“Trump Derangement Friday” Open Forum

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

In truth, I’m hoping that here we can find fascinating ethics discussions that don’t involve the election at all, but maybe that’s expecting too much. Over at the asylum that once was my Facebook feed, several of my once rational friends appear to be genuinely investigating where to move, you know, like Spain or England, where there is less freedom of speech even than usual. Well, these people have turned into morons, and I’ll miss them, but moron are a burden in a democracy, so “Bye!”

The Project 25 hysteria was one of the Democrats’ more despicable gambits. I keep seeing that list above or similar ones posted as Trump’s agenda. The list is hilarious, and anyone who believes that’s what’s in the document thinks the Constitution was written by Donald Duck and begins, “There once was a man from Pawtucket….” The website of the exercise , essentially a brain-storming session among many conservative groups, is easy enough to check, but know, the Trump Deranged hysterics would rather use a phony meme designed to demonize the Right than discuss the real thing. They deserve to live in Spain.

There’s got to be something less stupid to discuss…..

Trump Derangement Friday Begins….

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments

The hysterical, fearful diatribe below came from my Facebook feed. This is a friend. A very nice guy. I don’t have the energy or heart to fisk it; if you feel like making the effort, even if you just do part of it, go ahead. It won’t be hard.

I am very angry at the people, officials, celebrities and publications responsible for doing this to my friend. I’m sure he really believes everything he has written. He’s an innocent, caring, trusting soul who was a sitting duck for the diabolical propaganda the Axis marinated good people like him in for almost ten years for their own political agendas.

It can’t feel good believing you and your friends are at “mortal risk.” Deceiving people like my friend so they are terrified of the future is despicably cruel. Yes, my friend is an artist and artists are emotional and often politically unsophisticated and under-educated (and our civic education is terrible anyway.) It is not just artists though. I know lawyers who are expressing essentially the same fears.

Bad, cynical, ruthless and unethical people are responsible for all this crazy panic. Today, the execrable Karine Jean-Pierre was pressed on this point by a Fox News reporter: If Biden was telling the truth about how a Trump administration would create an existential danger to the republic, that if he was elected “rights would be stripped away” and “democracy would crumble,” why did the President say in his remarks today that everything is going to be okay?

Karine, who would have a hard time answering a question about what her favorite color is, gave a rambling non-answer, then complained that the question was unfair, and left the room in a huff. But we know the answer, don’t we? Biden and the Democrats always knew all of that Hitler fearmongering and the “last election ever” warnings were pure nonsense, but they thought it might win the election. If trusting souls like my friend were reduced to permanent anxiety, eh, well, so what? Collateral damage. The ends justifies the means. Screw ’em.

This is who today’s Democrats are. Remember.

How here’s my poor friend….

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Trump Derangement and “It Isn’t What It Is”: Three Philippics

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Three anti-Trump-biased post-election pieces came to my attention today and yesterday. I guess “philippics” doesn’t exactly apply to all three of them, but I seldom get to use the words, it’s my blog, and so there. One is disappointing, one is disinformation and deflection, and the third is certifiably deranged.

Let’s start with Politico’s “Why Kamala Harris lost the election.” The answer, according to the authors, is this…

She never sufficiently buried Biden’s ghost, severely hamstringing her ability to sell voters on the idea that hers was the turn-the-page candidacy. It happened, simply, because Harris refused to make a clean break from the last four years when voters indicated that’s what they wanted. Worse, she hesitated to draw any daylight between herself and her boss on Biden’s biggest vulnerability — his stewardship over the economy — nor identify any specific way her presidency would be different from his tenure beyond naming a Republican to her Cabinet.

Is this denial or deliberate dishonesty? Either way, the authors, Christopher Cadelago and Holly Otterbein are covering for Harris, Walz and their party rather than providing truthful analysis to their readers. Harris’s problem wasn’t strategy. Her problem was Harris (and to a lesser extent, Ol’ Knucklehead). No strategy ever devised can make a metaphorical purse out of a metaphorical sow’s ear, and that’s what Harris was as a potential President: a pig’s ear. And not even a very impressive pig’s ear. She was unpopular and generally ignored as Veep, her past positions were radical if not insane, and she literally cannot speak coherently without a script or a teleprompter. To anyone who has a grain of knowledge of psychology, her manic cackle is a tell: she’s insecure, not exactly a quality we seek in our leaders. The primary (well, I shouldn’t use that word because she never offered herself to voters in a primary) persona she projected to the public, other than an empty suit, was that of a chameleon. She presented her position on the Gazan war diametrically differently to Jewish and Muslim audiences. She was pro-fracking and anti-fracking, she was 100% behind Joe Biden and everything he did, and a candidate of change. She was a law and order candidate who opposes “over-incarceration.” She said there had to be consequences for illegal immigration, then said those consequences should be citizenship.

Harris didn’t follow a bad strategy. She was a bad candidate and ran a terrible campaign. That’s why she lost the election. As Harris would say, “Let’s be clear.” Yes, let’s.

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Obama’s Clever Fake Magnanimity

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I’m sorry, but to those who are saluting the allegedly classiness of our 44th President, I say “Fool me once, shame on him, fool me 2,576 times, he can bite me.”

Now make no mistake: Obama know how to fake virtues he doesn’t have, and that’s an important leadership skill. Most Americans probably think he really was trying to be a “President for all Americans,” when he was in fact one most disastrously divisive Presidents in our history. He knew how to act Presidential: if only Donald Trump had that skill (or wanted to have it), he might be far more effective. On the other hand, enough people figured out Obama’s act (and Hillary’s, and Biden’s, and Bill Clinton’s, and Joe Biden’s, and Kamala Harris’s…) that they decided that an open vulgarian that didn’t pretend to be something he isn’t (like nice, kind, respectful, dignified, civil, even-tempered…well, ethical, frankly).

There are several tells in the statement, which, of course, is being fawned over as if Michelle and BO didn’t attack Trump personally when they played cavalry to Kamala’s ill-fated metaphorical wagon train to the White House. Obama suggested that Trump was senile, which takes quite a bit of gall for any Democrat, considering that they pretended that Joe Biden was solving Rubik’s Cube blindfolded for years when he really belonged in a home with a drool cup. I don’t call that “good faith and grace.”

But my favorites were the words he used on Kamala and her pathetic campaign.

In the theater world, a constant ethical dilemma is what to say when you go to a friend’s show and the show, or the friend’s performance, stinks on ice. Books have been written about this problem. “I’ve never seen you better!” is a classic response; pure deceit, of course, but effective. “That was memorable!” is another. Obama chooses his words carefully, and the carefully chosen deceitful word he used for Harris’s disastrous campaign was “remarkable.” It was remarkable all right: remarkably inept and ineffective. Before that, Obama calls Knucklehead and Harris “extraordinary.” Same trick. Actually, in theater circles, using more than one of these deliberately two-edged superlatives is considered risky, but I don’t think Obama cares: he has plausible deniability.

Finally, he says, “he couldn’t be more proud.” That one’s a version of the theater classic, “I couldn’t have enjoyed the show/your performance more!” (My personal favorite variation, “I’ve never seen you better!”)

Oh yeah, this guy’s good.

Unethical Quote of the Day: CNN’s Van Jones

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

“As a Democrat, I am proud that my party isn’t hypocritical.”

—Van Jones, CNN’s reliable race-baiting progressive propagandist.

And shameless, too! That statement this morning in a post election autopsywith morning host John Berman (a partisan ally) and Scott Jennings, CNN’s token conservative made my head explode, as you can see above.

The topic was Harris’s assurances to Trump that there would be an orderly and peaceful transfer of power, and that Democrats would accept the will of the voters. Van (and Berman) were pointing out the contrast with Trump’s reaction after the 2020 election.

The gall of these people continues to break previous records. Democrats were fully amped up to challenge the election results if Trump won. Jamie Raskin made it clear that plans were in place to “fight” if the election results showed Trump squeaking out a win. Democrats never accepted Trump’s 2016 election as legitimate. Their supporters rioted on Inauguration Day. They investigated him, impeached him twice, didn’t extend to him even the basic traditional deference and respect every previous elected President since Lincoln had received.

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Ethics Points on a Trump Derangement Screed

/ Jack Marshall / 42 Comments

The Trump Derangement-triggered outbursts on Facebook continue to fascinate me. It is a public health phenomenon worthy of research. One friend, a brilliant professional director who had been posting some of the more inflammatory (and, frankly, just stupid) attacks on Trump before the election, announced yesterday that he was leaving Facebook because he “didn’t feel safe.” And he deleted his account. Several announced in high dudgeon that if you weren’t sufficiently furious and terrified that Donald Trump had won the election, they didn’t want you as a Facebook friend or a friend at all. Other posted mind-melting, pious and irresponsible memes and quotes: one said that every citizen now has a responsibility to act exactly as the Germans didn’t act when Hitler was on the rise. It had over a hundred “likes.”

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Comment of the Day: “Last Election Related Post of the Day, I Promise”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

From master commenter A.M. Golden, as excellent a personal account of Election Day as you are likely read, the Comment of the Day on “Last Election Related Post of the Day, I Promise”…

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Yesterday, I got up early and drove to my polling station, parked along the side of the road because I knew I wouldn’t find a space on the parking lot of the local Lions Club and got into a line that stretched to the end of said parking lot. The line began to extend onto the side of the road. It was 5:50 AM. It was a beautiful sight.

I was in the door at 6:24 AM. I had my ballot by 6:30 AM. I had filled it out by 6:35 AM. I stuck it in the scanner and got my sticker at 6:40 AM.

When I got home, I took my sticker, wrote “Garbage” on it and wore it proudly all day. I also posted on Facebook Abraham Lincoln’s famous statement from his first Inaugural Address (when the country was in far worse straits than it is now): “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

I kept up with the news all day long. The voting machines in Pennsylvania that didn’t work (that one of the most technologically-advanced countries in the world cannot run an election without these kinds of antics happening is absurd). The Voting Guides handed out in Rhode Island that were allegedly real ballots with the Republicans whited out. The bizarre happenings in Milwaukee where the ballots had to be recounted. The bomb threats in Georgia. Mr. Golden and our son went to vote later in the day and didn’t get stickers because they were out. In fact, the polling station ran out of ballots around 1:30 PM yesterday and had to get more.

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Oh, I Can’t Let THIS Pass…

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

In Harris’s (late) concession speech to her supporters, she told them to “fight” and “keep fighting.” Trump said that on Januray 6, and when the crowd went off and started a riot, he was accused of telling his follower to literally fight. He was accused of leading an insurrection: MSNBC repeated that canard all night.

Naturally, it never occurred to Harris that her choice of words was gross hypocrisy, and exposed the double standards Trump has been subjected to since 2016.

Thanks, Kamala. You’re an idiot, but that was helpful.

Into The “Bias Makes You Stupid” Hall of Fame Goes American University Professor Allan Lichtman

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

I didn’t need a magic 8-Ball to predict that I would be writing this post on November 6. Back in July, I noted the absurdity and hubris of this epitome of a progressive-biased historian—but then aren’t they all?—pretending that he sees all amd knows all. Allan Lichtman’s claim to authority is that he has this formula, see, and it allows him to predict with astounding accuracy (9 out of 10 times! Oops, now it’s 9 out of 11 times…) who will win Presidential elections. I wrote in conclusion,

[Lichtman] went on Fox News Sunday to bloviate that if Democratic delegates rebel against President Joe Biden and choose another Democratic nominee, it will spell chaos for the party.  Lichtman, who is a progressive Democrat and once ran for the Senate as one, was relatively restrained on Fox News, but on MSNBC, he went full Trump Deranged, saying that if the Democrats don’t run Biden, it will mean Trump will win (his system says so!) and that will be the end of democracy!

Those are Lichtman’s warped priorities: he thinks it’s essential that his party wins even if it means electing an obviously deteriorating old man who won’t be able to do the job of President along with everything else that implies. A shadow government run by unelected apparatchiks, for example. He’s a Presidential historian: he knows about Woodrow Wilson, and still he thinks its in the best interest of the nation to vote for that. Lichtman is warning the MSNBC types—you know, morons—that all that matters is keeping The Party in control. Having a virtual basket case in the White House? That’s not a disaster to this guy, not like he says an open Democratic convention would be.

The professor’s shtick radiates poor civic values, sickening priorities, irresponsible advice and worst of all for a history professor, a rotten historical perspective. I have no interest in his prognostications and neither should anyone else. Lichtman should go away now, coming out of his hole in four years like Puxatawny Phil to fascinate the same kind of gullible suckers with his election predictions as are entranced by systems to win state lotteries.

Wonder of wonders, despite his prognostication of doom if Biden left the ticket, once Kamala Harris was installed as Joe’s replacement, Lichtman’s infallible “system” found that she was going to win the 2024 election. That was passing strange, since his system didn’t include categories for babbling empty-suits who alternate between taking two diametrically opposing positions simultaneously and running on “My opponent is Hitler” platforms.

One might justifiably think that, as as a historian, Lichtman would give the only precedent for a defeated single term President coming back four tears later and running for President again significant weight. Grover Cleveland won, after all. Nope. The professor was certain that his formula was correct. Not only was the professor wrong, he was spectacularly wrong. “Right now after a very long night I am taking some time off to assess why I was wrong and what the future holds for America,” Lichtman told USA TODAY this morning.

It’s obvious why he was wrong: bias made him stupid. Gee, who could have guessed that an incompetent candidate chosen without winning a single delegate or running in a single Presidential primary, with the lowest popularity numbers of any Vice-President and a strategy that depended on not letting voters know who she was or what she believed, wouldn’t defeat a previous President of the United States with a devoted, even fanatic, following?

Well, there’s me, and, oh, many thousands of other people with a passing knowledge of history and a modicum of common sense.

Here’s a tip Professor Lichtman: add “Terrible candidates running incompetent campaigns tend to lose” to the factors you consider next time. Trust me: it works.

NOW Can We Say Trump’s Claims That the 2020 Election Was Stolen From Him Aren’t “Baseless”?

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

This was raised in comments on the last post, but it should be highlighted.

There needs to be a bi-partisan investigation. If I try really hard and indulge my creative powers, I can think of innocent reasons for there being so many more votes cast in 2020, but they aren’t the reasons suggested by Occam’s Razor. Wouldn’t you think the 2024 election would have drawn more voters that in 2020, since the future of democracy was supposedly hanging in the balance?

Does the chart suggest that Republicans were cheating too, but just not as well as Democrats? If nothing else, the statistics support the need for secure, trustworthy election procedures, and we did not have them in 2020.