Democratic Party Swallows the Suicide Pill

 

Approaching the Democratic National Convention, the Party may already be a dead man walking, but if Democrats nominate Joseph Biden for President, then surely they will be swallowing that cyanide capsule.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDTiZisXrkw

The Republican Party has really only one aim, and that is to enact the Project 2025 which includes, most prominently, a huge tax give away to millionaires and to return to the salaried masses, the HVAC guys, plumbers and electricians the full burden of paying for government.

Because Republicans have nothing rational to offer re: climate change, energy conservation, environmental protection, education, infrastructure and because they oppose contraception, abortion and efforts to achieve clean air, clean water and public health, including vaccinations against pandemic viruses, they really have nothing to run on except phantoms: the invasion across the Southern border by insane asylum inmates and rapists, criminal gangs. 

So the GOP instead of talking about these losing issues: direct attention to efforts by Democrats who Republicans claim deny there are two distinct genders, and then they slide into the cant that Democrats want to  brain wash/indoctrinate your children into becoming transgender or gay, whichever you might think worse.

This gender discussion has been the Democrats' biggest gift to the Republican Party.

I am in full agreement with Dave Chappelle on this: I support anyone becoming whoever they want to be, whatever they believe they have to be--but to what extent do I have to participate in your self image?

Where this arises is the whole "pronoun" thing. Don't expect me to talk about "they" going to town for a haircut when I'm referring to a single person. Gender fluidity, transgender folks lose 99% of the American public when they open any speech with, "I am so and so, and I use his."

Also, the whole idea of a transgender college athlete, who went through puberty on a tide of testosterone, with all that meant for his skeleton and musculature, and then undergoing transgender manipulations and being allowed to compete as a woman against women, and rewriting all the female swimming records is so transparently wrong it hardly requires explication.

At what point will Democrats start valuing winning over some ideal of intellectual consistency? 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDTiZisXrkw

Just look at this video of President Biden in the Rose Garden at the White House. There he is frozen in his Parkinsonian grip, while a male in long dreadlocks and a dress undulates beside him. All the GOP has to do for the next two months is to buy airtime and internet time to replay this scene over and over again and they'll add the Senate, the House and the White House to their Supreme Court.

And the Democrats will have only themselves to blame.

To Boldly Save or Meanly Lose Our Democracy

 Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. .. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. 

--Abraham Lincoln

How can a President not be an actor?

--Ronald Reagan

WE ARE ALL JUST PLAYING SHUFFLEBOARD ABOARD THE TITANIC RIGHT NOW

--Mad Dog

Reading about how Democracy died in the Weimar Republic and how Hitler's rise to power could have been prevented if only he faced bold opposition, I think of today. 

Hitler was a bold leader. He took chances and risks no other leader of his time was willing to take.

In that, Trump is the same. And his Republican Party, which has come to duplicate the National Socialist Party (Nazis) in almost every way, is the same. They nominated a man who had never served in elected office as their candidate for the Presidency of the United States, as his first elected job. 

A bold move.

Voters did not care about his lack of experience. They felt they knew him. He had developed his brand over years, first in the New York press, then on television and people, at least some people, thought they knew him.

And they believed that "experience" really does not matter in the Presidency, because the big decisions a President is called to make do not demand a command of the details. The President is the captain of the ship who merely decides what the destination is, and leaves it to others to plot the course, work out the mechanics.

Ronald Reagan, of course did hold public office, Governor of California, but he was always really just a movie actor who delivered the lines written for him, and who decided what it was he liked and did not like and his big job was to inspire the public. 

When I sought out the opinion of the most highly placed and connected Democrat I know in New Hampshire, he wrote me in an email, "Unfortunately, this late in the process, it is most likely that you will lose votes if you shift away from Biden." Now, this was a private email and not meant for publication, and so I will not identify him, but I use it because it means even the smartest, bravest politician I know simply cannot shift gears away from being a politician. All the pundits say the same thing.

But has anyone commissioned a poll to test what the voting public would do if someone not currently under discussion were to be nominated?

So, here is my fantasy, being called to give a nomination speech at the upcoming Democratic National Convention.

I would appear on stage wearing my LL Bean blue and black plaid shirt  and my favorite hat. A nobody. Just a guy from New Hampshire. 

And it would go like this:

None of you has ever heard of me. In fact, I am not qualified to be speaking before this Convention, except by the one qualification that I cherish Democracy. I am but a humble, anonymous citizen, one of millions anonymous Americans and nobody here knows my name.

But you have heard of the man whose name I rise to put into nomination. 

You all know him, and he is the solution hiding in plain sight.

You will not believe I am serious, even though he clearly is the one person who everyone knows could beat Der Fuhrer decisively.

But you will say nominating him would be too risky; it's never been done. And I have to reply as Lincoln said in the midst of his turbulent times: "As our case is new, so we must think anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country."

We are told that bringing forth a new name now only three months before the voting begins is too risky, that nominating anyone other than those we are expected to nominate is too great a risk.

And I agree: It is too late to bring forth into the election someone who we have to introduce to the American people. But that means that although we have a very deep bench of elected Democrats, none of them has the national fame of Der Fuhrer. We have wonderful Democratic governors from Minnesota to California to this very state of Illinois. We have stars in the U.S. Senate from Rhode Island to New York. We have great Congressmen from Maryland to California to the state of Washington. 

But none of them can match the fame of Der Fuhrer. We'd have to introduce each and every one to the nation, but we do not have that kind of time.

Which leaves one man who we all know, and who is widely loved. Sleepless suburban housewives from New York to Seattle love him. Children dreaming of a train ride to the North Pole for Christmas love him. We have seen him washed up on a deserted island, and we have seen him celebrate and extol the ordinary Americans who became heroes, who became a Band of Brothers, fighting across Europe from Normandy to Der Fuhrer's Eagle's Nest. 

And yet you will say: No, it's too unheard of! It's an impossible dream! But just blocks from where we assemble today, a man whose middle name was "Hussein" walked out on to a stage in a wet Chicago night, at Hyde Park, on the night of his victory, and said, "For any of you who doubt that in America anything is possible--Tonight must be your answer!"

The impossible has happened, right here and it can again.

And we saw the man we all know now, recently at the 80th anniversary of D-Day, at the graves of American soldiers in Normandy. Those graves Der Fuhrer refused to visit because it was raining and Der Fuhrer did not want to get his hair wet, did not want to show his bald spot.

You know him because he searched for one American soldier among an entire Army, to save Private Ryan. 

You know who I'm talking about. Every American does, from Biloxi to Bangor, from Peoria to Portland. He literally needs no introduction, because he has visited all of us. 

And yes, you know I cannot resist saying it: Gump Dumps Trump!

And so I'm privileged, I'm honored, to put into nomination before this Convention, for President of the United States: 

 Thomas "Tom" Hanks.

Drummer Boy

 

On June 6, 2024, as Tom Hanks, Christine Amanpour, Joseph Biden and the surviving veterans who stormed the beaches at Normandy gathered to commemorate the 80th anniversary of that momentous day, someone noted that there were fewer years between the end of the Civil war (1865) and that beach landing (1944) = 79 years and the time between D-Day and it's 80th anniversary.

I can recall, as a boy in 1953, there were still Civil War veterans alive who held reunions, and attended commenorations at battlefields and got trucked out for July 4th parades, 88 years later. If you were 12 years old, and drummer boy, you were a Civil War Vet. If you were 103, and there were vets who lived to that age, you might have been a soldier.

So the newly discovered story by E.L. Doctorow published in this week's New Yorker held special fascination for me.

I do not know all of E.L. Doctorow's work--I read "Ragtime" and liked it well enough. 

But this, for my money, is a masterpiece.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/07/08/the-drummer-boy-on-independence-day-fiction-e-l-doctorow

Uberfremdung

 

History does not repeat itself; but it  often rhymes.

--Attributed to Mark Twain (among others)

Watching the debate, like most people I know, I could only focus on the mouth agape, frozen faced, tongue tied Joe Biden, and hardly noticed Donald Trump, who was, after all, just saying what Donald Trump always says. It was like that classic psychology demonstration where the professor puts a glass bowl on the table in the front of the room and then an outraged student appears and begins a shouting, remonstration and the professor attempts to calm this explosion in the front of the classroom, but meanwhile another student slips in and runs off with the glass bowl and the professor turns to the class and asks, "What happened to the bowl?" And usually not more than one or two out of fifty can say. Everyone else was focusing attention elsewhere.

The power of distraction.

So that was me and the debate, but somewhere in there, I managed to notice the thief who would steal the bowl: Donald Trump launched into his diatribe about all those horrible, no good, very bad illegals crossing our Southern border: insane asylum escapees, escaped convicts, rapists, murderers every last one of them.

Obadiah Youngblood

That got no attention from the moderators asking the questions, and certainly Joe Biden was in no shape to respond: Wait, the fact is immigrants, even those, especially those awaiting hearings, commit crimes at a vanishingly low level. Yes, there is that occasional horrific crime committed by an immigrant here illegally, but that is the exception that proves the rule.

Christopher Isherwood

Reading "Weimar Germany" by Eric Weitz, you hear Hitler, among many others, used the word "Uberfremdung" to signify the poisoning of the pure Aryan blood of the German folk by Jews, Poles, Slavs and other undesirables. All those "races" who had slipped across German borders and contaminated, poisoned and otherwise defiled German blood, pure German women in particular.

The Real Sally Bowles

Trump does not vilify Jews; he seems to exempt them. And he is careful not to vilify Blacks--although he doesn't have to, because his white supremacist cant is satisfactory to the Confederate and Mountain states so he doesn't have to get too explicit about who exactly is poisoning America's pure white blood.

Obadiah Youngblood

Reading about the 20 year Weimar Republic is so fraught with headlines which have been written about today, it is downright spooky. 

I've now imbibed "Weimar Germany" (Eric Weitz),  "Before the Deluge" (Otto Friedrich), "In the Garden of Beasts" (Eric Larson), "Good-by Berlin," (Christopher Isherwood, on which "Cabaret" was based), "Weimar Culture" (Peter Gay) and the excellent, mesmerizing "Babylon Berlin" now in season 4, available only on MHz-Choice, a $7 subscription worth every penny. 

These descriptions of Germany between 1919 and 1939 are a mirror to today's America. We recognize the characters, the types, the arguments. The language may be German but it sounds American.

One of Eric Weitz's observations is that the Nazis were not just street thugs, although there were plenty of that type, but they came from the universities and industry and the professions. J.D. Vance's story would have been tucked seamlessly into any of these books.

Reading Vance's book, "Hillbilly Elegy" it is abundantly clear Vance came from one of those Appalachian families which wasn't a family at all, with an absent father, a mother constantly disappearing off with her latest boyfriend, and the children left to the care of grandparents who served some parental functions but had their own limitations. The first time Vance got anything like a family was when he joined the U.S. Marines, which he seems to forget is a part of the federal government. So he owes his only true family experience to the most socialistic entity in America: The federally funded Unites States military.

The pathos of his going home on a leave with enough money (Marine money) in his pocket to take out his siblings and grandparents to Chilis for dinner is supreme. It's the first time in his life he could be proud. He had made enough money to treat his family to dinner at Chilis. You had to feel for this guy, but then he turns around and rants about how the federal government is nothing but an unmitigated evil.

Obadiah Youngblood 

And this is true of so many of the Nazis during the rise of the Third Reich: the most meaningful experience of their lives was in the military. 

And there is a difference between Trump and the pullulating Nazis of the Weimar: Trump sneers at the suckers and losers who had nothing better to do than join the Army ("Join the Army if you fail") and he dismissed John McCain as a loser because he was captured by the Vietnamese. "I like the guys who were not captured," Trump famously remarked.

And no, American folk are not enduring the deprivations of the early years of the Weimar--hyperinflation--but that doesn't mean they don't harbor resentments. 

So despite evidence that the federal government saved them from COVID--with vaccines developed by scientists using science (which the right denigrates) and rescued America from another great Depression, by spending money on Americans, American businesses and schoolchildren, President Biden and the federal government get no thanks at all. 

Americans will still send Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz back to Congress.

Hitler, it must be remembered was sentenced to 5 years for treason in jail for his part in the Beer Hall Putsch, an insurrection. The judge was sympathetic, so he did not get life in prison. But he served only 9 months, owing to a sympathetic judiciary. 

And now we have Trump's Supreme Court saying if Trump is re elected, nothing he does can result in jail time. He really can shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not fear punishment--as long as he claims that shooting was an official act, even if he shoots Joe Biden or Jamie Raskin or Melania's latest lover. 

Oh, I don't need to duck for cover,

For shooting Melania's lover,

For me the law does not have to budge,

Because I know the judge.

Fourth of July Story

 

People from many countries think they are a chosen, special case. Surely Russians think so, and the English often have. The Chinese and Japanese will make their own cases. You can go down your own list.

But if you're looking for some celestial sign, you need look no further than July 4, 1826. It was the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. 

In Virginia, at his plantation, Monticello, Thomas Jefferson, who had written the Declaration, lay dying in his bed and hearing some indications of celebration, he asked, "Is it the Fourth?" And told it was,  he smiled and died, 50 years to the day of the signing of the Declaration.

A little over 500 miles to the north, outside Boston, on July 4th, 1826, that very same day, John Adams, second President of the United States, the man who with Jefferson arguably did as much or more to win the Revolutionary War for the American colonists as Washington, was also lying in his death bed, and feeling death close in, his last words were, "Jefferson survives."

(No Facebook or texting then.)

Adams

Both of these men knew what the most important achievements of their lives were, and that dated back to July 4, 1776 and the 5 years which that day unleashed.

The Declaration spoke of the self evident truth that all men are created equal, but of course, Jefferson did not believe all men are created equal, as he held slaves, unless you argue he did not see Africans as men. 

And Adams signed the Alien and Sedition act which allowed for the arrest of any citizen criticizing the President, First Amendment be damned.

So neither was perfect. 

But, they both knew one big thing and stuck to it: asserting that they were equal in God's eyes to the King of England.

 And participating, as both did, in the war to deny the King of England had any right to govern his countrymen, those steps were radical and revolutionary enough for these men to carry with them to the grave the importance of the objections they made. Franklin observed, as the Declaration was signed: "We had better all hang together, for surely, otherwise, we'll all hang separately."

They pledged their fortunes, their lives, their sacred honor to the Declaration and the revolution it declared.

Three Stalwarts & 6 Monarchists

Now, facing a nation restructured by the Supreme Court, a nation which, in the words of Justice Soto-mayor writes in her dissent, the Supreme Court has now made "the President a king above the law," and now  we can understand just how important and revolutionary Adams and Jefferson really were. The ease with which kings can be created, the fragility of our American constitutional guarantees are today, more than ever, apparent, as the work Jefferson and Adams did now lies shredded upon the floor of the Supreme Court at 1 First Street, NE, Washington, DC. 

We can say, as our nation lies on its bed July 4, 2024, "The Constitution Survives," but we'd be as wrong as Adams. 

Brain Worm: The Lab Leak Theory

 

Did SARS COVID-2, the COVID19 virus originate in a lab, and if it did, why would that matter?

Dr. Paul Offit

If it came out of a lab in China, then that opens a cascade of conspiracy theories, that the work in the Wuhan, China lab was funded by Tony Fauci at the NIH in cahoots with President Xi to cause a pandemic to bring down Donald Trump and crush the 2nd amendment and enslave the White world...

Or something.

Enter the New York Times, or the "Failing New York Times" as Dear Leader Trumpsky calls it, whose editors saw fit to publish a full page "opinion piece" by a molecular biologist, Dr. Alina Chan, who wrote a book saying it was a lab leak and then the opinion piece giving 5 arguments for this possibility. 

Even Dr. Fauci has said it's best to keep an open mind about the possibility, but he adds the preponderance of evidence is this virus, like almost all viruses which have become epidemic or pandemic, is derived from nature, from bats most likely, conveyed to other animals and then leaping into human beings.

Semmelweiss

The anonymous editors at the New York Times saw fit to publish Dr. Chan's piece, complete with artwork, without publishing a response from anyone else who might know this field substantially better than Dr. Chan, who though a PhD, does not apparently know much about virology, epidemiology or public health.

Why the NYT decided to leap into the National Enquirer arena, as if possessed by the spirit of "Men In Black," is known only to God and the lost souls on the editorial board of the New York Times.

Paul Offit, of the University of Pennsylvania, who does know a lot about virology, vaccines, the sequencing and structure of viruses, has published a point by point rebuttal, which the NYT should have requested and published side by side with Dr. Chan's article. It is linked below on Substack in written form, or you can watch it on youtube.

Dr. Offit provides everything you will ever need to know when you are at the barbecue this holiday and some blow hard starts bloviating about the lab leak theory.

Basically, what Dr. Offit says is the viruses at the Wuhan lab are well known, gene by gene, and look nothing like the COVID 19 virus, could not have been changed into that virus and the COVID 19 virus was found in blood on the stalls which contained the animals at the Wuhan market, after the Chinese government swooped in to cull all the animals there. The Wuhan lab released the genomic sequence quickly after it was isolated, allowing for the astonishingly swift production of an effective vaccine which saved millions of lives worldwide, before the Chinese government laid the iron fist down on the scientists in a hamhanded way sparked by a  paranoid fear they would be blamed for the virus, which happened anyway.

As Jonathan Swift noted: "Falsehood flies; the truth comes limping after." 

For me, there will always be people like Alina Chan, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Aaron Rodgers, who claim public attention, to scream about bizarre stuff, the Area 51 syndrome,  and I waste little energy getting agitated about them.  For me, it's the people who you thought well of, like the NYT folks, who, inexplicably, behave to support and enhance those who should be ignored, dismissed and denigrated. 

That is the real mystery and exasperating thing here.

As Martin Luther King, Jr. once observed, "In the end, we will not remember the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

Watch Dr. Offit on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ukv9H6iAn7A

Or read his Substack article

https://pauloffit.substack.com/p/lab-leak-mania

The Hidden Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Power

 

Do you know these names?

• Mike Donillon
• Ron Klain
• Valerie Owens
• Symone Sandler
• Steve Ricchetti
• Anita Dunn
• Cedric Richmond

One thing about Donald Trump, you know he is not a puppet on strings controlled by others. He is his own enfant terrible, whose tantrums control others.

But in Joe Biden's case, there are people behind him, propping him up, propelling him forward you never or only rarely see, who will keep him in this Presidential race because if he drops how, their lives are ruined.

I caught a glimpse of these folks when Joe Biden arrived at the Community Oven, a capacious Pizza restaurant in North Hampton in 2020, in the midst of the New Hampshire primary. (He left days before the voting, in 5th place, to go to South Carolina.)

I arrived there with my long time guide to New Hampshire politics, with whom I frequently canvassed for votes, and she had met Biden in some previous New Hampshire primary, when he was likely four or even eight years younger, and still had an eye for the ladies, and he told her as he worked his way down the line she had gorgeous eyes, which is still true, but which I'm not sure he can even notice any more.

We had listened to him try to get through audience questions, as he lost his way, and by the end of every sentence had lost track of the original question, words drifting off on clouds of distraction, often unintelligible, slurred and non sensical.

"Oh," my guide said. "This is not the same man." 

That was 4 years ago, 2020.

But what fascinated me was watching Joe Biden outside, in the parking lot, after the event, as he waited to be loaded into a limousine SUV, standing there with older women and men I did not know, but who were clearly his "handlers."

Some of them may be the folks named in that list at the top of this post. 

Whoever they were, they were clearly guiding Joe, at his elbow, behind him, and he looked very much like an addled old man being guided by others, as if he would simply have remained chatting with random citizens had they not guided him into his car.

He particularly seemed to enjoy hearing stories of distress from wounded people on the receiving line, telling them to give their names to his people so he could call them back, to be sure they got the help they needed, as if a President should be someone who personally helps a half dozen people in a small New Hampshire town.  More a parish priest consoling the flock than a man who wanted to be President, who needed to rule from the top and get big forces in motion which would provide help to legions of wounded.

He was incapable of connecting with words with a crowd, so he was trying to connect with individuals.

And I thought of Obama, on that rainy Chicago night in Grant Park, his election just won, walking out on that stage and saying to the crowd: 

"If There Is Anyone Out There Who Still Doubts That America Is a Place Where All Things Are Possible... Tonight Is Your Answer."

The cameras panned across the crowd--found Ophra Winfrey with tears streaming down her cheeks, and other anonymous souls weeping for joy.

If Joe Biden was ever capable of that sort of stagecraft, that time is long gone. 

The debate was not, of course an aberration, a single bad night, it was the confirmation of what we had all been seeing for some years. Sure, even people with dementia have lucid moments, but the obvious decline in President Biden is there for all to see.

It is only this inner circle, who see their own jobs and fates circling the drain if Mr. Biden withdraws, as he surely ought to do--it is only this inner circle, this cabal, which is keeping the country on tenterhooks.