Month: July 2016

So, Tim Kaine

by digby

He wasn’t my first choice. I wanted Elizabeth Warren. And my second choice was Tom Perez. Either of those would have sent some electricity through the Democratic coalition and made the convention a lot more exciting. Instead, it seems more like the Obama pick of Joe Biden who was known to progressives at the time as the Senator from MBNA but a safe choice for the first African American president trying to reassure certain folks by putting an experienced white male on the ticket.  I’m guessing that after plenty of focus groups the same calculation was involved in this pick.  If some of my older male friends are any example, this is especially meaningful to them. They seem to think she needs a lot of help because she’s just been a “political wife” in their eyes. With Bill to consult and Kaine to “help” her they feel more confident.

I know. It’s maddening. But they’ve said it to my face. And if older Democratic men feel that way, I’d guess that any hope of skimming a few anti-Trump suburban Republicans depended on it. So, that’s my theory about why both of our last presidential candidates chose popular white male Senators to be their running mates.

Kaine himself seems to be very similar to Biden.  Biden, also Catholic, was also personally pro-life but voted pro-choice. There are quite a few Catholic Democrats with that belief system including John Kerry, the 2004 nominee, so no special barrier has been broken here. And like Biden Kaine has a somewhat centrist history on banking and trade which is worrisome to progressives for whom these issues are their litmus tests. So, in these particulars Kaine isn’t a particularly progressive choice.

But he’s very good on war, civil liberties, gun proliferation, criminal justice, healthcare, civil rights, and immigration among other things. The fact that he speaks perfect Spanish, which he learned serving in Honduras, is meaningful to Latinos.

Clinton is trying to run as an experienced, competent, rational, decent mainstream leader of a team of experienced, competent, rational, decent mainstream public servants in contrast to Donald Trump the con artist who wants to blow up the world. I don’t know that policy is even the point but to the extent it is they are running under the most progressive platform in history (thank you Bernie)  which just shows how far the coalition has come since the day Al Gore chose Joe Lieberman, one of the most depressing days of my life.

I wish it could have been different, but understanding the considerations that impact the first woman nominee, it’s fine.

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About that Munich shooting

by digby

It sounds like this really was a very disturbed mentally ill young Lone Wolf.

Your latest gun tragedy: 

The 18-year-old gunman who killed nine people in Munich was obsessed with mass shootings but had no known links to the Islamic State group, German police say.

Written material on such attacks was found in his room. Munich’s police chief spoke of links to the massacre by Norway’s Anders Behring Breivik.

The gunman, who had dual German-Iranian nationality, later killed himself.

His name has not been officially released but he is being named locally as David Sonboly.
He had a 9mm Glock pistol and 300 bullets in his rucksack.

Police do not yet know how the weapon was acquired, but said he had no permit for it and the serial number had been obliterated.

They are investigating whether he may have lured his victims through a Facebook invitation to the McDonald’s restaurant where he launched his attack on Friday evening.

Candles and flowers were laid outside the shopping mall on Saturday

The father of Dijamant Zabergja clutches a photo of his son in Munich,

The father of one young Kosovan victim, Dijamant Zabergja, displayed his son’s photo
Friday evening’s attack at the Olympia shopping mall also left 27 people injured, including children. Ten of them are critically ill, including a 13-year-old boy, police say.

Seven of the dead were teenagers. Three victims were from Kosovo, three from Turkey and one from Greece.

Police say the Munich-born gunman had been in psychiatric care, receiving treatment for depression.

“We are in deep mourning… we share your grief”, said Chancellor Angela Merkel after chairing a meeting of the national security council.

Munich police chief Hubertus Andrae said there was an “obvious” link between the new attack and Friday’s fifth anniversary of Breivik’s attacks in Norway, when he murdered 77 people.

Mr Andrae warned the number of injured could increase if people who had fled the scene came forward.

Brevik, of course, was a right winger. And Iran is an enemy of ISIS. So despite what people on the right are saying this, like so many of these spasms of violence it seems to be much more related to mental illness than ideology. And the viral nature of these things cannot be ignored.

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Bookending the RNC convention
by Tom Sullivan

“He sounded like some two-bit dictator …” — Sen. Elizabeth Warren

Friday morning I read through a Trump acceptance speech Facebook thread by Bernie Sanders supporters. Friends. There was a lot of gloom and doom, in some sense echoing the rhetoric coming from the RNC convention. Some were holding out hope for a Philadelphia miracle in which, somehow, Sanders would come out of the DNC convention as the Democratic nominee. Otherwise, we’re doomed.

Some of that is because social media tends to sort us into our own Fox-like echo chambers where we reinforce each others’ thoughts and opinions, cut off from outside voices. It happens in Washington, D.C. It happens in state capitols. It happens online.

Take heart. GOP strategist Nicole Wallace:

You know, listening to this, I was struck by two things that I always believed during my two decades in the Republican politics,” she explained to NBC’s Lester Holt. “One, the voters always get it right. And two, the Republican Party that I worked for for two decades died in this room tonight.”

“We are now represented as a party by a man who believes in protectionism, isolationism and nativism,” Wallace continued. “And those are the forces that George W. Bush and, I belive, John McCain were most worried about during their times as the leaders of the Republican Party.”

NBC’s Chuck Todd was stunned: “You believe the party died tonight?”

“Well, the voters picked this guy, this is where the Republican Party is now,” Wallace replied. “They now are attracted to those forces of isolationism and protectionism.”

“But the party I was part of for two decades is dead.”

A leading North Carolina Democratic politician called the other day to ask about the state of some down-ticket races here. The Republicans locally are in disarray. They have three empty slots on the fall ballot: one state House race and two county commission seats. As best we can tell, they have no one to fill them and can barely muster enough members for a meeting to appoint replacements before Labor Day.

Okay, your mileage will vary, but consider: The Trump disorganization that misled the RNC’s nominating convention is now in charge of heading his party’s national campaign effort. Good luck with that. Between a Trumpist base with little experience in organizing campaigns; national, state, and local Republicans who want nothing to do with their presidential candidate; and a presidential candidate with no interest or experience in supporting local efforts that are not all about HIM, Nicole Wallace has reason to despair. You do not.

That’s not to say I won’t be growing a second butt just so I can work that one off too. Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren cautioned Stephen Colbert about Trump:

“What Donald Trump says is, “Turn on each other.” And the consequence of that one is when you turn on each other, the same guys who are in power, the same guys who rigged the system get to stay in power.” Don’t fall for it.

As Warren said, “I like women who fight back.” There’s a lot to be said for that.

This election has never been about one man. (Or one woman.) But I have to admire what the Sanders campaign has brought to this race, and the promise his energized supporters represent for shifting the power leftward in the Democratic Party. If. They. Stay. Engaged. I don’t begrudge overnight sensations, but that’s not usually how it works. Sanders has been engaged his entire life. He’s 74. It took him that long to get this kind of national recognition.

I spent seven months in the first congressional race I worked on (for a progressive woman). Five of that full time or more as an unpaid volunteer with no experience whatsoever. I got some. And we lost. It was the most fun I ever had losing.

Patsy stayed engaged. She now chairs a resurgent state party. Maybe it’s the Irish in me, but being in the fight — even when you lose — is empowering, and far better than feeling like a victim. As I wrote here just a month ago, the upside of staying in the fight is you stop feeling like roadkill. I highly recommend it.

Friday Night Soother

by digby

To celebrate “it” being over:

And more!

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Four days o fleece and psysic: RNC Wrap-up

by Dennis Hartley

In case you missed the whole thing…a brief recap of RNC 2016:

It was 4 days of celebrating America’s diversity…

4 days of hopeful messages…

4 days of ringing endorsements…

…capped off by a rousing acceptance speech:

I’m guessing move to Canada is zooming back to #1 on Google Trends.

Cross posted at Den of Cinema

A much needed commentary

by digby

After watching the media try to “pivot” to Trump’s alleged “pivot” after the exploding Hindenburg of the RNC, this will be a welcome refresher:

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The Orange McCarthy strikes again

by digby

He just can’t help himself. On the day after his big triumph he comes out and smears his former rival’s father again. (He never denied it, did he?) He’s sick:

“I don’t know his father. I met him once,” Trump said. “I think he’s a lovely guy, a lovely guy. All I did was point out the fact that on the cover of the National Enquirer, there was a picture of him and crazy Lee Harvey Oswald having breakfast. Now Ted never denied that it was his father.”

The Trump Movement grows down ballot

by digby

He’s just another populist against money in politics and free trade speaking to the economic anxieties of the working class:

ICYMI

by digby

In case you decided to skip the death and destruction convention, here’s a little mash up of it from the Clinton campaign:

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Bye Bye GOP

by digby

I wrote about the party for Salon today:

At the end of Donald Trump’s interminable acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last night, CNN commentator Ana Navarro had this to say:

I am getting texts from Republican congressmen who are saying “I’m embarrassed of my party,” “he sounded like a fearmonger,” “this is not Republicanism.” A lot of Republicans today are cringing by what we’ve seen tonight…. Go listen to the words of the chief of police of Dallas, that’s the kind of thing that will get us past this crisis not this fearmongering, not this disgusting speech that we heard tonight that does nothing but bring out the darkness in America. It is terrifying to me. 

It was terrifying to a lot of people and that was the point. Indeed, if you look at all four nights of the RNC, the overriding theme was that Hillary Clinton and her death cult of illegal immigrants, Muslim terrorists and cop killers have turned America into a bleak, dystopian hellscape and only Donald Trump can turn it around. Indeed, it’s so bad that Trump can’t even tell us how he’s going to do it just know that he’s going to do it “fast” and we’re going to win.

There were plenty of hot takes on the speech last night ranging from mainstream pundits who inexplicably thought Trump was  “restrained” because he refrained from calling Hillary Clinton names (other than a liar and a criminal) and those who saw a demagogue shouting at the American people for nearly an hour and a half in a manner reminiscent of certain historical figures who also liked to harangue large adoring crowds for hours about national pride and white grievance. There is definitely a divide between those who thought his speech was inspiring and those who thought it was terrifying.
The question will be how many people fall on either side. We will know that soon enough.

In the meantime, it’s clear that the Trump phenomenon is not simply a matter of a charismatic con man dazzling a large number of Republicans into believing that he’s going to magically turn back the clock to a time that only existed in the imaginations of Hollywood screenwriters. It’s about the collapse of an ideological movement and a political party. The bottom has fallen out of an entire belief system. That’s where the darkness is coming from.

The last two decades have been disastrous for the conservative movement and not just because it “ran its course” or “matured.” The three pillars of conservatism, traditional values, free market economics and a strong national defense all failed and failed in rather spectacular fashion.

Social conservatism has been reduced from what was once a dominant political and cultural force to a rear guard action fighting to roll back abortion rights in the states and tilting at windmills to ban birth control.  The gay rights movement has successfully left them reeling, so much so that even Donald Trump gave an awkward shout out to the LGBTQ community in his speech last night promising to protect them from Muslim terrorists. The culture warriors are still toiling away, particularly on their new “religious liberty” legal line of attack but the fact that the large evangelical base is ardent in their support for a New York libertine with children from three different wives has exposed their heretofore unseen flexible virtue. They will no longer be able to credibly attack the Democrats for their allegedly loose morals.

The failure of the conservative national security philosophy was laid bare by the Bush administration’s Iraq war debacle. The vast majority of the people in that hall in Cleveland undoubtedly cheered George Bush’s disastrous policies at the time assuming that all wars would be glorious antiseptic (for America) successes like the first Gulf War. Their Vietnam propaganda had led them to misunderstand the practical restraints that exist around US military power and they believed that the war machine in the hands of a Republican could only bring victory. They learned otherwise and today they are supporting a man whose national security policy is completely incoherent but who promises to make the world “respect” us again.

Finally the financial crisis exposed the risk inherent in free-market economics and the idea that all you have to do is keep interest rates low, cut taxes and let the brilliant masters of the universe do their magic. It turned out that without some restraints these financial geniuses could not help but turn into degenerate gamblers and the low tax dogma resulted in dangerous income inequality. The instability of the middle class and the stalling out of traditional social and economic mobility created the environment for a flim flam artist like Trump to exploit the resultant insecurity.

All that’s left of the “three-legged stool” of conservatism is the seat — racism, nativism and xenophobia.  That’s what Trump is running on. And it’s also failing. As you can see by the words of Ana Navarro or Ted Cruz, John Kasich or Jeb Bush or the whole staff of National Review, the party is splitting over that issue as well.  The conservative movement as we’ve known it is disintegrating.

It’s possible that Trump will win the election in November in which case we will all have bigger problems and the GOP will have already morphed into something very new and very scary.  But assuming that he doesn’t pull it off it’s going to be interesting to see how the remains of Reagan’s Republican party deals with the smoldering remains of their party.  At this point there are no leaders who are untainted by hypocrisy and past mistakes, no new ideas, no “young guns.” The dark, dystopian vision we saw this week in Cleveland is all they have left. For the conservative movement it’s midnight in America.

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