Violence and Opportunism from the Left

On June 14th, a gunman opened fire on a group of Republican congressmen practicing for the annual baseball game with the Democrats. Initial reports indicate that the shooter was a Bernie Sanders supporter and had verified that it was Republicans on the field before opening fire. Further reports say that while he was from Illinois, he'd been living in Alexandria in his van since March.

I'm going to speculate a bit about his motives. The shooter's social media groups included one called "Eliminate Republicans" and he seems to have taken this seriously. It's possible that he moved to Alexandria specifically to kill President Trump and settled for shooting at congressmen after being unable to get near enough to harm the President. But, as I said, that's speculation.

What we know for sure is that this was an act of violence against the Republicans. When Gabby Giffords was shot six years ago, the Right was immediately blamed for including coded messages that their agents would understand. The Left backed off of this a bit after it came out that the Giffords shooter was an incoherent leftist who was obsessed with language purity. Nevertheless, I still see references to that shooting as Republican-inspired.

There have been no coded messages since the election of President Trump. The Left has been very straightforward with calls for violence. These range from images of Trump being assassinated (Snoop Dog killing Trump in a video, Kathy Griffin holding Trump's bloody head, Shakespeare in the Park killing Trump nightly as Julius Caesar) to memes saying that "it's OK to punch a fascist".

Once you've decided that an act of violence is proper, it can easily escalate from punching fascists to shooting Republicans.

The Left needs to take a deep breath, calm down, and stop obsessing over President Trump. They also need to start condemning the violence coming from within their side. This includes a lot of campus protests and the black-clad antifas. And they need to remember that unprovoked violence is never appropriate no matter how distasteful you find someone's views.

So far this is not happening. I've seen very few posts on social media calling for less rancor. Instead I've seen people suggest that the congressmen who were shot had it coming for opposing gun control or simply that the Republican Whip who was hurt the most deserved it for being a poor human being. This only makes things worse. It excuses the shooting.

Trying to tie this to gun control is inexcusable. While it is still early, nothing has surfaced to show that the shooter would have been failed a background check. Yes, he did have a semi-automatic rifle but kiives kill more people than all types of rifles. The gunman also had a handgun.

But this is the worst type of opportunism. The important thing her is the will to commit violence. Millions of people own rifles but only a handful are used to kill or injure. Simply having a gun does not make you want to kill members of a political party. It's the toxic rhetoric that does that.

Recent attacks including the one in London just last week show that it is the will to harm that is important. Islamic terrorists have gone from using guns to using vehicles and knives. Taking away the Alexandria attacker's guns would not remove his will to harm. He had a van. He could have as easily used it.

Currently almost all of the violence is coming from the Left. This is in contrast to the Tea Party rallies of the Obama era when protestors made it a point of pride that they never caused any property destruction. Instead of giving a wink and a nod to the violence, the Left needs to make it clear that this is unacceptable.

Is it possible to tell how President Trump is doing?

President Trump was inaugurated nearly six months ago. How good a job is he doing? I can't tell. News coverage is beyond biased. The newsrooms are filled with people who hate Trump. Many of them see themselves as part of the Resistance and use this to justify suspending even the appearance of balanced reporting. Others simply get caught up in whatever the day's distraction is. This is in contrast to President Obama who could do no wrong in the eyes of the press.

Here are a few examples. The Philippians are an important ally and partner in the fight against Islamic terrorism but the current Philippine president is known for his brutal treatment of drug dealers. When Trump made it clear that he would not push for civil rights reforms in the Philippians, the press ran multiple stories and editorials condemning Trump. But Cuba is also a major violator of human rights. Not a word was said about this when Obama opened relations with Cuba, not even when the Castro regime had a major crackdown and made things worse after Obama opened relations. Instead the press swooned at the thoughts of seeing classic cars in Havana and Cuban baseball.

Trump negotiated a major arms deal with Saudi Arabia. This was to balance the region after Obama's promotion of Iran as a regional power. There seems to have been a side-deal that the Saudis would stop turnign a blind eye to the financial support of terrorism. As part of that, several Arab countries cut relations with Yemen. All of that seems like a good thing but all the press could talk about was that the US has a naval base in Yemen.

And the biggest share of press coverage for Trump's first overseas trip was devoted to his wife not wanting to hold his hand.

The Paris Accord is another example. Even if it did everything it was promised to do, the effect would be too small to measure. Did the press ever mention this? Of course not. Instead we were given stories about rising sea levels.

The biggest distraction has been Russia. Trump is not under investigation for colluding with the Russians. There is no evidence that the Russians actually changed the election results, either directly through tampering with election equipment and releasing emails or indirectly through fake news stories. But you won't hear that from the press. Instead we get stories about every time a member of the Trump administration had any contact with anyone from Russia as if a handshake in public is a smoking gun. This story has been, to used a preferred phrase of former Secretary of State Clinton, a big nothing-burger. In fact the book Shattered suggested that she and her campaign were the ones who started pushing the Russian story days after the election. It should have been a big story when fired FBI Director Comey said that the Feb 14 New York Times story stating that members of the Trump administration had meetings with Russian agents. Instead that was, at best, a footnote.

All of this makes it impossible to judge how well the Trump administration is performing. We have no idea if the Trump White House is in disarray or simply going through the normal settling-in pains experienced by every administration. When Trump has accomplishments, they are drowned out by headlines about his tweets or Russia.

This doubles down on the bubble the Left lives in. They get constant confirmation bias. But is this deluge of anti-Trump coverage enough to turn Trump voters to vote Democrat or will the constant, unfair attacks stiffen the resolve of his supporters? We won't know for another year an a half, at the earliest.

Trump and Comey

Yesterday former FBI Director Comey testified before Congress. Many on the Left had been hoping that this would be a knock-out for Trump's presidency or at least the beginning of the end. It was not. Here are the big take-away:

Trump asked for loyalty. As soon as the election was called in Trump's favor, Obama hold-overs vowed to resist his presidency in any way possible. While there are several interpretations of what Trump meant when he asked Comey for loyalty, the most likely is that Trump was asking Comey to do his job impartially instead of undercutting Trump from undercover. Comey offered his honesty which Trump accepted. This shows that Trump way manly asking Comey to do his job.

Trump was correct in mistrusting Comey. Comey didn't trust Trump and acted accordingly.

Trump only asked Comey to go easy on former National Security Advisor Flynn. Flynn was only being investigated because Trump appointed him. This comes across to me as Trump suggesting that being forced to resign was enough punishment but that he left it up to Comey. Comey testified that he took it as an order which he chose to ignore. It must not have been much of an order since he did not report Trump following up on the request. I suspect that when you choose to ignore a direct order by Trump, he does not forget about it and let the matter drop. It would be impossible to impeach Trump on obstruction of justice charges based on this (which hasn't stopped the left from screaching).

Trump was never under investigation. This is a big one. A major justification for opposing Trump was that he is Putin's puppet (or worse according to a foul rant by Stephen Colbert). Comey's testimony showed that Trump was never suspected of colluding with Russia. Further, Trump was all in favor of investigating any of his "satellites" who had cooperated improperly with the Russians. That ends the hope of somehow nullifying the election.

Trump had a good reason for firing Comey. While the White House has offered several reasons for the firing, The biggest one seems to be that Comey knew that Trump was innocent of dealing with the Russians but refused to say so publicly, despite the damage his silence was causing  the president. Among other things, the (non-existent) investigation was given by Democrats as a reason to hold up Trump's Supreme Court nominee. Comey was quite free in confirming the investigation of Hillary Clinton's email server despite the damage that did to her campaign but he was unwilling to be as flexible for a sitting president.

The Obama Justice Department did try to obstruct the investigation of HRC's email server. Among other things, Comey was instructed to call it a "matter" rather than an "investigation".

Comey is pretty sleezy. He took a lot on himself. He decided to make a public announcement about the email server and make it in such a way that no charges would be filed despite that being outside of the FBI's authority. He claims to have decided to ignore an order from the President on an investigation. He leaked his memos to the press in the hope of starting an independent investigation but he never gave a good cause for investigating anything.

Paris Treaty Hysterics

Last week President Trump announced that he was pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement on Global Warming. Naturally the world erupted in hysterics. One of the ore heated reactions I saw was a letter to the editor in the Columbus Dispatch that talked about millions dying and global flooding. Nowhere was it reported that a majority of the country is skeptical about Global Warming or what the trade-offs to the agreement are. This is why Trump won the election. Within the bubble it is unanimous that the agreement was a good thing and that there could be no descent. The people inside the bubble aren't even aware of the bubble,

Along with the Iran nuclear arms pact, the Paris Agreement was meant as the capstone on President Obama's foreign policy. Similarly, despite being a treaty in all but name, it was never submitted to the Senate for ratification. Since the two agreements were so important to Obama, the negotiators were willing to settle for a bad deal over no deal.

The Paris Agreement was not going to stop Global Warming or even slow it appreciably. If all of the goals were met then the reduction in the expected rise would be around 0.02 C. That is too small to be accurately measured against weather so it amounts to a rounding error. The signatories were allowed to set their own goals and the only enforcement mechanism was "name and shame" so it's unlikely that it would even meet its goals. It also contained a Green Fund which was an huge funds transfer from the developed nations (led by the US but not including China or India) to the rest of the world in the name of environmental justice. That's why the agreement had nearly 200 signatories - most of the countries involved were promised cash for signing with no real penalties for failing to meet their goals.

Seriously, we were going to eliminate American jobs for that?

In his announcement speech, Mr Trump said that he is the President of Pittsburgh, not Paris. The fact that this was widely derided (and even compared to Hitler) is why Trump won the election. There is still a significant core support in the US for a President who puts his pwn country first instead of last.

The Chimera of Single-Payer

The American Left is enamored with the idea of single-payer health care. To them, it's the best possible form. They are blind to it's drawbacks.

Making the government responsible for health care also gives the government a bigger say in individual behavior. Considering the misguided efforts at dictating school lunches, imagine what will happen if politicians decide that the best way to cut health care costs is to mandate lifestyle changes? Right now insurers are offering incentives but imagine if these had the force of law?

And there is the big question, why does the Left want to trust their health care to the people who administer the VA hospitals?

But these issues are minor compared to the disruption that a change to Single Payer would cause to the economy. Think about it. Health care is a big portion of the economy. Single Payer means nationalizing it. Insurance is around 9% of the economy and they want to outright eliminate that.

Most Americans get their insurance through their employer and are happy with it. It's part of their compensation package. It's also one of the biggest things that unions have to offer. Unionized industries typically offer superior health benefits.

What will happen if Single Payer is implemented? Health insurance is a tax-exempt benefit. Just handing over the cash paid on employee's behalf will bet them less than they are currently getting.

In order to implement Single Payer, taxes will have to be raised. Most advocates think that other people (the rich) will be taxed and that they will get free benefits. The truth is that the rich don't have enough money. Everyone will have to pay.

When all is said and done, lots of people will be better off but lots will be worse off and the change will put the economy in turmoil for years, maybe decades. One thing that is guaranteed is that the transition will be must harder than the Left believes. The idea that the government can just put it into place without consequences is absurd.

We may get to see how this works out. Vermont tried to implement a single-payer system but it was a total failure. California is currently debating it. We'll see if they have more success than Vermont had. 

Hillary's Flights of Fancy

In recent interviews, Hillary Clinton has "accepted full responsibility for her loss" then immediately blamed other people. She still hasn't accepted that she lost outright and that she, herself, is the person most to blame. Here's some of her claims:

If the election had been ten days earlier. This isn't much of an excuse. Yes, if the election had been held when she was ahead in the polls she might have won. But if the election had been held nine weeks earlier then Trump would have won the popular vote as well as the election. Hillary believes that the letter FBI director Comey sent to Congress, which was immediately leaked to the press, caused her to drop in the polls, costing her the election. This may be true (polling at the time indicated the announcement only caused a three-day dip and she'd been cleared before election day regardless) but the Bill Bush tape hurt Trump much more that the Comey letter hurt Hillary. All losingcandidates wish that the election had been held at a time that was more favorable to them but few go as far as Clinton.

Voter Suppression in Wisconsin. Trump won Wisconsin by 20,000 votes. A voter advocacy group calculated that a new voter-ID law in Wisconsin had kept 200,000 people from voting. The assumption is that the majority of those kept from voting were Hillary supporters. The fact-checkers disagree. The "study" came from an openly pro-Hillary group and their methodology was hopelessly flawed. They compared voter numbers in 2016 to 2012 in Wisconsin and Minnesota (which did not have a voter-id law). Turnout was down in Wisconsin and up in Minnesota so they concluded that the only factor was the voter-id law. Among other flaws, this ignores the fact that the Wisconsin turnout was higher in 2016 than in 2008 and that minority turn-out in general was down which accounted for most of the drop in Wisconsin (for some reason minorities were more likely to turn out for a fresh, young black man than an old, establishment white woman). It may comfort Hillary to think that outside forces kept her from winning Wisconsin, the fact remains that she never set foot in the state.

The Russians. Those terrible Russians. They hacked the election by releasing all of those boring Podesta emails. Even Hillary admits that there was nothing damaging in the emails but she still insists that the release was a factor. I can almost forgive her for this one. The emails were a much bigger issue inside her campaign. Every day for a month staffers would have to pour through the latest email dump then report to the campaign what the damage was. This made the emails seem much bigger to those in the campaign than to voters. But by blowing the emails out of proportion, Clinton can advance the idea that she was robbed by the Russians (with dark hints that they colluded with Trump).

Misogyny. Sure some people voted against her because she's a woman. But being a woman was a big part of her appeal. She undoubtedly got more votes because of the gender she identifies as than she lost. She and her campaign staff still complain about a double standard - that men are allowed to be angry but women aren't. Inconveniently, this doesn't apply to other women candidates. Elizabeth Warren is always angry and never accused of being shrill. Maybe the fault is in the candidate instead of society's reception to her gender. As a side-note, Hillary's still pushing the lie that Trump followed her around the stage and loomed over her during the second debate. A close look at photographs shows that Trump never moved from his seat. Hillary walked over to his side of the stage and placed herself between Trump and a camera man. According to Shattered, this was a move she'd rehearsed.

The truth is that Clinton was constantly her own worst enemy. Her decision to have total control over her emails by setting up a private server was an unforced error that came back to haunt her in numerous ways. That lead to the FBI investigation. She compounded this by forwarding emails to her assistant Huma who sent them to her husband, Anthony Weiner, to print. These turned up in an unrelated investigation of Weiner's PC. The hacking of Podesta's emails would barely have been news if the public hadn't been hearing about Hillary's private server for months. It's been said of Hillary that she'll never tell the truth if she can lie instead. She told lie after lie about her email server and each time a lie was exposed, the public lost more confidence in her. (Yes, Trump set a record for statements that weren't true but they weren't seen as self-serving the way Hillary's email lies were.)

Hillary's lack of candor really caught up with her when she collapsed at a 9/11 commemoration. Her campaign had been denying her health problems for weeks and the initial explanation - that she'd become dehydrated - turned out to be a lie. When it came out that she had pneumonia and hidden it from everyone including most of her staff, her campaign insisted that sexism was somehow to blame.

While Hillary had position papers on everything conceivable, no one can truly say what she believes in. In 2008 she was running on a platform of a return to the Clinton years. By 2016, under pressure from Bernie Sanders, she was repudiating all of her husband's accomplishments. She teased for months on the Trans Pacific partnership which she had been involved in negotiating and which she had called the gold-standard. No one was surprised when she came out against it after it became unpopular within her party. The same was true for other issues such as oil and gas pipelines and gay marriage. She always took the most expedient stand on issues and always after waiting to see which position would be most advantageous. She had no real core to her beliefs. This was in contrast with Trump who seemed to care about what's best for Americans.

According to Shattered, Hillary was never able to articulate a reason why she was running to her closest advisors. She simply assigned them the job of inventing something. With no core to her campaign, all she had to run on was negative attacks on Trump. She set a record for negative ads but failed to even attempt to court voters. her campaign was centered on turning out likely voters while suppressing Trump voters as the most cost-effective way of running the campaign. She has to take responsibility for that. A presidential candidate has to inspire by more than simply being a woman and grandmother.

Hillary lost because multiple decisions came back to haunt her. Her email server, relations with Russia while she was Secretary of State. her paid speeches for Wall Street - they all hurt her. With no core beliefs for her supporters to rally behind, there was nothing to make up for her short-comings. While it's true she did win the popular vote, she did it by running up the vote in states where Trump never tried to compete. In the Electoral College, which is all that matters, she was not competitive.

Hillary Clinton lost fair and square. She needs to accept that and be a gratuitous loser instead of the bitter failure that she's become.

Original Hypocracy

One contentious point between conservatives and progressives is original intent. Conservatives believe that laws should be enforced according to the understanding and motivations of the legislators when it was passed. If a law needs updating then it should be done by the legislature or by amending the Constitution. Progressives and liberals before them preferred the concept of a "living Constitution" and of reinterpreting laws. One example is Title IX which was passed to prevent discrimination in colleges receiving federal funding on the basis of sex. Over the Obama administration, Title IX's scope was expanded to include the proper response to allegations of sexual assault and to gender identification. Neither of these was intended when the law was passed in 1972.

It's easy to understand why the left likes using new interpretations. It's much easier to find a sympathetic (progressive) judge or administrator than to convince a (likely conservative) legislature that a law needs modifying. The left insists that it's impossible to know exactly what the original intentions were so it's up to the current courts to assign whatever meanings they want.

This principal has been turned on it's head with President Trump's executive order on immigration, often (inaccurately) described as a Muslim travel ban. Court after court has ruled that the order is perfectly legal then struck it down based on the President's intentions based on broad statements made during the 2016 campaign. Ruling that an order would have been legal from any other president sets a dangerous precedent, one that will probably come back to bite the left. Giving judges the power to strike down legal executive orders because of the suspected intentions of the President will inevitably be used against the next Democratic president.

This is not the first, or second, time that Democrats have pushed for systemic changes based on short-term gains without looking at the long-term consequences. The Democratic Senate eliminated the filibuster for judicial candidates short of the Supreme Court which made it easy for the Republican-controlled Senate to approve Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. President Obama expanded the use and bredth of the executive order giving Trump similar powers.

In a democratically-elected representative government, both sides must adhere to the existing rules and both sides must agree to changes. Unilateral changes will inevitably be used against the instigators.

The Perpetual Impeachment Proceedings

In was wake of a special council being named to investigate connections between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, local Representative Joyce Beatty called for impeachment proceedings to begin. Keep in mind that to date, no one has identified an actual crime beyond someone hacking the DNC email server and the Gmail account of John Podesta. It still hasn't been proven that thee hacks were directed by the Russian government (and a whole new wrinkle was thrown in when a private investigator claimed that a member of the DNC was the real source of the Wikileaks material). While there was incidental contact between people associated with the Trump campaign, it has not been proved that this was anything but innocent. If there was a quid pro quo agreement between the Russians and the Trump campaign, so far there is no trace of it. And, since there is no evidence of an agreement, there is no evidence that Trump was party to it.

In other words, at this point all we have is a circumstantial case that the Russians tried to affect the election and a deduction that Trump must have been involved.

Without a lot more concrete evidence, there can be no impeachment. And investigations like this take a long time. We may not have the results in until after Trump is reelected.

So why is Beatty talking about impeachment right now? Sheer partisan hatred.

This is poisonous to our democracy. Trump won the election fair and square according to the rules in place at the time, The Democrats spent the months leading up to Trump's inauguration trying to change the rules. Not that that failed, they are looking for pretexts to remove him from office.

But the Democrats are so blinded by partisan rage that they don't see what till happen next. The Republicans spent the Obama years being fairly quiet. True, Congress obstructed as much of Obama's agenda as they could but that's what opposition parties do. What they did not do was vow start talking publicly about removing him from office before he was even sworn in. But if the Democrats keep trying to remove Trump then they can count on their next president getting a similar reception.

Let's save time and start the impeachment proceedings for the next Democrat president now. Beatty has already shown that we don't need an actual cause.

Shattered - what it tells us and what it doesn't

The recent book Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign is an interesting insider's account of Hillary's campaign and why it failed. The authors said that they had been getting information from the campaign staff all through the campaign on condition that is not be published until after the election. I suspect that the authors intended it to chronicle Hillary's winning campaign and how she surmounted numerous internal issues and external events.

The authors are Democrat insiders. They have detailed accounts of Bernie Sanders's entrance into the campaign but very little insight into Trump of his campaign. The biggest insights come from the debate preparation when they admitted that Hillary's trump-proxy was a better candidate than Hillary.

There are some omissions and false impressions. The book waits until the final chapter to mention that Trump was the candidate that Hillary wanted to run against. Early polling showed that she had the best chance against him and her hope was that he would pull the entire Republican slate down with him, giving Democrats total control of Congress and the White House. This was reduced to a single sentence.

Hillary's Basket of Deplorables speech was covered but around the same time she recorded a video asking "Why aren't I 50 points ahead?" That got a lot of play and contitributed to her early-September slump but was skipped.

At one point Trump jokingly called on Russia to release the 35,000 emails that Hillary had deleted. This was meant as a dig at the private server and the assumption that it had already been hacked. Trump was not calling on the Russians to hack into the server. The Clinton campaign spun it as Trump calling on the Russians to hack into the server which was already in FBI custody and off-line. Shattered repeats the charge without pointing out how silly that spin was.

After the second debate the Clinton campaign circulated a picture of Trump "looming disapprovingly behind Hillary," Shattered mentioned that Hillary rehearsed for the debate on a set that was lent to her by Obama but failed to mention that she actually made a point of walking past him to the other side of the stage so that she was between Trump and a photographer.

Shattered goes light on some of the damaging details leaked such as the Clinton campaign getting questions in advance. At the same time it over-emphasizes the effect of the Podesta emails. This probably reflected the view inside the Clinton campaign. Wikileaks did a daily dump of emails for the month before the election. That meant that the Clinton campaign had to check hundreds or thousands of emails daily and evaluate if any were damaging. As it turned out, there was very little of significance in the emails and it's unlikely that they had any measurable effect on the polls. Regardless, Hillary is still talking about them, using the same language that Shattered uses.

Despite these short-comings, Shattered is a good look at all of the back-scenes drama that was kept hidden. It is also comforting for anyone who is unsure about Trump being elected. Given the problems that Hillary had just keeping her campaign together, her presidency would have been a disaster.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means

Why did Hillary Clinton lose the election? Misogyny

What is President Trump? A Misogynist
 

We hear that constantly but up until late last Summer those words almost never appeared. What was used instead was sexism and sexist.

For those who never heard of a misogynist before the 2016 presidential campaign, it means someone who hates women. It does not mean someone who imposes himself on women. A true misogynist would never do that because he hates women.

And seriously, does Hillary really think that she lost the election because a large portion of the electorate hates women?

The proper word here is sexist and sexism but those words are not strong enough.

The same thing happened with racism. There used to be a distinction between prejudice and racism. Some acting from a stereotype, possibly with good intentions, was prejudiced. But someone who actively hated a person because of his race was a racist. Over years, the definition of racism has been inflated until it pushed prejudice out of the vocabulary. Now the left is trying to do this with sexism, just to make things sound worse.

Trump and Comey

President Trump fired the director of the FBI. This was the first time a president has fired an FBI director since President Clinton fired William Sessions in 1993. The Democrats and the press (which are practically the same thing) went wild, insisting that this was done because Comey was investigating Trump's connections to Russia. They insisted this despite Comey saying repeatedly that the FBI was not investigating the President.

So, what's going on? I can see three possibilities:

1) Trump Derangement Syndrome. To many on the left, everything that Trump does is ominous and self-centered. They've never given up on the idea that Trump is a Russian puppet so they see this as just one more piece of evidence. They are the Trump version of Birthers.

2) Political posturing. Many on the left are calling for a special prosecutor to investigate. Savvy operators know that special prosecutors can run wild. Look at Clinton - the special prosecutor was appointed to investigate if Clinton as Governor gave special treatment to Whitewater Savings where Chelsea's college fund was invested but ended up investigating charges of sexual harassment in the White House. The hope is that once a prosecutor is appointed to investigate Trump, he won't stop until he finds an impeachable offense.

3) Trump was taking appropriate action. Just as a thought exercise, let's assume for a moment that Trump is not Russia's stooge. Comey lost the trust of both parties last year by inserting himself into the campaign multiple times. Just a few days ago he testified before Congress about his actions. Despite his rationalizations, the Democrats were still livid at him. The Republicans still haven't forgiven him for letting Hillary Clinton off the hook by saying that no reasonable prosecutor would file charges. Comey was a distraction for the FBI and no one trusted him. The best thing to do was fire him.

The Resistance and Trump's reelection

I know that Donald Trump was only inaugurated a bit over three months ago but I had an insight about his chances to be reelected based on pop culture reaction to previous presidents.

For this I'm using modern presidents because I'm basing this partly on the relationship between the president and pop culture. Kennedy was assassinated before he could run for reelection and Johnson was a special case. So for this exercise, I'm starting with Nixon and continuing through Obama.

During that period there have been five Republican presidents: Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush(41) and Bush(43). There were three Democrats: Carter, Clinton, and Obama.

Now here's the interesting part, Nixon, Reagan and Bush(43) were hated in pop culture. All three had constant protests and inspired numerous dystonian predictions. They were often openly mocked. Take this example from the comic strip Doonsbury.  CBS ran a two hour special by a British puppeteer group that was mainly an anti-Reagan screed. You can see a sample of their work here. Things went into high gear under Bush(43). Several major movies were released with strong anti-Iraq messages (they all tanked). Cable news channel MSNBC reinvented itself as the anti-Bush channel led by Keith Olbermann. Whoppi Goldburg went on a drunken tear during an awards show comparing her pubic hair to the president.

I could give lots of other examples. My point is that the Democrats hated all three of these presidents with a white hot anger. And all three were reelected. Nixon and Reagan won record landslides. Bush(43) didn't do as well but he was still the first president to win a majority of the vote in four elections.

What about Ford and Bush(41)? They were mocked a bit, mainly on SNL. But there were no marches, no major protests. They were tolerated. And they lost.

It's harder to apply this to the Democrats. Pop culture is dominated by people who are Democrat-friendly. But anti-Clinton sentiment bubbled up in other places. Rush Limbaugh became amazingly popular as the resistance to Clinton. The same thing happened with Glen Beck and Obama. These radio celebrities led the resistance to Clinton and Obama respectively. Republicans hated both of these presidents. The Gingrinch Revolution and the Tea Party rose to fight these presidents. And they failed miserably. Both presidents were reelected easily.

Carter was a different matter. There was no widespread resistance to him. There were no protests. Even SNL ignored him. And he lost.

So here we are with Trump. The left hates him with a passion. They've marched in the street in the hundreds of thousands. But it doesn't matter. In fact, all of that hate probably helps Trump. He's not the monster that the left makes him out to be and reasonable people tend to recoil from unreasonable hatred.

So all of this hatred is likely to increase Trump's chances of reelection.

Hillary's Mistakes

In one of her first public interviews, Hillary Clinton admitted to making mistakes but was vague about them, preferring to focus instead on factors outside her control.

So, did we make mistakes? Of course we did. Did I make mistakes? Oh my gosh, yes. … But the reason why I believe we lost were the intervening events in the last ten days. And I think you can see, I was leading in the early vote. I had a very strong — and not just our polling and data analysis, but a very strong assessment going on across the country about where I was, in terms of the necessary — both votes and electoral votes.

I disagree with her assessment that intervening events were the cause of her loss. She made lots and lots of mistakes and some of them led directly to the intervening events she complained about. Here's a partial list of mistakes:

The Email Server. The FBI couldn't have announced that they had reopened an investigation of misuse of classified information if Hillary hadn't used a private server in the first place. She wanted to have total control over what got out. She even went so far as to delete more than half of the emails on the server. Why did she do this? Excess concern for privacy? To hide influence peddling? We'll never know but the speculation darkens an already tarnished reputation (more on this later). In addition to this, she was careless with classified material. It just came out that she regularly forwarded emails to her assistant, Huma, to print and she forwarded them to her husband, Anthony Weiner. If this had made the headlines before the election she might not have lost the popular vote as well as the Electoral College.

Libya. If it wasn't for Hillary we'd never have overthrown Libya. This was a disaster for the Libyans and it lead to the death of an US ambassador. It also poisoned the US's relationship with Putin. Libya's Qaddafi had been cooperating with the US including voluntarily dismantling its nuclear program and we overthrew Qaddafi anyway. Putin was convinced that he'd be next and blamed Hillary. Personally, I don't think that the release of emails hacked by the Russians had much effect on the election but if it did, it can be traced back to this.

Wall Street and the Clinton Foundation. The voters were still mad at Wall Street about the Great recession. Both Sanders and Trump harnessed this anger. But Hillary was a creature of Wall Street. She made millions giving speeches to big banks. So did her husband, Bill. The Clintons' speaking fees were high, too. So, were these institutions simply paying for big-name speakers to impress the attendees at their functions or were they buying future good will from the next president? Again, we don't know. Hillary danced around the issue a lot and insisted that she'd warned the banks to be more careful with their investments but the one leaked transcript show just the opposite. She spent her time congratulating the banks on their wisdom. People wanted an outsider and she was the ultimate insider. She was even warned that accepting speaking fees from banks would hurt her and she brushed the warning off.

Lies and prevarications. Hillary has the reputation for never telling the truth when she can lie or tell a half truth. She did both constantly and, when she did tell the truth, she did it in a lawyerly way. She flat out lied when she said that her personal email server was because she can't use two devices at a time. She was forced to make admissions but never came out and told the entire truth. She hid the fact that she had pneumonia until she collapsed in public and even then spent hours insisting that it was just dehydration.

Expecting to rebuild the Obama coalition. Hillary expected that, as Obama's chosen successor, his voters would automatically default to her. But Obama was a fresh face and an outsider. Hillary became First Lady before many voters were born. Democrats voted for her out of duty but it was a joyless campaign.

Running negative. No one has ever run such a negative campaign as the one Hillary ran against Donald Trump. She started them well before the official launch of the national campaign, before either of them was officially the candidate. There were numerous cuts but they were all the same message, repeating things that Trump had said over years or decades. This was the worst thing that Hillary could have done. After months of hearing the same Trump quotes, they no longer shocked. They just faded into the background. Hillary inoculated the voters against Trump. The few positive ads that she ran failed to tell voters what she would do for them. That gave Trump space to tell voters what he would do for them.

The Basket of Deplorables. You just don't insult somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 of the voters. Ever.

At one point Hillary released an internal video were she asked why she wasn't ahead by 50 points. Given all of her mistakes, it's a wonder that she was ever ahead.

LGB Rights Turned on Their Head

I'm old enough to remember when the movement was called Gay Lib. Then Lesbians and bisexuals insisted on inclusion and it became Gay and Lesbian Rights. Bisexuals were added in and it became LGT Rights. Through it all, the movement had one message: "We aren't asking anyone else to turn gay, we just want to be free to express our own proclivities." This is an appeal to basic fairness and very hard to argue against. Reasonable people will agree that what ever happens between consenting couples is their business.

Two things have happened in the last couple of years that have turned this argument upside down. It began when the transsexuals managed to include themselves into the mix becoming LGBT then LGBTQ, sometimes with other letters added at the end. This flew below the radar until 2015 when the Supreme Court declared gay marriage legal nation-wide. Suddenly the LGB part of the alliance had achieved all of their goals.

Movements seldom just declare victory and shut down. They declare new goals. So, the LGBT movement seamlessly moved on to the T part with the Q part waiting in the wings.

Things get kind of strange here. Where, previously we had two sexes easily differentiated by their chromosomes as well as secondary sexual characteristics. Now we have a gender spectrum where gender is separate from sex. Officially the movement is pushing the idea of being born in the wrong body. Just as gays were "born this way", trans people say that their bodies do not match their gender. Someone might have XY chromosomes but still be convinced, deep down, that he is and always has been a woman and that society should treat him as a her.

This group has yet to reconcile with the gender-fluid people who claim to change genders as often as their clothing and who want to be treated as whatever gender they happen to be currently wearing. But I'll ignore them for the moment.

A big problem with being a transsexual is that sexual reassignment surgery is expensive and just builds an approximation of the opposite sex's genitals. So a majority of transsexuals only change secondary sex characteristics. Trans-women take hormones to grow breasts and possible get implants. Trans-men take hormones to grow beards and have their breasts removed. This leads to the construct "a woman who happens to have a penis".

Problems arise when trans people start dating. It's difficult to find a guy (or a lesbian woman) who wants to have sex with a girl who happens to have a penis. The problem resolves itself with trans couples but the number of trans people is really pretty small.

Which bring me to the point of this post - the demand that CIS-gender people (people whose gender matches their genitalia) ignore a trans person's genitalia. Here's a rant by a trans women who insists on being treated as a real women. The original, powerful message of the Gay Lib movement is gone. Instead of "let us live our lives", (s)he's now demanding that others change.

This is self-defeating. Where gay rights advocates have always insisted that you can't force someone to change their sexual attraction, now the trans people are demanding just that. And they are not just demanding it from straight people. They are demanding that everyone change. And you just can't expect people to change their sexual preferences because you demand it. It just doesn't work that way.

This is also a total redefinition of what it is to be gay or straight. By this reasoning, gays are now two people with the same secondary sex characteristics regardless of primary sexual characteristics.

I expect that this conflict will start breaking up the LGBTQ alliance. If that doesn't then the gender-fluid folks will.

 

Chess and Checkers

Hillary Clinton managed to lose two presidential races where she was the front-runner with a huge financial advantage. First she lost the 2008 primary to Barack Obama then she lost the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump. I had a recent insight into how this could happen - Hillary was using checkers rules in a chess game.

There are two major differences between checkers and chess. The obvious one is that the pieces move differently. But that's minor. The biggest difference is that you win checkers by taking all of your opponent's pieces but you win chess by taking the king. Taking pieces in chess is a strategy but it can also be a distraction and it is possible for a player with fewer pieces to still win by effective use of his resources.

In both elections, Hillary had the wrong objectives. She went after large states, assuming that wins there would crush her opponents. Both Obama and Trump ran in states that Hillary ignored and, when she didn't do as well in the big states, they passed her.

Once you look at it this way, you can see several aspects of Hillary's campaign that showed the wrong strategy. Look at the first debate. The accepted wisdom was that Trump needed to act presidential and keep from losing his temper. Hillary was supposed to have consulted with experts on how to needle him and make him lose his temper. In a later debate she made a point of crossing the stage so she could be photographed with Trump looming behind her. Then her staff sent out the picture as an example of how women have to cope with angry men looming over their shoulder.

What Hillary forgot was that the goal of the debates was not to score points on your opponent. It was to convince the voters that they would be better off with you in the White House. Trump spent most of his opening statement explaining why renegotiating treaties would help put people back to work.

Hillary had twice the campaign funds as Trump but she only spent a fraction on ads promoting herself and those only told how she had fought for children all her career. The vast majority of her ads were aimed at telling us that Trump is a bad person. Like taking chess pieces, negative ads can put you in a stronger position but they miss the goal of convincing enough people to vote for you to win the Electoral College.

Trump did the opposite - me told people how he would help them. Trump, like Obama before him, never lost sight of the goal and both dark horse candidates went on to win the presidency.

Gotcha Politics

While making a point about the brutality of the Syrian government, White House spokesman Sean Spicer pointed out that even Hitler didn't use chemical weapons. This should have been an uncontroversial statement since it is true. World War One saw wide-spread use of mustard and chlorine gas warfare. It was widely anticipated that Hitler would order the V2s fired at London to be equipped with similar payloads and images of the Blitz show Londoners in gas masks in preparation for that.

Similarly, battlefield troops across Europe were equipped with gas masks which they never needed.

So why the controversy? It's because the Nazis used gas chambers to kill Jews and other minorities.

This is not remotely the same thing as dropping nerve gas on apartment buildings. Spicer did not try to compare Assad's brutality to Hitler's. He was referring to specific battlefield use of chemical weapons Pointing this out in no way diminished the horrors of the concentration camps or Hitler's final solution and no one would have been outraged if President Obama's spokesman had made a similar statement. It's just gotcha politics.

About that Pepsi Ad

The big story of the day (not counting poison gas in Syria and rocket tests in North Korea) is a "tone deaf" ad by Pepsi featuring Kendall Jenner.

Assuming it hasn't been pulled, you can see it here.

The add contrasts a big but friendly street protest and a professional model in the middle of a photo shoot. The model is wearing a slinky silver dress, makeup and a blond wig. There is also a guy playing a cello (or similar large stringed instrument) which is not part of the sound track and a woman in Islamic headscarf who is looking at contact sheets or something. The guy with the cello drinks a Pepsi and joins the march. The woman in the headscarf screams in frustration, scatters she contact sheets, grabs her camera and runs out the march. The cello guy catches the eye of the model who apparently is suddenly "woke". She pulls her wig off, flashes to herself with different makeup, then hands her wig to an older black woman and joins the parade. She also manages to change clothes in an instant.

The model picks up a can of Pepsi, gives a Pepsi-fist bump to a couple of people including cello-guy and has her picture taken by headscarf girl. Then she hands the can of Pepsi to a good-looking cop who is standing peacefully nearby. He drinks it and the crowd goes wild.

The ad is sort of a feel-good version of the anti-Trump marches. People are carrying peace signs or signs that say "Join the conversation" and "love". There are a lot of minorities but the majority of the crowd is white. There are several cops present but none of them are visibly armed. A couple have riot helmets but most are simply standing there with their arms held behind them. There is no hint of violence.

If anyone should be offended, it's Trump supporters. It makes protests seem cool, especially if Pepsi is involved.

But that's not who's protesting. The complaints are all coming from the left, primarily Black Lives Matters. Here's a report on the backlash. The backlash is mainly split into two complaints. The first is Pepsi co-opting protest culture to sell soft drinks. That's a valid complaint.

The other complaint, and probably the real one, is that it makes the police look human. That's not how they put it but it's what they mean. It's a peaceful march, not a violent protest. The cops are engaged in traffic control. But the commenters keep going on about how a black marcher would be shot for approaching a cop like that.

Again, there is nothing in the ad to link it to the BLM marches. The closest anyone has come is a still of Kendal approaching the cop with a can and a picture of a BLM protestor being arrested.

But Black Lives Matters is all about teaching people that cops are terrible, people who will use any excuse to kill blacks. They still repeat the "Hands up, don't shoot" lie. So they can't allow an ad campaign that shows marchers and cops getting along. The ad has to go.

Nuking the Court

Senate Democrats are about to successfully filibuster a Supreme Court nominee for the first time ever. In response the Republicans are expected to "go nuclear" and change the rules governing the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees.The Democrats are making a mistake and doing it for very poor reasons. At the heart of their justifications are two truths - that they have no respect for principle and that they prefer to oppose President Trump than to serve the country,

They claim that the seat that Gorsuch was nominated to was "stolen" from Garland, President Obama's nominee and that no vote on Gorsuch should be allowed until a vote on Garland is first held. This sounds great in principle until you remember that President Obama and Vice-President Biden were both against a President nominating judges in their final year. I'd like to know if the Democrats would have held to these principles if Hillary Clinton had been elected and nominated a different, more progressive justice? I suspect I know the answer.

Gorsuch's elevation to the Supreme Court will not change the balance. He will be a conservative replacing a conservative and there is no chance that President Trump will withdraw his nomination and replace it with Garland.

A case can be made for leaving the court with eight members. Since Obama packed the lower courts with ideological appointments, that means that the court will keep ruling 4-4 on controversial matters letting lower court rulings stand. While terrible for jurisprudence, this would be good politically for the Democrats. But that would requite them to keep the seat open the entire Trump administration and to manage to win a 60-vote majority in the Senate after a Democrat replaces Trump. This would be a viable strategy if not for the nuclear option. The Republicans will not allow the Democrats to leave the seat vacant and by opposing such a well-qualified candidate who will not shift the court, the Democrats make the nuclear option inevitable.

That leaves obstructionism for its own sake as the Democrats' only motive. Their far-left base insists that Trump be opposed in every possible way and they are pandering to that group rather than serving their country.

Wonder Woman's Arm Pits

There's a controversy about Wonder Woman's arm pits. Some feminists are outraged that Diana shaves them. Here's some thoughts on that:

The character has been represented without excess body hair for decades.

Ancient Greek Women removed extra body hair (NSFW). Wonder Woman's culture is inspired by the ancient Greeks.

Many fashion trends, such as shaving, are as much about impressing other woman as they are looking good for men.

Men shave, too and much more often (and these days, men shave more of their bodies, too). I've seen speculation that both sexes are trying to preserve an adolescent look. Men shave world-wide including in cultures where women do not shave and this goes back thousands of years. There's something in the human makeup that makes us want to remove body hair. 

Science and Dogma

Recently a student organization at Middlebury College invited Charles Murray to speak. Murray is considered a controversial speaker because he co-wrote the book The Bell Curve in the 1990s. His most recent work is about the effect that college recruitment has on income inequality. Rather than hear what Murray had to say or just ignore his talk, protestors shut it down and forced him to leave, injuring a professor in the process. The college paper published a letter from a guest contributor signed Nic Valenti '17 that gives some insight into the motivations of the protestors.

Nic begins with this:

I can understand the perceptions that would lead the AEI to invite a controversial speaker such as Charles Murray. Indeed, when I first arrived at Middlebury I was clueless to the systems of power constructed around race, gender, sexuality, class or ability, and found that when I talked about these issues as I understood them — or rather, as I didn't — I was met with blank stares and stigma rather than substantial debate. As a young bigot, I can recall thinking: "I thought at Middlebury I would get to have intellectual discussions, but instead it feels as though my views are being censored." However, as a first-year I had failed to consider a simple, yet powerful component of debate: not all opinions are valid opinions. I had fallen into the trap of false equivalence.

He then talks about a debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham, a Young Earth Creationist, on the legitimacy of evolution. Naturally, Nye failed to convince Ham which seems to have infuriated Nic. That serves as a springboard into the controversy about Charles Murray:

And yet Charles Murray's views are even more dangerous than Ham's. Ham disavows a scientific theory; Murray disavows the fundamental equality of all human beings. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center: "In Murray's world, wealth and social power naturally accrue towards a 'cognitive elite' made up of high-IQ individuals (who are overwhelmingly white, male and from well-to-do families), while those on the lower end of the eponymous bell curve form an 'underclass' whose misfortunes stem from their low intelligence. According to Murray, the relative differences between the white and black populations of the United States, as well as those between men and women, have nothing to do with discrimination or historical and structural disadvantages, but rather stem from genetic differences between the groups."

This is an interesting juxtaposition and it shows how misguided Nic is about the world.

First of all, Nye didn't have a chance of convincing Ham. Nye was taking the scientific viewpoint which is that you go where-ever the evidence takes you. Ham was taking a dogmatic viewpoint that the Bible is to be taken as literally as possible and and evidence that says otherwise must be incorrect. I doubt if Nye ever expected to convince Ham. He was playing to the audience of people who might have been swayed by Ham.

So, on to Murray. Murray is not arguing dogma. He is a scientist and he is arguing in favor of an interpretation of the evidence. He uses genetics and statistics to make his case, both hard sciences.

Nic doesn't even bother to quote a dissenting scientist. Instead he quotes from the Southern Poverty Law Center which is not a scientific body by any stretch of the imagination. They are condemning Murray because they don't like the implications of his conclusions.

Nic doesn't realize it but he's in the same position as Ken Ham - he's spouting dogma against a scientist. If you look at Nic's earlier paragraph in this light you can see the parallels between it and a religious tract: "I was a sinner but I've received the word and I've been saved." Nic tells us that he came to college ready to debate issues but was indoctrinated.

This attitude explains the violence against a speaker. Science allows dissenting opinions to be voiced. They are then accepted or rejected on the soundness of their arguments. Dogma rejects all dissent out of hand and harshly suppresses heresy.

In late-17th century the Puritans in New England had a problem. The founders were sure they had been saved. But they weren't sure about their children. Salvation isn't hereditary and there's no visible mark to tell who is among the elect (the ones chosen by God). According to the Puritans. the only way to be sure was to constantly search your own soul and the souls of those around you for sin. That's what college campuses have become these days. The students are constantly searching each other's souls for and deviation from their dogma and engaging in ostentatious virtue signalling to prove that they are among the elect.

Kellyanne and the Gotcha photo

Earlier this week President Trump had a meeting with over 100 leaders of historically black colleges and universities. The press didn't run a picture of that. And pictures were taken. Here's one of Kellyanne Conway taking a picture with her phone.

Here's the picture that was run

Which was followed by criticism for Kellyanne for having her feet on the couch and fir sitting in the presence of the visitors. This is a "gotcha" picture. It had two purposes:

1) It keeps the press from having to report on Trump's outreach to a large group of black leaders.

2) It helps to discredit Kellyanne. The left hates her with a passion for orchestrating Trump's winning campaign.

Contrast this with eight years ago when CNN had a group of black kids singing and dancing in support of Obamacare.

That's why the press is no longer trusted.

The Two Year Myth

Ever since the election I've been seeing people on the left talking about how Trump will be president for two years. The highest profile version of this I've seen to date is a column by former conservative Kathleen Parker. She says:

My "good" prediction is based on the Law of the Pendulum. Enough Americans, including most independent voters, will be so ready to shed Donald Trump and his little shop of horrors that the 2018 midterm elections are all but certain to be a landslide — no, make that a mudslide — sweep of the House and Senate. If Republicans took both houses in a groundswell of the people's rejection of Obamacare, Democrats will take them back in a tsunami of protest.

This is a total fantasy. There is no way that the Democrats can remove Trump from office, even in an unprecedented landslide. No chance at all.

Because Senators server six year terms, the people coming up for reelection in 2018 are the ones who last ran in 2012 with Barack Obama at the top of the ticket. The Democrats who won were riding on Obama's coattails and the Republicans who won were bucking a headwind. The numbers show that. The Democrats and independents who caucus with the Democrats are defending 25 seats. The Republicans are defending 8. That's long odds for the Democrats.

But, let's assume that the Democrats manage a clean sweep and win all 33 seats. That would give them 56 seats. Assuming that they also take the house and pass a bill on impeachment, then the Senate would have to vote on removing President Trump and that takes a 2/3s super-majority. They'd have to have 67 votes. Does anyone seriously think that 11 Republicans will join the Democrats in ejecting a Republican president? The best guide we have to go on was the impeachment of Bill Clinton which failed in the Senate because the Democrats refused to vote to remove him, even though there was no question that he was guilty of perjury.

And, even if the Democrats did manage to remove Trump, that just elevates Pence to the presidency. Are we to believe that they will find cause to impeach him, too, so that nancy Pelosi can be president (it goes without saying that they will also refuse to confirm a replacement vice president after Trump is removed).

So any hopes of removing President Trump involve a lot of wishful thinking.

But is it even rational to assume that 2018 will be a Democratic wave election? The White House changes parties regularly. Since World War II, it's switched every 8 years with two exceptions, both involving Reagan (Reagan defeated a sitting president and his successor was elected but only held the White House for a single term). The Senate has changed hands several times since the Republicans took it in 1980 but its shifts tend to take 6 years or longer. The Republicans have only controlled the Senate since 2014.

The House is a different animal. The Democrats controlled it continuously from the 1930s until 1994 with the exception of the Republicans controlling it twice, both times for single term in the 1950s. The Republicans finally won control of the House in 1994  after 40 years and kept it until 2006 then won it back again in 2010.

It's instructive to look at what was going on when the House changed hands. 1994 was partly a reaction to Bill Clinton's presidency but it also featured the Contract With America - a set of issues that the Republicans promised to vote on in their first 100 days. They delivered on their Contract, also, but it was mainly symbolic since the Democrats still controlled the Senate.

The Democrats took the House in two wave elections. The first, in 2006, was largely a reaction to the war in Iraq. The 2008 election was a reaction to the financial crisis. The Republicans formed the Tea Party in 2009 and took the House back the following year. Considering that the Democrats controlled the House for 58 out of 62 years then the House may be in a similar, long-term Republican period with short interruptions because of external events. If this is true then there is no pendulum to swing back.

There is good reason to believe this. The country in general tends to be center-right but in the last two decades people have self-selected so that the country is a sea of red with small clusters of urban-dwelling liberals. This makes it nearly impossible to draw competitive congressional districts. Ohio continues to be nearly 50/50 but the graphic below shows how the Democrats have retreated into only a few counties.


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Even if we assume that it is possible to swing Congress back so soon, what will the Democrats' message be? Their post-election analysis rejected and moderation in favor of doubling down on progressive policies and identity politics. They have sworn to to all that they can to resist President Trump at every level. That satisfies their base but they already have the base's vote. A lot depends on how Trump's policies play out but the Democrats are taking a huge risk. They are convinced that Trump is a terrible president and that the rest of the country will eventually realize it. They have no plan B. If Trump succeeds or even muddles through then the Democrats will fail. 

Elizabeth Warren (sort of) Gets It.

In a speech to the Democrats last weekend, Elizabeth Warren had some genuine insights.

Our moment of crisis didn't begin with the election of Donald Trump," she said. "We were already in crisis. We were already in crisis because for years and years and years, Washington has worked just great for the rich and the powerful, but far too often, it hasn't worked for anyone else."

"People don't just wake up one day and elect leaders like Donald Trump because 'hey, everything is awesome, but what the hell, let's roll the dice and make life interesting,'" she added. 

Democrats frequently enabled or participated in these trends, Warren said.

"Republican politicians have pushed one policy after another that has favored the rich and powerful over everyone else, and far too often, Democrats have gone right along," she said. "And no matter how extreme Republicans in Washington became, Democrats might grumble or whine, but when it came time for action, our party hesitated and pushed back only with great reluctance. Far too often, Democrats have been unwilling to get out there and fight."

She's exactly right when she says that people didn't elect Trump because they are satisfied. But she missed some important points.

Her biggest problem is her insistence that it's all the Republicans' fault.

This country is in an economic crisis. For more than 30 years, working families, middle class families, poor families, students, seniors have been squeezed harder and harder, and now they are at the breaking point. Republican politicians have pushed one policy after another that has favored the rich and powerful over everyone else, and far too often, Democrats have gone right along. And no matter how extreme Republicans in Washington became, Democrats might grumble or whine, but when it came time for action, our party hesitated and pushed back only with great reluctance. Far too often, Democrats have been unwilling to get out there and fight.

Warren needs to take a close look at her own party. They like to tell themselves that they are the party of the working people and not the rich and powerful but that's not how people outside the party see them. Who are their biggest donors? Wall Street, Hollywood and Silicon Valley. The super rich. And why do these super rich people donate to the Democrats if the Republicans are the ones pushing policies favoring them? Are these people crazy? Or maybe the Democrats have become the party of the rich while telling themselves that they still represent the poor.

Former President Obama likes to brag that he saved the economy but what he saved was Wall Street. No one went to jail. All of those companies that are too big to fail weren't broken up. Instead they were buttressed. Income inequality kept rising. The Fed pushed billions into Wall Street by lowering interest rates to an effective 0%.

Ideology rules the Democrats. When given a choice between jobs and ideology, ideology always wins. The XP pipeline may not produce all that many jobs but it is symbolic of how the Democrats think. Even after studies showed that it was safe and would not contribute measurably to global warming, the Democrats still killed it because it made the ideologists feel good.

First Obama and then Hillary came out against coal. Hillary actually said that she was going to put coal miners out of work. yes, she went on to say some platitudes about finding them new jobs in clean energy but they knew better than to believe that.

In every other recovery since WWII, small businesses have lead the way but not this time which is probably why the recovery was so weak. What happened to the small businesses? No one is sure but it's very possible that the mountain of new regulations the Obama administration created has something to do with it.

Then there was the Trans-pacific Partnership which Obama decided to call an agreement instead of a treaty so that he wouldn't have to get the Senate to ratify it. He did the same with the Paris Accords, too. Both were unpopular among working-class Americans.

So Warren is correct that people feel left out of the economy but she missed the fact that they blame the Democrats - on every level. The Democrats have become the party of the wealthy and the city-dwellers.

Trump is trying to change the economy and put jobs first. He may be wrong-headed but he's trying to help Americans.

And here's where Warren gets it completely wrong,

We are not the minority party. We are the opposition party, and we need to talk about the key difference between us and them every day—and we need to say it in the plainest possible way

She goes on to talk about all of the regular anti-Trump talking points. But she never talks about what the Democrats will do for the average worker. She never proposes a new economic agenda, just doubling down on the current platform. She never thinks about how that will look to the people who voted for Trump.

So she learned nothing from the election.

The Democrat's Dilemma

The Senate Democrats have a huge dilemma. They spent years complaining about Republican obstructionism in general and the last several months complaining that the Senate Republicans needed to "do their Constitutional job" and approve President Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court. But now that President Trump has nominated someone, the Democrats suddenly turned obstructionist.

There is no good reason for opposing Judge Gorsuch. He is eminently qualified and he will not tilt the court further to the right. There are some ruffled feathers on the left because Obama's nominee didn't get a hearing but the precedent of the opposing party stopping lame duck appointments goes back to 1992 and both Barack Obama and Joe Biden supported it as senators.

The main reason there is any controversy is that the left hates President Trump with a white hot passion. They don't want to see the Democrats in Congress cooperating with Trump on anything.

The problem for the Democrats is that it makes what the Republicans did against Obama look mild by example. The Democrats are raising the level of obstruction. This will haunt them in two ways. When they inevitably return to power, the Republicans will use every trick that the Democrats have used. In the meantime, the Republicans have every excuse to throw away the rule book and use the "nuclear option" - changing the rules by a simple majority vote. The Democrats already did this for everything except Supreme Court nominees, something they are surely regretting right now. Doing away with the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees will make it easier to confirm more polarized justices. That's one of those things that's only good when your side can do it.

So the Senate Democrats have strong reasons to allow Judge Gorsuch to be confirmed. But that will anger the base and will probably lead to some primary challenges.

For many Senators, there is no good choice. Doing the right thing will hurt them and doing the wrong thing will hurt the country. So they have a dilemma.

Obama to Trump

A had a few thoughts during Donald Trump's inauguration about the difference between him and former President Obama. The quick version is that Obama's main priority was trying to transform America while Trump's seems to be trying to help Americans.

The XP Pipeline is a perfect example. Studies said that it imposed no significant risks and that the amount of oil produced from it would not affect global warming in any measurable way. Blocking the pipeline stopped American jobs and hurt relations with Canada. But Obama did it anyway for symbolic reasons.

After the Sandy Hook shootings, there was a major push for gun control. None of it would have stopped the tragedy. It was just an excuse for gun control.

The regulatory state went into overdrive during the Obama administration with the EPA claiming control over such diverse things as automobile mileage which had previously been under Congressional control.

Obama claimed that he was forced to use executive orders to reform immigration law because Congress refused to act. The reason Congress didn't act was because the legislation was highly unpopular. Pressure from illegal immigrants depresses wages of American workers.

Obama seemed to give more support to the Black Lives Matters movement than to police officers who were killed directly because of BLM protests.

Obamacare may have insured millions who didn't have insurance, but it also stifled tens of thousands of small companies. In every previous recession, small businesses were responsible for most of the new jobs during the recovery. Without the hiring from small business, the recovery has been, at best, tepid.

The Obama administration and the Democrats in general went out of their way to be as harsh as possible on dissenters. In 2008, Obama felt that he could not be elected if he admitted he favored gay marriage and the State of California passed an anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment. Regardless of that, any business that refused personal services for gay weddings was fined enough to put it out of business.

The same was true for religious exemptions for birth control under Obamacare. The Obama administration was very unforgiving in awarding exemptions.

I could go on. These are just examples off of the top of my head but they illustrate my point - that Obama and his administration valued conformity with its principles over the desires and well-being of the populous. This was especially true in coal country and managed to push a solidly blue state (West Virginia) to being solidly red.

All I have to go on so far from Trump is his campaign promises and his inaugural speech but he seems to desire to put American workers first, ahead of ideology. That is a huge change from the previous administration.

Obama's Legacy - Foreign Policy

Obama opposed the Iraq war. This gave him a big advantage in the 2008 primaries since Clinton and Edwards had both voted in favor of it. Of course, he was a state senator at the time but it gave him credibility when he made ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the center of his campaign. During one of the debates he stated that he was willing to meet with the heads of hostile countries without pre-condition and spoke disparagingly of treating a presidential visit as a reward to foreign countries. THis was met with disbelief by Clinton and others with foreign policy experience. Regardless, Obama doubled down, implying that nations were hostile to us only because we hadn't approached them properly.

Although never stated publicly, this was the main thrust of Obama's foreign policy: approaching hostile nations and trying to forge friendly relations. He also was a proponent of nuclear disarmament. 

This sounds good in practice but requires careful implementation and care that traditional allies are not slighted.

The Obama years were not a good time to be a friend of the US, especially one who had good relations with the Bush (43) administration. The Obama administration decided that Germany was more important to us than England. India, which had been growing close to the US, got a cool reception from the US under Obama. Israel received the worst treatment as Obama put "daylight" between the two countries culminating with a UN resolution that declares that Judaism's holiest spots are illegally occupied conquered territory.

The various policies are so interconnected that it's hard to know where to start. An easy one is Cuba. The best policy would have been to wait fo the Castro brothers to die of old age and strike a bargain with their successors to lift sanctions in exchange for liberalizing Cuba. But that meant that a different president would get credit for reopening ties with Cuba and Obama wanted that to be part of his legacy. So he opened relations on nothing more than a vague promise from the Castros to release some political prisoners in the future. Unsurprisingly, the opening of Cuba was accompanied by government crackdowns instead of liberalization and Fidel Castro never softened his anti-American speeches until his death.

Iran is a more difficult case. Obama dreamed of being responsible for Iran being accepted back into the brotherhood of nations. He planned for it to take it's place as a regional power and to take our place as the peacekeeper in Iraq. The first step to that was to conclude the talks that were supposed to stop Iran's nuclear program. This cast a long shadow over all of Obama's other dealing in the middle-East. It was obvious to Iran that Obama wanted a treaty more than they did so they were able to dictate his actions elsewhere, particularly Syria. Syria is a client state of Iran and they let it be known that any actions we took to dispose the Syrian government would end the treaty negotiation.

This gave a sanctuary for the radical groups who had been forced out of Iraq to come together to form Isis. When he was finally forced to fight, Isis, Obama limited his efforts to Iraq. There was an effort to find and train Syrians to fight Isis but it was nearly impossible to find people who would promise not to take part in the raging Syrian civil war.

Since Obama had no intention of sending American combat troops to fight Isis, he had to rely on the Kurds. This caused tension with Turkey which has a Kurdish minority that wants to join with the Iraqi Kurds to form their own state. Obama's refusal to establish a no-fly zone over Syria caused more tension (the no-fly zone was vetoed by Iran). Eventually Turkey turned to Russia.

The Syrian civil war has caused humanitarian disaster. Hundreds of thousands are dead and millions displaced. Obama keeps saying that there is no military solution to Syria, only a diplomatic one and engaging in his favorite rhetorical device the straw-man choice (doing nothing vs a full scale invasion which no one has asked for). At this point, the Russians have proved that there is always a military solution if you are ruthless enough.

Libya is another humanitarian disaster, one we were responsible for. Obama supported a rebellion that overthrew a corrupt but stable government. The result is that Libya became a failed state.

The refugees from Syria and Libya are streaming into Europe and threatening to break apart the European Union. Anti-immigrant parties are on the rise in several countries across Europe and resistance to Europe's open border policy was a factor in the Brexit (Obama made things worse by threatening Great Briton that they'd go to the back of the queue in trade talks if they split from Europe. The Brits resented being lectured on their future by an American president and probably helped the leave faction).

We had a chance to change the governments of both Iran and Syria. After a rigged election, the Green Revolution broke out. We could have helped it. The CIA had a group that assists in organizing groups pushing for democratic reforms. Rather than assisting the Green Revolution, Obama ordered a hands-off policy. Later, the Iranian government was on the verge of collapse because of sanctions so he lifted some and lifted even more after the nuclear treaty was signed. He even shipped pallets of cash in small bills to Iran to pay for a hostage release.

At one point, early in the Syrian civil war, Russia offered to force the Syrian government out but we passed on that offer because we were sure it would collapse on its own soon.

Relations with Russia were already strained when Obama took office. He sent Secretary of State with a symbolic "reset button" then followed up personally. Instead of improving, relations continued to deteriorate. The Ukraine was invaded and the Crimea annexed. During a 2012 debate, Obama mocked Romney for calling Russia our biggest geopolitical rival. By his last month in office he was sanctioning them for interfering in the presidential election. Along the way Obama managed to convince Putin that we were planning on overthrowing him.

Egypt has had two revolutions on Obama's watch. In both cases, we started by supporting the current government, then supporting the revolution. The Obama State Department allowed the Muslim Brotherhood to take over Egypt because they were curious to see if it could turn into a responsible government. They couldn't and we supported a military coup which has turned out to be at least as repressive as the two previous governments.

One indirect benefit of Obama's pro-Iran policy is a stronger Israel. The Saudis and their allies are worried by Obama's support for Iran and see Israel as a strong ally, one that the US has similarly turned it's back on.

All of this for a treaty that was supposed to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons but instead gives them a timetable for becoming a legal nuclear power. Like Cuba, Iran was far from grateful. Instead they are working on ballistic missiles capable of striking all of Europe with the nuclear bombs that they are allowed to build in just a few years. And they have already declared that the US is in violation of the treaty which allows them to do anything they want (and can now afford after sanctions were lifted and billions of dollars delivered).

In 2004 Obama accidentally drew a red line for Syria - no chemical weapons. By 2005 it was obvious that they had been using them. Obama and Secretary of State Kerry promised that we would retaliate but it would be "unbelievably small". Then, after Britain's Parliament voted against taking action, Obama decided that he would not act without Congressional approval. Keep in mind that he had already expended his drone war into a half dozen countries and overthrown the government of Libya without Congress but he needed their approval for an unbelievably small retaliation. Congress refused. Russian intervened and Syria gave up its chemical weapons stockpiles and resorted to using chlorine gas instead. This was a terrible outcome. Obama and the US looked weak for making threats that we had no intention of following through on and for needing Russia to clean up after us and it didn't even stop Syria from using poison gas.

That sums up the world's view of the US under Obama. We talk a lot, often talking down to other nations, but we fail to follow through in any meaningful way. The world has stopped looking to the US and now goes it alone or looks to Russia for support.

I've rambled on long enough so I won't even mention China's incursions into the South Sea or Korea's weapons program.

Obama's Legacy - Obamacare

Early in his presidency, Mr. Obama announced to his staff that he needed something big as his legacy. "Isn't saving the world's economy enough?" they asked. "No, it has to be bigger than that," the President told them.

Obama wanted to be remembered as the Roosevelts are for national parks and Social Security, respectively or LBJ and Medicare/Medicaid. He wanted something big.

Surprisingly, health care wasn't the first thing that came to mind for him. The Democratic party had been waiting impatiently since the early 1990s when Hillary Clinton's proposed health care reform collapsed under it's own weight. But health care reform was never a priority for Obama. He'd only included it in his platform to counter Hillary's proposal in the primaries. He'd even mocked her individual mandate. But health care reform was big - big enough to be his legacy.

Since he wasn't that interested in it, he left the details up to Congress and provided no guidance at all except that it should be something to address the uninsured instead of a total overhaul of the health care system. Even that was going to be a hard sell. And it was. Several Congressmen cut deals in exchange for their votes. It was decided early on that the Republicans would be cut out of writing the legislation which meant that they were unanimously against it. The Democrats had enough votes to go it alone but just barely.

The result was a mess but that was acceptable since it could be cleaned up during the reconciliation process with the Senate's version.

Then things got difficult.

Most Americans were happy with their insurance and worried that they'd end up with worse coverage. Opposition started to show up during the August recess when Democrats held town hall meetings to try to sell the legislation. It got worse when it came out that the Congressional leaders had no intention of actually reading the legislation. Public opinion turns against the bill. The final blow came when Ted Kennedy died and a Republican was elected to replace him on an anti-Obamacare platform.

That should have been the end of it. But Obama needed his legacy and the Democrats were convinced that the legislation would eventually become popular and assure them generations of majority status. With only 59 votes in the Senate they could not get past a filibuster so they used a legislative sleight-of-hand and used the House's bill, as written which only required a simple majority vote.

Obamacare became the law of the land without a single Republican vote and with more than half of the country against it.

The bill was flawed and they knew it but Obama and the Democrats preferred to pass something than nothing and they kept telling themselves that it would pay off in the long run.

It didn't. Obamacare never became popular and while Obama was reelected in 2012, the Democrats lost everywhere else.

As different parts of the law went into effect, left-leaning writers bragged about the number of people who were covered but neglected to mention that enrollment was always millions short of projections. This was an important shortfall. In order to work, a lot of young, healthy people needed to be enrolled to pay for the older, sicker ones. The program had no problem signing up the sick ones but the shortfall of healthy members meant that the participating insurance companies had huge losses. This lead to several insurance companies pulling out and others raising their rates much faster than inflation.

In selling the program, Obama promised "if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor". This was named the lie of the year.

One rather cruel part of Obamacare was the Cadillac Plan tax. If your employer-provided plan was too good then it was taxed at a punitive rate to pay for subsidies. This meant that millions of people (and I'm one of them) had their insurance cut because their employer couldn't afford the taxes. In my case, the cuts amount to hundreds a month in out-of-pocket costs and I'm not alone.

Obamacare called for the states to set up insurance exchanges. Many Republican-controlled states refused so Obama simply ordered that the federal government would provide an exchange instead. The roll-out of the federal system was a complete disaster and it was months before the exchange was working properly.

The states that did set up their own exchanges had similar problems and several of those have since folded.

There was an employer mandate in Obamacare but Obama used an executive order to push that back, regardless of not having any actual authority to do this.

Despite being 2,000 pages long, a lot in Obamacare was left to bureaucrats to write. That included what birth control methods would be mandated. At first the Obama administration wanted this mandate to be universal but religious institutions objected. A waiver was allowed for them but the definition of who could get a waiver was very strict. A church could but a school run by that same church could not. This lead to two court cases. In one, Hobby Lobby objected to three out of fifteen types of mandated birth control on the grounds that they caused abortions. The Supreme Court ruled in their favor. The Little Sisters of the Poor, a group of Catholic nuns, objected to providing any birth control. This is still pending after being sent back to the lower courts. When no one in the Obama administration or the Democratic party noticed was that these administrative choices sent a clear message that the Democratic party was anti-religion. This cost them in the 2016 election when Evangelicals and Catholics turned out heavily for the Republicans.

As of this writing, it is unclear exactly what will become of Obamacare. The Republicans have vowed to Repeal and Replace Obamacare. Even if Hillary Clinton had won and the Democrats had swept back into office, the program couldn't survive without a major overhaul.

Obama saw Obamacare as his legacy, something that future generations would look back on. Instead, it will be looked back on as a cautionary tale against rushed, unpopular legislation.