Tag: politics

An open letter to Democrats

ESR writes one in the faint hope they will react reasonably and learn from their unexpected defeat:

Donald Trump’s victory reads to me like a realignment election, a historic break with the way interest and demographic groups have behaved in the U.S. in my lifetime. Yet, Democrats, you so far seem to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Indeed, if I were Donald Trump I would be cackling with glee at your post-election behavior, which seems ideally calculated to lock Trump in for a second term before he has been sworn in for the first.

Stop this. Your country needs you. I’m not joking and I’m not concern-trolling. The wailing and the gnashing of teeth and the denial of reality have to end. In the rest of this essay I’m not going to talk about right and wrong and ideology, I’m going to talk about the brutal practical politics of what you have to do to climb out of the hole you are in.

We need to start with an unsparing assessment of that hole.

First, your ability to assemble a broad-based national coalition has collapsed. Do not be fooled into thinking otherwise by your popular vote “win”; that majority came entirely from the West Coast metroplex and disguises a large-scale collapse in popular support everywhere else in the U.S. Trump even achieved 30-40% support in blue states where he didn’t spend any money.

County-by-county psephological maps show that your base is now confined to two major coastal enclaves and a handful of university towns. Only 4 of 50 states have both a Democratic-controlled legislature and a Democratic governor. In 2018 that regionalization is going to get worse, not better; you will be defending 25 seats in areas where Trump took the popular vote, while the Republicans have to defend only 8 where Clinton won.

Your party leadership is geriatric, decades older than the average for their Republican counterparts. Years of steady losses at state level, masked by the personal popularity of Barack Obama, have left you without a bench to speak of – little young talent and basically no seasoned Presidential timber under retirement age. The fact that Joseph Biden, who will be 78 for the next Election Day, is being seriously mooted as the next Democratic candidate, speaks volumes – none of them good.

Your ideological lock on the elite media and show business has flipped from a powerful asset to a liability. Trump campaigned against that lock and won; his tactics can be and will be replicated. Worse, a self-created media bubble insulated you from grasping the actual concerns of the American public so completely that you didn’t realize the shit you were in until election night.

There is considerably more, all of which will be completely lost on Democrats wailing about Russian hackers, Putin, incest, racists, and Nazis.

Encouraging the others

Sorry, Jack, no seat for you at the table:

As we reported earlier, Trump sat down with top tech executives, including several of his sharpest critics, to mend fences after a divisive election in which virtually all of Silicon Valley backed Hillary Clinton. Trump was heading into hostile territory – with the exception of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley shunned the New York billionaire during the presidential campaign, throwing their weight behind his Democratic rival Clinton.

The tech talks, convened by Trump, bought together numerous CEOs such as Tim Cook of Apple, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Larry Page of Alphabet (Google) and Brian Krzanich of Intel, among others. In addition to Trump nemesis Jeff Bezos, also on the guest list are Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and Oracle chief executive Safra Catz.

We now know the answer why Dorsey was MIA: according to Politico, Twitter was told it was “bounced” from Wednesday’s meeting between tech executives and President-elect Donald Trump in retribution for refusing during the campaign to allow an emoji version of the hashtag #CrookedHillary, according to a source close to the situation.

Play fair or be frozen out. The God-Emperor hasn’t even Ascended yet and he’s already laying down the law. It’s going to be interesting to see how the Trump administration wields the IRS once it assumes control.

And, in the meantime:

Officials at FBI headquarters instructed its New York field office to continue its corruption investigation into the Clinton Foundation following the election of Republican candidate Donald Trump, according to a former senior law enforcement official.

The instructions ordered agents to “go forward” with their ongoing inquiry into the Clinton Foundation which is focusing on issues of corruption and money laundering, according to the source.

“There were no instructions to shut it down, to discontinue or to stand down on the investigation, but to continue its work,” the former official told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview.

Mailvox: recount and consequences

Apparently the Michigan recount is pulling back the veil on Democrat vote fraud. An email from an anonymous insider.

People have known for years that Democrat-controlled Detroit has been rigging elections. During the Bush/Kerry election they had GOP poll watchers arrested and ran up 100 percent voter turnouts. It was so bad the Federal judges had to allow voter ID laws they had been blocking for years to take effect in Michigan.

The Hillary/Jill recount didn’t help Hillary, but it has hurt the Democrats’ reputations and may hurt them badly going forward. The count has been stopped but the state has now ordered an audit as to how 20 Democrat-controlled locations had a lot more Hillary votes than voters.

We use drivers license scans now for a computer record poll book, so they know how many voted. The worst location had 300 Hillary votes cast by 50 voters.

As the Alt-Right is demonstrating, all that is necessary for the Right to win is to show up and fight. Who would have imagined that anyone could come up with a strategy more effective than rolling over and playing dead?

Ignoring the irrelevant

The Trump Presidency has been amazing, and the God-Emperor hasn’t even ascended to the Cherry Blossom Throne yet. Now he’s ignoring and delegitimizing the EU, and correctly so, since it’s neither a state nor a government:

Europe WHO? Trump’s snub to Brussels as he names Britain but NOT the EU among key allies

DONALD TRUMP delivered a major snub to the beleaguered European Union today in a further sign of the marginal role Brussels can expect to play in his foreign policy plans.Mr Trump was a frequent critic of the beleaguered bloc during his campaign to become the leader of the Western world, and has described his shock White House victory as “Brexit plus, plus, plus”.

But he conspicuously failed to mention a single EU state in his roll call of global players, further indicating that relations with the European Union will be low down on the new US administration’s list of priorities.

And responding to media reports criticising his contact with global leaders today, the billionaire tycoon hit back: “I have received and taken calls from many foreign leaders…Russia, UK, China, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and more. I am always available to them.”

His pointed snub to EU member states will send further shivers down the collective spine of Europe’s elite, which is scrambling to formulate an effective response to the populist uprising taking place across the globe.

In particular it represents the huge reversal of fortunes facing Germany, coming just days after outgoing President Barack Obama praised Chancellor Angela Merkel as his “closest ally”.

And it reaffirms that Britain will be a key ally to the self-avowed anglophile’s new administration, coming a week after eyebrows were raised when he placed Theresa May 10th on his initial ring-round of international leaders.

Stunned European Union chiefs have been thrown into panic mode since Mr Trump’s election to the globe’s most powerful post, issuing a series of garbled and contradictory statements as they watch the cosy EU-US relations built up under Mr Obama crumble before their eyes.

The EU already lacks democratic legitimacy. If the God-Emperor continues to delegitimize it and its member-states, it will crumble faster than the Soviet Union. I’m starting to think there is a very good chance that the God-Emperor is going to pull the US out of NATO, which would serve as a sufficient trigger for the fall of the fraudulent Brussels-based Euro elite.

Tillerson for Secretary of State

Chuck Johnson and company score a reporting coup:

ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson is set to be nominated for the position of Secretary of State on Tuesday, according to a source close to the highest levels of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s transition team. The source tells GotNews that Trump-hating failed presidential candidate Mitt Romney is “not going to get it,” while Tillerson’s chances of being nominated are “100%.”

The public announcement of Tillerson’s nomination will come Tuesday, according to the source.

Tillerson is the chairman and president of ExxonMobil and has been CEO for nearly 11 years. He worked his way up to the top post since joining the company in 1975 as an engineer.

ExxonMobil is a multinational oil and gas corporation and one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world.

Tillerson was called the “worst Secretary of State contender” by The Washington Post for his and his company’s ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

I have no idea if it’s true or not, and I know literally nothing about Tillerson, but if the Jeff Bezos blog hates him, he can’t be all bad.

One leftist complains: “If Tillerson pick is accurate, Trump’s path is now clear. Corporate statism combined with aggressive white Christian supremacy.”

Sounds pretty good to me, so long as the corporate statism is corporate nationalism.

Let’s just be friends

Rudy Giuliani will not serve in the God-Emperor Ascendant’s administration. And that’s probably just as well:

Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor, will not serve  in a Trump White House, it was announced Friday afternoon. Sources told NBC and CNN that Donald Trump told the former New York City mayor he wasn’t getting the job. Trump said in a statement Friday afternoon that Giuliani told him on November 29 that he no longer wanted to be considered.

The Trump statement said: ‘President-elect Donald J. Trump today announced that during a meeting with former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani held on November 29, 2016, Mayor Giuliani removed his name from consideration for a position in the new administration.’

Giuliani surfaced shortly after the statement was published to tell Fox News he wanted to serve in the cabinet ‘but not that much’. ‘I went through the entire vetting process,’ he said. ‘None of them [his business dealings] would amount to even a conflict of interest.’

Asked if he was bitter he said: ‘Not at all. I’m a very happy man. Donald – sorry President-elect Trump – remains one of my closest friends. I’ll go to the Army Navy game with him tomorrow.’

It increasingly looks like it will be Dana Rohrabacher for Secretary of State, which would be vastly preferable to the selection of the neocon favorite, the oft-mentioned, never-selected John Bolton. But I’m not terribly concerned about it either way. One thing we can be sure of is that the God-Emperor Ascendant will not hesitate to remove any Cabinet member who insists on playing his own game rather than following orders.

The media has been aghast at the number of former military men in the Trump administration, but I don’t see how that is even remotely surprising. Say what you will about US generals, but even the most well-scented perfumed princes are adept at effectively following orders.

Complete failure

Even the mainstream media is finally giving up on Saint Obama:

There’s no other way to describe it. Every December, Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post picks the biggest political loser of the past year. In 2013, Cillizza’s selection was Barack Obama. He cited the botched rollout of Healthcare.gov, the NSA domestic-surveillance scandal, the IRS’s targeting of tea-party groups, and the continuing questions about the administration’s actions before, during, and after the attack on Americans in Benghazi.

In 2014, Cillizza’s selection was Obama, again. The midterm elections went abysmally for Democrats, the threat of ISIS became much clearer, Russia moved into Ukraine, and former CIA director and secretary of defense Leon Panetta painted an unflattering portrait of the president’s leadership in his memoirs.

In 2015, Cillizza picked two co-“winners,” Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. The reasons were obvious. By December 2015, it was clear Bush’s odds of winning the nomination were small and shrinking quickly. Clinton, meanwhile, looked likely to emerge bloodied from the Democratic primaries after a tougher-than-expected fight with Bernie Sanders.

This year, Cillizza assessed the surprising post-election political landscape and selected “The Democrats”:

The Democrats may be effectively locked out of power in all three branches of government for years. At the state level, after last month’s elections, they’ll control only 16 governorships and 13 legislatures. This year, punctuated by Hillary Clinton’s loss, exposed the remarkably shallow depth of the Democratic bench. The size of the Republican primary field — for which the GOP was relentlessly mocked — was also a sign of the party’s health up and down the ballot. Democrats simply didn’t have the political talent to put forward 17 candidates (or even seven). That’s partly because there’s been limited opportunity to move up in the leadership ranks. Pelosi (Calif.) and Reps. Steny H. Hoyer (Md.) and James E. Clyburn (S.C) have had a death grip on the party’s top congressional slots for a very long time. It’s also partly because the Democratic farm system is hurting. 

Lined up one after another, Cillizza’s picks create a broader narrative: President Obama’s second term has been a terrible failure for the country.

It’s actually hard to say which has been worse, Obama’s domestic policy or his foreign policy.

The boomerang concept

French Socialists quite clearly don’t understand how their actions in the National Assembly are likely to come back to haunt them before too many years have passed, if the Senate doesn’t have the sense to reel them in:

The French National Assembly has voted to approve a bill that would outlaw some pro-life websites. The Socialist government wants to criminalise sites which it says “exert psychological or moral pressure” on women not to abort. The proposed offence would be punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment and a €30,000 fine.

Archbishop Georges Pontier of Marseille, president of the French bishops’ conference, has written to President François Hollande expressing his concern about the bill. Archbishop Pontier urged Hollande to not allow the bill’s passage, calling it a “serious infringement of democratic principles”.

French law already prevents pro-lifers from demonstrating outside abortion clinics. Supporters of the bill argue that pro-life tactics have now moved online and must be stopped.

The bill will now need to pass through the French senate, which blocked the legislation earlier this year.

Dominique Tian, MP for Les Républicains, said there was a “very heavy atmosphere in parliament” and accused the government of “attacking freedom of expression”. He said the government’s proposals were “dangerous for democracy and probably anti-constitutional”, and that his party would do all it could to stop them.

I mean, it’s not like such a law would ever be used to criminalize sites that advocate alternative sexual preferences, or practices, or for that matter, Marxian economics, right? Now, I understand the principle of MPAI and I know that socialists tend to have a hard time anticipating logical consequences, but this is indicative of a short time-preference to an extent one seldom sees outside of primitive tribes that can’t count to five.

So put him in charge!

I think he should have accepted it, mostly because Trump will end up firing a neocon who doesn’t abide by his policies as directed within months, if not weeks:

Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) was offered the Deputy Secretary of State position by President-elect Donald J. Trump’s transition team, but declined because he “could not support a Secretary of State that didn’t have Trump’s policies”, according to a source with intimate knowledge of the process.

The source told GotNews that Rohrabacher, who was being considered for the Secretary of State post, refused to serve under a Secretary who did not align with Donald Trump’s foreign policy views.

Rohrabacher, an “outspoken Trump enthusiast” and long-serving member of the House called “Putin’s favorite congressman” for his pro-peace views, stands out among the other potential picks for head of the State Department, such as Trump-hating failed presidential candidate Mitt Romney, gun-grabbing classified info leaker David Petraeus, and neoconservative warmonger John Bolton.

The Deputy Secretary of State position is currently filled by Obama’s Tony Blinken, who was appointed in 2015. The Deputy Secretary of State is the chief assistant to the Secretary and replaces them as Acting Secretary in the case of death or other emergency.

Rohrabacher evidently chose not to take his chances and risk serving under a conventional establishment Secretary of State with pro-war, anti-Trump foreign policy views, such as Mitt Romney, John Bolton, or David Petraeus.

Rudy Giuliani, another contender for the post, was exclusively revealed by GotNews to have failed his own vetting process, likely due to his recent foreign lobbying. Giuliani is no longer in the race.

Then again, perhaps Trump will just give him the top spot.

Making war great again

The God-Emperor Ascendant chooses Mad Dog Mattis for Defense:

President-elect Donald Trump has chosen retired Marine Gen. James N. Mattis to be secretary of defense, nominating a former senior military officer who led operations across the Middle East to run the Pentagon less than four years after he hung up his uniform, according to people familiar with the decision.

To take the job, Mattis will need Congress to pass new legislation to bypass a federal law that states secretaries of defense must not have been on active duty in the previous seven years. Congress has granted a similar exception just once, when Gen. George C. Marshall was appointed to the job in 1950.

An announcement is likely by early next week, according to the people familiar with the decision. Mattis declined to comment. Spokespersons for Trump’s transition team did not respond to requests for comment.

Mattis, 66, retired as the chief of U.S. Central Command in spring 2013 after serving more than four decades in the Marine Corps. He is known as one of the most influential military leaders of his generation, serving as a strategic thinker while occasionally drawing rebukes for his aggressive talk. Since retiring, he has served as a consultant and as a visiting fellow with the Hoover Institution, a think tank at Stanford University.

Once more, Donald Trump exceeds expectations. It will be good to see a genuine strategist who understands war and is capable of riding herd on the neocons and their insane, ignorant fantasies in a position of overseeing the military.

One hopes this will bring an end to the lunacy that has pervaded the Pentagon since 2001.

The best thing about Trump’s selections is that he clearly has a penchant for self-confident men who are not inclined to be influenced by the vagaries and narratives of the media.

To gain some insight into Mattis’s thinking, it’s worth reading A New American Grand Strategy, a piece he wrote for the Hoover Institute:

The world is awash in change. The international order, so painstakingly put together by the greatest generation coming home from mankind’s bloodiest conflict, is under increasing stress. It was created with elements we take for granted: the United Nations, NATO, the Marshall Plan, Bretton Woods and more. The constructed order reflected the wisdom of those who recognized no nation lived as an island and we needed new ways to deal with challenges that for better or worse impacted all nations. Like it or not, today we are part of this larger world and must carry out our part. We cannot wait for problems to arrive here or it will be too late; rather we must remain strongly engaged in this complex world.

The international order built on the state system is not self-sustaining. It demands tending by an America that leads wisely, standing unapologetically for the freedoms each of us in this room have enjoyed. The hearing today addresses the need for America to adapt to changing circumstances, to come out now from its reactive crouch and to take a firm strategic stance in defense of our values.

While we recognize that we owe future generations the same freedoms we enjoy, the challenge lies in how to carry out our responsibility. We have lived too long now in a strategy-free mode.

To do so America needs a refreshed national strategy.

Sure, some of the language he uses is enough to make one reflexively reach for one’s pistol and scan for neocons. But the salient point is that what the USA has been doing since the end of the Cold War IS NOT VIABLE. And the fact that we “must remain strongly engaged in this complex world” is not a prescription, it is an accurate observation.

He doesn’t say what the nature of that engagement is. And, more reassuringly, there are these comments:

  • We know that the “foreseeable future” is not foreseeable; our review must incorporate unpredictability, recognizing risk while avoiding gambling with our nation’s security.Incorporating the broadest issues in its assessments, Congress should consider what we must do if the national debt is assessed to be the biggest national security threat we face.
  • Strategy connects ends, ways and means. With less military available, we must reduce our appetite for using it. Absent growing our military, there must come a time when moral outrage, serious humanitarian plight, or lesser threats cannot be militarily addressed.  Prioritization is needed if we are to remain capable of the most critical mission for which we have a military: to fight on short notice and defend the country.

If nothing else, at least he’s asking some of the right questions.