James Gillen

Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn
World serves its own needs
Don’t mis-serve your own needs
Speed it up a notch, speed, grunt, no, strength
The ladder starts to clatter
With a fear of height, down, height
Wire in a fire, represent the seven games
And a government for hire in a combat site

REM, “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

So, now that an NPR world news story about Wuhan, China has pretty much transformed the world in about a month, let me give you my personal experience with the coronavirus scare.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been experiencing notable shortness of breath, not just “fat guy out of shape” shortness of breath but “if I stand up or walk for any period of time I get headaches and almost black out” shortness of breath. This was accompanied by various aches, not just headaches. And yet when I took my temperature, it was usually under 99 degrees and often under 98. And while I haven’t traveled and have no reason to believe I was in contact with a coronavirus case, I fit several of the risk factors: Over 50? Check. Existing respiratory issues? Check. Other pre-existing conditions? Check!

It got bad enough on Tuesday morning to where I politely asked my manager to let me take the rest of the day off – which because of the existing scare they freely granted – and I ended up spending the rest of the day trying, and failing, to get a coronavirus test.

I went straight to my doctor’s office. They told me they don’t do the test and referred me to Southern Nevada Health District. I couldn’t reach anybody on their phone line (for some reason). So I drove all the way out there, and even though there are big signs above the desk saying that if you’re experiencing respiratory issues to let someone on staff know, when I explained the situation they told me I had to get diagnosed by my doctor first. They gave me a handout list of various clinics, but when I went to the one in my area, they told me they don’t take my insurance.

I was told by my employer that Quest Diagnostics does have a test, and when I read their site it said that they don’t do the test directly for patients but rather collect samples from the doctor’s office. So I called my office again, and scheduled an appointment for Wednesday. And when I did, I was told by them that they don’t actually have a coronavirus program set up but they’re supposed to be doing that eventually. So I asked to be examined for what I did have, and since I have no fever, swelling or communicable issues, I was told that I am suffering an exacerbation of my existing asthma. I was already prescribed an inhaler which I normally don’t need, but I’ve used it more in the past five days than I have in the past five months. I did get a five-day prescription of Prednisone and Azithromycin, which have not solved my issue completely but made it less intense.

And if this is where I am WITH insurance, imagine what it’s like in the rest of the country, such as the New York school districts that stay open because otherwise kids wouldn’t have lunch, or with my friend who has his own diabetes, respiratory problems, and heart disease, and who is on public assistance and needs to travel everywhere on the bus.

The problem with coronavirus (COVID-19) is that even if more people have died from the flu (which seems to be no big deal, apparently) the coronavirus is potentially more threatening, largely because it takes longer to manifest and it is therefore easier for asymptomatic people to spread the virus.

This is what I got this week when I searched “are covid 19 tests available”:

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)

“CDC has developed a new laboratory test kit for use in testing patient specimens for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes COVID-19. The test kit is called the “Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time Reverse Transcriptase (RT)-PCR Diagnostic Panel.” It is intended for use with the Applied Biosystems 7500 Fast DX Real-Time PCR Instrument with SDS 1.4 software. This test is intended for use with upper and lower respiratory specimens collected from persons who meet CDC criteria for COVID-19 testing. CDC’s test kit is intended for use by laboratories designated by CDC as qualified, and in the United States, certified under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) to perform high complexity tests.

On Monday, February 3, 2020, CDC submitted an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) package to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in order to expedite FDA permitted use of the CDC diagnostic panel in the United States. The EUA process enables FDA to consider and authorize the use of unapproved, but potentially life-saving medical or diagnostic products during a public health emergency. The U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services declared the SARS-CoV-2 virus a U.S. public health emergency on Friday, January 31, 2020. FDA issued the EUA on February 4, 2020. IRR began distribution of the test kits to states, but shortly thereafter performance issues were identified related to a problem in the manufacturing of one of the reagents which led to laboratories not being able to verify the test performance. CDC is remanufacturing the reagents with more robust quality control measures. New tests will be distributed once this issue has been addressed. CDC continues to perform initial and confirmatory testing.

Serology Test for COVID-19

CDC is working to develop a new laboratory test to assist with efforts to determine how much of the U.S. population has been exposed to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes COVID-19.

The serology test will look for the presence of antibodies, which are specific proteins made in response to infections. Antibodies can be found in the blood and in other tissues of those who are tested after infection. The antibodies detected by this test indicate that a person had an immune response to SARS-CoV-2, whether symptoms developed from infection or the infection was asymptomatic. Antibody test results are important in detecting infections with few or no symptoms.

Initial work to develop a serology test for SARS-CoV-2 is underway at CDC. In order to develop the test, CDC needs blood samples from people who had COVID-19 at least 21 days after their symptoms first started. Researchers are currently working to develop the basic parameters for the test, which will be refined as more samples become available. Once the test is developed, CDC will need additional samples to evaluate whether the test works as intended.”

Short answer: NO.

What we are witnessing is on one hand a challenge to libertarian premises and on the other hand a justification of them. On one hand, we can see that a coordinated response to public crises is necessary, or at least would prevent a lot of unnecessary suffering and death. On the other hand we can see that a coordinated government is not what we have, and we now know the consequences of not only handing over government to the worst possible people, but depending on a government that was not that dependable in the first place.

The people of the Soviet Union were no less in need of a wise hand during the Chernobyl disaster, and that is what they did not have. And while China is praised in some quarters for taking harsh but necessary measures to contain the virus in the short term, and the spread in Wuhan itself now seems to be contained, the Communist Chinese had at first downplayed the initial reports, including from one Wuhan doctor who later died of the virus. And as the disease left China, it had arguably its worst effect in Iran, where several government officials have turned out to be infected, or killed, because they were so determined to downplay the seriousness of the outbreak that they did not take their own precautions and engaged in casual contact with patients.

(Side joke: What’s the difference between the US and Iran? One country is technically a democratic republic but is actually run by a cabal of old fundamentalist whackjobs who want to start World War III in hopes that the Messiah will appear in the Middle East. The other is Iran.)

And the American apocalypse cult that used to be a main political party has been making much the same public front, with its Leader frequently shaking hands, touching mics and getting exposed to various people who have since tested positive for coronavirus.

Yet the designated official “anti-socialist” and “pro-business” party has been the primary barrier to private efforts to address epidemics through its control of government, even as it uses policy to deliberately hamper public efforts at disease control. There was an article in The American Conservative (no less) pointing out that before Trump took over, the US Army decided to help kickstart funding of development of a Zika virus vaccine to be licensed for commercial use, working with manufacturer Sanofi. However Health and Human Services withdrew its commitment to the project once the virus began slowing down.

“In 2017, Eric Sagonowsky of FiercePharma reported that “the collaboration [between Sanofi and the government] had come under intense public and political scrutiny this year as critics demanded pricing guarantees if a commercial vaccine grew out of the taxpayer-funded research.” These pressure groups typically fail to mention the immense costs of bringing life-saving treatments to market due to an onerous Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approvals process. It can take manufacturers a decade and more than $2 billion to bring a medication to market, and excessive FDA testing requirements hinder patient access to care.

“Currently, hundreds of COVID-19 patients are being treated with the antiviral drug called Remdesivir, which has had promising initial results but is not yet FDA approved. While the agency is allowing seriously ill patients to take the medication through their “compassionate use” program, this is only permitted on a limited, last-resort basis, and the drug remains unavailable to most of the population. Producers of novel treatments may need to wait months to bring life-saving therapies to market and face the real risk of getting FDA rejection letters if, say, new evidence were to come to light on the drug’s efficacy after the application was submitted.”

Another piece, on Reason Magazine’s site: “As the Times reports, Seattle infectious disease expert Dr. Helen Chu had, by January, collected a huge number of nasal swabs from local residents who were experiencing symptoms as part of a research project on flu. She proposed, to federal and state officials, testing those samples for coronavirus infections. As the Times reports, the CDC told Chu and her team that they could not test the samples unless their laboratory test was approved by the FDA. The FDA refused to approve Chu’s test on the grounds that her lab, according to the Times, “was not certified as a clinical laboratory under regulations established by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a process that could take months.”

“In the meantime, the CDC required that public health officials could only use the diagnostic test designed by the agency. That test released on February 5 turned out to be badly flawed. The CDC’s insistence on a top-down centralized testing regime greatly slowed down the process of disease detection as the infection rate was accelerating.”

And yet, when we knew that the Obama Administration had contained Ebola in the United States to two fatalities (both African patients treated in America), Trump’s advisor John Bolton closed the National Security Council’s task force on global pandemics and the Administration cut most Centers for Disease Control funding on pandemics. As the global situation became more serious and cases were announced in America, Trump continued to downplay the threat, fearing (correctly) that a public response would lead to a downturn in business, when business growth has been his main public justification for staying in office and running for re-election.

It has in fact been the business community at all levels that took the initiative in fighting coronavirus in America, weeks before the Trump Organization finally announced a national emergency. It has been businesses that closed buffets, closed athletic events, removed audiences from taped media programs, all to encourage social isolation in order to tamp down the spread of disease. This ought to make sense. As arrogant as the upper class might be, they still have to run businesses and address the current moment and weigh the consequences of one decision over another. Some have had to lay people off because they simply can’t afford the overhead. Others have decided to have some level of paid leave because they are trying to keep employees in expectation of recovery after the worst passes. Most businesses are assisting in social isolation because losing customers in the short term can reduce the chance of having fewer customers in the long term – either due to preventable deaths or the hit to reputation that comes with customers knowing that the businesses could have helped prevent spread of disease and refused to do so. Businesses by and large deal in a world of consequences. Governments don’t have to.

The Trump Administration is what you get when you combine class privilege with the government’s monopoly on force. Trump himself is the natural result of a system that pretends to capitalism but actually relies on social capital – what Randians would call “pull” and we in Las Vegas call “juice” – in order to avoid the checks and balances that are supposed to be inherent in the capitalist system, in much the same way that party solidarity has destroyed the checks and balances written into the Constitution. Trump has never actually been the CEO of a corporation, because he has never run an incorporated business. The Trump Organization is a group of entities of which Donald Trump is the sole or principal owner. For that very reason, its financial returns are private. The Trump Organization is a family outfit, in every sense that applies. Trump has never been responsible to shareholders. Trump has a record of stiffing his creditors when his bills come up, raising the question of exactly how profitable and healthy his businesses are. And yet, someone more powerful has always covered his tab – his Daddy, Roy Cohn, his friends in government, Deutsche Bank, Vladimir Putin – and he’s always been able to avoid the consequences of his own mistakes. Trump’s survival up to this point is a measure of how the system traffics in deceit, and in retrospect, his quest for political power makes sense as a drive to the only position that would make his conduct literally unimpeachable.

When such a person is elected President of the United States, the present moment is what you ought to expect.

When Senator Lamar Alexander reviewed the impeachment case and made it perfectly clear that he knew how guilty Trump was and also made it perfectly clear that in professional solidarity he and the other members of the Party of Trump refused to hold their Leader accountable, I and many other people observed at that time that everything that would happen to America from that point on would be primarily their fault.

Now more than ever.

Seriously, what the fuck? MSDNC fired its handsy, Irish Catholic gaffe machine this week, why couldn’t the actual Democratic Party?

We know the story by now: Joe Biden was left for dead. He put all his chips on South Carolina. But (largely thanks to veteran congressman Jim Clyburn) the state came out for him in a big way, and everyone else’s vote take was underwhelming. So Pete Buttigieg dropped out and endorsed Biden. And then Amy Klobuchar, because Amy will not be one-upped by Pete on anything. And then Monday, Biden was at a Texas rally and got a surprise endorsement from Beto O’Rourke, complete with gratuitous Spanglish.

And Biden went on to win not only the states he was expected to win, but Texas, where Bernie Sanders was polling strong, and Minnesota, where Klobuchar’s endorsement helped break Sanders’ previous lead. (Don’t say I never gave Amy Klobuchar credit for anything.)

After Nevada, Bernie Sanders was the candidate to beat, but Biden performed so much better than expected this week that he actually overtook Sanders’ delegate lead. Now a veteran Democratic pollster says, “It’s done unless Joe makes some horrible mistake.”

Pfft. What are the odds of that?

Biden: Can at least have credit for staying power. His strategy all this time (conscious or not) is that that lots of Americans like the idea of Donald Trump – the straight-talking, politically incorrect populist – but unlike his cultists, realize he’s a Russian gimp who makes Biden look like Bill Nye the Science Guy. And he conveys himself in a positive way that neither Trump nor Sanders do. A point I kept hearing over the weekend after South Carolina is that Biden is a kind man, a decent man. Well, yes. He would certainly be a welcome change of pace after four years of Andrew “Dice” Trump.

(Seriously, I thought Trump was going to start his last State of the Union speech with ‘I got my tongue up Nancy Pelosi’s ass, see?’)

Biden also has the same thing that Hillary Clinton had in 2016 that sank Sanders the last time: party backing. It matters tremendously that everyone came out to endorse Biden, and to do so when they did. Exit polls indicated that a lot of Super Tuesday voters made their decision for Biden after his South Carolina victory and party endorsements.

I would have no problem voting for Joe Biden. But he’s still vulnerable. Banana Republicans are still trying to hang Hunter Biden over him. The same people who pretend Trump has no mental problems will pick on every mistake Biden makes (and it’s a matter of WHEN and how MUCH, not if). And his main problem remains his attitude that we can just wind back the clock four years and the Republicans will be a normal party again, which they haven’t been for quite some time. But as I’d said, the broader picture is that if the Democratic Party is settling in behind Joe, he at least has a very strong back bench to help him, including people who are not only more on the ball but more willing to accept that the political reality of our “two” party system has irrevocably changed, and will act accordingly. People like Pete Buttigieg. I very much got the impression that in the last few days of campaign appearances, Joe was letting Pete try out for the role of Vice President, which would make him a good auxiliary brain. Of course I’m sure that would make “progressives” hate him and Biden all the more.

Warren: The fact that Elizabeth Warren has not done as well as a lot of people, including me, thought she would has itself been the source of some media discussion. The best comment on it being from Reason Magazine: “Indeed, the media stumped for Warren so hard that Vox‘s Matt Yglesias recently had to write a post explaining to people why she was losing “even if all your friends love her.” By your friends, he meant friends of people like you, a reader of Vox.“

So – you’re convinced that your candidate is the objectively best choice for president and you just have to get around the trivial matter that the entire rest of the country doesn’t agree?

Hi. Welcome to the Libertarian Party.

There have been several pre-post-mortems of Warren’s campaign in the media, and they usually come to the common point that by emphasizing “progressive” politics while at the same time going back on some pledges – like not taking PAC money – Warren has alienated both progressives and mainstream Democrats rather than being a point of common agreement between the two camps. This means that any hope of her riding in as a compromise candidate to a brokered convention is probably futile, since that would require her to have a base that would take her as a second choice – when she didn’t even place second in her home state of Massachusetts.

I like Elizabeth Warren. I think Warren is a perfectly good politician and would make a fine president. I just don’t see anybody voting for her.

Sanders: Sanders is hardly beaten. But he’s in trouble. David Faris had a pretty good summary in The Week Wednesday. He started, as many analyses do, pointing out Bernie’s colossal mistake in praising Cuba’s education program, however qualified that praise may be.

Look, praising the Soviet legacy is not an unforgivable sin in America. Just look at Jane Fonda. Or Donald Trump. But Trump notwithstanding, that’s not a guarantee of political success. Socialists are being too cute by half if they think they can create a distinction between “good” socialism in Canada and Europe and “bad” socialism in communist countries, and then collapse that distinction by defending communist Cuba and socialist Venezuela. For one thing, what you have with Left parties in Canada and Europe is simply a more distributionist model of capitalism, because you cannot have the benefits of “socialism” without a capitalist system. And that is because you cannot redistribute income if there is no income to redistribute. That requires profit motive, that requires surplus value, that requires capitalism. And as I’ve said already, if you can point to other countries (including Costa Rica) that have welfare systems and social programs without putting priests and gays in prison, why do you not point to those countries as examples of success instead of Cuba? It makes the rest of us think that the one-party tyranny is not a means to an end but the end in itself.

It’s exactly the sort of thing that makes mainstream liberal hysteria over Bernie seem justified. The fact that Bernie is still a better choice than the Putin-Trump ticket says less for Bernie and more against what used to be the Republican Party.

But Faris also points out Sanders’ several other strategic mistakes, notably the fact that he has failed to reach out to potential fellow-travelers as well as Biden has. It’s one reason Warren is still in the race. It all comes down to the idea that there are two very strong constituencies in the Democratic Party – the (temperamentally) conservative mainstream liberals and the “progressive” leftists, and they both have enough force to make things difficult for the winning nominee going into the general election. But some of that potential force that Bernistas bring to bear was undercut by the results of Super Tuesday. Nevada and California disproved the liberal canard that Bernie can’t win non-white votes. But however much he has gained with Hispanic voters, he still hasn’t appreciably improved among black voters, at least those above their 20s. And that leads to another issue. As Esquire put it, “The Bernie Sanders Youth Revolution Was Nowhere To Be Found On Super Tuesday.” Voter turnout did increase over previous primaries, but mostly with the old white and black people who favored Biden. For example, Bernie’s percentage of the youth vote in Virginia went from 69 percent in 2016 to 57 percent this week. And this calls the best bluff that the Sanders wing has. It was thought that if Sanders was strong enough at the Democratic National Convention and party insiders pulled tricks to get a white-horse candidate to replace him, that huge voter base would just stay home and hand the election to Trump. Now if Bernistas say that they’re not going to vote in November, mainstream Democrats can just say, “Well, it’s not like you’re voting now.”

Bloomberg: As a lot of people predicted, Bloomberg dropped out after Tuesday. Not only that, he did endorse Biden, which on paper gives him a lot more campaign money. This is another strategic mistake of Sanders, who said he wouldn’t take Bloomberg’s support if he wins the nomination. But on the whole, Bloomberg’s campaign makes socialism look better than capitalism, because he proved you don’t need to be a government bureaucrat to spend hundreds of millions on a political vanity project that won’t do anything good for anybody.

Ironically, it also disproved Sanders’ central thesis that big money is the central focus of politics, since not only did his small-donor base make him competitive this year and 2016, both he and Bloomberg dwarfed Biden’s campaign spending and Biden still won most of the Tuesday states.

But really, the night was best summed up by anchor-in-exile Brian Williams on MSNBC, who made an off-hand remark to Rachel Maddow: “Perhaps if voting were central to our democracy, we’d be good at it.”

“On the shoals of roast beef and apple pie, all socialist utopias flounder.”

-Werner Sombart

As Bernie Sanders becomes more and more popular and apparently more likely to win the Democratic nomination – assuming Joe Biden’s campaign doesn’t catch up by Super Tuesday – I see the same kind of question popping up on Quora and other discussion sites. The question is something along the lines of “why has socialism become so popular?” or specifically “why has socialism become popular along millennials?”

Well, I’m a libertarian, and a confirmed anti-socialist, so I think I can answer the question. But it’s going to go into some detail. There are three broad answers as to why socialism is getting more popular.

Socialism has lost its power to scare.

For socialism to be a bad thing, it must be worse than the system we have. “Conservatives” and most libertarians will point to Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela as an example of where socialism will lead. We will say, “If we went to a socialized healthcare system, the government would be in charge, we wouldn’t have any choices, and with only one provider, the government would be rationing urgent procedures!” And millennials will look at us and go, “Oh. You mean like what we have NOW?”

What we have is itself mandated by Big Government. During World War II, the federal government instituted wage and price controls and then allowed employers to sponsor health insurance programs to compensate for the wage increases they were no longer allowed to offer. So, a huge part of our country is run on the basis of a wartime policy which no longer has a reason to exist. Like much else in the government. This second-hand socialism means that government doesn’t have to cover the costs of healthcare like the United Kingdom does, but it also means that individual insurance is mostly dependent on the employer, if the employer offers it at all. In this system, your only “free-market” choice is to switch jobs. And if you do, you don’t necessarily know what your healthcare plan is going to be. You also don’t know if your job gives you medical insurance after 90 days, or six months, or the beginning of the year. And even if you like your policy, you don’t know if the employer is going to go through negotiations and change the plan, or change the provider. And then you have to find out what prescriptions and providers are actually covered, often after the fact.

As John Oliver recently put it, “the American healthcare system gives you so many choices in how to get fucked, it is truly the Kama Sutra of healthcare.”

Not only that, the fact that the healthcare system is based on private insurance is another flaw. Among other things, it’s one of the reasons that employers do have to negotiate prices for coverage, because these are largely dictated by the insurance giants. I’ve gone over this before, but let me do it again: While the Affordable Care Act is considered the government’s most unacceptable advance of socialism by many right-wingers, Obama with the ACA was trying to save the insurance-company paradigm of healthcare.

The comparison to other forms of insurance comes up, but what it amounts to is that with most forms of insurance, there is a difference between the “risk pool” and the total number of policy payers. The risk pool is the number of people who might be expected to collect on a policy. You don’t expect to crash your car and need auto insurance the same month you start the policy. You don’t expect to collect on your life insurance policy as soon as you start it, and if you do, the insurance company may investigate your estate.

But with healthcare, since private insurance is expected to cover all healthcare, including preventative medicine, the risk pool is functionally identical to the pool paying in. You buy insurance because you EXPECT to collect on it as soon as you get it. Insurance companies cannot survive on this principle. Forget “healthcare is a human right” – it’s just economics. Which is where the insurance companies came up with the bogosity of “pre-existing conditions” so that people couldn’t get coverage on the basis of the very conditions they needed coverage for. Otherwise the insurance companies would not be profitable.

The Affordable Care Act solved this issue – sorta – by simply obliging everybody to buy insurance and expand the payer pool whether they wanted to or not. However this does not make healthcare actually affordable, because forcing everybody to buy a service does not automatically decrease prices and in fact gives business an incentive to increase them. But that was the “socialism” right-wingers object to. And that IS socialist BS when your choice is eliminated, but this was the only way the system could preserve the private standard of health coverage. With socialism.

But since the system is still based on insurance-company coverage, we are obliged to play by insurance company rules, for example, this wonderful concept called a deductible. It’s a little hard to explain, mainly because it’s hard to justify, but basically as a “cost control” some plans require you to take a deductible, let’s say $2500, so that most of your services have to be paid for out of pocket until you pass that threshold, and only then does the plan cover you. Which raises a question I have never gotten a sufficient answer to: If I’m paying for my medical care out of pocket as if I didn’t HAVE a policy until I pass this threshold, then what the fuck am I still paying premiums for until then???

If we’re defending that as capitalism versus a nationalized system, the difference between capitalism and what we have here is like this: If I want to get satellite TV, I may have to sign a 24-month commitment for the equipment, which is bogus in and of itself, but then I don’t HAVE to have satellite TV. And that’s a choice that a lot of people have made. You can switch from DirecTV to Dish, or to cable, and back, or just go to Netflix or streaming services and antenna.

But if I have type II diabetes or some other “pre-existing” condition that obliges me to get regular prescriptions or get sick and DIE, then I can’t just “cut the cord” on my insurance or switch to Netflix.

Like I said, I’m a libertarian. And the reason I switched to supporting national health care is on fiscal conservative grounds: The US spends more money (both public and private) on the health care system than any other developed nation (most of which have ‘socialized’ systems) AND gets worse results. And that’s because, unlike most capitalist endeavors, the system is not geared to consumer demand. It is a cartel to benefit the medical and pharmaceutical industries, and it is set up that way by both Big Government and Big Business. Comparing the free market to American healthcare is not like comparing apples to oranges, it’s like comparing apples to Cadillacs. Most people don’t need Cadillacs. Most people don’t even want Cadillacs. But if you can’t afford a Cadillac, you have other options for transportation. But if the government tells you you either have to buy a Cadillac or you go on foot, and you still can’t afford a Cadillac, you’re fucked.

And if that’s what you’re calling capitalism, you can’t be surprised that socialized medicine is getting popular.

Socialism has lost its point of contrast.

If we on the Right – using innumerable examples in history – can describe socialism as a collectivist system that destroys freedom, human rights and political choices, the Left has a counter for that: Just call their system “democratic” socialism! Depending on the person, this may be more or less disingenuous. After all, even Lenin described his system as democratic. But the real problem with “conservative” opposition to the socialist agenda is that if we are going to define socialism in terms of Soviet-style communism and illiberal politics, we can no longer say that conservatism is the opposite of that. Donald Trump’s signature policy, almost a fixation, is building a border wall. The only other modern politician who likes border walls served in the KGB in East Germany. The Banana Republican Party has abandoned not only its flirtation with libertarianism but fiscal conservatism itself to embrace deficits, tariffs, and then, subsidies to farmers to cover up the natural results of the tariffs. This is all defined by Trump himself as a “nationalist” agenda. The resemblance of “good” nationalism to “bad” (Soviet style) socialism is something that the Left could really use against Banana Republicans, but they won’t, because that would require “democratic socialists” to admit that any collectivism could be bad. It might be a bit much to say that fascism is synonymous with socialism, but there are common roots (at least with Mussolini) common goals, and some common elements.

In fact, if you divorce the Aryan-vs.-Jew mythology peculiar to Nazism from every other type of fascism, you’ll see that all fascism, even original Italian fascism, is nationalist socialism, that is, it uses socialist means towards nationalist and reactionary ends. If you think that the purpose of socialism is to benefit previously oppressed groups of people, of course you see fascism as the radical opposite. But if you see the goal as nationalizing the entire society towards a certain ideology, it definitely qualifies.

This even applies to leftist “real” socialism, if only by default and not ideology. The goal of Marxist socialism of course was to create a total class revolution, but in practical terms it only happened in the Russian Empire at first, and then mainly under conditions that orthodox Marxism did not hold to be ideal for changing the system. Because of this there was a real struggle in the early days of the Soviet Union between endorsing a world revolution or the idea (ultimately championed by Stalin) of creating “socialism in one country.” For obvious practical reasons (among them, losing to the Poles in the Polish-Soviet War) Stalin chose the latter path. This led to various nationalist measures to create a new “Soviet” identity under Russian culture, which involved crushing dissent in Ukraine and other areas. Until the Soviets won World War II, they were simply not able to export their view of the world across national borders, and so their political ideology, internationalist as it was, was practically limited to national ends.

The point is not whether leftists disagree with the assertion that Nazism is a type of socialism. Let’s say I agree with the assertion, although I would phrase it more that socialism is one method of nationalism. The problem is that the new Right presents the argument in a bad-faith way that you don’t have to be a leftist to figure out. To wit: If Socialism Is Bad, and Nazis Are The REAL Socialists, then why are “conservatives” emulating the Nazis?

You might say that what you’re endorsing isn’t Nazism, but why did the Trump Administration change immigration standards based on race, why is the Administration not wanting the public to know about detention policies that lead to the deaths of migrants, and why does the government actively turn away volunteer efforts to stop such people from dying?

Just as the new Right deliberately confuses the definitions of socialism and liberty, they have also conflated the definitions of “democracy” and “republic” so that stopping an agenda that is increasingly unpopular is deemed to be “thwarting the will of the people” – with “the people” apparently being only those people who support the agenda. When socialist Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said recently that the Electoral College should be abolished, Representative Dan Crenshaw (BR-Texas) responded, “We live in a republic, which means 51% of the population doesn’t get to boss around the other 49%.”

Quite so. But that raises the question: Why is it MORE fair for the 49 percent to boss around the other 51 percent?

What we now refer to as the conservatives claim to be defenders of freedom and democracy, but their idea of “democracy” is where a plurality of the most gullible and vicious gravitate to a demagogue because he validates their regressive opinions, so they allow him and his cronies to gang-rape the Constitution and loot the national piggy bank while the majority of Americans who knew better are apparently supposed to just sit and stew because Liberal Tears.

THAT’s what you’re calling democracy. And you wonder how socialism got popular.

Young people have no sense of perspective.

As the prospect of Bernie Sanders winning the Democratic nomination became more likely, lots of people – many of them Democrats – objected to Sanders’ previous support for hard-left movements around the world and even his recent defense of Castro Cuba’s education system. Leftist supporters act as though this isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a problem given that Sanders qualified his statement as not being a defense of the Cuban government in general.

Well yes, it IS a problem. And it’s that much more obvious because the same people who emphasize the differences between Leninist/Chavista socialism and democratic socialism are the same people who praise the Castro government and defend the Chavista government against any alternatives, such as, letting people vote for someone else.

But it comes down to the same factor as the other two points. We choose between the devil we know or the devil we don’t know. In 2016, people chose Trump because they didn’t like the “devil” (Democrats) that they knew. In 2020, people know Trump all too well but they don’t know much about socialism at all, either the “good” socialism that leftists endorse or the “bad” socialism that right-wingers emphasize in history. To choose A over B, or vice versa, and have that count as something other than an aesthetic preference, one must not only be different to but superior to the other.

Young people, frankly, don’t know why we thought socialism was such a terrible thing, nor why it is such a good thing to emphasize business over unions and business over regulations. They aren’t familiar with how Lyndon Johnson tried to have both an escalation in Vietnam and the Great Society, they aren’t familiar with how Nixon succeeded him with policies that were both culturally conservative and economically Keynesian, and that Carter’s policies at least in the short term made everything worse. They don’t remember how the Soviet Union seemed to be humiliating us at every turn. They also don’t know how people reacted by putting Ronald Reagan in office, and how his policies right from the get-go were intended to break unions and break inflation. In a certain respect, Reagan’s willingness to confront the Soviet Union also broke them, ultimately by undercutting their economy. Reagan was rewarded by having 49 of 50 states vote for him in his re-election campaign of 1984. Even after Reagan, those few liberals who did get in had to make concessions to the new paradigm, with Bill Clinton saying “the era of Big Government is over.” It wasn’t, really, but the era of leftist government was.

I had talked with a left-wing Facebook friend about these subjects, and told him my overall theory that just as leftists can’t seem to understand that the right-wing paradigm of today is a response to what went before, that the union-busting business model and anti-inflation fiscal policy were intended for previous conditions that no longer exist, and that while what they see as a golden age really wasn’t so great, likewise right-wingers can’t seem to understand that the economy they crow about really isn’t working for everybody and that they have set the conditions for their own upheaval. Not every leftist corresponds to the Right’s tyrannical caricature of them, but then one of the reasons Reagan succeeded back then is because it was very hard to imagine him as a xenophobic fascist ogre. It is on the other hand very easy to imagine Trump as such. The longer a given group stays in power with its assumptions unchallenged, the more they assume they can get away with whatever they want and not have to care about public reaction.

And that is based on the assumption that The Way Things Are is the a priori Way Things Are Meant To Be rather than a simple chain of causality in which the way things are now is because we previously did things a different way and didn’t like the results.

I mean, if you’re voting for duopoly, your two choices are Spam, Socialism, Sausage, Abortions, Socialism, Drag Queen Story Hour and Socialism, or Spam, Spam, Socialism, Border Walls, Racism, Corruption and Socialism. And if you stand up and go, “But I don’t LIKE socialism!” tough, because they’re BOTH socialism. If you don’t like socialism, you can always vote for the Libertarian Party, which is the only American party that is not explicitly or implicitly socialist. Assuming, that is, you’re serious about not wanting socialism.

But you’re not, are you?

You want a big, heavy handed government that creates the society you want. And the kids who want the socialism that admits to being such just want the same thing that you do: A big, heavy handed government that creates the society they want. It just happens to provide them with more material benefits than liberal tears.

I’m not sure why that concept is so radical.

News You Can Use

Trump’s Decision Somehow Fails To Impress Wall Street

GILLEN NEWS NETWORK

NEW YORK February 27 – Wall Street closed trading today with a loss of 1,190 points, or 4.42 percent, with NASDAQ falling 4.61%, the worst one-day losses in eight years. The market declined due to continuing nervousness over the worldwide spread of the coronavirus (Covid-19) and the loss occurred only one day after White House occupant Donald Trump announced Vice President Mike Pence as the policy czar for America’s coronavirus policy.

During his press conference Wednesday February 26, Trump blamed the steep losses of the stock market Monday on the shambolic Democratic debate in South Carolina, despite the fact that the debate occurred on Tuesday. In order to coordinate public response, the White House announced Thursday that in Pence’s new role he will be approving all responses from government officials on the crisis.

Response from Wall Street brokers was mixed.

Goldman Sachs trader Sol Lieberman said, “Look, we know that Trump has to pacify the witch doctor contingent of this party, but that’s not going to impress people who actually do math and predict trends. For a living.”

The appointment of Pence to his current responsibility drew controversy given that as Governor in Indiana in 2014, an HIV epidemic started that Pence did not respond to until four months after cases were reported. “Before the outbreak, there had been numerous deaths and known risks from the increase in injection drug use in the area for several years. Pence had long been a vocal opponent of needle exchange programs, which allow drug users to trade in used syringes for sterile ones in order to stop the spread of diseases, despite evidence that they work. Such programs were banned in the state when the outbreak started.”

It was unknown what short-term measures the government is going to enact to stop the spread of coronavirus, given that Vice President Pence spent most of Thursday praising Donald Trump at CPAC.

On the Wall Street floor, investor Tom McKinney said, “the market’s still over 25,000, and it’s due for a correction. But still, it’d be good if the government knew what it was doing.”

According to insiders, Trump is said to be furious about how officials in his administration have handled the coronavirus outbreak, and blames downbeat warnings from health officials for a brutal downturn in financial markets.

Public trader Naryanan Mattacharya said, “Look, we all know Donnie thinks of Wall Street as his bulletproof vest. He could bugger a 5-year old on 5^th Avenue and most of the donor class would blame the kid. But if Wall Street tanks, all that changes. He’ll be walking around with his Vienna Sausage d*ck thinking he’s King Sh*t, and then suddenly Bernie Sanders wins the nomination with a 10-point national lead.”

“It’s almost as if F*ckface Von Clownstick did the easiest, laziest thing to smooth public relations cause he doesn’t know what’s going on and spends half the day with his head up his *ss. That must be why his face looks like that,” Mattacharya said.

Gillen News Network – Not The Real News, But Let’s Face It, It’s Probably Better

As genuinely exciting and often substantive as the Las Vegas Democratic debate was last week, the South Carolina debate last night was just an unholy mess.

Bloomberg – slightly better at presenting himself, although that’s not saying much. His best moment, if you want to call it that, was admitting that what works in New York won’t necessarily work in the rest of the country, saying “otherwise you’d have a Naked Cowboy in every city.” This joke went down like the proverbial lead balloon, and those of us who know who Naked Cowboy is probably all agree we’d rather have him running against Trump than most of the people on stage.

Biden – clearly NOT PUTTING UP WITH ANY MORE SHIT and DOESN’T CARE if he yells. It might even work.

Buttigieg – not only told billionaires he’d raise their taxes, but made a case against the Senate filibuster by pointing out how Strom Thurmond used it to defend segregation. He said this in South Carolina.

If there is anything more brave than being an openly gay man running for president, it’s that.

Klobuchar – was asked what the biggest misconception is about her and she responded “that people think I’m boring.”

How can you be in Dunning-Kruger Effect while being made aware you’re in Dunning-Kruger Effect?

Warren – got that much more in Bloomberg’s face, using her own history of motherhood to confront him with the second-hand accusation that he’d told a pregnant employee to “kill it” because her condition inconvenienced him. Bloomberg insisted the incident never happened and when moderators asked how she could prove the woman’s opinion, Warren just said, “her words.” I am not sure this approach helped her or not.

Steyer – I am not sure what he’s even doing here, but between the two billionaires he seems less clueless and less harmful than Bloomberg.

Sanders – really seems to underestimate the threat he created for himself in praising communist governments like Castro Cuba, underestimates the degree to which the moderate Democrats (still the majority) are alienated by that, and how much they can weaponize such comments, because you know damn well if they don’t, the Republicans will. I mean yeah, you’re a Democratic Socialist. As Elizabeth Warren would say, good for you. But if democratic socialism is NOT the same thing as Leninism, it follows that you don’t need to present a Leninist government as a positive example. If you’re going to count EU nations, Israel, even Costa Rica as socialist countries, it follows that you could point to examples of socialism working WITHOUT putting gay people and religious dissidents in prison.

Of course, given Trump’s praise for dictators, and Bloomberg saying at this very debate that China’s Xi Jinping is NOT a dictator, maybe Sanders thought he could get away with it.

CBS: What’s the grade below F? G? H? Gayle King and Norah O’Donnell kept complaining about the candidates not respecting the rules of the debates, which didn’t actually mean they enforced them. Nobody seemed to know what was going on. “This is the last segment of our debate. No, we’ve got time for one more break.” [back from commercial] “That concludes our debate.”

What was the difference between this schoolyard fight and the MSNBC debate? I guess with TV, you get what you pay for.

In the course of Bernie Sanders’ pretty decisive win in the Nevada caucuses, I’d decided to stay home and watch MSNBC, since I had already done early voting the week before. What I saw was pretty revelatory, given that MSNBC is perceived to be the Democrat channel in the same way that Fox News is the Republican channel. (Which is why I and others often call it ‘MSDNC.’)

First, Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist James Carville told Nicole Wallace, “If you’re voting for (Sanders) because you think he’ll win the election, because he’ll galvanize heretofore sleepy parts of an electorate, then politically, you’re a fool … And if people are appraised of this, and they know that, and they want to do it as Democrats, that’s their own business. But I don’t think they have all the facts that they need before they make this judgment going forward.”

Harsh as that was, that wasn’t the network’s biggest own-goal news story. A little bit later, national anchor Brian Williams interviewed MSNBC’s elder statesman Chris Matthews to get his take, and he said, “I’m reading last night about the fall of France in the summer of 1940. And the general calls up Churchill and says, ‘It’s over,’” Matthews said. “And Churchill says, ‘How can it be? You got the greatest army in Europe. How can it be over?’ He said, ‘It’s over.’”

Such was the reaction to this comparison – in which Matthews indirectly compared Sanders’ campaign to the Nazi regime that ended up killing so many of Sanders’ European Jewish relatives – that Matthews (or a network superior) was obliged to open Hardball Monday the 24^th by saying, “I was wrong to refer to an event from the last days, or actually the first days, of World War II.” And then he brought on New York City’s current mayor, Bill de Blasio, to explain his staunch support for Bernie’s left-wing policies.

Now if you’ve been paying attention, Chris Matthews, an old-school, anti-communist, Kennedy liberal, is no big fan of Sanders. Not too long before this, Matthews was part of post-debate commentary in New Hampshire, and told other panelists, “I remember the Cold War … I have an attitude towards [Fidel] Castro. I believe if Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War there would have been executions in Central Park and I might have been one of the ones getting executed. And certain other people would be there cheering, okay?” Also if you’ve been paying attention for years longer, Matthews’ foot-in-mouth speaking style is not limited to calling the 1940 campaign the “last days” of World War II. I mean, given how much he trips over facts and gets people’s names wrong, the fact that he can score points on people like Gary Johnson and Donald Trump is that much more remarkable. He’s like the Columbo of political TV. Either that or his success says a lot more about the qualities of the political elite that he interviews.

And as super-liberal as MSNBC is perceived to be, Matthews is simply the standard. On one side you’ve got Joe Scarborough, Nicole Wallace and Never Trump Republican pundits like Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin who only have common cause with the liberals because they still believe in a definition of conservatism prior to “whatever Trump says, goes.” Then you’ve got Matthews, the middle-brow elder. Then you’ve got Joy Reid, Rachel Maddow and a few other “progressives” who are certainly more leftist than Matthews but no socialist’s idea of a socialist. Most of the real political extremists, like Melissa Harris-Perry, Cenk Uygur and the famous Keith Olbermann, are long gone due to backstage squabbles. So while Matthews is not entirely representative of MSNBC opinion, his senior status makes him a leading indicator of where the network is on Bernie.

Here’s the thing, Matthews’ blockhead insensitivity drew attention by invoking the Holocaust (however accidentally) but I sort of see his point. It just wasn’t the one he was intending to make. Mind you, what I’m about to say is NOT intended as a defense of Matthews. It’s just my take on the comparison.

If you’re a World War II buff, like I am, you can acknowledge the skill and success of the German military without being a fan of the Nazis. When Matthews made his remark about 1940, and Churchill’s surprise that France lost so completely when they had “the greatest army in Europe,” there was a right to be surprised. While France had about half Germany’s population, they still had 5 million men under arms, with about 2,240,000, or 104 divisions, in the north. They were backed up by the Dutch and Belgian armies (over a million men) and the British Expeditionary Force with over 1.5 million men. Germany had about 3 million men available for the Western Front. It actually had less vehicles and heavy tanks than the French army. What they had, and the Allies did not, was a willingness to try a new strategy rather than assuming they would win the same way they did last time – because for one thing, Germany didn’t win the last war, but the Allies eventually did with trench warfare and attrition. And being fundamentally lacking in imagination, the Allies neither adapted to current conditions nor anticipated that an enemy which had every incentive NOT to repeat a losing strategy would in fact refuse to do so.

“In March 1940, less than two months before the German surprise invasion, Parliamentary Army Committee member Pierre-Charles Taittinger led a parliamentary delegation to inspect the defenses in Sedan, a city for whose defense General Huntziger was responsible. Taittinger prophetically reported, “In this region, we are entirely too much taken with the idea that the Ardennes woods and the Meuse River will shield Sedan and we assign entirely too much significance e to these natural obstacles. The defenses in this sector are rudimentary.” He wrote that he “trembled” at the thought the Germans might attack there. General Huntziger dismissed Taittinger’s warning entirely.

“The chief comptroller of the Army asked General Huntziger if he put any stock in Taittinger’s report and the general replied, “Certainly not, the Germans are dead afraid of attacking.” On May 9, less than twenty-four hours before the invasion, Huntziger told his troops that “the German preparations which you have observed are only an exercise. The Germans are not crazy enough to take the additional risk of facing twenty-seven Belgian divisions”—though, to be fair, the confidence of the French High Command was not entirely without justification.” https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/the-super-simple-reason-nazi-germany-crushed-france-during-19484

If you are a student of history, which I guess Matthews takes himself to be, you know what happened next. Using a repeatedly-modified plan from rising general Erich von Manstein, Germany first attacked Holland and Belgium, leading the British and French to believe this territory was the main thrust of the attack, as it was in 1914. They advanced and Germany, taking a risk, forced motorized units through the difficult terrain of the Ardennes, bypassing both the French fortifications on Germany’s border and the main Allied armies to the north. While those armies engaged the Germans in Belgium, German armor units blitzed out from the breakthrough point and cut the coalition off from Paris, eventually isolating them from their supply lines, taking Brussels and devouring Allied units piecemeal, which led to the Dunkirk evacuation of remaining Allied forces and shortly thereafter, the fall of Paris. History also records the lack of leadership and initiative on the other side, one French staff officer describing a general at headquarters, “in tragic immobility, saying nothing, doing nothing, but just gazing at the map spread on the table between us, as though hoping to find on it the decision which he was incapable of taking.”

Not unlike Hillary Clinton’s people in fall 2016, actually.

What did Sanders do that he didn’t do last time? Well, for one thing, he didn’t have one opponent with the entire Democratic establishment behind him, which is one reason Matthews’ reference is not the best. But Sanders did know he needed organization and leadership, based on the hard fight he had in Nevada last time. And he had that. I can tell you from my own experience at the 2016 caucus, the 2016 Clark County Democratic convention, and my volunteer work for Sanders leading up to the caucus this year, that Sanders’ people had numbers, they had a schedule, they had their own apps to keep track of who they recruited. They followed up on the people they contacted (including me). I volunteered largely because I knew they had that level of organization in 2016, and I didn’t see anybody else in Nevada who had that kind of commitment. In many ways, it’s as simple as that. The main thing I’ve heard from various news sources in regard to the caucus is all the Hispanic voters telling reporters that they voted Bernie because he was the only candidate doing ads in Spanish and raising his profile. I don’t really follow Hispanic media in Las Vegas, but I know it exists, and I know it’s huge. This is one thing that the Sanders people tried to do in 2016 but didn’t really succeed at until now. Meanwhile the same experts who assumed that non-white people were not sympathetic to Sanders took it for granted that those votes would go to Joe Biden. Just as they took a lot of stuff for granted in 2016.

Insofar as the comparison to World War II applies, it’s that the “good guys” used tactics that were already flawed at the time without examining how things had changed, whereas the “bad guys” were adaptive and worked in directions that their opponent didn’t anticipate. It was assumed for instance that it would be a strike against Sanders when the Culinary Union refused to endorse him on the grounds that Medicare for All would take away their healthcare plans. However, exit interviews with union workers indicated that many members were thinking of friends and relatives who don’t have their coverage or would lose it if they lost their jobs. And again: it is that much more obvious in retrospect what a colossal strategic error it was for Mike Bloomberg to enter the debates before actually contesting a state race, because not only were his own negatives used against him in the Las Vegas debate, in the process everyone concentrated on Bloomberg and not Sanders, making it that much less likely that there will be a strong alternative to him in the contests to come. And in the contests where Bloomberg is competing, he is coming off a public humiliation without actually getting any votes.

If we continue the Nazi comparison, Western civilization was eventually saved when Nazi Germany ran up against Soviet Russia and was defeated. So for mainstream liberals like Matthews to save their party from socialism, they have to hope that Sanders is eventually defeated by Donald Trump. Which, given that Trump is Vladimir Putin’s bitch, fits the analogy.

I mean, at another point on Saturday, Matthews had a panel where he posed the question, “I’m wondering if the Democratic moderates want Bernie Sanders to be President? I mean, he takes it over, he sets the direction of the future of the party,” Matthews continued. “Maybe they’d rather wait four years and put in the Democrat that they like.” SURE. After all, Trump has outright said, “I have the right to do whatever I want as President.” Maybe he’d let the Democrats survive as a party. Maybe not. Who knows? He might keep up appearances just to keep the liberals from being more scared of him than they are of Sanders. The Democrats might be allowed to survive, if only as the House Negroes of the Trump Plantation.
(Does that analogy offend you? GOOD! Now try not to justify it.)

But really, the problem with Matthews’ analogy isn’t that it doesn’t apply on some level, but that it isn’t the most immediate or relevant analogy to apply. The obvious similarity to Bernie Sanders’ current romp is not with Nazis in Europe, but with Donald Trump’s 2016 political campaign. You know, where the incumbent party had an unpopular candidate that no one would run against because they had institutional backing, while the party out of power had everybody and his Mom running for president, and it was all they could do to get everyone on the same debate stage, and after a few months of that circus, people decided they liked the blunt-talking outsider who wasn’t in the party machine, and he ended up getting victory after victory, albeit by plurality, and where all the non-Trump candidates knew that they had to bow out and unite behind a designated NotTrump, and for various self-centered reasons, all of them refused to do so. And eventually, after talking a big game about populism and “the real America”, all the technocrats and policy wonks and shills of billionaires in the Republican Party had to walk in line behind the radical who actually took all that stuff seriously, and from then on they had to go along with it even if they didn’t agree. And if liberals want the White House back as desperately as conservatives did, they might have to do the same thing.

Maybe that’s why they’re so scared.

For once the Vegas hype machine is justified.

We sure had a Wang Dang Doodle Wednesday, didn’t we? The Democratic debate was definitely the most entertaining yet. Certainly if you’re a liberal, and especially if you’re not. It helped that there were only SIX candidates! Of course, one of the two remaining billionaires who actually IS running in Nevada did not qualify for the debate by Democratic National Committee rules, while the one who is not running did. By rules recently changed by the DNC, Mike Bloomberg qualified after spending literal tons of money to raise his profile in Nevada or South Carolina, while Tom Steyer, who is running in Nevada but is only super-rich, did not. Steyer himself said that the previous rules that the DNC threw out excluded people “of color” like Julian Castro, but the new rule allowed Bloomberg to barge in basically by paying enough cash.

If Bloomberg choosing not to run in Nevada was a big Fuck You to the state, then the DNC changing the rules to let him into the Vegas debate when Steyer was excluded was an even bigger Fuck You. Maybe caucus voters can deduce which candidate the party establishment hates most and push that person over the top on Saturday just to show them, huh?

And so to review:

Mike Bloomberg: What the FUCK was this guy doing there? It wouldn’t be so bad if he could actually debate, which he can’t, or if he were at least an entertaining boor, like Trump was in the 2016 debates, but Mike just stuck there like a sour lemon and assumed that that attitude was proof of his superior qualification.

The real issue is that hoser seemed to think that he could run in a party that, much more so than in 2008 or even 2016, has to at least play to the idea that liberal billionaires and technocrats don’t have all the answers when people in the real world are still working multiple jobs. His presentation is basically that Trump’s success has less to do with the Republican plurality gaming the system to keep their Leader in charge and more the idea that the majority actually LIKES a bossy New York elitist who thinks that his money gives him more rights than anyone else. Whereas the party he now chooses to run in has invested much of its identity in opposing that very concept, especially after Trump took charge and made himself more unpopular than he already was.

Of course since Bloomberg is not running in Nevada, we will have no way of knowing if this debate really affected his trajectory, but we can only hope it hurts.

Warren: Wow. She was the clear winner. Not only did she reserve her (justified) focus for Bloomberg, she had plenty of trash to sling around, even bagging on Amy Klobuchar’s health care plan (or lack of one). And if the whole campaign was one debate, she certainly distinguished herself as the candidate best positioned to push “progressive” policies while still being a member of the party establishment. Of course the context is a little different from that. She is widely perceived to be fighting for her life. The good news is that she IS. If the contests from Nevada on are considered to be the substantial test (especially after the Iowa fiasco made that state a wash), Warren is suddenly a lot more viable.

Buttigieg: He certainly justified why I like him, but I’m not sure he made that case to everybody else. He had some of the best lines, positioning himself as the middle ground between the “extremes” of Bloomberg and Bernie Sanders, especially “let’s put forward somebody who’s actually a Democrat” – which merely points out that Bloomberg and Sanders are NOT. Sanders is an open socialist and Vermont Independent who only runs as a Democrat for the sake of expediency, whereas Bloomberg was and ultimately still is a liberal Republican who’s running as a Democrat because Republicans have hunted their liberals to extinction.

It’s just that when the current political system is based so much on hate – Trump hating everybody, Democrats hating Trump, and some Democrats unsure of whether they hate socialists more than Trump – Pete’s approach may get him drowned. As with Warren, he put words together beautifully, but even more so than Warren, he’s in tough position and unlike her, things may be more rather than less difficult after Saturday.

Biden: He didn’t really distinguish himself, but by the same token, he didn’t negatively distinguish himself. He stanched the bleeding, as they say. I think his best moment might have been when Bloomberg claimed to have a change of heart on “stop and frisk” and Biden pointed out that he basically had to be forced into ending the policy due to legal action from the Obama-Biden Administration. This goes to show what a tremendous strategic error it was for Bloomberg to get into this race: He makes everyone else in the primary, including Klobuchar, look better.

Klobuchar: That doesn’t mean Klobuchar did well. She was called upon to name the president of Mexico and couldn’t, which we can call an honest flub. But then Pete Buttigieg kind of scored an own-goal when he counted that as a case of her not being that knowledgeable. She shot back, “Are you trying to say that I’m dumb? Are you mocking me, Pete?” And then Elizabeth Warren stepped up to take Amy Klobuchar’s side.

Ah yes, the tried-and-true “They’re Picking on Me Cause I’m a Woman” tactic. Well, that may work against men with chivalry or a sense of scruples, but as we saw in 2016, it will not work on Donald Trump. As I’ve already mentioned, both Klobuchar and Warren have the same built-in support base that Hillary Clinton had in 2016, but Klobuchar also has Clinton’s personality issues – namely a sense of oblivious entitlement – that Warren lacks (but that Klobuchar shares with Bloomberg). Not only that, as we saw this week, Warren is much better at maneuvering and changing the debate. So if you’re going to do the politically correct thing (like the Times did) and endorse both Klobuchar and Warren, knowing only ONE of them can be nominated, Warren is clearly the superior.

So that goes to the last candidate on stage. Bernie Sanders. And again, if the goal in promoting Mike Bloomberg is for somebody, anybody, to save the Democratic Party from socialism, this was a tremendous strategic error, because for one thing, on one night, Bernie Sanders was NOT the most unpopular guy on the stage. Most of the debates up to this point have been a game of King of the Mountain as everyone gangs up on the person who has the current political buzz. At one point it was Biden. Then it was Warren. Then Sanders. Then Buttigieg. Now it’s Bloomberg.

Moreover, by being such an obvious and deliberate symbol of corporatocracy, Bloomberg allows Sanders to focus his class-warfare, bottom-up vs top-down arguments in a way that he would not have gotten to do until the general election, assuming he is nominated. Which is now a little more likely.

Because Sanders didn’t even have to do a lot in this debate, just watch everybody pile onto Bloomberg, whom even the moderates like Klobuchar and Biden can see as a bigger threat to their party system. And so if the goal is for everybody is to unite behind the not-Sanders and present a non-socialist alternative to Trump (as if Sanders were the new George McGovern, when Trump is not even as popular or competent as Nixon), well, Mission un-Accomplished. And so, it is that much more likely that Sanders will win the Nevada caucus going into Saturday (especially since Queen Hillary the Inevitable is not in position to lean on the votes this time), which given this state’s demographics will make it harder to argue that he can’t get non-white votes, which will help him going towards South Carolina and Super Tuesday. The problem is that at least one other person had an even better debate, which means that the process of elimination hasn’t really eliminated any of these people yet.

And so, in conclusion:

Hi, I’m Mike Bloomberg, and I just
bought space on this guy’s blog to promote my presidential campaign
after promising him a new pancreas!

BloombergCare: It’s still private insurance, but I’m buying everyone’s policies!

So early voting for the Nevada Democratic caucus started Saturday. I was wondering if I should give up my third-party registration to participate, especially since while the Nevada party was sensible enough to ditch the “Shadow” app that turned the Iowa caucus into an even bigger clusterfuck than usual, there still seemed to be a chance that caucus workers could be tripped up because that decision meant the process was still in flux.

And what is the point of changing my registration when I’ve basically decided to vote for the NotBananaRepublican major nominee in the general election anyway?

But then I asked myself the question I often ask at points of decision:
What would Robert Fripp do?

What really convinced me to participate in the Democratic caucus was the fact that in addition to early voting, this version of the caucus has something equivalent to ranked-choice voting, which journalists like the New York reporter seem to think will complicate the results even further. It will probably be slower to tabulate than a standard primary but overall it will take less time than a standard caucus, especially since ranked-choice has the winnowing effect of a standard caucus without the laborious process of needing to take a whole afternoon or longer and risk having to meet other people and negotiate your preference with them, which is where civilization often breaks down.

Local news had reported long lines in some areas, but my nearest polling place was a Mexican supermarket, and I got there around noon and it wasn’t all that crowded and the line moved quickly. The process involves confirming your registration (or changing it if you aren’t already a Democrat) and then explaining the ballot, after which you were told to go into a small room in the supermarket and fill out the card. There are five columns that you fill out in order of preference, so that if you like Biden, you’d put Biden as first column and then (in the expectation that he doesn’t win) your second-best preference and so on. You don’t have to mark all the names, but you have to get at least one and leave the others “uncommitted.”

Recalling from memory, I think the ballots list the names in alphabetical order, so I eliminated Bennett, Yang and Patrick (the people who dropped out after New Hampshire), Mike Bloomberg (who didn’t think enough of my state to get himself on the ballot) and Amy Klobuchar, who is still viable but is not in my priorities. I have never seen any politician smile so much with so little cheer other than Chuck Schumer. I rest my case.

So in this order I picked: Sanders, Buttigieg, Warren, Biden, Tom Steyer.

In reverse preference: Steyer (unlike Bloomberg) at least seems to be a good guy and actual progressive (as opposed to statist). I do not like his term limits idea, but he seems to be willing to deal with corruption in the government.

Biden is, or would be, a good centrist choice. I would really prefer the Biden of 2016 to this one, but it’s been pointed out by more than one leftist that even in earlier years, Biden’s presidential campaigns have never polled much better than they are now.

Warren is a good moderate-to-progressive choice. I think she could potentially be a “uniter” in a way that my other two choices aren’t. Sanders alienates the centrists and Pete Buttigieg alienates the leftists. I am not sure why Warren isn’t doing better, but hopefully in this system, she’ll get something out of Nevada.

Now I’d already mentioned that I prefer Pete Buttigieg. I think he has the knowledge and personality elements (moderation and common sense) that made Obama a winner last decade, but he doesn’t have Obama’s naive assertion that Republicans will work with him, so he’s a little more inclined to serious changes, including eliminating the filibuster (which makes him more ‘progressive’ on that score than Senators Warren and Sanders). I also think that phrasing his healthcare plan as “Medicare for all who want it” may persuade people who are scared off by the idea that nationalized medicine will eliminate their choice. You may disagree.

Why then did I pick Sanders as first preference? Well, if in Fripp’s phrase, we need radical action to unseat “monkey mind” – the reflexive, unthinking mentality – that applies almost as much to the Democratic Party as to Trump’s Banana Republicans. I’d said before, but Trump and Sanders are parallels in certain ways (and not just the cotton-candy hair). Both of them didn’t really belong in their parties’ establishments, but they both realized that in order to accomplish their ultimate goals, they needed one of the two ruling parties behind them. It’s just that Trump’s scheme worked and Sanders didn’t, for various reasons. Namely, the Democrats were already effectively aligned with Obama’s designated successor, who’d made a deal to be in his Administration in exchange for supporting his campaign, and who superficially seemed like the best qualified candidate. Trump was dealing with a vast array of primary challengers, but he caught the support of a populist base that like him didn’t get along with the institutional party. Not only that, they were so desperate and scared of what the other party would do to change the country after years out of the White House that even the establishment types got in line. Well, that’s where the Democrats are now. It’s just a question of whether they will get out of their own way to win the election or if they would rather lose and keep a grip on their party. I’d already mentioned that a lot of old-school Democrats would rather do the latter. And along with that, I’d mentioned that while I would prefer moderate methods, what we are calling “radical socialism” is very much mainstream in other developed countries, but is now considered Satanic by the American Right, and the American Left has been basically whipped into going along. I had said, “It is still a legitimate question as to who pays for all that shit, and what the broader costs of redistribution would be, but it is not a literally unthinkable policy. I have seen people on the Internet make serious arguments – namely, the point that America spends more money on healthcare, including government money, than ‘socialist’ countries in the European Union, and gets worse results – but hardly anybody in the Democratic Party institution will make these arguments.”

In many ways, the Democratic Party – as the designated institution for support of modern American government – is the main force in the way of a serious reordering of priorities. It is conservative in the sense that it wants to keep things the way they were, for the benefit of its own group. That is a bad thing, and even the Trumpniks are capable of realizing this, which is why Trump got so much mileage out of ragging the Democratic (and Republican) establishment. But temperamental conservatism also means that Democrats are the last defenders of “the rule of law” and what Trump calls “the deep state” (that is, the institutions that do not see serving his whim as the charter of their existence). If the Republican Party is now completely lost, Democrats have to reform their own institution, so that it is trustworthy and can make necessary changes. Sanders, and arguably Warren, are the only two candidates in serious position to do that. And with every indication that the leftist/centrist/Hi, I’m Mike Bloomberg and I’m Buying This Party Because I Can wings of the party are heading towards a brokered convention, I decided that Sanders needs to maintain his momentum and demonstrate to his party, as Trump did with Republicans, that he is the person who needs to be listened to.

So there it is. I took the plunge.

Don’t make me regret this, Democrats.

After posting my last piece around noon, I went out and about and caught this article on my smartphone that I really should have included in the argument:

https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/482214-sanders-obviously-i-am-not-a-communist-but-maybe-trump-doesnt-know

“Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a 2020 White House hopeful, on Sunday dismissed concerns that his status as a self-proclaimed democratic socialist would be a liability in a general election and said President Trump’s description of his ideology as “communist” was inaccurate.

“Obviously I am not a communist,” Sanders told host Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday” in response to a clip of Trump using the designation in a Fox News interview, adding that Trump “maybe doesn’t know the difference.”

Sanders also called Trump a “pathological liar” for claiming Sanders was “married in Moscow.”

Wallace continued to press Sanders on how he would address criticisms that agenda items such as the Green New Deal, Medicare for All and forgiveness of college debt are both overly radical and prohibitively expensive.

“In many respects, we are a socialist society today,” Sanders responded, noting the tax breaks and subsidies Trump received from the government as a businessman.

“The difference between my socialism and Trump’s socialism is I believe the government should help working families, not billionaires,” he added.”

See, Democrats, THIS is what I’m talking about. When the mean Republican bullies call you names, you FIGHT BACK. And you don’t have to do it by being as ugly and evil as they are. All you have to do is hit ’em with the facts.

And the fact is that Trump IS a socialist. He never would have gotten to where he is without gaming the system of government preferences and loans. It’s the sort of thing that leftists refer to as “socialism for the rich,” eliding the question of why socialism for the poor is not also corrupt. It’s just a question of emphasis and benefits. With Trump, he said at this year’s State of the Union speech that he would not allow socialism to destroy Americans’ healthcare, which for most old people means the socialist crutches of Medicare and Medicaid. Trump has defined himself as a “nationalist.” A lot of his supporters, like Iowa Congressman Steve King, have more explicitly embraced the label. In terms of orienting the government towards a certain goal, the Trump Republican Party is using socialist means towards nationalist ends. One could call their party philosophy nationalist socialism. Or even, national socialism.

Now, this is going to raise the usual screaming and crying from leftists who rejected similar arguments because they want to foist the idea that socialism is an unalloyed good. It is not, as anyone whose family escaped from Cuba or the Warsaw Pact can tell you. But as Jonah Goldberg points out, a lot of the right-wing nationalists in Russia are nevertheless fans of the old Soviet Union, because that was the height of Russian military and cultural power (including republics in the Warsaw Pact that are now independent of the Russian Federation). The new Right may bad-mouth socialism but they clearly do not see it as an unalloyed evil any more than the Left does. What matters to them is not the trappings of government, but the nature of it. What Leninists and fascists have in common is that the state is a means to an end, and power is the end in itself. Lenin specifically opposed the approach of Social Democrats in Germany and elsewhere, saying “the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology; for the spontaneous working-class movement is trade-unionism, and trade unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie.” Anything that allowed for freedom or plurality undermined the chances of achieving long-term goals, so Lenin wanted a “vanguard party” that would run things from the top down and would only work with other parties for the purpose of subverting and destroying representative government so that it could be replaced with control by one party. This was the Bolshevik approach after the March Revolution, it was the approach of Mussolini and Hitler towards the Italian and German parliaments, and it is clearly the approach of Mitch McConnell, who is more deliberate in his subversion than Donald Trump.

If Sanders and others wish to disassociate their movement from that kind of Leninist socialism, then they ought to do so, and as we see in that piece above, I think Sanders IS doing so. His counter argument gets to the other point: How does the Trump Republican Party get to say it’s against socialism? You have Trump allies smearing Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman over his Soviet (Jewish) family background as though he had divided loyalties, but their loyalty is to a man whose campaign manager worked for Ukraine’s pro-Putin wannabe dictator, who consistently takes Vladimir Putin’s side over the intelligence of our own government, and who fired Alexander Vindman AND his brother from their government posts just because one of them was disloyal to the Party boss.

How can you claim to oppose Soviet-style socialism, when THAT is the path you want America to follow?

Look,you can still vote for the Libertarian Party, or some other party that actually believes in the Constitution as written, but You, The People, have clearly decided you don’t want that option. You have decided, on behalf of the majority, that the purpose of government is not to protect our natural rights, but to reward its patrons and punish their enemies.

So let’s quit kidding ourselves. If you’re voting for one of the two ruling parties this year, the fact is that they’re BOTH socialist. It’s just a question of which government you want: The one that covers your cancer treatment, or the one where your daughter has to fly to California to get an abortion and your favorite gardener is about to get deported?

“I’m not a member of an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” – Will Rogers

“Moral victories don’t count.” – GURPS Illuminati

Democrats: We need to talk.

This week, Joe Walsh – not the cool ex-drunk who plays with Eagles and Ringo Starr, but the Republican ex-Congressman – announced that he was ending his campaign for the Republican nomination, referring to the Republican Party as a “cult.” As at least one journalist put it, this raised the question of why Walsh needed to run an expensive political campaign just to find that out. Now, I like Walsh’s moxie – like when he came on Chris Matthews’ Hardball this week and pronounced the Republican Senate to be “chicken shit” – and I admire the fact that he is capable of holding conservative views while still disagreeing with Trump, but by the same token, being batshit crazy on almost every other subject, Walsh is a great example of the anti-intellectual Tea Party philosophy that turned the Republican Party into the cult that it is.

And then there’s Bill Weld, who I supported as Gary Johnson’s running mate, but who is still running in those Republican primaries that allow him to do so. This makes even less sense than Walsh’s run, because again, Walsh is a Tea Partier. Turning back to the Republican Party is blanking out the point that Weld left them in the first place because he wasn’t xtreeem and edgee enough for them. He’s not a good fit for the Libertarian Party, but with his positions he’s still a better fit with the LP than with a party that has rejected his moderate, common-sense attitude. In retrospect, the Republicans never were a party of free minds and free markets, but they’ve been more clear than ever in displaying that they don’t believe in them now.

So if I’m a right-winger and I go along with the establishment’s binary logic, and the designated “right-wing” party is actually against my values, well, until the Libertarian Party steps up to the plate – assuming they want to – there’s no point in being a NTR (Never Trump Republican). Might as well be a DJTFT.

Democrat Just To Fuck Trump.

But if I’m supposed to agree that we HAVE to vote for the lesser of two incompetents because the stakes are so dire, then if I and other people who don’t normally vote Democrat are on board with that, it behooves the Democratic Party to do it’s part and QUIT FUCKING IT UP.

They should have already figured out that it’s possible to have the most evil and unworthy opponent in American history and still lose.

I mean, Christ on a cracker, if you look at Chuck Schumer give an interview on MSDNC, it makes you want to put on a uniform and drag Hispanic kids to the border camps, that’s how anti-inspirational he is to the Resistance. If Schumer was half the hardass in the Senate that Pelosi has been in the House, we might not be in this kind of mess. (I know, because Harry Reid WAS that kind of hardass, even when Democrats were the Senate minority.)

I’d like to give some advice – I can’t say it’s good advice, but it can’t be any worse than the advice that the Democratic leadership has been following, on the premise that they take any advice at all.

For one thing, there’s one word you need to burn out of your vocabulary: “bully.” Quit saying that Trump is bullying you. Quit saying it’s unfair. If you actually remember what it was like to be bullied as a kid, you remember what happened when you whined and cried and told the bully to stop picking on you? That’s right! He picked on you even more! Because you’re dealing with a sadist and a culture of sadists, and telling the sadist that you’re in pain because you can’t fight back is like a shark smelling blood in the water. It’s what they live for. It doesn’t help that so many people on the liberal side come off as just that type. I mean, I get the impression that Chris Hayes got stuffed in his high school locker on a regular basis.

Quit being losers. Quit being wimps. There’s a very wise thing that was once said by General Patton – well, actually it was George C. Scott. It was: “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.” That sort of can-do, optimistic spirit really is what makes America great. But it’s also a problem in one respect. “Winning” in itself is not a moral value. As a decidedly more liberal character said, “it is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.” Now, in one respect it’s a good thing that Democrats have some scruples over winning at any cost, but if they think the stakes really are the future of America, they may want to find a way to win with morals. The alternative is not to just keep losing. The alternative is to get so desperate and power-hungry watching the other side remake the country that you will do literally ANYthing to win. Cause that’s what happened to the Republicans. As far as they’re concerned, America’s Apocalypse already happened, because of That Man Obama. (In their defense, they did have the minor issue of out-of-touch presidential candidates who pushed counterproductive policies that nobody liked.) They think that THEY’RE being bullied, they’re being picked on, and anything that they do to fight back is justified. This is of course, the attitude of racists and conspiracy theorists, but even the Trumpniks who aren’t at least one of those have been labeled such by association, so they don’t care anymore.

That’s part of the secret to fighting back. No, not giving in to evil and associating with the worst thugs on your side of the aisle. The trick is not caring any more. “Conservatives” know that you’re going to call them Nazis anyway, so they don’t even bother countering the argument any more. I’ll get to that shortly. But in general, what you do is you take their whining and you turn it against them. When a Trumpnik says, “Well, you’re just mad that Hillary lost!” say, “Whitey, please. Half of Team Trump is still mad that Lee lost Gettysburg.” When they say, “Well, you just hate Trump, and you’re just haters, and you’ve wanted to get rid of him before he was even inaugurated” you respond, “You’re saying that like it’s a bad thing. That’s like saying ‘You just hate colon cancer.’ There’s something WRONG with that? Trump is the colon cancer of the republic. It’s like a Yakov Smirnoff routine gone blue: ‘In Soviet Russia, asshole eats YOU!’ Speaking of Russia, why doesn’t Trump show his tax returns?”

The other point I want to make is that the Democrats need to quit playing circular firing squad. (It used to be Italian Firing Squad, but not only is that politically incorrect, the Democrats make Mussolini’s army look competent.)

Specifically, there is a perception, fair or not, that the results in the Iowa Democratic caucus were deliberately slow-walked in order to create a better impression for Pete Buttigieg over Bernie Sanders, who can claim victory by actual votes under the arcane system they’re using. The debate rules have changed so that Mike Bloomberg will be allowed to appear, when he fell under the previous standard that had excluded Julian Castro, and there are rumors that the DNC is going to reverse the rule on first-round superdelegate votes at the national convention. With Biden and even “progressive” Elizabeth Warren getting bad returns in Iowa, and New Hampshire just around the corner, the liberal political-media complex seems to be scrambling for somebody, ANYbody, other than Bernie Sanders.

Just this week, covering the Friday New Hampshire debate for MSDNC, Chris Matthews said, ““I have my own views of the word ‘socialist’ and I’d be glad to share them with you in private. They go back to the early 1950s. I have an attitude about them. I remember the Cold War,” he said. Matthews continued, “I have an attitude towards [Fidel] Castro. I believe if Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War there would have been executions in Central Park and I might have been one of the ones getting executed. And certain other people would be there cheering, okay?” Then Matthews made the connection to Sanders, claiming ignorance about whether or not the candidate did, in fact, support violence and public executions. “So, I have a problem with people who take the other side. I don’t know who Bernie supports over these years,” Matthews said. “I don’t know what he means by socialist.” The Rolling Stone article with this quote concluded, “Matthews nearly losing his mind on national television in addition to some of the debate questions about Sanders — including whether his opponents were afraid of having a democratic socialist on the ticket — shows just how terrified corporate media is of a Sanders win.”

But if my moderate first choice, Pete Buttigieg, gets appointed with the same sort of shenanigans that the Party institution pulled for Clinton, you will see the same schisms as 2016, and that will defeat the purpose of electing a moderate, which is to have a candidate who can unite the mainstream and the Left against the reactionary Republican plurality.

Bernie Sanders is not necessarily my first choice for president; I’ve already gone over that. The idea of Bernie is probably more attractive than a Sanders Administration would be in practice, and there are problems that it would create going in. (For one, Larry David doesn’t want to appear on Saturday Night Live every month for the next four years.) But while I’m chewing out the Democrats on their wimpiness towards every other subject, I need to address the mainstream party’s phobia towards socialism. And I don’t even LIKE socialism.

There’s a whole spiel I could go into about the definitions of socialism, and I think I will in another post, but for now let me focus on the point that for this year’s State of the Union speech, Trump invited Juan Guaido, the opposition leader against Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela’s government, which really is an example of socialism gone wrong. The main reason I don’t support active measures to depose the Chavista government is because we already tried that, and it didn’t work. But in any case, it’s a little odd to declare yourself an opponent of the Venezuelan approach when you want to close the border to your own citizens (as Maduro does), want to control the economy for political purposes (as Maduro does) and game the system to make sure that both the legislature and judiciary are dominated by your yes-men (as both Chavez and Maduro did).

Why aren’t we talking about that? Why is the Democrat expected to recoil like Dracula from the cross at the word “socialism”, but no one in the Democratic Party (as opposed to Facebook liberals) will compare the Republican agenda to fascism? And why is it that when you do make the association, “conservatives” on social media will either avoid the association or turn the corners of their lips, and say “So?….” Why is it not possible to acknowledge that one can reach the same destination on a different road, and that all the things that Republicans claim to hate about socialism are the result of the road we’re on now?

As the guys at Jacobin Magazine would tell you, most “democratic socialists” aren’t even socialist in the sense of seizing the means of production, they are mainly trying to create the same social supports that conservatives in Canada and elsewhere take for granted. It is still a legitimate question as to who pays for all that shit, and what the broader costs of redistribution would be, but it is not a literally unthinkable policy. I have seen people on the Internet make serious arguments – namely, the point that America spends more money on healthcare, including government money, than “socialist” countries in the European Union, and gets worse results – but hardly anybody in the Democratic Party institution will make these arguments. But that’s why Sanders and kids like “the Squad” will look at your demon-word “socialism,” smile, and say, “So?…”

There’s a pretty good reason why Senator Bernie Sanders never ran for Senate in Vermont as a Democrat and why he only registers as a Democrat for the limited period that he runs for the Democratic Party nomination. And it’s much the same reason that he’s got a serious chance to win that nomination. Because Bernie Sanders is NOT a Democrat, and I can’t imagine why anybody would be.

But yet, Sanders knows that in this binary country, if he’s going to run for a national office, he needs as broad a base as possible, and if an independent run is a “spoiler” but taking over a national party means that you get that huge group of people, a majority of whom don’t agree with you on every thing or even most things, but they’re gonna go with you anyway cause you’re their nominee, then the expedient thing to do is run in that party in hopes of accomplishing your goal.

Bernie is a DJTFT.

And even though I’m not a socialist, and I don’t think that healthcare or any good thing you want government to pay for is a “right”, I do think there’s some stuff that we are better off having government do even if it isn’t a right. We don’t think that the interstate highway system is a human right, but we were willing to pay for it (if not to maintain it). Bernie and I are opposite on many things, but we have something in common: We both avoid the Democratic Party as counterproductive to our goals and yet have to work with it to deal with Republicans who are the real problem. There are a surprising number of people – both leftists and former conservatives – who fit that description. Hell, Joe Walsh, y’know, the guy who said “Sorry Jimmy Kimmel: your sad story doesn’t obligate me or anybody else to pay for somebody else’s health care” also said after dropping out of the race, “I would rather have a socialist in the White House than a dictator.” So, if THIS guy gets the distinction between socialism and dictatorship, and understands that someone on the anti-socialist side CAN be a dictator, then why can’t the Democratic National Committee??

This goes along with a certain theme I’ve been seeing on the Internet. It’s “democrats would rather lose” or more precisely, “Democrats would rather lose to Trump than win with a progressive.” The main Party still sees the Republican Party as a factor in the political institution rather than a cancer on it. Biden is the obvious example of that. They are actually less threatened by Trump than by the idea of losing their own institutional power. After all, even if Trump wins, this may not become a one-party state. Maybe. We may still have the illusion of a multiparty system, as with Hungary or even Venezuela. The professional Democrats will still have jobs, to the extent that they can get anyone elected. And at the same time, some “progressives” would rather lose to Trump to teach the mainstream Democrats a lesson.

The “lesser of two evils” argument was no less – probably no more – relevant in 2016. And the reason Democrats couldn’t get enough people to vote for Hillary is because institutional Democrats couldn’t convince people that their future was at stake. As Thomas Frank put it just after the election: “To try to put over such a nominee while screaming that the Republican is a rightwing monster is to court disbelief. If Trump is a fascist, as liberals often said, Democrats should have put in their strongest player to stop him, not a party hack they’d chosen because it was her turn. Choosing her indicated either that Democrats didn’t mean what they said about Trump’s riskiness, that their opportunism took precedence over the country’s well-being, or maybe both.”

In other words, Democrats expected voters to treat the election as though the world was at stake while taking the voters themselves for granted.

And some of them want to do it again. And if it isn’t the old Cold Warriors trying to head off “socialism” it’s the woke “progressives” blowing off the moderates.

So in conclusion, Democrats: Grow up and get your shit together. You can’t expect me to believe that any Democrat is better than Trump if YOU don’t believe it. And there isn’t much point in NOT being a Libertarian if the Democrats are only slightly more effective in politics despite having a vastly larger budget than the Libertarian Party and the singular advantage of actually having people in office.

This morning I was on Facebook and a liberal posted, “Libertarianism is just astrology for men.”
This was of course, AFTER the Iowa caucus.

As of 5 pm Pacific time Tuesday, the results of the Monday Democratic caucus are still only about two-thirds in, and while there is no reason to suspect foul play or interference, the state party blamed a coding problem with the new app that caucus leaders were supposed to use to report their results. This meant that people had to rely on phone reports, which jammed up the phone lines because they were only meant as a backup. The end result, as one wag put it, was that it’s still taking at least 24 hours to get the results from a populace that is less than that of a mayoral race in New York.

Jeez Louise, even The Daily Beast, which does nothing but rag on Megan McCain, is admitting she was right “not to trust the Iowa caucuses.”

The results were so ragged Monday night that various candidates were able to claim at least moral victory, with Pete Buttigieg declaring victory outright. And this caused a lot of lefties (who hate him anyway) to declare that Buttigieg is a presumptuous little twerp, but I think he’s just learned the first lesson of real presidenting: Take credit early in advance of the facts, just because you can.

Of course, the real winner in Iowa was Mike Bloomberg, who deliberately avoided this political-media circle jerk to concentrate on Super Tuesday.

And of course the liberal media, which expect the whole process to be to their benefit, are so mad that they’re declaring in advance that this is going to be the last Iowa caucus ever. Somehow I don’t think so. They underestimate the fundamental conservatism (general, not political) in American culture. Nobody’s going to give up an institution just because it’s old, stupid, and incompetently managed. (In other news, the Senate is going to acquit Donald Trump on impeachment articles this week.)

Now, I was reminded by another liberal on Facebook that back in 2012, Rick Santorum won the Republican Iowa caucus 17 days after the event. Which merely proves that the entire caucus process is santorum.

The irony being that a large amount of the snag is supposedly an attempt to modernize and make the process more transparent. In addition to delegates, the state Democrats had planned to announce votes by precinct as well as total votes earned. But that just added more detail to a process that already has too much of it. Not only that, the process involved an untested app that people were not adequately trained on, called “Shadow.” Shadow was created by a Democratic non-profit called ACRONYM (I can’t confirm if the initials stand for anything) which was described by one anonymous insider as “far and away the most disorganized place I’ve ever been a part of“.

It’s actually the lefties who are pointing out how un-progressive and un-democratic the caucus process is in practice. They’ve pointed out, not just in this election, that the Iowa caucus takes place on a weekday, mostly during business hours, usually in rural community centers. A lot of people have to work or can’t get transportation, and this is a process that basically works best for people who have money, have time and don’t have to work that day – i.e. Old, upper-middle-class white people. It doesn’t work as well for urban dwellers who are “people of color” who don’t live in the main caucus areas.

As a registered Libertarian, I have no problem telling people to vote Democratic straight-ticket in November if that’s what it takes to flush the Party of Trump, but are any Democrats willing to admit that half the reason Trump won is because THIS is what he was running against?

See, this is why it matters to me. I’m in Nevada. It’s also a caucus state. And while the February 22 date is a Saturday and there is an early-voting period (because in Nevada, we think that a right to vote means it should be easy to vote and not harder than a self-appendectomy), the whole process has become questionable. Now, in another example of common sense, the Nevada Democratic Party just announced that they have abandoned plans to use the “Shadow” app. But still: I did switch from Libertarian/independent to Democrat in 2016 specifically to vote AGAINST Hillary Clinton in the caucus, and that didn’t work out, though that’s mostly due to Inner Party chicanery rather than problems with the caucus itself. But that reveals the real issue. If you have a choice between primary and caucus and you still choose caucus, that’s a priority of the state party. If we have a process that continues in a dysfunctional manner when this is not even the second election when we have told people how clownshoes it is, then maybe the duopoly and the state governments they control are dysfunctional.

I mean, there’s a lot of reasons to bag on the Libertarian Party, but one good thing about being so small is that they don’t bother with the giant national soap opera of a long (and expensive) primary season. They just have the national convention and vote for their presidential candidate right then and there. No, it’s not reflective of a state-by-state consensus, much less a democratic process, but can we honestly say that this shitshow is?

Two weeks ago – which of course is like a year in Trump physics – the New York Times took the unusual step of endorsing not only one but two women for president, presenting Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren as the choice for “progressive” Democrats and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar as the choice for moderates. And the issue I had with that comes down to two famous cliches: you can’t have it both ways, and you can’t have your cake and eat it too. Again, damn near ANY Democratic candidate (with possible exceptions, which I’ll review) would be better for the country than Donald Trump, representing the great state of Vladimir Putin’s Wallet. Anybody who doesn’t get the nomination would be a great running mate or (in some cases) Senator. Only ONE of them is going to get the nomination. And since we now know that the stakes for the future are, one, Trump can commit any crime he wants, and two, Republicans are never going to stop him from doing so, it is imperative that in the binary-logic duopoly that is our political system that the designated NotRepublican party not only win the presidency but do so with enough political momentum to flush out Trump’s enablers in the downballot Senate races. And that means you need the right candidate, and splitting the difference like the Times did is splitting your focus, which the NotRepublicans can’t afford to do.

At the start of the year, there were still twelve Democrats running for president, but as of last Friday, John Delaney made the shocking announcement that he was leaving the race, which led to the even more shocking discovery that he’d been running for months in the first place. So that leaves eleven. And at this point just before the Iowa caucus, I think I should review the people who are left. Because some of those who quit the race – like Harris and Booker – are on paper more serious candidates and better choices than some who are left. To eliminate the people who really don’t need to be there: You’ve got Michael Bennett, another person who no one has heard of on the national level, and fairly recent entry Deval Patrick of New Jersey, who is at least known there but doesn’t seem to have much reason to run other than he wants to, not because he has a chance of getting more attention than he has.

Tulsi Gabbard gets a lot of attention, but not necessarily for good reasons. As with some of the centrists here, she reveals the real problem with the “two” party system in practice: It used to be that socially conservative people could be in the Democratic Party and fiscally conservative, socially libertarian people could be in the Republican Party, but polarization is not equal. As the Republicans continue to purge any non-wacko, non-Trumpnik influence, the standard for “conservative” is theoretically broad but increasingly narrow: All you have to do is agree with everything Trump says, even if it contradicts what he said two hours ago. And if you can’t keep up with a conductor who throws out the sheet music, the duopoly obliges you to put your trust in the designated NotRepublican party, even if the Democrats would really prefer to be the “progressive” party. Gabbard agrees with the liberals on a lot of spending proposals, but as a Hindu she is culturally conservative in many ways, and even if she has made overtures to the queer community, they have reason not to trust her. She’s also vocally anti-war and anti-Beltway complex, and that does impress leftists, but they already have Bernie. It also impresses contrarian conservatives and libertarians, but they already have Trump, who talks a lot about not wanting to start a war, and that seems to be good enough for them.

Then you have the men who could be grouped as The Billionaire Boys Club. The first being Andrew Yang. I like Yang. The universal basic income (UBI) concept is one of the few things that socialists and libertarians can agree on, and it reveals a long-term aspect of the economy that few politicians focus on: As more jobs become automated, larger sections of the population will be literally surplus labor. But for all Yang’s ideas, and recently increased public profile, he’s still not getting that far in the polls.

But whereas Donald Trump, who’s essentially been raising 2020 money since 2017, has raised more than $300 million this year for his campaign, Tom Steyer has raised $157 million, and Mike Bloomberg, who only entered in November 2019, has already raised over $200 million dollars, mostly his own resources.

And the thing is, it’s gotten Steyer to the debate stage, and while polls in Iowa are still sketchy, Bloomberg is doing as well as most of the second-tier candidates without even being in a debate. I agree with a leftist friend on Facebook who said that if we have to have one of these billionaires in charge, he would prefer Steyer or Yang, because they at least seem to care about the public, whereas Bloomberg is just trying to preserve the plutocracy in his own way. And he’s especially not good from a libertarian standpoint. He is a great advocate for what we call the “nanny state”, pushing large soda bans as Mayor of New York, along with the “stop and frisk” policy that concentrated on non-white neighborhoods. I might still have to vote for him if he ends up being the nominee, but he’s easily my least favorite choice. But I think Bloomberg is looking at Trump’s example and he’s concluded that if you already have a national profile, and you already have enough money (or razzle-dazzle) to expand that profile, you might as well run, and apparently some sections of the country like a pushy New York elitist in charge, but after almost four years they don’t like everything he does. Really, this ought to be Mike’s approach to campaign ads. “BLOOMBERG 2020: A Billionaire Asshole Who’s Not Trump.” Or: “BLOOMBERG 2020: A Pushy New York Billionaire Who’s Not A Putin Bitch.”

And then we get to Klobuchar. I’ve seen a lot of attempts to push her profile in recent weeks, including of course the NYT endorsement, but there have also been other efforts, like the New York magazine profile “Does Amy Klobuchar Have A Shot?” from January 10.

Liberal Media: Stop trying to make Amy Klobuchar a thing. It’s NOT going to happen.

If you’re fixated on diversity and distressed that the departure of Senators Booker and Harris means that Patrick, Gabbard and Yang are the only people of color left in the race – meaning, for all purposes, it’s an all-white race – you’re really going to be distressed by the gender politics going in. Both Klobuchar and Warren have the advantage that Hillary Clinton had going into 2016, of being the first potential woman president, and either would have the support of all the people who wanted that to happen in 2016 and are mad that it didn’t. Unfortunately, they would both have to deal with the same gender politics as Clinton, and while I think Warren has the personality and disposition to compensate for that, Klobuchar will handle that bias about as well as Clinton did, which means not at all.

Indeed, while the Times article presented Klobuchar as the best champion for centrism, Klobuchar is really a great example of why that’s not necessarily the best approach. I believe that it WOULD be the best approach in a country where the other member of the duopoly was not batshit insane and rationalizing everything on bad-faith arguments, but that’s where we are now, and if there was a legitimate reason that Trump won, it’s that the establishment approach to things is not working out for most people, and Klobuchar is nothing if not an establishment Democrat. The same New York magazine had another article just this Thursday showing how as a county attorney general, she put a teenager away for killing a child, but new reports suggest he wasn’t the guy who did it and there’s little direct evidence to suggest that he was. “It’s worth nothing that in her eight years as county attorney, cops and county sheriffs killed 29 civilians. Klobuchar’s office did not criminally charge any of the officers involved.” Now, while the Democrats can’t go too far to accommodate the woke “progressives,” they also shouldn’t try to alienate them by rationalizing this approach to government, especially since a lot of moderates and even conservatives are rethinking this approach to the law.

And ultimately, it just comes down to the same thing I have with Patrick and Bennett and to some extent Bloomberg: Why is Klobuchar here? What makes her approach better than everyone else, and why does she think her resume and profile are such that she could even get the nomination, much less beat Trump? Because again: Beating Trump is what we’ve got to be concerned with.

And so at this point I move away from the kids’ table to deal with the four people who’ve actually got a serious shot at winning the first set of races. Two are basically centrists and two are self-proclaimed progressives. I’ve already gone over my impressions of Biden and Buttigieg. I am a centrist, and Buttigieg is probably my favorite, since he reminds me of the common-sense approach of Obama, without Obama’s naive assertion that you can negotiate with Republicans on conventional terms of courtesy and compromise. And yet all the haters say he isn’t going to get anywhere once he reaches the Southern primaries with their huge black constituencies. (Klobuchar has Buttigieg’s same homefield advantage in the Midwest, but doesn’t seem to have any greater strength in South Carolina, and the media doesn’t make an issue of that.) I can’t deny that that is a factor, though. And I have to ask, if Buttigieg’s gayness is not an issue with most of the white public, how much of an issue is it for black voters who may be liberal on a lot of things but socially conservative? It’s not something one wants to acknowledge, but a lot of people didn’t want to acknowledge that Trump could win black, Hispanic and white female voters either.

Still, if Buttigieg’s youth and lack of national experience are a disadvantage in running for president, those factors in addition to his assets would make him an excellent running mate. Which means the Vice-Presidential debate with Mike Pence would be glorious.

And I like Joe Biden. But not as much as I did. I still think that there’s enough sympathy with the IDEA of what Donald Trump could be, contrasted with the ugly reality, that Biden could get support as the garrulous, politically incorrect guy who just wants to do the right thing. But even if Trump has done so much to lower the bar, I’m not sure that Democrats are going to endorse Joe the One-Man Gaffe Machine. Remember, in 2016, Republicans already thought they were in the Apocalypse. They were willing to endorse any candidate, no matter how scummy or unqualified, who had a real chance to beat Hillary Clinton and get Democrats out of power. By contrast, 2020 Democrats are still handicapped by a residual attachment to standards. This also means that they have to consider that the Ukraine smear campaign, fair or not, may work. Biden could still turn it to his advantage and point out that Trump’s Ukrainegate stunt demonstrates the depths that he and his party will go, and that they go to these depths because they’re more afraid of him than anyone else. And he does seem to be trying this, but I question how well it will work, or how flexible Biden will be in dodging the slime that he should know will be coming. The upside to sticking with Biden is the knowledge that if he isn’t chosen in the primary, Trump will pull some other skullduggery on whomever the nominee is. The bright side of that will be that Trump has already sunk so much of his attention to killing Biden that if he does, Trump’s going to have to switch it up late in the game, and it will be fairly awkward when he does. What, is he going to pressure Narendra Modi to investigate Elizabeth Warren because she’s an Indian?

Speaking of which: Now we get to the progressives. Again, I think that if you’re going to focus on Klobuchar and Warren, even though I am a centrist, that’s not necessarily the best approach, nor is the personality of Klobuchar better suited for the fight than that of Warren. To reiterate, Warren is going to be subject to much of the same snottery, bitch-calling, and other concealed and open sexism as Hillary Clinton. I also think she’ll deal with it better. The real difference between the Warren and Clinton, or Warren and Klobuchar, is personality. Warren seems nice. She seems sincere. And as they say, if you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made. Hillary Clinton couldn’t pull off sincerity even on the issues you know she cared about. And that’s partially because she was lacking in spontaneity and partially because everyone knew she was only in it for Her. Warren lacks both of those flaws. She has genuine rapport with voters she meets, and as she says, she has a plan for each of the issues she targets, including a plan to require candidates to disclose their tax returns and place their assets in a blind trust. That in itself would be good reason to support her, since as with Buttigieg, she realizes you can’t just reset the system back to “normal” once the Democrats are back in charge, because normal under Democrats was the system that got us to where we are now.

As for Bernie Sanders: Bernie Sanders is to politics what the Ramones are to rock music: He’s only got one song, but everybody loves it. Actually since 2016, he’s branched out: In addition to dealing with “the billionaire class”, he’s gotten fixated on climate change. I don’t necessarily agree with everything, or even most things that Sanders and Warren want- in fact, Sanders signature success in 2016 and this campaign was making himself a major contender with no corporate or billionaire money, simply by bottom-up contributions and word-of-mouth. While many would claim this is socialism in theory, in practice socialism (in both ‘democratic’ and Leninist forms) has always been centralized. But by demonstrating the power of large groups of individuals, Sanders has demonstrated an alternative to both corporate and government influence even as he claims that corporate influence is insurmountable and that a larger government is needed to oppose it. Indeed, it’s largely because of government influence that corporate influence exists. Business wouldn’t spend so much money on influencing government if it were a wasted investment. I actually did support Sanders in 2016 and even changed from Libertarian to Democrat temporarily as a last-ditch shot to have someone other than Hillary against Trump. With the number of choices in the system now, I haven’t decided if I’ll do the same thing this year. Only a couple (Klobuchar and Bloomberg) are busybody statists that I really don’t like. (The other one, Kamala Harris, dropped out.) Any of the others, including Biden, would be acceptable. I would prefer Buttigieg at this point. But Sanders has the profile and the populist bona fides to fight Trump on the turf where he won.

After all this DAMN time, watching the Trumpublicans make this country more and more corrupt, watching Democrats continue to play circular firing squad, we have to pick who it is that is going to oppose Putin’s viceroy in November. And that process starts this week. A process of elimination.

Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls…

Dyin’ time’s here.