Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for September 2, 2019

September 2nd, 2019

Gillibrand is Out, CNN is going to subject America to 7 hours of climate change blather because they hate America (and ratings), Biden suffers imaginary flashbacks, and the next debates loom. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

Polls

  • Quinnipiac: Biden 30, Warren 19, Sanders 15, Harris 7, Buttigieg 5, Yang 3, Booker 1, O’Rourke 1, Klobuchar 1, Gabbard 1, Williamson 1, Bennet 1, Bullock 1, de Blasio 1.
  • USA Today/Suffolk University: Biden 32, Warren 14, Sanders 12, Buttigieg 6, Harris 6, Yang 3, O’Rourke 2, Booker 2, Castro 1, Ryan 1. “The contenders who did not receive the support of a single one of the 424 likely Democratic voters surveyed included Montana Governor Steve Bullock, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, Maryland Rep. John Delaney, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Miramar (Florida) Mayor Wayne Messam and former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak.”
  • Economist/YouGov (page 166): Biden 24, Warren 20, Sanders 14, Harris 8, Buttigieg 5, Yang 2, Gabbard 2, Castro 2, O’Rourke 2, Bennet 1, Booker 1, Bullock 1, de Blasio 1, Gillibrand 1, Steyer 1, Williamson 1.
  • Emerson: Biden 31, Sanders 24. Warren 15, Harris 10, Yang 4, Buttigieg 3, Booker 3, Gabbard 3, O’Rourke 2, Klobuchar 1, Castro 1.
  • Politico/Morning Consult: Biden 33, Sanders 20, Warren 15, Harris 8, Buttigieg 5. Booker 3, Yang 2, Bennet 1, Castro 1, de Blasio 1, Delaney 1, Gabbard 1, Gillibrand 1, Klobuchar 1, Ryan 1, Steyer 1, Williamson 1.
  • The Hill/Harris X: Biden 30, Sanders 17, Warren 14, Harris 4, Buttigieg 4, O’Rourke 3, Booker 2, Yang 2, Bullock 2. Sample size: 465, 190 males, 275 females. That’s a pretty small samples and a pretty strong sex skew.
  • Monmouth: Sanders 20, Warren 20, Biden 19, Harris 8, Booker 4, Buttigieg 4, Yang 3, Castro 2, O’Rourke 2, Williamson 2. This is the poll that launched a thousand “Biden is toast!” pieces last week, only for every other poll to come out and go “Yeah, not so much.”
  • Real Clear Politics
  • 538 polls
  • Election betting markets. Warren is now a 10 point favorite over Biden…
  • Pundits, etc.

  • Ten Democrats qualified for the next round of debates: Biden, Booker, Buttigieg, Castro, Harris, Klobuchar, O’Rourke, Sanders, Warren and Yang. 538 staffers debate the debate. “Isn’t Biden presented with the most downside risk now that the focus gets tightened to 10 candidates? Instead of having to worry about mainly one top-tier challenge (Harris or Bernie or whomever), he now risks getting outshone by any or all of them.”
  • Believe it or not, the criteria to make the October debates is actually easier.

    Here’s the catch: To qualify for the fourth round of debates in October, the candidates must meet the same requirements as those for September. In other words, candidates can raise money or improve in polling with a much longer deadline; for this reason, at least a few candidates will stick around until October.

    Of the candidates who failed to qualify, only Gabbard, Steyer, and Williamson came close, so it’s unlikely any of them will call it quits over the next month. (Steyer fell short only one point from qualifying for September’s debates.)

    After failing to qualify, both Delaney and Ryan have reiterated their commitment to their campaigns. “We’re moving forward,” Ryan said on Morning Joe on Thursday. “This is not going to stop us at all … we’re picking up endorsements left and right.” And in a story published yesterday over at the Atlantic, Benett has already stated his commitment to stay in the race until the 2020 Iowa caucuses in February.

    All of this leaves us with Bullock and de Blasio, our predictions for the next candidates to drop out of the race.

  • “CNN to host live 7-hour climate change town hall with 2020 Democrats.” I’m pretty sure this is outlawed by the Geneva Convention…
  • Nation Begs Jesus To Return Before Democrats’ 7-Hour Town Hall On Climate Change.”
  • All the Democrats except Biden (who’s staying mum) support union efforts to unionize big tech.
  • “2020 Democrats Back Funding Abortion Overseas With Taxpayer Dollars.” Of course they do.
  • “Cory Booker meditates. Kamala Harris does SoulCycle. Beto O’Rourke eats dirt.” Pretty much posting it just for the headline.
  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s staying in the race despite not making the debate. “Bennet says he plans to do well in the 2020 Iowa and New Hampshire primaries.” In other news, I plan to date lots of hot supermodels this fall…
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Biden managed to mangle three different war stories into one. (Heh: “Biden Claims He Was There 3,000 Years Ago When Isildur Took The Ring And The Strength Of Men Failed.”) Chances are good that Biden’s gaffes are not going to get better:

    Biden is probably mentally and physically fine — or within the parameters of fine for a man who turns 77 in November and who never had the greatest verbal discipline at the height of his career.

    When Biden tells a story where he gets just about all of the details wrong, when he mixes up New Hampshire and Vermont, or calls former British prime minister Theresa May “Margaret Thatcher,” or when he says, “those kids in Parkland came up to see me when I was vice president” or when he mangles the address of his campaign web site at the end of a debate, it’s probably just a normal man in his mid-to-late 70s behaving like a normal man in his mid-to-late 70s.

    I believe that if Biden were genuinely mentally or physically unwell and incapable of handling the duties of the presidency, his family and friends would sit him down and make him withdraw from the race. No one would want their loved one to go out into the national spotlight and stumble and be embarrassed. Watching a loved one succumb to age and gradually lose their mental acuity and memory from Alzheimer’s is an extremely painful process.

    (In a strange way, “I want to be clear, I’m not going nuts,” is kind of a cute and charming unofficial slogan. With the news being what it is these days, Mr. Vice President, we’ve all felt the need to reassure others and ourselves of that fact.)

    But even assuming that these are just normal septuagenarian memory lapses, it’s more than a little uncomfortable to watch Biden appear to forget Barack Obama’s name, saying during a recent appearance, “he’s saying it was president . . . (pause) My boss’s, it’s his fault.” If part of the reason to vote for Biden is his superior experience and knowledge in foreign policy, it’s a little unnerving to hear Biden say, “I don’t know the new prime minister of England. He looks like Donald Trump, I know that.” Really? Does the former veep need glasses?

    The problem for Biden and his campaign is that nothing gets easier from here. Running for president consists almost entirely of long days of extemporaneous speaking in front of cameras and getting asked difficult questions from both reporters and voters. It is physically and mentally grueling marathon even to the healthiest and youngest candidates. Sure, the Biden campaign can rely on ads where Biden barely speaks and try to get him to stick to a prepared script as much as possible. But we know this man. Biden likes to talk. He likes to tell stories. He will tell stories where he doesn’t really remember the details, fills in the blanks with how he wanted it to have happened, and insist, “this is the God’s honest truth.”

    Kevin Williamson doesn’t think Biden is senile, he thinks he’s just a liar:

    In the most recent example, detailed by the Washington Post, Biden made up a story in which he as vice president displayed personal courage and heroism in traveling to a dangerous war zone in order to recognize the service of an American soldier who had distinguished himself in a particularly dramatic way. It was a moving story. “This is the God’s truth,” he concluded. “My word as a Biden.”

    But his word as a Biden isn’t worth squat, as the Post showed, reporting that “Biden got the time period, the location, the heroic act, the type of medal, the military branch and the rank of the recipient wrong, as well as his own role in the ceremony.” Which is a nice way of saying: Biden lied about an act of military heroism in order to aggrandize his own role in the story.

    Like Hillary Rodham Clinton under fictitious sniper fire, Biden highlighted his own supposed courage in the face of physical danger: “We can lose a vice president. We can’t lose many more of these kids.”

    If Biden here is lying with malice aforethought, then he ought to be considered morally disqualified for the office. If he is senescent, then he obviously is unable to perform the duties associated with the presidency, and asking him to do so would be indecent, dangerous, and unpatriotic.

    The evidence points more toward moral disability than mental disability, inasmuch as Biden has a long career of lying about precisely this sort of thing.

    The most dramatic instance of that is Biden’s continued insistence on lying about the circumstances surrounding the horrifying deaths of his wife and daughter in a terrible car accident. It is not the case, as Biden has said on many occasions, that they were killed by a drunk driver, an irresponsible trucker who “drank his lunch,” as Biden put it. That is a pure fabrication, and a slander on the man who was behind the wheel of that truck and who was haunted by the episode until the end of his days. Imagine yourself in the position of that man’s family, whose natural sympathy for Biden’s loss must be complicated by outrage at his persistent lying about the relevant events.

    Why would Biden lie about the death of his wife and daughter? Why would he lie about the already-heroic efforts of American soldiers? In both cases, to make the story more dramatic, to give himself a bigger and more impressive narrative arc. That he would subordinate other people — real people, living and dead — to his own political ambition in such a callous and demeaning way counsels strongly against entrusting him with any more political power than that which he already has wielded.

    Jonah Goldberg thinks Biden should run a front porch campaign:

    Biden is crushing Donald Trump in the polls in no small part because he is a known quantity, having been on the public stage for decades, most notably as vice president for eight years under Barack Obama. Biden’s lead in matchups between Trump and various Democratic candidates is his single greatest advantage in the Democratic primaries.

    The risk for Biden is that he’s not a good presidential campaigner, as his two prior attempts demonstrated. While he may be showing signs of age, the truth is that he’s always been prone to gaffes, malapropisms, exaggerations, and misstatements. Every time Biden opens his mouth in an unscripted situation, there’s a chance he’ll say something goofy that undercuts his elder-statesman status.

    So why play the game the way the others are playing it? In most sports, when you’re ahead by double digits, the smart (though boring) strategy is to play it safe and sit on your lead. Getting into arguments with political Lilliputians such as Senator Cory Booker and Andrew Yang elevates their profile while lowering Biden’s. And if Biden loses his cool and starts shouting, “And you can take those ducks to the bank!” or “My pants are made of iron!” the game is over.

  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Booker ally pressured Newark water contractors to donate to mayor’s campaign, jailed official told FBI.” (Insert raised Spock eyebrow.) “Why I vote ‘Hell, no!’ on a vegan president.”
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. He visited Muscatine, Iowa. Maybe he got a chance to visit the National Pearl Button Museum
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. Hey, remember all the way back to a few months ago to when Mayor Pete was The Next Big Thing? Then it turned out that Mayor Pete wasn’t so good at the mayoring part:

    Reports of violent crime increased nearly 18 percent during the first seven months of 2019 compared to the same period in 2018. The number of people being shot has also risen markedly this year, after dropping last year. The city’s violent crime rate is double the average for American cities its size.

    Policing problems in South Bend came to national attention on June 16, when a white sergeant fatally shot a 54-year-old black resident, Eric Logan. The officer’s body camera was not turned on, which was widely seen as a sign of lax standards in the department. Mr. Buttigieg found himself flying home again, regularly, to face the fury of some black citizens and the frustrations of many others.

    It is the great paradox of Mr. Buttigieg’s presidential candidacy: His record on public safety and policing, once largely a footnote in his political biography, has overshadowed his economic record in South Bend, which he had spent years developing as a calling card for higher office.

    “When he came in, the goal was to help turn the city around. That had nothing to do with the police department,” said Kareemah Fowler, until recently the South Bend city clerk.

    Mr. Buttigieg’s image as a young, results-oriented executive continues to make him popular with many upper-income white liberals. They have delivered an overflowing war chest to his campaign: He had the best recent fund-raising quarter of any Democrat in the race, pulling in $24.8 million.

    But criticism of Mr. Buttigieg’s oversight of the police has damaged his viability as a Democratic presidential candidate, given the huge influence of black voters in choosing the party’s nominee. He has slipped in the polls in recent months, from double-digit poll numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire in the spring to the single digits more recently. In a recent Fox News poll, he earned less than 1 percent support from black Democratic primary voters.

    So what’s a guy that’s suddenly not-so-hot but still have lots of campaign money to spend do? Obviously beef up his campaign staff. Especially in Iowa and New Hampshire. Buttigieg is in better shape than the also rans, or, for that matter, Harris, who wasn’t able to translate her brief turn in the sun into a fundraising haul the way the Buttigieg campaign did. If Biden does flame out, Buttigieg is still best positioned to pick up the mantle of “Well, he’s not as crazy as the rest,” and a lot of DNC money seems to be hedging that way.

  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. This time it’s Politico offering up the Castro failure-to-launch piece:

    The audience laughs and cheers and there is time for one more question, and it is the big one: How are you going to beat Trump?

    Just as Castro begins to answer, an airplane, landing at nearby Manchester airport, flies low over the party. No one can hear anything over the plane’s growling engines. But Castro keeps talking, smiling, jabbing the air in front of him, uttering words only he understands or can hear.

    This should be Julián Castro’s moment. At a time when issues of immigration and family separation, race and the border are front and center in the national consciousness, the story of a third-generation Mexican-American would seem tailor-made to resonate emotionally with voters.

    Snip.

    And yet, as he spoke to Democratic voters in New Hampshire, Castro’s campaign seemed to be on the cusp of ending. Despite being pegged as the future of the Democratic Party almost as soon as he arrived on the scene as San Antonio mayor in 2009, and as the “Latino Obama” after he delivered a memorable keynote to the 2012 Democratic National Convention, here he was, stuck in the third tier of a sprawling field, polling around the 1 percent mark. And most crucially, he had not yet qualified for the third Democratic debate in September, which required polling at 2 percent to make it on the stage.

    Snip.

    And yet Elizabeth Warren is the “policy candidate.” And Pete Buttigieg, seven years younger than Castro, is the Millennial Mayor candidate. Joe Biden is the one with better ties to the Obama administration. And even though Castro proposes taxing inheritances of $2 million or more, raising the capital gains tax rate, providing a $3,000 per child tax credit, paid family and medical leave and a $15 nationwide minimum wage, Bernie Sanders is the candidate known for fighting income inequality. And somehow, despite being able to trace his lineage to the American colonies of the 18th century, Beto O’Rourke, a son of El Paso and fluent in Spanish, has become the candidate of immigration and the new Texas.

    Snip.

    Although Castro had been considering a statewide run in Texas for years, probably for governor, before O’Rourke’s 2018 run against Ted Cruz it was widely thought that the state wasn’t ready to elect a Democrat yet. After losing the veepstakes, he had planned to remain in Washington, angle for a job in the Hillary Clinton administration, possibly as secretary of Education or Transportation or in the Office of Management and Budget, or at some politically influential think tank.

    Instead he moved back to San Antonio in 2017 and signaled his interest in running for president almost immediately. He started a PAC, Opportunity First, which raised a half-million dollars and supported “young, progressive leaders” around the country. He wrote a pre-campaign memoir, An Unlikely Journey: Waking Up From My American Dream, which details his rise from the barrios of West San Antonio through Stanford, Harvard Law, San Antonio’s political scene and to the Obama administration, with his twin, Joaquin, younger by one minute, with him all the way.

    But other than the book and the PAC, Castro really wasn’t a major figure in the “Invisible Primary” period after the 2016 election. He wasn’t a regular on “Pod Save America,” there weren’t glossy magazine profiles or stories of him stumping for down-ballot candidates in the early primary states. It is hard to go from Housing secretary to presidential front-runner, and much harder when you are last seen in the public eye as being not picked for your party’s presidential ticket. It is telling that few of the most sought-after political operatives in Democratic circles rushed to join Castro’s campaign even though he had signaled he was in the race for a long time. Instead of veterans of the Obama and Clinton or Sanders campaigns, the Castro team is filled with many longtime loyalists from San Antonio and his Housing secretary days.

    The most likely and most obvious political path for Castro would be to consolidate the Latino vote, a population which comprises an increasingly growing share of the population but one that, frustratingly for Democratic strategists, doesn’t vote in nearly the numbers that it could. Latinos are the now the largest minority group in the country and account for about 10 percent to 20 percent of the Democratic Party electorate. 2020 polling on Latinos is scant, but the polling that does exist shows that immigration isn’t the big concern among Latinos that many analysts assume it to be. Jobs and health care rank above immigration, and polling shows that Latinos tend to favor the candidates who are preferred by the rest of the Democratic electorate like Warren, Sanders and Biden. A recent open-ended Pew survey put Castro below even Buttigieg in a poll of Latino Democrats.

    Castro mouths the words, but he doesn’t hear the music.

  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. Not in the debates. And he might finish destroying New York City’s public schools:

    Picture the Pacific Ocean after an underwater nuclear catastrophe, and you’ll have some idea of what Bill de Blasio’s public-school system is like.

    There would be a few safe islands scattered around, but they would be separated by thousands of square miles of radioactive seawater — patrolled by mutant sharks, fire-breathing giant squids and unnecessarily rude sea turtles.

    And what does de Blasio think when he surveys this immense realm of inequality?

    “Hey, why not blow up the islands? That way everyone is equal. Problem solved!”

    The mayor sent his own kids to be educated on those rare, precious islands. Chiara de Blasio, now 24, attended the selective Beacon School, a public high school that has tough admissions standards, in Hell’s Kitchen. Dante de Blasio, 21, graduated from the even more selective Brooklyn Tech, admission to which is granted entirely based on performance on a famously difficult test.

    Yet de Blasio, the longtime Iowa resident who owes New Yorkers a large salary refund for all the days we’ve been paying him to wander the Midwest sucking on corn dogs, set up a commission to investigate the problem of de-facto segregation at New York City schools.

    The city has a lot of underperforming high schools, these schools are filled with black children, and de Blasio is doing zilch to help them.

    That’s because the teachers union won’t allow any solution that even whispers a hint of a rumor about the main problem at these schools, which is the large number of radioactive sharks: the lousy teachers who work there.

    As de Blasio knew it would, the commission he stocked with his ideological cronies recommended this past week to get rid of the Department of Education’s selective schools and ax the Gifted & Talented (G &T) programs.

    These programs operate within schools — sometimes effectively setting up a good school within an otherwise mediocre or bad one. That amounts to creating islands of safety away from the tired, lazy, inept, ambition-destroying teachers whose only goal is to kill time until their pensions kick in.

    I know this story is only barely relevant to the 2020 Democrat Presidential Race. Much like de Blasio’s campaign…

  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. Still running, despite missing the debate. Complains that the DNC is kind of like Thanos, except Thanos didn’t kill half the universe based on under-performing poll numbers.
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She’s not dropping out. More than any other candidate, Gabbard seems to be screwed by the DNC debate rules. “Rep. Gabbard has exceeded 2% support in 26 national and early state polls, but only two of them are on the DNC’s ‘certified’ list. Many of the uncertified polls, including those conducted by highly reputable organizations such as The Economist and the Boston Globe, are ranked by RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight as more accurate than some DNC ‘certified’ polls.” 538 on the same topic, noting Gabbard and Steyer might be in under different criteria.
  • Update: New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: Dropped Out. She dropped out August 29:

    Go back to Gillibrand’s biography. If you had a daughter who was accepted to Dartmouth and studied two semesters abroad in Beijing and Taiwan, you would probably be pretty proud. If she got into UCLA law school, and then was accepted for internships in her senator’s office and at the United Nations in Vienna, Austria, you would be proud of that, too. If, after law school, she got hired by one of Manhattan’s oldest and most distinguished law firms, and went on to get selected for coveted law clerk positions, you would probably be bragging to the neighbors.

    By a lot of standards, Gillibrand did what a bright and ambitious woman is supposed to do. In fact, by the standards of America’s self-labeled meritocratic elite, Gillibrand’s path to success is exactly what a young person is supposed to pursue. This comparison hasn’t been made much, but in this way she’s like Pete Buttigieg — the bright young son of professors at Notre Dame who is accepted to Harvard, moves on to Oxford, and immediately gets hired by McKinsey consulting. They’re both Type-A personalities with grades to match, carrying around golden resumes and heads full of answers that wow teachers, professors, and potential employers. Quite a few parents look at standout young people like this and wish their kids could be more like that.

    America’s self-labeled meritocracy (please avert your eyes from all the nepotism, bourgeoisie readers, it’s gauche to bring it up) unsubtly turns all aspects of life into a competition. You want to get the best grades, get into the best school, study under the best professors, get the best internships, get the best jobs, get the highest salary, move into the best house, drive the best car, have the biggest portfolio . . . This isn’t new; America has long had a competitive sense of “keeping up with the Joneses.” It’s easy to understand why many Americans would grow to find this rarely openly expressed but almost omnipresent mindset unappealing. People sigh about “the rat race.” Seemingly high-achieving workers hit burnout. People dream of winning the lottery and moving to some sparsely populated island somewhere and “leaving it all behind.” People crave a sense of being valued for who they are, not just for their big salary, prestigious job, or fancy car. A seemingly endless stream of nonfiction and fiction works explore “the cost of the American dream.”

    When you have a competition, there are usually going to be a few winners and a lot of people who “lose.” We conservatives have grumbled about “class envy” for a long time, but maybe some resentment is natural. People who have thrived in America’s “meritocracy” include Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Eric Schneiderman, Bernie Madoff, Jeffrey Skilling, Elizabeth Holmes. We’ve seen plenty of millionaires and self-proclaimed billionaires who turned out to be terrible human beings. We’ve seen plenty of celebrities demonstrate every repugnant behavior under the sun, to the point of self-destruction. Lots of people who are in the middle or bottom have reason to doubt the notion that the best really do rise to the top in America.

    When Kirsten Gillibrand — super accomplished, $500,000-per-year lawyer — turned her attention and ambitions to the political world, the best opportunity to run for office was a purple district in the middle of New York state. The top-tier Manhattan lawyer might not seem like the perfect fit, but she adapted, her opponent got caught in a scandal, and she won.

    There’s a particular circle of elite New York Democratic party and media voices who found Gillibrand to be exactly what they wanted; she had risen to the top, and other people at the top found her to be as close to perfect as they could imagine. Their swoon spurred those ridiculous-in-retrospect overestimations of her appeal as a presidential candidate: Politico (“Her moment has arrived”), GQ (“the most fearsome contender”), The New Yorker (“the new face of moral reform”), and Vogue (“she’s got newfound street cred among lefties and progressives”).

    The swoon started soon after her appointment to fill Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat. I love making fun of Vogue’s 2017 profile of Gillibrand, but the gushing in the 2010 profile — entitled, “In Hillary’s Footsteps” — is pretty over-the-top, too:

    “Gillibrand is nothing if not genuine, and through sheer force of personality she bends the occasion to suit her style, which is essentially folksy and earnest. She radiates kindness. But she is also direct and no-nonsense. Despite the fact that she is a Democrat (and a fairly progressive one, at that) and worked for fifteen years as a hotshot Manhattan lawyer, she seems utterly at ease among this crowd of mostly Republican farmers, with their rough hands and weathered faces.”

    For some reason, Iowa and New Hampshire farmers did not find her as appealing.

    Gillibrand kept getting compared to the character of Tracey Flick from Election, and perhaps that is indeed sexist. But let’s reexamine that character and that movie. On paper, the villain of the story is Matthew Broderick’s high school social studies teacher, who grows so infuriated and antagonistic to Reese Witherspoon’s Flick that he’s willing to try to cheat to ensure she doesn’t win the election for student body election. Technically, Flick is the victim in the story. But we, the audience, relate to Broderick. Flick is a fascinating but thoroughly unlikeable character, and she’s supposed to be one. At one point she declares, “I feel sorry for Mr. McAllister. I mean, anyone who’s stuck in the same little room, wearing the same stupid clothes, saying the exact same things year after year for all of his life, while his students go on to good colleges and move to big cities and do great things and make loads of money — he’s gotta be at least a little jealous. It’s like my mom says, the weak are always trying to sabotage the strong.” Tracey Flick doesn’t have much beyond her all-consuming ambition and determination, and probably the single most important characteristic is that we never see her actually caring about anyone besides herself, and perhaps the desire to make her mother proud. Why was Election a hit that is remembered and still referred to, two decades later? Because a lot of people knew high school class presidents who reminded them of Tracey Flick.

    I have two minor quibbles with this analysis, both related to the same facet of Gillibrand. One, Gillibrand’s rise strikes me as less meritocracy at work than credentialism (a point Geraghty implies without actually stating). In truth, nothing I’ve seen from Gillibrand suggests that she’s actually bright. It seems like liberal female New York political writers bestowed that unearned distinction on Gillibrand because she came across as one of them, someone with the right pedigree who held all the right fashionably liberal opinions. Gillibrand’s one-woman show of The Wokeist Sorority Girl is finally over. Good riddance:

    From the beginning, her upstart campaign was characterized by an enormous amount of virtue-mongering, insisting not only that her progressive bona fides made her superior to you, but that only she could help you comprehend exactly how backwards you are. In the last debate, for instance, she promised to traverse the suburbs explaining “institutional racism” and white privilege to white women.

    It was an interesting tactic from a candidate attempting to distinguish herself as a female candidate running for women, and it’s easy to see why the effort failed to gain much traction. The major policy centerpiece of her campaign was called “Fighting for women and families” and focused exclusively on issues like unlimited abortion rights, universal paid family leave, public education, and sexual harassment. Perhaps the most news attention she got all campaign came when she compared being pro-life to being racist. Light on substance, she needed a forum to peddle her platitudes, and without the debate stage, she had little hope of convincing Democrats to listen to her at all.

    The news that she had terminated her campaign came just a few days after a former Gillibrand staffer told the New York Post, “I don’t know that anyone even wants to see her on the debate stage. Everyone I have talked to finds her performative and obnoxious.”

    Because this is the last chance we’ll get to flog this dead equine, here’s 538 on how Gillibrand couldn’t get it done:

    On paper, though, Gillibrand’s campaign didn’t seem especially quixotic. She was on the national stage for more than a decade before throwing her hat in the ring, and established herself as a strong advocate for women’s rights issues such as paid family leave and sexual assault in the military. She was also explicitly pitching her candidacy toward groups like white college-educated suburban women, whose political enthusiasm had just helped sweep a record-breaking number of women into office in the 2018 midterms.

    So Gillibrand’s biggest problem may have simply been that there wasn’t a clear base for her in the Democratic electorate — at least not one for which there wasn’t also fierce competition in the rest of the primary field. After all, she was running against a number of other women who are also strong on issues like abortion rights and equal pay. Without another signature issue to help her stand out, she often got lost in the melee of the primary.

    Snip.

    In some ways, Gillibrand’s campaign may have also shown just how tricky outreach to women voters can be, even in a year where issues such as abortion and the #MeToo movement are prominent. Women make up about 60 percent of the Democratic base, but there isn’t a lot of evidence that they gravitate automatically toward female candidates because of their shared identity, or even because of shared priorities. In that Politico/Morning Consult poll, for instance, only 5 percent of Democratic women voters said that gender equality was a top voting priority. And Warren and Harris appear to be polling only very slightly better with women than men; that gap is actually bigger for Biden.

    She was truly the No One Cares candidate.

  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Can she come back?

    Harris’ tumble in the Democratic primary race has worried donors and supporters after her launch attracted huge crowds amid high expectations. A rising charismatic and accomplished star, they did think she couldn’t go wrong. They also figured she could ride her early summer ascent to a face-off with the front-runner, former Vice President Joe Biden. After all, her decision to jolt her campaign by attacking Biden at the first candidate debate had initially proven successful — Harris had left him wobbly-kneed and doubted. New endorsements came in from the Congressional Black Caucus, along with a surge in donations, and media accounts of voters and insiders talking about her unique ability to “prosecute the case” against Donald Trump, as the former California attorney general likes to say.

    But last week a CNN national poll that had her at 17% support — in second place — in June now showed her in fourth place with only 5%. In the new USA Today/Suffolk University Poll out Wednesday, Harris is at 6% but now in fifth place, behind Pete Buttigieg.

    I’m going to go with “no.” Harris’ stumbles revealed that, like Gillibrand, her “charisma” was more media creation that real, and that she’s actually unpopular with black voters, a huge problem if the media positions you as ‘the black candidate.” “Five times prosecutor Kamala Harris got the wrong guy.”

  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. It’s one thing when randos say your presidential campaign is all-but-dead. It’s another thing when Walter Mondale says it.
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. There’s no Messam news this week. His Twitter timeline is discussing preperations for Hurricane Dorian, so he’s evidently doing the job he actually has now, and will presumably continue having once he stops pretending he’s running for President. Maybe Mayor Pete could take notes…
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Far-left Democratic presidential candidate Robert Francis O’Rourke announced over the weekend that if he is elected president, he intends to confiscate tens of millions of semi-automatic firearms from law-abiding Americans.” Wants to end President Donald Trump’s tariffs on China.
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. Missed the debate, still running, but he’s also fundraising for his congressional campaign. Hardly burning his boats. Says there’s no shot of him dropping out of the Presidential race. So I’m guessing he’s out in about five weeks or so…
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. In the latest case of Bernie spending taxpayer money he doesn’t have, he promises to cancel all medical debts. At this rate, Democrats will be promising to cancel all debts on everything, credit cards and mortgages included, so why pay any bills any more ever? The Magic Power of Socialism™ will take care of it all! A California restaurant owner says that Brnie is a rude asshole. “It was all very nice, except for rude and cranky Bernie…He didn’t want to shake hands, he didn’t want a picture. No campaign face…He wasn’t nice to any of the staff.” Campaigned in Porland, Maine.
  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets an ABC profile.
  • Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. Why Steyer couldn’t buy his way onto the debate stage:

    Tom Steyer’s campaign was confident he would make it into the September debate. With the help of a nearly $5 million online advertising blitz, the billionaire presidential candidate had scooped up the necessary 130,000 unique donors in just over a month, meeting the Democratic National Committee’s donor threshold to qualify.

    But he also had to meet the polling requirement. As the party’s deadline approached, Steyer had notched the necessary 2% in three qualifying polls, meaning he needed just one more to make it into the debate. The campaign hoped for another in an early primary state, where Steyer had spent more than $8 million on TV ads in six weeks, according to Advertising Analytics — more than any candidate, including President Donald Trump.

    That poll never materialized.

    The campaign vented that there hadn’t been a qualifying poll in Nevada, where Steyer spent $1.7 million and finished fifth in one survey that wasn’t approved by the DNC. But several political strategists offered another possible reason Steyer’s strategy came up short: No amount of paid media can match the influence of actual coverage, referred to in media parlance as “earned media.”

    “Advertising you pay for can increase your name recognition, but unless people are hearing about you from third parties like earned media that are reinforcing a real narrative, then it’s not really going to go anywhere,” said Robby Mook, campaign manager for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential run.

    And if there’s anyone who knows about tremendous campaign failures, its Robby Mook. Steyer’s only been in the race for two months and we already have our first failure-to-launch piece:

    Even before liberal billionaire Tom Steyer was shut out of the next Democratic debate, there were tell-tale signs his rocket-fueled six-week presidential bid was failing to launch.

    At last weekend’s Democratic National Committee summer confab in San Francisco, Steyer’s home turf, his campaign had a fancy booth complete with a snazzy “Tom2020” photo backdrop, but only a handful of supporters were happily snapping pics and there were no sign-waving foot soldiers to compete with Kamala Harris’ k-hive entourage.

    Still, just before his remarks to the gathering, there was a slight buzz in the ballroom from Democrats eager to hear from the familiar activist in person.

    To put it bluntly, Steyer underwhelmed. The wooden speech fell especially flat when he lectured his DNC hosts to stop accepting corporate cash.

    “We can’t be chasing corporate money. … We should only be chasing people’s votes,” he said. “As president, I would insist that the DNC not take one single penny from any corporation.”

    Overall, the party faithful assembled there offered tepid applause even after Steyer reminded them that his NextGen group organized and paid for the “largest youth mobilization in American history” in 2018, helping to flip 33 GOP House seats to the Democratic column.

    Strangely, with the notable exception of slamming Donald Trump as the “biggest swamp rat of them all,” Steyer didn’t focus much on the president despite the months he spent demanding Democrats in Congress move to impeach him.

    Steyer’s speech left some DNC delegates scratching their heads, though no one wanted to go public berating a billionaire who has invested so many dollars in liberal causes. Steyer was the single largest individual donor to Democratic-aligned groups in 2016 and his voter registration drives in California and Arizona helped fuel the 2018 blue wave.

    The spending largesse aside, many Democrats privately say Steyer, an Exeter/Yale/Stanford graduate and a former Goldman Sachs associate who made his fortune running a $26 billion hedge fund, is simply the wrong person to pitch the party’s anti-corporate message to voters.

    Ya think?

  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. “‘Pocahontas’ Could Still Be Elizabeth Warren’s Biggest Vulnerability.”

    Elizabeth Warren came to last week’s Native American presidential forum in Sioux City, Iowa, with, as you might expect, a plan. And she executed it perfectly.

    First, the Massachusetts senator expressed sorrow for the “harm I caused,” referencing her attempt to prove she had Native American ancestry through a DNA test. Then she pivoted to her literal plan, her sweeping and detailed set of ideas to expand tribal nation sovereignty and invest in social programs benefiting Native American communities. The long list of proposals was repeatedly praised by the forum’s attendees, several of whom excitedly predicted that they were speaking to the next president of the United States.

    While Warren’s campaign staff might have breathed easier coming out of the forum, her Republican antagonists have made it clear they have no intention of forgetting the episode. Shortly before Warren’s appearance at the forum, the Republican National Committee released an opposition research memo titled, “1/1024th Native American, 100% Liar,” which quoted its deputy chief of staff Mike Reed as saying, Warren “lied about being [Native American] to gain minority status at a time when Ivy League law schools were desperate to add diversity to their ranks.” A few days earlier, President Donald Trump, after lamenting that “Pocahontas is rising” in the polls, assured his supporters at a New Hampshire rally that he still has the ability to derail her: “I did the Pocahontas thing. I hit her really hard, and it looked like she was down and out. But that was too long ago. I should’ve waited. But don’t worry, we will revive it.”

    Has Warren effectively addressed the controversy? In conversations I had with Democratic and Republican political strategists, unaffiliated with any presidential campaign, there was no bipartisan consensus. The Democrats believed Warren’s rise in the polls is evidence she has weathered the storm. The Republicans argued Warren remains vulnerable to charges of dishonest opportunism.

    They’re both right. Warren is enjoying a comeback because she has convinced many skittish progressives that she won’t let Trump disrupt her relentless focus on policy solutions. And she has convinced many Native American leaders that her policy proposals for indigenous communities are more important than what she has said in the past about her ancestry.

    But because Warren’s comeback has relied on restoring her standing on the left, she has not done anything to address concerns potentially percolating among swing voters. A detailed white paper on Native American policy has no bearing on whether a moderate white suburbanite believes Warren is of good character. And since Warren has apologized for her past claims, she remains open to the charge she was dishonest when, during her academic career, she relied on nothing more than family lore to identify herself as Native American.

    That means if she becomes the Democratic nominee for president, Warren would still face a “Pocahontas” problem, one that threatens the core of her candidacy.

    Native Americans are not particularly quick to forgive her, either. The media’s is slavishly boosting Warren:

    It used to be that the Boston Globe practically had a monopoly on slobbering, unctuous flattery of the erstwhile Native American, the first woman of color at Harvard, emeritus.

    It wasn’t enough for the Boring Broadsheet to pretend that the New England Historical and Genealogical Society hadn’t busted her melanin-impaired grift, or to peddle fake statistics about her scam DNA test. No, the bow-tied bumkissers also penned hagiographies of her dead dog (Otis), her new dog (Bailey) and her campaign headquarters in Charlestown (complete with a cameo appearance by Bailey).

    But the Globe is one busy Democrat fanzine these days, what with having to break out the pom-poms for, among others, Ed Markey (he may be a doddering old fool, but he’s our doddering old fool), JoJoJo Kennedy (look, a Kennedy! And he has red hair!), and of course Seth Moulton (America’s loss is Essex County’s gain, or something).

    So when it comes to open and gross cheerleading for Lieawatha, there’s an open lane, and boy, are the Democrat operatives with press passes rushing to fill the void.

    The thesis is that Fauxcahontas is, well, thoughtful and substantive, plus you always have to mention, as the New Republic gushed, “her passion, her intellect and her lack of artifice.”

    Here’s how Lieawatha’s thoughtful, substantive policies work: Bernie Sanders goes in front of some whining group of self-proclaimed victims demanding handouts, and promises them, say, $10 trillion.

    So the fake Indian follows and says, I’ll raise you, Bernie – how’s $20 trillion in handouts sound?

    Scott Adams thinks Warren has gotten much better as a candidate but Biden is done (political portion starts about 34 minutes in):

    He also thinks Warren is vulnerable on making the healthcare of everyone who already has it worse. Also thinks Harris is the worst candidate of all time. “Even worse than Beto, and he’s terrible.”

  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. Williamson would like you to know she’s not an antivaxxer and she doesn’t own any crystals. Hey, don’t go changing on us, babe. She visited Greenville, South Carolina and Atlanta.
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. Here’s a thread on the many ways MSNBC and CNN have blatantly kept Andrew Yang out of newsgraphics describing all the candidates, even those polling lower than him. It’s pretty egregious. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) “Yang climate plan heavily relies on entrepreneurship, nuclear.” If you’re going to do something incredibly stupid like the Paris Climate Accords or the Green New Deal, then Yang’s approach is indeed the one that does the least collateral damage, and a pro-nucelar voice is a breath of fresh air among Democrats.
  • Out of the Running

    These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti
  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
  • Actor Alec Baldwin.
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (dropped out August 23, 2019)
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Nice First-Person Defensive Gun Use Piece

    September 1st, 2019

    This is a nice long, sympathetic account of a man who used his gun defensively against two people robbing a convenience store:

    When he arrived, the 37-year-old headed to the fountain drink machine, paying little attention to the din of chatter inside the South Newtown Road store. After pouring his favorite strawberry-melon flavored iced tea into a cup, he walked toward the cash register on the other side of the counter.

    “I’m sipping on my Big Gulp, and this red beam cuts into my drink,” said the man, who agreed to tell The Virginian-Pilot what happened July 25 on the condition he not be identified.

    “I look down and I’ve got a pink drink with something orangish-red in there. Then I look up and there are two guys pretty much standing on top of each other with two guns pointed in my face.”

    The gunmen, on what police say was the last stop of a spate of robberies around 2 a.m. that Thursday, had hoods pulled over their heads and bandannas covering their faces. The red spot in the man’s drink was a laser light from one of the guns aimed in his direction.

    Still clutching his Big Gulp, the man followed orders to raise his hands and move to the side. Two other customers, a woman and a man, stood frozen in front of the cash register.

    While one robber stuffed his pockets with money, the other leaned over the counter with his gun fixed on the store clerk.

    “The clerk was arguing with them, saying, ‘You don’t have to do this. Just leave,’” the man said. “The situation just started to escalate, and I was worried he was going to shoot the clerk.”

    While the robbers focused on the cash and the clerk, the man touched the 9 mm handgun hidden in a holster under his T-shirt with his pinkie. No one noticed. He knew he had about 10 rounds in the clip.

    As he stood there, still clutching his Big Gulp and occasionally taking a sip, the man now found himself facing a tough decision: Should he draw the gun?

    He ran through the possible consequences: Will I go to jail? Do I have a clear enough shot that no one else will get hurt? Is anyone else in the store? Will someone else pop in? If I don’t do it, is the clerk or someone else going to get shot?

    “I’m thinking about all of that and at the same time thinking, you’re supposed to have the right to bear arms, the right to protect yourself, the right to protect others if need be,” he said.

    “I’m like ‘Man, you say you believe in the Second Amendment. You say you believe in America. You know God’s got you.’”

    Still holding his drink in one hand, he fired first at the robber behind the counter. He aimed for his shoulder, he said, but ended up hitting him in the neck.

    “He hollered, and I think that distracted (the other gunman) because he wasn’t thinking that was going to happen,” the man said. “Nobody thought that was going to happen. He’s probably emotional and distraught because he was in control up to that point.”

    The robber behind the counter fell. The one who’d had his gun pointed at the clerk turned to see where the shot had come from. With that weapon now turned in his direction, the man fired two more shots. Both hit the second robber in his torso, killing him.

    After kicking the gun away from the dead robber, the man told the clerk to call police, then checked on the one behind the counter to take his gun away and see if he needed first aid.

    “He was like, ‘How’s my brother?’” the man said. “I remember answering him pretty coldly. I told him, ‘You don’t got a brother no more.’

    “He looked at me like he wanted to do something and I immediately lost it. I was like, ‘(Expletive), no one points a gun at me and gets away with it.’”

    The woman at the register had dropped to the floor after the first shot was fired. She was still on the ground shaking uncontrollably, with her hands covering her head, when he went to help her up.

    The man, a divorced father of a teenage son and an employee of a medical transport business, was also shaken but tried to remain calm.

    He’d never shot anyone before.

    He is, however, experienced with guns and has had a concealed handgun permit since he was 21. He enjoys going to a shooting range a couple of times a week and believes all gun owners should be properly trained.

    As he waited for police to arrive that night, the man began to worry about how the officers would react.

    “You just shot and killed somebody in 7-Eleven. You just told these people to call the cops and they’re coming. You got to stand here and wait for them. Of course, you can’t be standing here with a gun in your hand. You’re a black man with a gun. You’ll probably get shot.”

    Keep in mind that a lawyer or carry instructor would probably advise you to avoid saying some of the things the many in the article does in the aftermath of the shooting.

    Read the whole thing. And if you haven’t already, read the terrific follow-up piece on Stephen Willeford, the man who stopped the Sutherland Springs shooter with his own AR-15 I linked to a while back.

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

    Jack Hacked

    August 31st, 2019

    Either Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s account was hacked yesterday or else he developed a written version of Tourette’s Syndrome.

    Naturally I reported his Tweets to the Twitter support for violating Twitter rules. All of them have evidently been taken down. And it’s happened before.

    Does anyone have any faith in Twitter data security if they can’t keep their own CEO’s account from being hacked? And does anyone doubt that any non-blue checkmarks whose accounts spewed such statements would be quickly suspended or banned?

    LinkSwarm for August 30, 2019

    August 30th, 2019

    I hope you’re ready for the Labor Day Weekend. I certainly am…

  • At the G7, President Donald Trump is the popular one. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Three documents President Trump should declassify. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Obama’s Social Justice Warrior dictates harmed American military readiness.
  • Democracies around the world should hope that President Trump wins the trade war with China. “China’s victory [would] bring about a world in which democracies are enfeebled and the largest autocracy is emboldened.”
  • Boris Johnson has outflanked remainers by proroguing Parliament for a Queen’s speech.

    For this, Johnson is being pilloried as a dictator by Remainers. Why? By doing this, Johnson has made it harder for parliamentarians who oppose a no-deal exit from the European Union to interrupt Johnson’s Brexit negotiation strategy, which includes the possibility of no deal. Johnson has very sharply limited the time in which parliamentarians could organize to force the government to request another extension from the EU and thus make a mockery of Johnson’s promise of leaving the European Union — deal or no deal — by October 31. Essentially, parliamentarians will face a choice: Allow Johnson to proceed with his form of brinkmanship while negotiating with Brussels, including the possibility of no deal, or make Jeremy Corbyn prime minister.

    Remainers should look into the mirror, however. They have shaped this outcome as much as any hardcore Brexiteer. At every single turn, in fact, it has been Remainers who have increased the chances of the U.K.’s not only leaving, but crashing out on a series of ad hoc emergency measures, rather than a comprehensive adjustment to its relationship to Europe.

    Following this maneuver, Johnson’s Tories have surged in the polls.

  • How President Trump started a war between the UN and Hamas:

    While a handful of European UN employees act as the public face of UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees], the actual agency is run by Hamas operatives who control its schools, using them to recruit and to store weapons. The union representing UNRWA employees is controlled by Hamas and its employees implement Hamas policies.

    Hamas had announced as much when its newspaper responded to a call to fire UNRWA Hamas members by writing, “Laying off the agency employees because of their political affiliation means laying off all the employees of the aid agency, because…they are all members of the ‘resistance.’”

    The power struggle between the UN employees and Hamas was tested before during clashes over the teaching of the Holocaust in UNRWA schools and the use of UNRWA schools to launch attacks on Israel.

    The real crackup came when the Trump administration cut off all funding to UNRWA.

    Snip.

    “I am the captain of the ship which has 13,000 sailors on it and they have basically thrown me off the bridge and consigned me to my captain’s quarters,” Matthias Schmale, UNRWA’s director of field operations in Gaza, whined.

    Schmale had never actually been the captain. [Hamas co-founder Mahmoud] Zahar and other Hamas leaders had been running things.

    The UNRWA was forced to evacuate most of its 19 international staffers from Gaza, including its ten senior leaders, leaving behind only 6 international staffers. This made no practical difference as the UNRWA operation on the ground was actually being run by the 13,000 Hamas UN employees.

    But the UN isn’t moved by protests or violence. It runs on reports. And soon a report arrived.

    Al Jazeera debuted an internal UN report alleging corruption and misconduct by UNRWA leaders. Al Jazeera is an arm of Qatar. The Islamic terror state is currently the biggest backer of the Muslim Brotherhood, supports Hamas, and is extensively involved in Gaza. Al Jazeera’s barrage of stories on the UNRWA report was a clear signal that Qatar was targeting the UN agency on behalf of Hamas.

    Al Jazeera claimed that it had obtained a copy of the report from agency employees “concerned” that action wasn’t being taken against an “inner circle” running UNRWA. The inner circle consists of the international leadership that Hamas is angry at for trying to fire hundreds of its people.

    The report, aired by Al Jazeera, claimed that UNRWA boss Pierre Krahenbuhl had carried on an affair with his senior adviser, Maria Mohammedi, which “embarrassed” their colleagues and donors.

    Krahenbuhl, a Swiss NGO vet, is officially married to Taiba Rahim, the head of an Afghan non-profit, and Maria Mohammedi, is an Algerian who was, at least in the past, married to Rashid Abdelhamid, a “Palestinian filmmaker”, who is really an Algerian educated in France, and living in Gaza, and while this is all very multinational, it’s also the sort of “international diplomacy” that the UN frowns upon.

    But if the allegations are true, the Swiss humanitarian had just gone native by adopting polygamy.

    The report is filled with allegations of bullying, nepotism, abusing travel vouchers, and, the worst possible sin in a bureaucracy, bypassing official channels. And it might be more serious if the behavior being described weren’t slightly eclipsed by the fact that the rest of the UNRWA, which likely includes the employees behind the report, is an Islamic terror group dedicated to murdering children.

    But in the UN, using schools as munition dumps isn’t a serious issue, going outside official channels is.

    Result: Other nations, including the Swiss and the Dutch, are cutting off money to UNRWA.

  • Feminists just couldn’t accept their victory:

    In a grim determination never to take “Yes” for an answer, a different breed of feminist waddled onto the scene. Feminism had taken a vicious, vindictive and male-hating turn. Like other “civil rights” movements, it turned out to have less to do with “justice” and more to do with raw, abusive power, payback, quotas, unqualified people having set-aside slots based on their plumbing, and getting rich. Society needed to make some changes. And it did. However, we’ve all heard the expression “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Well, don’t look now, but there goes the baby…literally.

    Abortion was always a divisive subject. The first time Mr. AG and I heard a friend wax poetic about what a great thing abortion would be, I almost got into a fistfight with him, except he was also a pacifist! Where’s the fun in pummeling a pacifist? To a non-psychotic, the very idea of killing a baby is appalling, admit it. But by the early ’70s there was a growing consensus that in the first 12 weeks, the proverbial “clump of cells” should be able to be terminated. How quickly and predictably that morphed into abortion any time for any reason, including the sex of the baby, or no reason at all. I knew one certifiable, deranged feminist who used abortion as birth control. She had had 8 abortions that I heard of before I lost track of her.

    Today, after ultrasound has proven that the clump of cells looks remarkably like a baby, only 7 percent of the American people agree with third trimester abortion. SEVEN PERCENT! You could get more than 7 percent to say they have had lunch with Bigfoot and Elvis. (Bigfoot selected the steak tartare; Elvis chose the Biscuits and Gravy.) Yet seven of nine black-robed arbiters set the stage for what has become legalized infanticide.

    As they say on late-night informercials: But WAIT, there’s more! The old guard, who educated and litigated and lobbied for the rights and privileges women have today are driven from the movement, indeed from the public square. They have failed to get onboard with the quaint and unscientific notion that sex is a more or less imaginary construct and can change on a whim. How shocked Eve Ensler must have been to find that her tedious but lucrative play about chattering vaginas is now verboten because “some women don’t have vaginas.” Though she died in 1986, De Beauvoir herself wrote, “If you live long enough, you’ll see that every victory turns into a defeat.” Gotta love those cheery existentialists!

    Newly-minted women who are actually men can now win every athletic competition against real biological women. Title IX has been rendered meaningless. Protest if you dare, even if you’re an iconic lesbian tennis pro, and you will face a Twitter storm or legal action in Canada. Even backpedaling and groveling will not save you. As the famous novelist Max Cossack queried the other day over breakfast: “If men and women are exactly the same, why don’t we see women who’ve transitioned into ‘men’ winning athletic events against other men? How come that only goes one way?” Bueller? Mueller? Is that in anybody’s purview?

    So what you might call Fairness Feminism is dead. The loony ghouls feasting on its corpse will carry on, but it will never again approach being any kind of mass movement.

  • Kurt Schlichter is delighted that our liberal media elites are being hoisted on their on petards:

    You must have a heart of stone not to burst into uncontrollable, hysterical laughter at the agony of the failing New York Times and the rest of the media over how conservative activists are going to apply the same internet colonoscopy to lib journalistas as they apply to us.

    Monsters!

    Fascists!

    Meanies!

    Oh yeah, that’s the ticket.

    Drink in their pain.

    Drink it all in.

    Mmmmm, that’s some delicious pain.

    Yeah, conservatives are fighting back, and to the other side it’s an assault on the free press and further evidence that Trump is totally Hitler and probably Stalin too. But to us, it’s long-overdue counterpunching right into the progs’ soft gut. (Note: The author knows some of the conservatives allegedly involved, but was not involved in this glorious initiative).

    This is righteous retribution, and the screaming and hollering about it is further evidence that there’s plenty of dirt to dig up.

    Welcome to Accountability City. Population: All you liberal media jerks.

  • Ann Althouse wonders how a New York Times travel writer balances their job demands of selling air travel to rich people with his bedrock religious belief in global warming. Answer: with good old-fashioned hypocrisy:

    After a few more tips — including buy carbon offsets — [Seth] Kugel ends with this mind-bogglingly elitist paragraph:

    Most of this will make travel more expensive — and that may mean traveling even less. Think of it as a progressive tax paid by those lucky enough to travel for damaging the world those who can’t travel must live in. It is a small price to pay. And maybe it will make you feel a little less shame.

    No! You should feel MORE shame for even thinking like that. Kugel is saying that the people with the money to pay more will pay more and should feel lucky and less ashamed for “for damaging the world those who can’t travel must live in.” But refraining from doing what you can do is a core component of morality! To travel is to choose to cause damage. Kugel is just desperately trying to scare up every argument for continuing to travel by air…. other than relinquishing the idea that carbon emissions are destroying the world’s climate.

  • “Young Turks Host Hasan Piker Mocks Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s War Injuries, Declares America Deserved 9/11.” Thought about noting this for the Joe Rogan interview with Dan Crenshaw post, but decided the little shit just wasn’t worth mentioning there.
  • You can see the progress on the border wall here. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • “Obama Blows $15 Million on Mansion Doomed by Rising Tides He Failed to Slow.”
  • “NAACP President to Reporter: ‘I don’t talk to fucking Jews.'” That’s president of the Passiac NAACP, not the national organization. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Iranian rocket blows up on pad.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Karachi, Pakistan suffers through a plague of flies:

    First came the floods, as weeks of monsoon rains deluged neighborhoods across Karachi, sending sewage and trash through Pakistan’s largest city. Then came the long power outages, in some cases for 60 hours and counting.

    And then it got worse: Karachi is now plagued by swarms of flies. The bugs seem to be everywhere in every neighborhood, bazaar and shop, sparing no one. They’re a bullying force on sidewalks, flying in and out of stores and cars and homes, and settling onto every available surface, from vegetables to people.

    Flies and flooding can often go together, and Karachi is no stranger to either. But Dr. Seemin Jamali, the executive director for the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center, one of Karachi’s largest public hospitals, said this was the worst infestation of flies she had ever witnessed.

    “There are huge swarms of flies and mosquitoes,” she said. “It’s not just affecting the life of the common man — they’re so scary, they’re hounding people. You can’t walk straight on the road, there are so many flies everywhere.”

    The city started a fumigation drive, but the flies remain, and frustrations are growing. It’s all drawing new attention, and anger, to the city’s longstanding problems with garbage and drainage — an issue that feuding political factions have wielded against each other for years, but that hasn’t gotten any better.

    Experts say this infestation was probably brought on by the combination of stagnant rainwater, which stood in the city for days, with garbage on the streets and waste left behind from animals slaughtered during the recent Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha.

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • Guy does the opposite of what I do every day, going out on the Internet without any blockers of any kind to see what sorts of tracking cookies he picks up. He picked up hundreds. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Homeowner in Round Rock? The city council is going to be taking more of your money.
  • Lying about lobsters.
  • Stationary bicycle maker Peloton is preparing an IPO despite never having been profitable, having no realistic plans to be profitable, and a CEO who makes more than the CEOs of Ford, Home Depot and Cisco. “So, Peloton, while pretending to be a technology company, lost $195 million last year, yet paid its top three executives more than $50 million (up from $17.9 million in Fiscal Year 2018).”
  • “Gun stolen during anonymous masked orgy, police admit ‘we’re probably not going to solve this one.'” Bonus: Exactly the state you think.
  • Critics hate Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood because it’s not boring and woke. (I saw this last Saturday, and I highly recommend catching it in theaters while you can.)
  • “Liberals Clarify They Only Want Black Voices To Be Heard When They’re Saying Liberal Things.”

    “When black people agree with me, I very much want their voices to be heard,” said Helga Bannerman, 28, Portland, she/they/her/xen. “When they don’t agree with me, they’re pretty much just not black anymore. They’re basically an evil white person like me at that point. And the last thing we need on this planet is more white people like Dave Chappelle.”

  • A heh for the weekend:

  • Leftists Lie About (spins dial) the Tea Party Being Racist

    August 29th, 2019

    The endless parade of endless leftist lying has now gotten to the Tea Party. Everything and every one that stands between the Democratic Party and power gets labeled as racist, so why should the Tea Party, a spontaneous grassroots movement that helped Republicans retake the the House and Senate following the passage of ObamaCare, be any different?

    As always, it’s a complete and utter lie:

    Left-wing protesters, no matter how puerile, hateful, or bigoted, are typically depicted as righteous agents of change. Conservatives and libertarians, on the other hand, “rage.” The “summer of rage” typically refers to the riots that swept a number of American cities in 1967. The Tea Party protests never turned violent. There were no riots. No broken Starbucks windows. It was the most peaceful “rage” you’re ever going to see.

    I reported on the first of numerous Tea Party protests on April 16, 2010. What I saw were some silly people, and many others who were idealistic neophytes peacefully organizing around founding principles. Most had very specific policy goals in mind. None of them were about race. Most of them supported free markets. Many of them were still quite mainstream.

    A CBS/New York Times poll at time found that the average Tea Party activist was more educated than the average American, and their concerns mirrored the mainstream. Although a majority were more socially conservative than the average voter—particularly on abortion—8 in 10 of them wanted their burgeoning movement to focus on economic issues rather than social ones.

    Hardly the anarchists depicted in the media, the poll found that a majority of Tea Partiers wanted to reduce the size of government rather than focus on cutting budget deficits or even lowering taxes. A majority, in fact, believed that Social Security and Medicare were worthy taxpayer burdens. Not even clamping down on illegal immigration, often the impetus for charges of racism these days, was a big topic among these activists.

    The Tea Party had three main grievances: Obamacare, government spending, and “a feeling that their opinions are not represented in Washington.” The protests were fueled by Democrats’ unprecedented action on a health care policy. A decade later, the Tea Party’s suspicion that the health-care law was merely an incremental way to move towards more socialistic policies turned out to be correct, as most of the Democratic Party presidential field can attest.

    The Tea Party, whether some of their champions later turned out to be hypocrites or not, didn’t want to change the Republican Party as much as they wanted to force conservative politicians to keep their promises. The movement initially backed a number of terrible candidates, but it learned.

    In the end, the Tea Party successfully re-energized Republicans, who went on to win two wave elections and stifle Obama’s presidency for six years. Whether the movement was a long-term failure, as the Times argues, is a debatable contention.

    One things is true, though: the majority of Tea Partiers were white. You know what that means, right? And, as those of us who covered the Obama administration remember, no matter how historically detailed or ideologically anchored your position might be, the very act of opposing a black president was going to be depicted as act of bigotry.

    This cheap and destructive rhetoric now dominates virtually every contemporary debate, most of which have absolutely nothing, even tangentially, to do with race. It’s a kind of rhetoric, in fact, that now retroactively dominates our debates, as well.

    These are the lies leftists tell in order to justify their increasingly unhinged rhetoric and actions. Everyone standing in the way of the hard left agenda of the Democratic Party now gets labeled a white supremacist, no matter what. Especially now that President Donald Trump is calling out the Democratic Party elite on how badly they’ve failed inner city blacks over the last half century.

    I can’t see how that supergenius plan could possibly fail in 2020.

    Dave Chappelle vs. Social Justice Warriors

    August 28th, 2019

    Netflix just released a new Dave Chappelle comedy special, Sticks and Stones. Guess who he takes aim at?

    Chappelle humorously critiques school mass shooting drills, Jussie Smollett, the excesses of the #MeToo movement, and LGBTQ activists—or “the alphabet people” as he calls them—for thinking they should be immune from mockery.”

    The Margaret Dumonts of the Social Justice Warrior left are already condemning him for “misogyny” and “transphobia,” which instantly rocketed the special up my “must see” list.

    The Twitter Primary Revisited for August 2019

    August 27th, 2019

    As I did in previous months, here’s an update on the number of Twitter followers of the Democratic presidential candidates, updated since last month’s update.

    Last month, Twitter changed the way it did account rounding. This month, I’ve found a tool that gives me precise Twitter follower counts. Since the methodology has changed twice in the last two months, consider this a rebasing post, from which we can track actual changes next month. Because of the change, change rates for those with over 1 million followers are taken from Social Blade’s Last 30 Days count. The changes for those with under one million followers hasn’t been so radical, so I can still give rough changes there from the last count.

    The following are all the declared Presidential candidates ranked in order of Twitter followers:

    1. Bernie Sanders: 9,593,244 (up 171,765)
    2. Cory Booker: 4,342,363 (up 37,733)
    3. Joe Biden: 3,695,285 (up 66,276)
    4. Kamala Harris: 3,079,422 (up 93,164)
    5. Elizabeth Warren: 3,063,413 (up 202,592)
    6. Marianne Williamson: 2,759,201 (up 46,859)
    7. Beto O’Rourke: 1,556,543 (up 115,932)
    8. Kirsten Gillibrand: 1,462,026 (up 13,750)
    9. Pete Buttigieg: 1,389,324 (up 102,211)
    10. Amy Klobuchar: 752,927 (up about 20,000)
    11. Andrew Yang: 730,259 (up about 200,000)
    12. Tulsi Gabbard: 539,869 (up about 100,000)
    13. Julian Castro: 376,111 (up 40,000)
    14. Tom Steyer: 244,799 (up about 3,000)
    15. Steve Bullock: 184,915 (up about 6,000)
    16. Bill de Blasio: 168,227 (up about 4,800)
    17. Michael Bennet: 38,532 (up about 10,000)
    18. Tim Ryan: 37,000 (up about 10,000)
    19. John Delaney: 35,754 (up about 7,000)
    20. Joe Sestak: 12,439 (up about 600)
    21. Wayne Messam: 8,090 (up 364)

    Removed from the last update: John Hickenlooper, Jay Inslee, Mike Gravel, Seth Moulton.

    For reference, President Donald Trump’s personal account has 63,565,952 followers, up 1.1 million since the last roundup. The official presidential @POTUS account has 26,552,735, which I’m sure includes a great deal of overlap with Trump’s personal followers.

    A few notes:

  • Twitter counts change all the time, so the numbers might be slightly different when you look at them.
  • Warren seems to be adding Twitter followers at a faster rate than Harris, and I actually expect her to pass Harris this week.
  • Warren seems to picking up new followers at the rate of about 5,000 a day. Bernie seems to be adding about 4,000 followers a day, while Biden adds just under 2,000 and Harris just under 3,000.
  • For all the eulogies for his campaign, O’Rourke is adding Twitter followers faster than Biden, and indeed slightly faster than Buttigieg.
  • Both Yang and Gabbard continue to show significant momentum, and I expect Yang to pass Klobuchar in September.
  • For all the money Tom Steyer is throwing into Twitter advertising (I see tons on my iPhone), I see no signs he’s picking up significant new followers.
  • Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for August 26, 2019

    August 26th, 2019

    Inslee and Moulton are Out, Sanders wants to bring U.S. Postal Service efficiency to powering your house and car, and there’s a rumor Grandma Death may arise from her crypt. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!

    Polls

  • Economist/YouGov (page 79): Biden 22, Sanders 19, Warren 17, Harris 8, Buttigieg 7, O’Rourke 3, Booker 2, Gabbard 2, Bullock 1, Castro 1, de Blasio 1, Gillibrand 1, Inslee 1, Yang 1.
  • SSRS: Biden 29, Sanders 15, Warren 14, Buttigieg 5, Harris 5, O’Rourke 3, Booker 2, Castro 2, Gabbard 2, Bullock 1, Klobuchar 1, Ryan 1, Steyer 1, Yang 1.
  • Gravis (Nevada): Biden 25, Warren 15, Sanders 10, Uncertain 9, Harris 9, Steyer 6, Buttigieg 5, Booker 3. Yang 2, Klobuchar 2, Gabbard 2, Bennett 2, de Blasio 2, Gillibrand 1, Delaney 1, Castro 1, Williamson 1, Bullock 1, Ryan 1, Inslee 1.
  • Real Clear Politics
  • 538 polls
  • Election betting markets
  • Pundits, etc.

  • Debates update:

    Ten have already hit that threshold: Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Julián Castro, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Andrew Yang.

    Tom Steyer and Tulsi Gabbard are close. The outlook is currently pretty grim for Michael Bennet, Steve Bullock, Bill de Blasio, John Delaney, Kirsten Gillibrand, Tim Ryan, and Marianne Williamson.

    Gabbard’s campaign is complaining that the DNC has a limited list of “certified polls,” and she seems to have a point; her campaign counted 26 polls that had her at or above 2 percent, and some surveys, like ones commissioned by the Boston Globe and the Charleston Post and Courier, aren’t on the DNC’s “certified” list.

    Among the most recent polls, the Economist/YouGov national poll has her at 2 percent, the CNN national poll has her at 2 percent, the Gravis poll of Nevada Democrats puts her at 2 percent, the Politico/Morning Consult national poll has her at 1 percent and the Fox News national poll has her at 1 percent.

    That having been said . . . the threshold is 2 percent, people. If consistently getting 2 percent or more of members of your party to make you their first choice is too difficult . . . well, the presidency doesn’t have many easy days. You can picture some of the asterisk candidates muttering that the DNC rules have reduced the debate qualification process to a popularity contest. Well, yeah. A presidential primary is a competition to see who can get the most people to make a candidate their first choice. If Democrats really feel like Gabbard is getting screwed by an unfairly high threshold, they can inundate the DNC with messages of objection. But as is, when YouGov, or CNN, or Gravis, or Morning Consult or Fox News come calling, not enough Democrats are saying that their first choice is Tulsi Gabbard. The Hawaii congresswoman is a heck of a debater who basically vivisected Kamala Harris’s record as prosecutor in the second debate. But for whatever reason, that hasn’t translated into large numbers of Democrats saying, “yes, she’s my first choice.”

  • The Last Days of the Other 1 Percent:

    For a handful of Democratic candidates stuck at 1 percent (or lower) in the polls, a Wednesday afternoon in the dog days of August could be the moment when their lifelong dream of the presidency dies a quiet death.

    August 28 is the deadline for candidates to meet the Democratic National Committee’s heightened threshold for entry into the September debate, and as much as half the field is expected to wind up on the sidelines. Those who don’t make the cut will, at a minimum, be forced to reassess the viability of their long-shot bids. Some of those also-rans may trudge on through the fall, in the hopes of rebounding for the next debate in October, or simply out of a commitment to stay in the race until the first votes are cast in Iowa next February.

    But for all intents and purposes, next Wednesday will mark the first great winnowing of the 2020 White House race, when a field of more than 20 is cleaved into two divisions: those who still have a shot, and the rest who don’t.

    Governor Jay Inslee of Washington, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio, and the author Marianne Williamson are among the other hopefuls who could be on the outside looking in next month.

    As of this morning, 10 of the roughly two dozen Democratic hopefuls have secured spots by receiving donations from at least 130,000 individual contributors and registering 2 percent support or higher in four qualifying polls. The billionaire Tom Steyer is close to the marker, and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York has bought more than $1 million in television ads in Iowa and New Hampshire as part of an aggressive late push to get her to 2 percent in the three additional polls she needs to qualify. (She said this week she has just over 110,000 donors, putting her within reach of that threshold.)

    But with a week to go before the deadline, a handful of campaigns have all but conceded they aren’t going to make it, and some have directed their ire on the Democratic National Committee instead.

  • Various bits of poll analysis from 538:

    Hispanic Democrats don’t seem to have a favorite yet.

    A lot of polls of the 2020 race don’t include a large enough number of Latino respondents to break out the group’s results. But in its newly released survey, the Pew Research Center interviewed 237 Hispanic respondents who either identify as Democrats or lean towards the party. Biden had the support of 27 percent of Latino Democrats, with Bernie Sanders (15 percent) and Elizabeth Warren (14) the only other candidates in double-digits. Morning Consult found fairly different results among Hispanic voters: Sanders at 29 percent, Biden 22 and Warren 10.

    In short, exactly where Hispanic voters stand is somewhat unclear. While basically every poll shows Biden well ahead among blacks, Hispanic voters as a bloc seem more up for grabs.

    Perhaps Hispanic voters won’t unify behind a single candidate — unlike black Democrats, they haven’t historically. But if they do, or even if they partially do, that could substantially alter the race — Hispanic adults represent about 12 percent of registered Democrats and will likely be particularly pivotal in Nevada, which votes third in the 2020 primary process, and in California and Texas, which both vote on Super Tuesday.

    And Hispanic voters could be especially important to Warren, whose support comes predominantly from white Democrats. If Warren struggles to get traction with black and Hispanic Democrats, that complicates her path to the nomination — both in terms of raw votes and perceptions. White liberal Democrats are increasingly conscious of race, and I suspect that they will be hesitant to coalesce around Warren if her coalition is almost exclusively white. But the Pew poll, for example, found Warren doing better among Hispanic than black respondents (though she still did best among whites), so Hispanic voters represent both a challenge for Warren and an opportunity to diversify her coalition.

  • Politico does much the same thing.

    According to the Pew Research Center, 2020 marks the first year Hispanic voters will overtake black voters as the largest bloc of eligible minority voters.

    Among the national front-runners, Bernie Sanders was the favorite among Democratic Hispanic voters — topping out as the first choice among 40 percent — before Joe Biden declared his candidacy. Since then, Sanders and Biden have been in a dead heat for this group’s vote, with neither breaking away from the scuffle through two Democratic debates.

    Black voters still like Biden and Sanders but prefer Harris to Warren.

    Also: “Buttigieg overtakes O’Rourke on oldest, richest and whitest voters; both do poorly with black voters.” So much for all that skateboarding…

  • “James Comey and Wife Donated Nearly $20K to Democrats This Year.” Of course. “Klobuchar, Harris, Abrams among recipients of Comey cash.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s whining over the DNC debate thresholds: “Bennet said the debate rules reward ‘celebrity candidates’ with millions of Twitter followers, billionaires who ‘buy their way onto the debate stage’ and candidates who have been running for president for years.” He’s not entirely wrong, but it’s hard to work up much sympathy for someone’s whose campaign was stillborn.
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Elizabeth Warren has the crowds. Joe Biden has the lead.”

    On Sunday, Warren stood on the biggest stage of her presidential campaign for a rally here that drew an estimated 15,000 people — eclipsing an estimated 12,000-person event she held in Minnesota earlier in the week, according to her campaign. Across the country, Biden presided over a series of intimate, subdued events in New Hampshire and Iowa, hosting crowds that numbered in the low hundreds.

    Snip.

    In June, Warren raised $7.8 million from 320,000 donations, compared to Biden’s $2.2 million from 111,000 donations, according to data from ActBlue, the online fundraising tool. (That is the most recent information available from the site.) Their small-dollar performances have been going in opposite directions, with Biden’s best days coming the week of his launch and Warren gaining steam over time.

    But while Biden, for now, has the centrist, establishment path largely to himself, Warren still has Bernie Sanders in her progressive lane. Sanders has an even bigger small-dollar army, and also drew big crowds this week in Sacramento, Calif. and Louisville, Ky. The two are projecting similar messages, railing against the ultra-wealthy, asking people to join a broader movement, and subtly hitting Biden by warning against incrementalism.

    Sanders isn’t viewed by Biden’s campaign as having as much room to grow as Warren. But Biden’s camp does see the continued strength of both Warren and Sanders as an advantage, each limiting the other’s ability to expand their base of support. Sanders’ campaign thinks he can eat into Biden’s support because of demographic overlap between their voters.

    The two African-American candidates in the race, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, have so far been unable to chip away at Biden’s solid lead among black voters, who give Biden a huge advantage especially in South Carolina and other Southern states.

    Here’s some wishful thinking in the guise of an article:

    There’s a growing sense that Biden is something of a starter nominee, a candidate that voters can glom onto while they search for someone who better suits their values. “I did not meet one Biden voter who was in any way, shape or form excited about voting for Biden,” Patrick Murray, who heads the Monmouth University Polling Institute (which recently released a poll giving Biden a significant lead in Iowa) told The New York Times. “They feel that they have to vote for Joe Biden as the centrist candidate, to keep somebody from the left who they feel is unelectable from getting the nomination.” JoAnn Hardy, who heads the Cerro Gordo County Democrats, concurred, telling the Times, “He’s doing OK, but I think a lot of his initial strength was name recognition. As the voters get to meet the other candidates, he may be surpassed soon. I would not be surprised.”

    The writer mentions Sanders and Warren further down in the piece, and what do you bet he prefers them? Obama-to-Trump voters prefer Trump to Biden. Biden campaigns in New Hampshire, but calls it Vermont. Eh, it was close to the border, though Brit Hume wonders if Biden is going senile.

  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. Booker attacks Trump in Hebrew, and then is promptly chastised by his former Rabbi friend Shmuley Boteach:

    “I was the one who taught him the Torah he knows” and what I always emphasized to him is that Judaism’s highest value is protection and preservation of life. This is something that Cory unfortunately violated in the extreme when he betrayed the American Jewish community by voting for the Iran nuclear deal for political gain.

    Jewish values are about having core convictions that do not change based on any external benefits, especially when genocide is at stake. While I absolutely agree that President Trump’s words – and not only actions – should be consistent with Jewish values, there can be no question that in action he has been the most supportive President for Israel for security and legitimacy in the history of the United States.

    Cory, sadly, has gone in the opposite direction, catering to left-wing extremists who sadly despise Israel and the Jewish people for no legitimate reason. Cory has condemned the moving of the American embassy to Jerusalem, voted against the Taylor Force Act in committee, which would simply have stopped Palestinian terrorists from being payed to murder Jews, and most famously he voted for the Iran deal and refused to even once condemn Iran’s genocidal promises to annihilate Israel.

  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. He had a town hall with Bill De Blasio. Blandman vs. Groundhogkiller.
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Buttigieg’s Event in Chicago Black Neighborhood Drew in Mostly White Voters.” He says his campaign isn’t dead, it’s merely resting. Beautiful plumage on the Norwegian Buttigieg. “Buttigieg’s attempts to rally religious voters may not sway evangelicals.” Ya think? His party spent the last few decades telling everyone how much it hated each and every one of them.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. He qualified for the debate. If he keeps up his current momentum, he might be the front runner in January…of 2028.
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. That CNN town hall may be his last gasp.
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. “John Delaney: My Plan for Stabilizing Central America and Ending Our Border Crisis.”

    In my foreign policy speech earlier this year at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, I called for launching Plan Central America with the same holistic approach that the U.S. brought to Plan Colombia. Plan Colombia, which ran from 2000 to 2015, was successful in helping the Colombian government counter FARC and other extremist groups with a whole-of-government focus on counternarcotics, counterterrorism, sustainable development, human rights, regional security, and trade. Violence was reduced, which encouraged investment to return and the economy to flourish.

    It is time to bring that same approach to improve the conditions giving rise to the violence and instability that is sending so many Central Americans to our border.

    Plan Columbia is a good model, but applying it to multiple central American countries seems daunting. Because competing drug cartels make taking out one all but inconsequential, and because the immense profits of the drug trade make it far more capable for the apolitical cartels to buy off politicians than FARC (or Shining Path), the problem seems far more intractable. Plus Delaney’s plan is very vague on specifics. Finally, he’s never going to be president, which does rather put a damper on the plan’s chances. Another candidate whose campaign is complaining about the debate rules:

    Michael Hopkins, a spokesman for former Representative John Delaney of Maryland, says the DNC had “learned nothing from 2016,” when it was criticized for purportedly favoring former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the primaries.“By requiring campaigns to hit this arbitrary donor goal it forces campaigns to talk about more divisive issues and not be on the ground and instead go on Facebook and Twitter,” Hopkins says.

    He’s not wrong, but Delaney has the money to do social media ad buys to meet the debate criteria, and either he hasn’t done it or his attempts have been ineffective. Almost reasonable moderation doesn’t seem to sell to the Democratic base…

  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She complained about the DNC’s poll criteria, mainly that Gabbard has broken the 2% threshold in 26 polls, but the DNC says only two are the right polls. More Gabbard attacks on Harris, including the charge Harris put “over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana.”
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. Intervention time: “Former Kirsten Gillibrand staffers want senator to quit presidential campaign.”

    “I don’t know that anyone even wants to see her on the debate stage. Everyone I have talked to finds her performative and obnoxious,” said a former senior staffer in Gillibrand’s Senate office.

    “She comes across as an opportunist to the public. I think that’s the biggest problem,” said the staffer, who criticized the candidate’s flip-flopping on guns and immigration. “I think she’ll have to seriously evaluate her campaign and her candidacy if she doesn’t make this debate.”

    “She’s not going to make it,” said another longtime friend and supporter. “What is Kirsten’s reason to stay in? She should find some gracious way that enhances her . . . as she gracefully exits and throws her conditional support to whoever does get [the nomination].”

  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. Big hit piece on Harris from Conor Friedersdorf. I’m going to omit the lengthy details of the Daniel Larsen case and jump to the conclusions:

    Harris’s office didn’t merely fight to keep a man in prison after he’d demonstrated his innocence to the satisfaction of the Innocence Project, a judge, and an appeals court. After losing, it fought to keep the newly released man from being compensated for the decade that he spent wrongfully imprisoned.

    Harris failed the innocent-man test.

    Snip.

    In 2010, the crime lab run by the San Francisco Police Department was rocked by a scandal when one of its three technicians was caught taking evidence––cocaine––home from work, raising the prospect of unreliable analysis and testimony in many hundreds of drug cases. It was later discovered that, even prior to the scandal, an assistant district attorney had emailed Harris’ deputy at the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office complaining that the technician was “increasingly UNDEPENDABLE for testimony.”

    But even after the technician was caught taking home cocaine, neither Harris nor anyone in her office notified defense attorneys in cases in which she had examined evidence.

    “A review of the case, based on court records and interviews with key players, presents a portrait of Harris scrambling to manage a crisis that her staff saw coming but for which she was unprepared,” The Washington Post reported in March. “It also shows how Harris, after six years as district attorney, had failed to put in place written guidelines for ensuring that defendants were informed about potentially tainted evidence and testimony that could lead to unfair convictions.”

    In fact, her office initially blamed the San Francisco police for failing to tell defense attorneys about the matter. A judge was incredulous, telling one of the assistant district attorneys, “But it is the district attorney’s office affirmative obligation. It’s not the police department who has the affirmative obligation. It’s the district attorney. That’s who the courts look to. That’s who the community looks to, to make sure all of that information constitutionally required is provided to the defense.”

    Harris claimed that her staffers didn’t tell her about the matter for several months.

    The Wall Street Journal reported in June that years earlier, her aides had sent her a memo urging her to adopt a policy of disclosing police misconduct to defense attorneys to safeguard the right to a fair trial. Police unions, however, were opposed to the policy, and Harris failed to act on it until after the 2010 scandal.

    Had she chosen otherwise, she would not have woken up to this San Francisco Chronicle story: “Kamala Harris’ office violated defendants’ rights by hiding damaging information about a police drug lab technician and was indifferent to demands that it account for its failings, a judge declared Thursday … In a scathing ruling, the judge concluded that prosecutors had failed to fulfill their constitutional duty to tell defense attorneys about problems surrounding Deborah Madden, the now-retired technician at the heart of the cocaine-skimming scandal that led police to shut down the drug analysis section of their crime lab.”

    Meanwhile, Jeff Adachi, then head of the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, declared at the time, “Anytime I’ve asked the district attorney for a meeting, I’ve been told the district attorney is out of town or not available. We need a district attorney who will give this the attention it deserves.”

    Harris failed the disclosure-of-misconduct test.

    Read the whole thing. Why Harris is fading:

    Busing policies were abandoned because they were wildly unpopular, and there’s no reason to think they’ve magically become popular. So Harris equivocated and then backtracked.

    That attacking Biden on busing would paint the attacker into a corner was predictable. It was in fact predicted. See, for example, the end of this article from March in National Review. (Democratic strategists: Subscribe today!)

    Going on the offensive and then retreating on busing made Harris seem inauthentic. And the candidate had been dogged by questions of inauthenticity since the start of her campaign because of her waffling on the issue of Medicare for All, the policy at the center of the 2020 Democratic primary.

    First Harris indicated at a CNN town hall that she supported abolishing private insurance, as Medicare for All proposes. Then Harris said she didn’t support abolishing private insurance: She tried to hide behind the fig leaf that Medicare for All allows “supplemental insurance,” while obscuring the fact that “supplemental coverage” would be legal for only a very small number of treatments not covered by Medicare for All, such as cosmetic surgery. And cosmetic-surgery insurance doesn’t even exist.

    Harris thought she’d finally figured a way out of the Medicare for All mess in July: She introduced her own plan shortly before the Democratic debates. It tried to split the difference: She promised to transition to a single-payer plan in 10 years (as opposed to Sanders’s four-year deadline). This was meant to reassure progressives that they’ll get there eventually while also reassuring moderates that there will be at least two more presidential elections before the country goes through with anything crazy.

    Harris’s provision of Medicare Advantage–type plans was also supposed to reassure moderates, but the second debate demonstrated that she still wasn’t ready to respond to the fact that her plan would eventually abolish existing private health plans for everyone, and she has no serious plan for how to pay for single-payer.

    Then there were Joe Biden’s and Representative Tulsi Gabbard’s devastating attacks on Harris’s record as a prosecutor at the second Democratic debate. “Biden alluded to a crime lab scandal that involved her office and resulted in more than 1,000 drug cases being dismissed. Gabbard claimed Harris ‘blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until she was forced to do so.’ Both of these statements are accurate,” the Sacramento Bee reported after the debate.

    As Harris’s backtracking on busing made clear, no one is seriously considering resurrecting the deeply unpopular policies of the 1970s. But criminal justice is very much a live issue in Democratic politics, and that’s why the attack on Harris’s record as a prosecutor has had such a greater impact than the attack on Biden’s record on busing. Biden continues to do very well among African-American voters, while Harris continues to struggle.

    And stunts like this aren’t helping:

  • Update: Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out. Twitter. Facebook. Mr. Climate Change dropped out August 21, indicating that either he was a really bad candidate, or that Democrats are lying when they say how important climate change is to them.

    He also announced he’s running for a third term as Washington governor.

  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Twitter. Facebook. She appeared on Face the Nation, says she’s open to leaving troops in Afghanistan. She visited the Minnesota state fair:

    The Minnesota senator has been mired in single digits in national polls and those in Iowa and New Hampshire, which vote first next year.

    Two candidates with better ratings are making moves to challenge the three-term senator in Minnesota. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren drew thousands of people to a town hall in St. Paul, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders will be at the State Fair on Saturday. He won the 2016 presidential caucuses in the state.

  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. How am I supposed to pretend he’s a real candidate when I can’t even bring up his website?
  • Update: Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: Dropped out. Friday Moulton announced he was getting out of the race after getting in late and failing to meet the criteria to appear in any of the debates. 538 analyzes his campaign’s failure:

    Some people run for president to raise their national profile. In Rep. Seth Moulton’s case, his campaign didn’t even do that. Only 28 percent of Democrats could form an opinion of Moulton in an average of polls conducted between Aug. 1 and 20. This was lower name recognition than any of the other major presidential candidates in that time period and was a big part of the reason why Moulton never reached 2 percent in any poll — let alone one that counted toward debate qualification.

    Moulton found himself stuck in a vicious cycle: Without higher polling numbers, he couldn’t qualify for the primary debates … and without being in the debates, he lacked a platform from which to improve his polling numbers. So on Friday, the Massachusetts congressman dropped out of the Democratic primary for president in a speech to the Democratic National Committee. He is the fifth candidate to drop out this summer and the third in just the past nine days. His departure leaves us with 20 major Democratic candidates for president, by FiveThirtyEight’s definition.

    A Marine veteran who served four tours in Iraq, Moulton focused his campaign on national security and veterans’ issues; the most memorable moment of his campaign was probably his poignant admission that he had sought treatment for post-traumatic stress. But polls showed that foreign policy is not a top priority for voters (and hasn’t been for the past several cycles), and our research last year suggested that candidates who are veterans don’t win Democratic primaries at higher rates.

    Moulton’s path was also blocked by higher-profile candidates who appealed to the same constituencies. If voters were looking for a Harvard-educated veteran around 40 years of age, they already had South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, whose polling surge came just before Moulton entered the race. Indeed, Moulton admitted to The New York Times that he had made a mistake with his late announcement date, which gave him just seven weeks to collect the necessary polls or donors to qualify for the first debate. And if voters were looking for someone “electable” or who didn’t hail from the progressive wing of the party, there was former Vice President Joe Biden, who has dominated polls among those whose first priority is defeating President Trump and among moderate and conservative Democrats.

    Left out of this analysis is the fact he always looked vaguely constipated.

  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets an ABC profile that’s like all the other O’Rourke profiles. Prep school? Check. Punk rock? Check. Check. Skateboarding? Check. Cult of the Dead Cow? Check. All it’s missing from the checklist is “Kennedy-esque good looks” and “copious sweating.”
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. He agrees with Harry Reid that Democratic Presidential candidates have gone too far left. “I think going for taking people’s private health insurance away as part of our health care plan is a stone-cold political loser for us.”
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Bernie Sanders indicates climate plan will require nationalization of US energy production.” Also known as the Fuck You For Being Too Successful Texas Act. Sanders fan Susan Sarandon slams Elizabeth Warren.
  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Democrat Joe Sestak has spent more time in Iowa, 64 days and counting, than any of what he calls his ‘celebrity’ rivals for president.” What about all those reports Williamson moved to Iowa?
  • Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. Steyer calls on the DNC to expand the poll criteria, because all that money still hasn’t bought him a debate appearance yet.
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. The Pocahontas Gambit:

    When Warren was in her mid-30s, and a law professor, she for the first time asserted that she was Native American. She didn’t do it by joining Native American groups, by bringing lawsuits to help Native Americans, or by helping Native American students. Never in her life did she do any of those things.

    Instead, beginning in the mid-1980s, Warren asserted her Native American claim in the information provided to a law professor directory widely used for hiring purposes. That claim to be Native American landed Warren on a short list of “Minority Law Teachers.” Warren’s supposed Native American status was not disclosed in the directory, only that she was a minority.

    It was a particularly devious maneuver, enabling Warren to seek the benefit of being a minority at a time when there was an intense push to diversify faculty, without having to justify her claim to be Native American. Warren would maintain that stealth status in the law directory when she was hired as a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School in the early 1990s, and it was noticed. The Harvard Women’s Law Journal listed Warren on its short list of “Women of Color in Legal Academia.”

    Warren stopped filling out the law professor directory as Native American when she gained a full-time tenured job at Harvard Law School in the mid-1990s. At that point, being Native American and a supposed-minority no longer was needed, Warren had reached the top rung of the law professor ladder. While Warren asserts that she never actually gained an advantage from claiming to be Native American and a minority, there is no doubt that she tried to gain an advantage. When that need for advantage was over, she dropped the designation.

    DNC insiders are flocking to Warren:

    he “stretches across a broad spectrum of Democrats,” said Don Fowler, a DNC chair in the 1990s, a longtime Clinton-family loyalist, and someone who’s been to more DNC meetings over more election cycles than most people in Democratic politics today. Explaining what he thinks her appeal is to establishment Democrats, Fowler told me that for all of Warren’s talk of “big, structural change”—by fundamentally reworking the economy—“she does not include in her presentation the implication of being against things, except the current president.”

    Warren’s insider-outsider routine is one reason Democratic operatives and analysts told me—and one another, in private conversations—that they’ve begun to see her as the odds-on favorite to win her party’s nomination. However, a few of the Democrats I spoke with noted that her positioning could become a trap: With Sanders and Warren expected to battle even more intensely in the coming months, the change-hungry part of the Democratic base might begin to ask why establishment insiders seem so comfortable with her.

    And of course DNC insiders prefer her to Sanders, who had the audacity to attempt derailing Queen Hillary’s coronation…

  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. “I believe that the over-secularization of the Democratic Party has not served it. And I don’t think it has served the Democratic Party to make people of faith feel so diminished sometimes.” Don’t see that changing. She wants to remove Indian Wars medal of honor winners from the rolls in “atonement” for the treatment of American Indians. That’s not just pandering, it’s stupid and ineffective pandering.
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. The surprising surge of Andrew Yang:

    Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but Andrew Yang is … surging? It sounds crazy, and who knows how long it lasts? But for now he is one of 10 candidates who have qualified through sufficiently robust polling and fundraising for this fall’s third and fourth debates. The exhausting cluster of Oval Office aspirants, at least for these purposes, has been whittled to this: the aforementioned top four, two more senators, a mayor, a former member of Congress and … this guy. Yang is a 44-year-old entrepreneur from New York and a father of two young sons who’s never run for any office of any kind before this, and whose campaign is fueled by a deeply dystopian view of the near future (trucker riots, anybody?), a pillar of a platform that can come off as a gimmick (a thousand bucks a month for every American adult!), and a zeitgeisty swirl of podcasts, GIFs, tweets and memes. Last week, as a successful governor from a major state dropped out and the bottom half of the bloated field continued to flounder, Yang passed the 200,000 mark for unique donors—outpacing an array of name-known pols. He’s gotten contributions, on average $24 a pop, from 88 percent of the ZIP codes in the country, and he’s on track, he says, to raise twice as much money this quarter as he did last quarter.

    It’s a phenomenon hard to figure—until you get up close and take in some strange political alchemy. At the heart of Yang’s appeal is a paradox. In delivering his alarming, existentially unsettling message of automation and artificial intelligence wreaking havoc on America’s economic, emotional and social well-being, he … cracks jokes. He laughs easily, and those around him, and who come to see him, end up laughing a lot, too. It’s not that Yang’s doing stump-speech stand-up. It’s more a certain nonchalant whimsy that leavens what he says and does. Sometimes his jokes fall flat. He can be awkward, but he also pointedly doesn’t appear to care. It’s weird, and it’s hard to describe, but I suspect that if Yang ever said something cringeworthy, as Jeb Bush did that time in 2016—“Please clap”—the audience probably would respond with mirth, not pity. Critics ding his ambit of proposals as fanciful or zany (getting rid of the penny, empowering MMA fighters, lowering the voting age to 16) and question the viability of his “Freedom Dividend,” considering its sky-high price tag (“exciting but not realistic,” Hillary Clinton decided when she considered the general notion in the 2016 cycle). And his campaign coffers are chock-full ofsmall-number contributors and even $1 donors. Still, at this angry, fractious time, and in this primary that’s already an edgy, anxious slog, Yang and his campaign somehow radiate an ambient joviality. Of his party’s presidential contestants, he’s the cheerful doomsayer.

    His most foolproof laugh line—“the opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes math”—suggests that his candidacy is premised on distinguishing himself from the president the same way as his fellow challengers. But it’s not quite that simple. He’s attracting support from an unorthodox jumble of citizens, from a host of top technologists, but from penitent Trump voters, too. He’s one of only two Democrats (along with Sanders) who ticks 10 percent or higherwhen Trump voters are asked which of the Democrats they might go for—a factoid Yang uses as evidence that he’ll win “easy” if he’s the nominee come November of next year. Trump, of course, is the president, and Yang (let’s not get carried away) remains a very long long shot to succeed him.

    It’s not that Yang is right about anything, it’s just that he’s offering more novel wrong ideas than the rest of the field. His campaign is selling weed-themed merchandise. With pot-friendly governors Hickenlooper and Inslee out of the race, maybe Yang has an opportunity to be the weed candidate (though Gabbard also seems to be playing in that space). That won’t get you the nomination, but it can carry you into the early primary season.

  • Out of the Running

    These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti
  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
  • Actor Alec Baldwin.
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Wait, do I hear rumbling in the distance?

    Probably not, but lets tag this one “Developing.”

  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Like the Clown Car update? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Joe Rogan Interviews Dan Crenshaw

    August 25th, 2019

    Joe Rogan did a 2 hour and 36 minute interview with Texas Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw:

    They touch on topics ranging from Crenshaw’s Saturday Night Live incident to overseas operations against jihadists to marijuana legalization.

    I haven’t watched the full interview yet, but I intend to.

    The 80th Anniversary of The Great Totalitarian Teamup

    August 24th, 2019

    Yesterday marked the 80th Anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, AKA The Hitler-Stalin Pact, AKA The Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

    The evil that men do tends to live on long after they’re gone, and such is the case with Hitler, Stalin, Molotov and Ribbentrop. The anti-Israeli left is constantly demanding that Israel return to its pre-1967 borders (which ain’t gonna happen), but seems distinctly disinclined to protest the territorial expansion engendered by a treaty between Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s National Socialist Germany (you know, the real Hitler, not the imaginary simulacrum of same that seems to dwell in so many left-wing heads). Not only did the Soviets get to carve up Poland with Hitler without suffering postwar consequences, but many of the territorial changes wrought by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact continued to live on after World War II:

  • Given Stalin’s greenlight, Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. The Soviet Union itself invaded Poland September 17. The land Poland lost to Nazi Germany was restored to it (plus additional formerly German territory such as Danzing/Gdansk and land east of the Oder–Neisse line) at the Potsdam conference. Not only did Poland not receive the land the Soviet Union conquered, it had to cede additional land to Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Poland lost over 28,000 square miles of territory.
  • Assigned to the Soviet sphere of influence by the pact, the free Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union against their will. The nations would spend half a century suffering under communist domination before declaring themselves independent once again just ahead of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
  • Finland, assigned to the Soviet sphere by the pact, would find itself invaded by the Soviet Union on November 30, 1939. Unlike the overwhelmed Poles, the Finns tore the Soviets a new asshole in the Winter War, and after three and half months of fighting in this frozen hell, and losing over 100,000 men (500 at the hands of legendary Finnish sniper Simo Hayha alone), the Soviets agreed to a Finnish peace proposal that left them with about 10% of Finland’s prewar territory.
  • Romania would be forced to cede various territory to the Soviet Union and Bulgaria. (Romania would ally with Nazi Germany against the Soviets, then switch sides in 1944.)
  • One of the tragedies of World War II was that Stalin got to keep the ill-gotten gains of his alliance with Hitler because the other allies were in no position to push the Red Army out of central and eastern Europe in 1945.