likely offer much of an analysis. 
Trump could read a crowd and Ryan could not.

The question for 2020 is whether that crowd in front of you represents what most of the folks out there think. 

Hobbit versus Adventure: Trumpsters Nothing New

Reading an unexpectedly wonderful book about America at the turn of the nineteenth century, a time I have not had much interest in--until now--has been an eye opener and thrilling.

Ian Toll's "Six Frigates" is so exotic a sortie into a distant time and at the same time, like so many good histories, an examination of current times. 

Jefferson's Republican Party, which included fellow Virginian plantation society types like John Randolph, really was the "America First" constellation of Hobbits. These folks had inland plantations and they regarded land bound farmers as the very best sort of people, and could not understand or see much value in the coastal seafarers, who lusted for trade with far flung parts of the world, who exulted in intercourse with foreigners, with seeking adventure in the rest of the world.

Jefferson hoped for a time when the tax collector would be an anomaly, rarely seen. Those Tea Party folks took their yellow flag and anti tax rhetoric right from Jeffersonian founding fathers. That government is best which governs least. Leave me alone. Don't tread on me. I'm doing fine.

Of course, those Trumpland folks out there in the impoverished rural parts of Appalachia and the Midwest are not doing nearly so well as Jefferson was at Monticello, with his slaves and his plush debt sustained life. Today's Trumplings are festering, like those darklings in the 1935 cartoon, "The Sunshine Makers." 

Or, one can see it as the story of the happy Hobbit who is dragged reluctantly out of his paradise and out into the threatening, often ugly, violent world beyond.

Jefferson, of course, spent years in France and Europe and spoke French and his restless mind was forever seeking out books from abroad, but he returned to America determined to keep America isolated from France, England, Austria, Russia and China.

He led a party of men who did not care much about the depredations of the British fleet upon American merchant marine ships, as the Brits boarded the American sloops, kidnapped sailors for service in the British Navy, stole American goods bound for foreign ports.  They were unmoved when American merchant men in the Mediterranean were captured by the pirate princes of Tripoli and Northern Africa and when those pashas demanded extortion, tribute, and sold off the unlucky Americans into slavery.

Jefferson rejected an American navy as being too expensive, a burden which would require ongoing taxes and he hated the idea of taxes. He liked the idea of militias of farmers, who could be rallied to defend an invaded town, but then go back to the farm. His idea of coastal defenses were floating, flat bottomed boats which served as platforms for one or two cannon. Even coastal batteries struck him and his fellow Republicans as too expensive. A standing army and most especially a standing navy would result in endless war.

The problem for the Jefferson ideal was two fold:
1/ The world would not leave America alone; the Atlantic Ocean was vast, but sailing ships traversed it from England, Spain, France, the Netherlands and Portugal in the thousands and quickly enough to bring the world to America's door with increasing frequency.
2/ A whole population of adventurous souls from Boston to new York to Philadelphia to Baltimore to Hampton Rhodes, Virginia wanted to engage the world, and got rich and happy doing it. If they were part of a real country, a United States of America, then they felt they had a claim on their brethren to stand with them in their grand adventure.

But Jefferson and his ilk wanted none of that deep blue ocean and its shipping lanes. Let the British or the French try to invade the American continent and the Americans would swallow them up, like a bear, but venture into the ocean and you could only expect the sharks and leviathans of the the blue water would eat you alive.

Jefferson had no interest in trade with China or Amsterdam or England. 
We could make all we wanted right here in America.

Obadiah Youngblood, Sunset Lake

Of course, he had benefited enormously from the slave trade which brought Africans to the plantations of the South. If New England's rocky soil meant that shipbuilding and whaling and world trade appealed to those seacoast folks, let them take their chances on the high seas, but don't ask the South and the farmer to protect them with a blue water navy.

So there we have it: America is all we need. Foreigners have nothing important to offer. We are fine staring at our own navels. Why launch explorations?  North Africa, Naples, Amsterdam, London, Paris, Vienna, Istanbul, Jerusalem have nothing to offer us.

Everywhere else is but a shithole.

Here's a link to "The Sunshine Makers."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3VNoJiSN1g

Expunge the Stain: Get These "Psychologists" in Jail

We should always be circumspect when we accuse people of dastardly crimes, knowing how little we can know, sitting out here in cyberspace and local towns.

Twitter and Facebook are full of false accusations, conspiracy theories and just because we see a Hollywood movie about the CIA torture conspiracy doesn't mean it happened just the movie says it did.

But when you know there is a 500 page report detailing the misdeeds, when you can read the parts of the report in the Congressional Record and now, on line,  and most especially, when you can see the two accused "psychologists" on the internet defending themselves as "soldiers doing what we were told to do" echoing the Nuremberg Nazis's defense: "I was just following orders," you may be forgiven for believing what you can so readily believe, given the clips of Dick Cheney saying we have to be ready to resort to torture to save American cities from dirty bombs. 

If these two "clinical psychologists," Jessen and Mitchell, are even half as bad as they look in "The Report," they belong in some maximum security prison splitting rocks for the next 30 years. And, reading more about this mess, Jose Rodriguez, the CIA director of torture should be right there with them. 

Once you listen to Dick Cheney, you have a very clear picture of his mindset and the thinking of all those who sailed with him. And this pair looks like more than willing accomplices. 

Here they are in video from the NYT on line report: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/us/cia-torture-lawsuit-settlement.html

Mad Dog knows he may be accused of being no better than that guy who drove in from Virginia to the Pizza pallor in Washington, DC because he read on line about Hillary Clinton running a pedophile ring out of that joint. 

But the fact is, Cheney was excusing torture in public, on TV; Clinton was not extolling pedophilia. 
And we can listen to these creeps excuse their behavior as if they are well meaning guys, who just provided others with training to waterboard,to  bury people alive in coffins, hang them by their thumbs. 
Just your average, good ol' clinical psychologists, being as helpful as they can be.
Just trying  to prevent a real life episode from "24." 
Jessen says he was told if he didn't torture the prisoners, a nuclear bomb was going to go off in the United States soon, although somehow, CIA officers, who were told the same thing, didn't believe it, and  were resigning in numbers over the torture.

And that phrase: "Enhanced Interrogation." 
Oh, there is an admission of guilt, plain and simple.
Whenever you see our government involved in something really nasty, you know how nasty when they come up with some benign sounding euphemism: Hanging someone up by their thumbs, drowning them on a water board, sealing them up inside a coffin suffused with cockroaches, is not "torture," but "enhanced interrogation." There you have the guilty conscience visible in the effort to call a viper a potentially toxic legless reptile.

The beasts who sold their "expertise" to the CIA, and who were rewarded generously for their depravity, can be seen even today, on the internet excusing their torture techniques with the same argument the Nazi Goering used: History is written by the winners; if we win we are hailed as heroes; if we lose we are war criminals.

In this case "we" i.e., the torturers, did not win or lose. But they are still at large.

But there is another history, and that is the Report Daniel Jones wrote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:US_Senate_Report_on_CIA_Detention_Interrogation_Program.pdf&page=4


These CIA creeps  were simply criminals who tortured people.
They join their overseers at the CIA and in the Bush White House, and are still at large.
The problem is, you cannot whisk them awake to Jerusalem or Nuremberg for trial. We'd have to do it here.
And right now we've got a guy in the White House who would greet them there with a pardon and a clothes line franchise. 

No Swift Boating for the Salty Frog

“Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause… for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.” – George Washington, charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775

When John Kerry appeared at the Democratic National Convention, he saluted the audience and said, "John Kerry Reporting for Duty" and the Republicans went right after his super patriot, war hero thing with the infamous swift boat attack ads.

When Eddie Gallagher, the SEAL who was reported by half a dozen fellow SEALS as a war criminal who murdered innocent civilians and a prisoner, he was hailed as a tough guy hero by President Trump, pardoned, and embraced by all the tough guy Republicans, and from his guest suite at Mar a Lago announced his new line of clothes and booze, "Salty Frog."

Why are the Democrats incapable of capitalizing on this?
Why can only Republicans launch a marketing campaign to bring down an opponent?

These are the questions which send Mad Dog into a gloomy funk.