Friday 19th of April 2024
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breaking a pool-stick over putin's head...

convention

I don’t care what people think, I love political conventions. In an age of deconstructive irony and post-political wonks who think they can graph their way to a better tomorrow, the DNC and RNC are some of our last remaining throwbacks to good, old-fashioned, American electoral camp.


By Matt Purple

That’s true even as they’ve become more scripted, and especially true if you attend in person and venture outside the convention halls, where the activists set up shop. It’s a spectacle that cries out for the gonzo treatment: gulp down a bunch of Quaaludes and sally forth with your steno pad. Alas, the coronavirus intervened, leaving us all stranded on the couch in front of the TV.

 

So it went with the Democratic National Convention this week. The proceedings ostensibly took place in Milwaukee, though they kept throwing to Democrats all over the country, sometimes to schizophrenic effect: Andrew Yang tossing to Julia Louis-Dreyfus tossing to a calamari supremacist from Rhode Island tossing to Maggie Rogers stranded on the Maine coastline tossing to a man in a Kansas field. It was all very, dare we say, unconventional, which led many on Twitter to disapprove, accusing the Democrats of putting on a glorified infomercial-cum-Jerry Lewis telethon.

 

Not to defend the party of abortion, but that seems unfair. The Democrats, and the Republicans next week, have no precedent for anything like this. They’ve been forced to start from scratch, and ultimately what the Democrats came up with ended up seeming almost healthy. Despite their perpetual warnings that democracy will die if Donald Trump is democratically reelected, the Zoom-meeting aesthetic of the convention was refreshing. It undermined the hysteria, contextualizing the event as something less important than it otherwise would have been. The election was no longer a clash of the titans before roaring crowds; it was just another browser tab at the top of the screen, a subdued and rather bureaucratic affair. If you believe, as I do, that the nationalization and glamorization of our politics is ruining the country, then this was justice of a kind. Even the Democratic A-listers felt like a B-roll.


First up was Andrew Cuomo, who compared racism and xenophobia to the coronavirus he’d failed to contain and our government to an immune system. Bernie Sanders, who’d once praised Fidel Castro and the Soviet Union, warned that Donald Trump is “leading us down the path of authoritarianism.” Michelle Obama encouraged empathy, a major theme of the convention. Bill Clinton appeared live from Chappaqua, not the Lolita Express, as many were expecting, after photographs published that same day showed him receiving a massage from one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims. Dr. Jill Biden strolled into an empty classroom and proved herself one of her husband’s best decisions. Kamala Harris gave a rather banal speech (“there is no vaccine for racism”) from what appeared to be the headquarters of some intergalactic command.


And then it was over to Ol’ Joe. It seems like a stupid thing to say, but Biden was without a doubt the biggest winner of this year’s DNC. That isn’t always the case with presidential nominees: Barack Obama outshone John Kerry in 2004 and Bill Clinton arguably eclipsed Obama in 2012. With left-wing activists muttering under their breath and Uncle Bernie still rattling around the party attic, there was no guarantee that something similar wouldn’t happen this year. Yet while the Democratic convention was nowhere near as personalist as the Republican one is likely to be, while it focused on issues and party history as well as the candidate, I thought the narrative they crafted around Biden was a winsome one. For four nights, the man was all hands-on-your-shoulders empathy, personal grief, hardscrabble Scranton origins, Amtrak trips.


It was a rejoinder to snarky pundits like me, who like to reduce Biden to his supposed senility. Yet the former veep is much more than that. What he lacks in policy detail and verbal continence, he’s always made up for in social IQ, an essential trait for a politician, perhaps even more essential than attention to detail. That personal connectivity was on full display during his speech on Thursday. It was a success, I think, in that it was almost jarring in its normalcy, a reminder of the way politics used to be. This was an utterly conventional Democratic address with all the utterly conventional kitchen-table issues: jobs, unions, health care, equal pay. Amid a radical and surreal year, it felt disarming. The speech was more proof that Biden is, as Curt Mills has argued, the return-to-normalcy candidate, the Warren Harding of this century’s ’20s.

 

That isn’t to say, however, that the Democrats didn’t succumb to the feverishness of the times. One of the major rhetorical themes of Biden’s speech was literally darkness versus light, with Trump embodying the former and Biden (conveniently) a paladin of the latter. That made me flash back to a nutty San Francisco Chronicle essay from 2008, which declared Barack Obama to be a “Lightworker,” meaning “that rare kind of attuned being…who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.” (True enough, if you were a Yemeni civilian.) Biden is no Obama but there was still a slightly messianic feel to his presentation. The Democrats have apparently decided that this election is a space opera, a titanic showdown between good and evil, with themselves in charge of saving their country. That might ring true to the average left-wing door-knocker, but it’s also self-flattering to an unseemly degree.

I skipped over Barack Obama’s convention speech before, only because it was the best example of this Manichean tendency. The former president appeared in front of a giant backdrop of the Constitution and proceeded to inform us that our very founding was under threat. Obama’s understanding of the Constitution was reductive; it said nothing about, say, secretly spying on AP journalists or launching a war in Libya without congressional approval. The Fourth Amendment and the Tenth Amendment were not mentioned. Instead it dwelt on a single word (one many of the Founders happened to disdain): democracy. Our founding documents, Obama said, contained the blueprint for a democracy, which Trump is now menacing. America was portrayed as a glowing democratic arrow, pointing ever forward, demanding that opportunity and the franchise be continually expanded.

And that overall was the narrative of the convention, simplistic and incomplete, yet also familiar and firmly in the American tradition. In addition to Obama, it was espoused by, of all people, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who in an otherwise lackluster speech that felt like one of the lesser State of the Union responses, said, “That’s the story of this great nation. Action begets action. Progress begets progress.” Well, there you go. Donald Trump sees America as one afflicted by carnage and crime, which only he can fix (this time for real). The Democrats’ narrative, on the other hand, is one that affirms our history as a sequence of collective actions, of communities working with government to set aside self-interest and better the condition of the least among us. The 1619 garbage was (mostly) taken out; incremental progress was back in. Listening to these people, you would have never guessed that only a month ago the left was playing footsie with a cultural revolution.

The Democrats are thus making a play to be the Americanist party, conflating the United States with its democratic character and painting its president as a sinister and (ironically) almost foreign outsider. Trump next week will have to turn that on its head, to show that Democratic governance in fact impoverishes the marginalized and imperils democracy through chaos. Yet that’s still two days away. In the meantime, the parties have logged off and I’ve been left feeling jilted. I’m no Democrat, but everything I grew up liking about the left—its opposition to the Iraq war, its hatred of the imperial executive, its support for civil liberties—was MIA this week. Tulsi Gabbard wasn’t invited. Foreign policy was subordinated to the greater theme of democracy, as speaker after speaker promised that Biden would push back on overseas dictatorships. Biden himself threatened to break a pool stick over Vladimir Putin’s head.

The Democratic Party has moved on from the mid-2000s. That might be wise politically, but it will always leave some of us looking not forward but back.

 

Read more:

 

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-democrats-want-to-be-the-americanist-party/

 

 

 

 

Gus did not watch any of the speeches, though some of the extracts during the news seemed to be smoltzy, saccharinish and hollow. Thus Gus trust Matt Purple — a senior editor at The American Conservative to sum things up... Image at top from the New York Times?...The size of the image indicates the person's speaking time allowed.

running parties...

Twitter is an important space for breaking news, lively political discussions, and sometimes…just great clap-backs. 

GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel dished out a great comeback to a tweet by Xochitl Hinojosa, a senior advisor for the Democratic party.

Hinojosa tweeted, “WOMEN RUN OUR PARTY. TURN ON YOUR TV TO SEE,” on Wednesday night as Kamala Harris (D-CA) was accepting her nomination for Vice President.

McDaniel was not impressed. She fired back, “A WOMAN ACTUALLY RUNS THE REPUBLICAN PARTY,” a few minutes later.

Hinojosa has yet to respond. 

The DNC concluded yesterday with former Vice President Joe Biden accepting his party’s nomination — the convention, however, may not have been as successful as desired since President Trump’s numbers have shot up and many voters said the convention helped change their mind.

 

Read more:

https://saraacarter.com/mcdaniel-destroys-dem-senior-advisor-in-one-tweet-a-woman-actually-runs-the-gop/

 

 

 

 

a message to joe (and donald)....

 

by Peter Van Buren

 

Joe, I’m writing to ask a favor. Don’t be a bum, a palooka. If you lose the election, lose it graciously. Don’t drag a damaged America through a long fight designed to cripple the next Trump term, the way Democrats did in 2016. Those same voices are gonna want you to never concede, to “sue ’til it’s Blue” but you gotta do the right thing. Don’t be the guy to wreck America.

While two months can change a lot, it doesn’t look like November 3 is gonna be your night, kid. So far you got nothing to offer but you’re Not Trump, and because I know you play some poker, that’s stretching a pair of twos too far. Pennsylvania new voter registrations added 150,000 more Republicans than Democrats. Trump is beating you on Latino outreach, Joe, and owns the Cuban vote (as well the formidable Jewish vote) in crucial Florida. A pollster on our podcast believes the “shy Trump voter” effect is even stronger today than in 2016.

I’ve seen it myself. I know the way many Trader Joe Americans noodle around when they want to see if it’s OK to talk about Trump. They’ve done well in the economy. They’ve noticed the wars have tapered down. Once they open up, they say they’re afraid you’ll lose control to the progressives nipping at the party’s heels. When Elizabeth Warren childishly sneaks in a pro-BLM message during your convention, they don’t see the justice they titularly support, they see chaos. And the looting they roll their eyes over happening in New York is now in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Swing states, Joe, on literal fire under Democratic gubernatorial leadership.

I know you are counting on the left behind, out of work Americans without 401ks as your people, but Joe, they aren’t. Those folks are Trump’s base. They don’t blame him, they think he fights for them. You and I can have a lo-carb beer alongside a little Maalox, or maybe just some nice Jell-O, after you retire and try to make sense of that, but you can’t say it ain’t so, Joe.

So whattaya got? Russiagate was a lie built on falsified FISA documents, sleazy CIA-aligned operatives, and paid-for propaganda. Impeachment failed. None of that screams “trust me.” Large numbers of voters don’t blame Trump for COVID, and statistics show the worst economic damage to individual wallets has been done by Democratic governors willing to act against their own citizens to politically damage Trump. A Democratic governor keeps kids from school and you want the parents to blame Trump? Your party Goebbels’ are down to whimpering about violations of the Hatch Act most non-Beltway American know nothing of and care less about, and the Post Office.

The Post Office, Joe? That’s your big talking point two months out? You sound like Jan Brady trying to snitch on her brothers. Seriously, enough with the post office. The USPS handles 472.1 million mailpieces a day. There are only 153 million registered voters in the U.S., and typically only about 60 percent of them even bother to vote. You still get your paper Lands End catalog; handling the ballots is nothing.

You aren’t the only candidate using the Not Trump strategy. Your real opponent is Stay Home; that’s where a lot of the Never Trumpers may end up. Last election 42percent of eligible voters stayed home and likely cost Hillary the election; registered voters who didn’t vote were more Democratic-leaning than the registered voters who turned out. In 2020 most of your younger “Democrats” aren’t. They hate Trump more than they hate you, but they’re not part of your party. They’d really like a third party, for change, but until then they’ve made it pretty clear they won’t vote for crappy candidates like you (or Hillary) just because Rachel Maddow scolds them. They told you all, twice, they wanted Bernie and the party stiffed them.

More? You didn’t get any post-convention bounce, not even with both Obamas. Nice try with Kamala, by the way, but the only people who vote based on the VP choice are thinking you won’t make it past 100 days. And talk about a plan backfiring, research suggests the more Democrats message democracy is dead and Trump is going to win by cheating no matter what, the lower Democratic turnout will be. That’s on top of recent polls suggesting voter enthusiasm (which drives turnout) for you lags Trump in key battleground states. And you have to privately admit, Trump’s mantra about you—that Joe sent your jobs to China and your sons to war—cuts pretty deep across those all-important Midwestern states.

And that brings me to the favor I’m asking for. If you really lose, concede. Thank everyone, promise Kamala will be back fighting in 2024, and affirm the system worked. Don’t gin up a Konstitutional Krisis. If you really really have unambiguous proof of fraud, lay it all out in one splash, no weeks of leaks and hearings, and make sure it is clear enough all but the most committed ideologues have to admit you are right. You will save America. Because if the message is “burn it down” people just might.

Everybody sees what those around you are planning. Even you warned Trump will steal the election. Rep. James Clyburn said he believes the president “plans to install himself in some kind of emergency way to continue to hold onto office.” Hillary dictated you should not concede under any circumstances because “eventually I do believe he will win.” Her strategy for you is a lengthy legal battle after the election, a sue ’til your blue which envisions November 3 as only an opening act, followed by counts and recounts of mail-in ballots, followed by court challenges, all in hope of shifting public opinion toward not accepting the election.

Hillary made a good run at that four years ago, convincing a fair number of people her popular vote win meant the Electoral College didn’t count. But in the end she failed, Trump took office, and America slipped deeper into division. 

The poster child for being a Good Loser, Al Gore, is teeing it up for you as well. Gore believes the military will eventually have to remove Trump from office. That was the headline. But pay attention to Gore’s whole statement, the part when he said “there’s no intermediate step between a Supreme Court decision and violent revolution. You can always explore the option of dragging something out, tearing the country apart, mobilizing partisans against one another in the streets, but it is not a wise course for our country.” Gore of course is talking about Trump doing that, but I’m talking about you, Joe.

America can’t handle it so please don’t bring it on us. Don’t listen to the voices saying you have to save democracy by refusing to accept the election results. We are so divided that you refusing to go along with the vote, fanning the flames by claiming the popular vote is controlling, insisting racism lost you the election or otherwise playing to the hate could set off something that will be hard to control. It could ruin whatever confidence Americans have left in our system, flawed as it may be. You won’t inspire people, you will inflame them. Your opponent will fight a nasty campaign. Fight hard back. But when it is over, don’t fake losing, own losing. The critical tool for the ending of democracy is people’s conditioned readiness to believe it does not work anymore.

Joe, we’re both old enough to love the movie On the Waterfront, starring Marlon Brando at his most perfect. You remember the key scene, in the car with his mobster brother. Brando, a prize fighter who could have gone all the way, took a fall to make the mob money betting against him. Brando realizes giving in, doing what the dark forces wanted him to do even when he knew it was so wrong, ruined him. He made some money, sure. But he knew he was a bum, a palooka, when he maybe could’ve had class, could have been somebody.

Leave Hillary and Stacey Abrams in the history books as bitter losers. Fight your fight, Joe, and then do the right thing for yourself, your legacy, for America.

 


Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.

 

 

Read more:

 

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/author/peter-van-buren/

 

 

 

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cabbage on her breast...

Michelle Obama said there have been times when she wanted to “push Barack out of the window” and that marriage should be approached like picking a basketball team in a frank discussion about relationships.

In the latest episode of her Spotify podcast, the former first lady said young couples, especially when they have small children, struggle to deal with tiredness, stress and sharing roles and they give up on their relationship. 

“You’ve got to know that there are going to be times, long periods of time, when you can’t stand each other... I said it, you know, on the book tour, as a joke,” she said, in conversation with television host Conan O’Brien.

“There were times that I wanted to push Barack out of the window, right. And I say that, because it’s like you’ve got to know the feelings will be intense. But that doesn’t mean you quit. And these periods can last a long time. They can last years.” 

Because people do not talk about the difficult periods, she said often young couples want to give up when they face difficulties because “they think they’re broken”. 

She added: “I just want to say, look, if that breaks a marriage, then Barack and I have been broken off and on, throughout our marriage, but we have a very strong marriage. And if I had given up on it, if I had walked away from it, in those tough times, then I would’ve missed all the beauty, that was there as well.” 

The couple, who met in 1989, will celebrate their 28th wedding anniversary next month.

If people went into marriage as if they were picking their basketball team she believes it would lead to “better marriages”.

“Because if you’re looking at a team, the people you want to win with, then number one you want everybody on your team to be strong... If we looked at marriage as a real team, you want your teammate to be a winner, then you want LeBron [James, the LA Lakers star].” 

After having fertility issues, she said she was ready when they had Sasha and Malia, now 19 and 22, but that having children dramatically changed their dynamic. “I would not trade them in, but whew, they can mess up a marriage.” 

She said becoming a mother was the first time that she felt “the sting of gender roles” in their marriage. 

“I had to be there, and I had to go, and it was my body, and my husband was still sort of boppin’ around, living his life... the resentment starts to build up, or it started to, it’s like well, what happened to the unit, what happened to my best friend? What happened to my buddy, who’s, at the gym? It’s like, how the hell are you at the gym? You know, dude... I’ve got cabbage on my breast.” 

 

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/07/michelle-obama-barack-marriage-relationships

 

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