Biden Is In

April 25th, 2019

Former Vice President Joe Biden is officially in the Democratic presidential nomination race for 2020. His announcement video dropped this morning:

It’s interesting that Biden is going all in on referencing Charlottesville, presumably to make a play for the Social Justice Warrior vote, which is going to be difficult with Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, etc. in the race. Also, how does Biden expect the “good people on both sides” lie to have any legs when it’s been so thoroughly debunked? Or is it merely virtue signaling to the hard SJW left that “No, this old white guy is totally OK to vote for?” Plus it was almost two years ago, which is an eon in Internet time. I’ve never doubted Biden’s ability to pander, I just wonder why he’d think this would be an effective pander.

Otherwise his announcement video is full of anodyne, uplifting pablum.

It will be interesting to see what sort of fundraising haul Biden’s announcement triggers. My guess is that he’s going to out-raise Bernie Sanders 2-1 in Q2, and a $50 million haul isn’t out of the question, as a lot of big money Democratic backers have been sitting on the sidelines, waiting for Biden to enter the race.

Some reaction tweets:

Expect more on Creepy/Sleepy Joe in the next Democratic Presidential Clown Car roundup on Monday…

Former Williamson County DA Jana Duty Found Dead

April 25th, 2019

I was getting ready to do my “Biden is in” post when this news dropped:

Former Williamson County District Attorney Jana Duty was found dead Wednesday in South Texas, Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell confirmed to the American-Statesman on Thursday.

Local authorities and Texas Rangers are investigating Duty’s death, but do not suspect foul play, Gravell said.

“We are heartbroken for her family, her kids and her grandkids,” he said.

Duty served two terms as county attorney before defeating longtime incumbent John Bradley to become district attorney in 2013. She was defeated in the 2016 Republican primary by current district attorney Shawn Dick.

Duty was at times controversial, and served a short time in jail on a contempt of court charge in 2016.

Rockport police say they responded to a call Wednesday morning of a deceased person in a condo complex on the Rockport Country Club. No other details were immediately available.

Duty was a bad DA who had serious professional and ethical lapses, had trouble working with other Wilco officials, was defeated in the 2016 Republican primary by Shawn Dick, and had a lawsuit filed to remove her from office for various transgressions, including not coming into work. In hindsight this suggests that Duty may have been struggling with an undiagnosed mental illness. Maybe if she had resigned from the high pressure post she was so clearly unsuited for, she would have been able to get the help she so obviously needed.

(Hat tip: Dwight.)

Clinton Corruption Update for April 24, 2019

April 24th, 2019

No one expects the unexpected return of the Clinton Corruption Update! Surprise is one of our chief weapons…

With the Mueller document clearing away the cobwebs of the Russian collusion fantasy, we can finally focus on the other half of the scandularity. There’s news on the Clinton Corruption front, namely the recovery of still more Hillary emails:

Judicial Watch announced today that a senior FBI official admitted, in writing and under oath, that the agency found Clinton email records in the Obama White House, specifically, the Executive Office of the President. The FBI also admitted nearly 49,000 Clinton server emails were reviewed as result of a search warrant for her material on the laptop of Anthony Weiner.

E.W. (Bill) Priestap, assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division, made the disclosure to Judicial Watch as part of court-ordered discovery into the Clinton email issue.

U.S District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ordered Obama administration senior State Department officials, lawyers, and Clinton aides, as well as Priestap, to be deposed or answer writer questions under oath. The court ruled that the Clinton email system was “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.”

Priestap was asked by Judicial Watch to identify representatives of Hillary Clinton, her former staff, and government agencies from which “email repositories were obtained.” Priestap responded with the following non-exhaustive list:

  • Bryan Pagliano
  • Cheryl Mills
  • Executive Office of the President [Emphasis added]
  • Heather Samuelson
  • Jacob Sullivan
  • Justin Cooper
  • United States Department of State
  • United States Secret Service
  • Williams & Connolly LLP

Who knew that so many people enjoyed Hillary’s recipes and yoga tips?

Priestap, is serving as assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division and helped oversee both the Clinton email and the 2016 presidential campaign investigations. Priestap testified in a separate lawsuit that Clinton was the subject of a grand jury investigation related to her BlackBerry email accounts.

“This astonishing confirmation, made under oath by the FBI, shows that the Obama FBI had to go to President Obama’s White House office to find emails that Hillary Clinton tried to destroy or hide from the American people.” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “No wonder Hillary Clinton has thus far skated – Barack Obama is implicated in her email scheme.”

The complete text of Priestap’s response is here.

Now some other Clinton Corruption news that’s been cooking on the back burner for a while:

  • “FEC Records Indicate Hillary Campaign Illegally Laundered $84 Million.” That’s the DNC scheme we’ve covered before. Also, a familiar name shows up in the story:

    Dan Backer, a campaign-finance lawyer and attorney-of-record in the lawsuit, explained the underlying law in an article for Investor’s Business Daily: Under federal law, “an individual donor can contribute $2,700 to any candidate, $10,000 to any state party committee, and (during the 2016 cycle) $33,400 to a national party’s main account. These groups can all get together and take a single check from a donor for the sum of those contribution limits—it’s legal because the donor cannot exceed the base limit for any one recipient. And state parties can make unlimited transfer to their national party.”

    This legal loophole allows “bundlers” to raise large sums of money from wealthy donors—more than $400,000 at a time—filtering the funds to the national committees. Democrats and Republicans alike exploit this tactic. But once the money reaches the national committees, other limits apply.

    Suspecting the DNC had exceeded those limits, a client of Backer’s, the Committee to Defend the President, began reviewing FEC filings to determine whether there was excessive coordination between the DNC and Clinton. What Backer discovered, as he explained in an interview, was much worse. There was “extensive evidence in the Democrats’ own FEC reports, when coupled with their own public statements that demonstrated massive straw man contributions papered through the state parties, to the DNC, and then directly to Clinton’s campaign—in clear violation of federal campaign-finance law.”

    That’s the same Dan Backer who runs a number of scam PACs. Nice to see him doing something useful for a change, but you still shouldn’t contribute to any of his PACs.

  • Break out the tiny violins: “The Clinton Foundation saw contributions dry up approximately 90% over a three-year period between 2014 and 2017.”
  • “Ukraine’s top prosecutor divulged in an interview aired Wednesday on Hill.TV that he has opened an investigation into whether his country’s law enforcement apparatus intentionally leaked financial records during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign about then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in an effort to sway the election in favor of Hillary Clinton.”
  • Russia’s GRU military intelligence service used fraudulent emails to gain access to large amounts of sensitive emails and documents that were then disseminated via covert GRU websites during the 2016 presidential election campaign influence operation, according to the report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.” The GRU evidently used spearphising to penetrate the Clinton campaign and the DNC. The piece details the methods. This section was one of the most heavily redacted in the Mueller report. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Reminder: The Russia Collusion Hoax Was Hatched By Hillary Clinton and Her Aides Just Hours After Her Loss, and Fed to a Supportive Media to Explain Away Her Failure — and Theirs.” Including the key role of former CIA director John Brennan in the whole thing.
  • Hillary Clinton spawned the Russia hoax. Christopher Steele is merely its front man.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • It only took two and a half years, but even the New York Times has finally figured out that the Steele Dossier was complete and utter garbage. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • “U.S. Spends $90 Million to Help a few Dozen Afghan Women Get Jobs.” Guess who was involved?

    The U.S. government has blown almost $90 million on a doomed project to help Afghan women enter the workforce with a big chunk of the money going to a Clinton-aligned “development” company that reaped big bucks from Uncle Sam while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. The cash flows through the famously corrupt U.S. Agency of International Development (USAID), which is charged with providing global economic, development and humanitarian assistance. In this case USAID allocated $216 million to supposedly help tens of thousands of Afghan women get jobs and gain promotions over five years. Known as “Promoting Gender Equity in National Priority Programs,” the endeavor was launched in 2014 and tens of millions of dollars later it’s proven to be a major failure…Of interesting note is that one of the biggest contracts went to a company, Chemonics International, with close ties to the Clintons.

    (Hat tip: Borepatch.)

  • Hillary Clinton said confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court would bring back slavery.

  • “Easter Worshipers”:

  • Here’s an unlikely bombshell from almost a year ago: “Putin Claims U.S. Intelligence Agents Funneled $400 Million To Clinton Campaign.” Given the source and how little we’ve heard about this claim since, I have to assume there was nothing to it.
  • A new-ish book related to the topic at hand: The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump
  • How CNN Chose Michael Avenatti Over Alan Dershowitz

    April 23rd, 2019

    In the Before Time, the Long Long Ago (which, in this case, is October of 2016), Alan Dershowitz was almost universally hailed as a leading legal mind. A Harvard professor and staunch advocate of due process and constitutional rights, Dershowitz was a frequent guest on CNN. That is, until they replaced him with creepy porn lawyer Michael Avenatti as their go-to legal guy.

    “CNN, which used to have me on all the time, on Anderson Cooper, on Cuomo, on Lemon, as an analyst, as a centrist analyst, they decided no, no, it is okay to have extreme Trump supporters, because people just use them as a stick figure exhibits,” Dershowitz said. “What they didn’t want was a centrist liberal that went against their narrative.”

    It’s obvious that CNN didn’t want actual sober legal analysis of constitutional rights and designated presidential powers harshing their Trump Derangement Syndrome buzz. Which is why they chose a guy now under multiple felony indictments over a respected legal scholar who was telling them the truth rather than what they wanted to hear.

    No wonder Dershowitz gives the media a failing grade for their Mueller Report coverage. “I think we’re seeing an elimination of the distinction between the editorial page and the news page in some of the leading media in the country. It’s a shame. Walter Cronkite could not get a job in the media today.”

    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for April 22, 2019

    April 22nd, 2019

    Word is that Biden is finally going to announce he’s in on Wednesday, Seth Moulten just jumped In, and Terry McAuliffe is Out.

    Fundraising

    More Q1 fundraising numbers, continued from last week, with new additions linked and number of donors shown where known:

    1. Bernie Sanders: $18.2 million from 525,000 donors
    2. Kamala Harris: $12 million from 138,000 donors
    3. Beto O’Rourke: $9.4 million from 218,000 contributions
    4. Pete Buttigieg: $7 million from 158,550 donors
    5. Elizabeth Warren: $6 million from 135,000 individuals
    6. Amy Klobuchar: $5.2 million
    7. Cory Booker: $5 million
    8. Kirsten Gillibrand: $3 million
    9. Jay Inslee: $2.25 million
    10. Tulsi Gabbard: $1.95 million (and at least 65,000 donors)
    11. Andrew Yang: $1.7 million from 80,000 donors
    12. Marianne Williamson: $1.5 million
    13. Julian Castro: $1.1 million
    14. John Delaney: $435,000 in donations, plus $11.7 million loan from himself
    15. Wayne Messam: $43,500

    Most of the announced Democrats seem to have qualified for the first debates, with the possible exceptions of Williamson, Messam, and the two representatives (Tim Ryan and Eric Swalwell) who entered the race late in Q1.

    The New York Times has nine takeaways from the fundraising race.

    Ads on sites like Facebook and Google were the top expenditure for multiple campaigns. Why? In part because the nature of running for president is changing. And in part because the Democratic Party has made having 65,000 donors a gateway to the first primary debates, so campaigns are fishing for new donors online.

    Mr. Sanders spent $1.5 million on digital ads. Ms. Harris spent $1 million. And Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington, plowed more than half of everything he spent into online ads: $450,000.

    Warren’s hefty burn rate:

    Ms. Warren, who entered the race on New Year’s Eve, raised $6 million and spent the most of any Democratic candidate in the first quarter. Her $5.2 million amounts to a big and risky bet that early investment and organizing in the states that will begin the nominating contest — Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina — will pay dividends next year.

    Ms. Warren’s report showed more than 160 people on payroll — nearly double that of Mr. Sanders, even as he raised three times as much as her. Ms. Harris, the No. 2 fund-raiser, had 44 people on staff. Ms. Warren spent nearly $1.9 million on salaries, payroll taxes and insurance in the first quarter.

    Ms. Warren also transferred $10.4 million from her Senate account, giving her a financial cushion. But such a transfer happens only once.

    The Hill sorts them into winners and losers. Winners: Buttigieg, Sanders, Trump, Harris, O’Rourke. Losers: Warren, Gillibrand, Delaney.

    Polls

  • Real Clear Politics
  • 538 polls.
  • Pundits, etc.

  • Headline: “Andrew Yang, Marianne Williamson, Bernie Sanders are the 2020 candidates standing out to our readers.” Body: “And while we got overwhelming messages from the Andrew Yang, Bernie Sanders, Marianne Williamson and Tulsi Gabbard camps (in that order).” Man, even USA Today headline writers have it in for Gabbard…
  • 538 Presidential roundup.
  • Decision Desk has helpfully compiled a stream of 2020 Presidential candidate tweets.
  • Democratic Party presidential primary schedule.
  • Now on to the clown car itself:

  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe? Still hasn’t said, but her failed Senate campaign is under investigation by the Georgia Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission.
  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti: Out.
  • Actor Alec Baldwin: Probably not. Still not seeing any news since his Twitter outburst two weeks ago. Downgrade from Maybe.
  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: Leaning toward a run. He had successful prostate surgery. Best wishes for a speedy recovery.
  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: All But In. Supposed to announce Wednesday:

    Joe Biden is running. The former vice president will make his candidacy official with a video announcement next Wednesday, according to people familiar with the discussions who have been told about them by top aides.

    Seriously, he’s actually made a decision. It’s taken two years of back-and-forth, it’ll be his third (or, depending on how you count, seventh) try for the White House, and many people thought he wouldn’t do it, but the biggest factor reshaping the 2020 Democratic-primary field is locking into place.

    He wants this. He really wants this. He’s wanted this since he was first elected to the Senate, in 1972, and he’s decided that he isn’t too old, isn’t too out of sync with the current energy in the Democratic Party, and certainly wasn’t going to be chased out by the women who accused him of making them feel uncomfortable or demeaned because of how he’d touched them.

    Biden’s campaign will, at its core, argue that the response to Donald Trump requires an experienced, calm hand to help America take a deep breath and figure out a way to get back on track. First, however, the man who would become the oldest president in American history needs to get through a primary—one that’s already tracking 18 other candidates, including six senators, two governors, a charismatic Texan wannabe senator, a geek-cool Indiana mayor with an impossible-to-pronounce name, and a guy no one had ever heard of who’s already scored a spot on the debate stage by becoming a mock obsession in weird corners of the internet by talking about universal basic income and robots.

    The primary, Biden believes, will be easier than some might think: He sees a clear path down the middle of the party, especially with Bernie Sanders occupying a solid 20 percent of the progressive base, and most of the other candidates fighting for the rest. And the announcement comes at a moment when many in the party have become anxious about Sanders’s strength, with some beginning to wonder whether Biden might be the only sure counterweight to stop him from getting the nomination.

    Remembering Biden’s old plagiarism problems. He also visited a union picket line and delivered Fritz Hollings’ eulogy.

  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Probably Not. No new news, and the original speculation was he wouldn’t run if Biden did. Downgrade from Maybe, but he has enough FU money that you never know…
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. QA with The State of South Caroline. Booker sent out a fundraising email attacking…John Delaney? This is not exactly a novel insight: Booker’s biggest problem is Harris:

    Why has Harris got a better start than Booker? The answer is in the demography of the Democratic primary electorate and the importance of women in the party. The strength of black women was clearly illustrated in the results of the recent mayoral race in Chicago where the two finalists were both black women.

    The CNN research indicates the Democratic primary electorate has changed significantly since 2008. Black and female voters made up a larger share of the Democratic primary electorate in 2016 than they did in 2008. Unfortunately for Booker that gives the advantage to Harris.

  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown: Doesn’t sound like it.
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown: Out.
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock: Leaning Toward In, but is reportedly going to wait until Montana’s legislative session finishes, which would be May 1. Let’s see what happens after that date passes.
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s garnered ex-Obama and Clinton backers, including Steve Elmendorf, Laurie David, Robert Pohlad, Jill Goldman, John Phillips, and Orin Kramer. “Unlike much of the Democratic primary field, Buttigieg has not fully distanced himself from big money donors.” You don’t say. A Washington Post piece offers three points of historical comparison for Buttigieg:

    Several past candidates come to mind in trying to assess the Buttigieg phenomenon. One is Barack Obama. Another is former senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey. A third is former Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt. All had their moments. All were the subject of favorable and sometimes gushing media coverage. Only Obama went on to become both his party’s nominee and president of the United States.

    The tiny problem with this analysis is that Buttigieg can’t be Obama because he doesn’t have a century of white guilt behind his candidacy…

  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.: Out.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Mr. Castro is in need of a breakthrough moment.”

    Once considered a rising star in the Democratic Party — he was the first Latino to give a keynote address at the Democratic National Convention — he has been outshined in the ever-expanding field by brighter stars and nonstars alike. While he has many fans in his hometown, San Antonio, where he once served as mayor, he is not well known on the national stage. And with the sudden rise of the former El Paso congressman Beto O’Rourke, Mr. Castro is not even the most well-known candidate in his own state.

    Lots of “this should be his moment because immigration” blather snipped.

    Some Democrats believe that Mr. Castro’s moment has, if anything, already passed — that his best shot at national success occurred after he gave his electrifying speech at the 2012 convention. Some wonder whether he is too quiet, too inexperienced and too careful to compete in such a crowded, high-powered primary field.

    While Mr. Castro tries to brush off the inevitable comparisons to Mr. O’Rourke, whose challenge to Senator Ted Cruz last year turned him into a national celebrity, the attention drawn by Mr. O’Rourke — who speaks fluent Spanish, and whose hometown is on the border with Mexico — has cast something of a shadow over Mr. Castro’s candidacy.

    When he left Washington at the end of the Obama administration, Mr. Castro returned to Texas but resisted entreaties to run for statewide office. He finished writing a book, did some teaching and spent time with his family, but some Texas Democrats believe he missed an opportunity to advance his career and gain the kind of political profile that could have fortified his presidential run.

    Because Mr. Castro never ran for statewide office, he has not built up a big email list of supporters, and he still has not met the 65,000-donor threshold to qualify for the first Democratic primary debates. In the first three months of the year, he raised only $1.1 million (though his campaign said it had raised over half a million more by mid-April).

    Theta’s the real takeaway here, but 538 says he’s in the debates thanks to cracking 1% in three polls.

  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Out.
  • New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio: Leaning toward In. “Why Is Bill de Blasio’s Presidential Dream a Sad Joke?” (Talk about a question that answers itself!)

    It may be hard to believe now, but for a New York minute it seemed that Bill de Blasio was going to be the champion of an insurgent left. Progressive activists and commentators hailed de Blasio’s landslide victory in New York’s 2013 mayoral election as a sign of an encouraging new direction for the Democratic Party. His unabashedly liberal campaign—which centered on income inequality, or what de Blasio poetically termed a “tale of two cities”—prefigured the unrest that would shake the party, culminating in Bernie Sanders’s unlikely challenge to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential primary.

    Many unfulfilled, NYC-specific campaign promises snipped.

    Yet as de Blasio weighs entering the 2020 race, the prospect of a President de Blasio has been met with widespread derision. The New Republic’s Alex Shephard termed his interest in the presidency an “embarrassing quest for national fame,” while the mayor’s own allies (anonymously) told Politico that his flirtation with a presidential run was “fucking insane.” De Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, has said the “timing is not exactly right” for him to launch a campaign. The New York Times, which seems to take gleeful pleasure in dinging de Blasio for everything from calling errant snow days to ostentatiously hanging around Iowa, recently noted that Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has generated far more presidential buzz than the mayor of the country’s biggest city. Even in his hometown, there seems to be only one person who thinks a de Blasio presidential campaign would be anything other than a joke: de Blasio himself.

    How did he fall so far? De Blasio does, after all, have a robust record of actual accomplishments under his belt, which is more than what can be said for, say, Beto O’Rourke. He was once the favorite of grassroots groups and leftist elites alike. Perhaps the left soured on him because he is a singularly ham-handed politician, who possesses all the native charm of a Howard Schultz, the billionaire Starbucks founder who is trying to win the presidency one sanctimonious tweet at a time. Perhaps de Blasio has never been as progressive as his early cheerleaders made him out to be; he might simply be an opportunist who saw, early on, the way the wind was blowing and adjusted accordingly. Or maybe the Democrats, unnerved by the disaster of the last election and fearing another Trump victory in 2020, have started to prefer candidates who are all promise and no baggage.

    Read on for more bashing of other candidates, but since the words “corrupt crapweasel” never appear, I don’t think the author has quite hit the nail on the head…

  • Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. Delaney raised $435,000 in donations, plus $11.7 million loan from himself. Delaney has a net worth of about $180 million, so he can self-fund in the primary. But the general? Not so much. And John Delaney may get tired of John Delaney wasting John Delaney’s money trying to get John Delaney the Democratic nomination.
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. She raised $1.95 million in Q1, and also transferred $2.5 million into her presidential account from her congressional campaign account, so she’s managed to bat above the Andrew Yang Line. Polifact ranks “Tulsi Gabbard’s attack on new Trump policy for pork inspections, E. coli testing” as mostly false. I wouldn’t even have heard about the policy otherwise. She’s raising money off 4/20 for marijuana legalization. Here’s a “she’s doing badly so she should drop out of the race” piece.
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti: Out.
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Gillibrand struggling to break into top tier of Dem presidential hopefuls.”

    By the numbers, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s bid for president is foundering.

    Support for her candidacy has hovered around 1 percent in national polling of Democrats.

    Contributions to her campaign in its first three months totaled just under $3 million.

    And viewers of her CNN town hall on April 9 numbered 491,000, rating worse than nine of the 10 forums before hers.

    Hell, she’s struggling to stay in the middle tier. She also transferred $10 million from her 2018 senate campaign.

  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Probably not. But he did call for President Trump’s impeachment, which is a very “I might just run so I better pander to the hard left” move.
  • California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. She went on Trevor Noah and played the “is it because I’m black?” card on New Hampshire. Granite Staters not amused. “Harris, Booker miss most votes of senators running in 2020.”
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: In. Twitter. Facebook. Here’s a piece on his connections to fracking and “David Bernhardt, the new [Trump Administration] secretary of the Interior responsible for opening public lands to industry development.”
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder: Out.
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. He raised $2.25 million in Q1, which is far from stellar. Why he’s becalmed in the third tier:

    The Inslee strategy was to grow his numbers as Beto O’Rourke began to fade (which is already happening), move into the second tier with Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker, and eventually fight his way into the Final Four. But why isn’t he breaking into the second tier?

    Three reasons. First, Inslee is a white, older, male with a wonderful wife and pedestrian liberal views. Yes, Bernie Sanders is an even older white married man, but he has been a socialist and an outsider for years. In short, he’s authentic, the real deal for people who want an outsider who will challenge the power structure in both political parties. In years past, Jay’s personal bio would have been reassuring. This year it’s boring.

    Second, climate change is an important issue, but to help Jay Inslee it needs to be the issue. It guarantees media coverage, young volunteers and green money, but others are crowding his turf, preventing him from owning it outright. And there is an issue that is more important: being a genuine outsider. The three candidates with the most momentum, Bernie Sanders in Tier 1, Pete Buttigieg in Tier 2 and Andrew Yang in Tier 3 are completely outside the political vineyards, where Jay Inslee has been happily toiling for 30 years.

  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine: Out.
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry: Not seeing any sign.
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: In. Facebook. Twitter. She will be on a Fox News town hall. “Amy Klobuchar has voted to confirm more than half of Trump’s judicial nominees.” That’s from Think Progress, so you know they view that as a bad thing…
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu: Probably Out.
  • Update: Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe: Out. “Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe said Wednesday he will forgo a 2020 presidential bid and instead focus on boosting Democrats in Virginia’s legislative elections later this year.” A mild surprise after all the “he wants to get in” buzz. Maybe he doesn’t see room to run with Biden getting in. And maybe it provides grist for R. S. McCain’s “Buttigieg as designated Clinton stalking horse” theory.
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley: Out. Filing for reelection to the senate instead.
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: In. Twitter. Facebook. Wait, there are stories that he already missed payroll for his campaign? He just got in a few weeks ago! Then again, he’s evidently only raised $43,500 in Q1. That won’t get you far.
  • Update: Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: In. Twitter. Facebook. He just announced today.

    Rep. Seth Moulton announced Monday that he is running for president, vowing to engage young people and military veterans and becoming the third Massachusetts politician to throw a hat into the 2020 ring.

    An Iraq veteran who led an unsuccessful effort to oust Nancy Pelosi from the House leadership last year, the 40-year-old Moulton has said he plans to run a campaign focused on national security and defense issues, which his campaign argues will make him a foil to President Donald Trump. Moulton was elected to Congress in 2014, after he upset former Democratic Rep. John Tierney in a primary fight. The Salem lawmaker is serving his third term.

    “Engaging young people and military veterans” sounds less like a plan than a demographic excuse to run, as there won’t be enough of either voting in the primaries to secure the nomination. And “national security and defense issues” go over in the Democratic base about as well as tofu at a BBQ cookoff. He’s also securing office space and staffing up. Upgrade over Maybe.

  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama: Out. But see this interview with Norman Podhoretz where he predicts she’ll jump in an be the nominee.
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda: Out.
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: In. Twitter. Facebook. However, that NYT fundraising piece notes that “Nearly $300,000 of his first-day haul was actually general-election funds raised above the limit that he can spend in the primary contest.” Two top staffers leave his campaign. O’Rourke is wrong about America’s success being founded on slavery. Heh: “Michael Moore crashed Democratic presidential primary candidate Beto O’Rourke’s rally in Arlington, Virginia, but the crowd quickly turned on the left-wing documentary filmmaker.” Carlson Tucker says that O’Rourke’s campaign is dead:

    I suspect that pronouncement is premature. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Constitutionally ineligible to run in 2020.
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: Out.
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: In. Twitter. Facebook. He doesn’t back impeachment. He’s in Iowa, but not setting the world on fire: “Ryan’s audiences were small and quaint. At a brewery in Burlington, 15 people showed up. A sandwich shop in Fort Madison and a restaurant in Mount Pleasant had even smaller crowds. Most of the people were white and easily older than 50.” They note even Tulsi Gabbard drew 30…
  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. He had a Fox News town hall. He has a big fundraising advantage among small donors. “He’s relying almost entirely on small donors while railing against the outside influence of ‘millionaires and billionaires’ who have traditionally financed winning campaigns.” Also see Bernie vs. The DNC: Round 2 from last week.
  • Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer: Probably Out. But he is all in on impeaching President Trump. I’m sure Trump is equally delighted at the attempt…
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell: In. Twitter. Facebook. He really does want to put gun owners in jail.
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: In. Twitter. Facebook. More details on her staffing and spending.
  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: In. Twitter. Facebook. A CNN roundup says she raised $1.5 million in Q1 in their roundup, but I’m not seeing a source. She wants $100 billion for reparations.
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey: Out.
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a Reason profile, which included this nugget: “‘I’ve looked at the numbers…” Yang said repeatedly at a rally in Washington, D.C., on Monday evening, eliciting loud cheers from supporters who fervently waved signs that said ‘MATH.'” I was told…
  • Nigel Farage Starts New Party

    April 21st, 2019

    In all the Mueller Report reverberations, you may have missed news from across the pond that UKIP founder Nigel Farage just started an new political party:

    That Britain, whose voters chose to leave the EU in 2016, will partake in the European Parliament elections next month is frankly absurd. Britain was supposed to have left the bloc already (Brexit day was scheduled for March 31, was extended to mid-April, and was extended again to October 31). And elected British MEPs — presuming that Brexit still happens — would have to vacate their seats almost immediately.

    This is yet another source of voter frustration. And Nigel Farage, the former UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader, has seized it as an opportunity to gain support for his “Brexit party,” launched April 12. According to a YouGov poll, the Brexit party is leading with 27 percent of the vote. Labour is at 22 percent and the Conservatives are trailing behind at 15 percent.

    This is bad news for the Conservative party who are — at least ostensibly — the Brexit party. Around 70 percent of Conservative constituencies voted Leave in the 2017 election, and it has been the task of the Conservative government for the past two years to deliver this result. But they haven’t. Failure after failure, broken promise after broken promise; an entirely self-inflicted crisis of trust is upon them, and the gulf between Parliament and ordinary voters is ever widening. The worry now is that the Tories might bleed Euro-skeptics to Farage’s single-issue party.

    This is also a concern for the Labour party since 60 percent of its constituencies also voted Leave. So far, the Labour party has gotten away with a deliberately ambiguous line on Brexit. But in future elections, they’ll need to step up.

    The Brexit Prty has already signed up 60,000 dues paying members in nine days. They also have 14 Members of European Parliament, most ex-UKIP.

    At least some in the Labour Party seem to be taking the Brexit Party seriously:

    Lord Glasman said the Brexit Party would “capture the rage of people who feel like their democratic vote had been disregarded”.

    Issuing the warning at a panel organised by Labour Leave, he urged the party not to “sneer” at people who voted to quit the bloc.

    Support for Brexit in working class areas was “robust and not moving”, he believed.

    “People see this clearly for what it is which is a refusal of the ruling class to accept their vote,” said the peer.

    “If Labour can’t lead the democratic possibility of this then people will swing to the right.

    If both Labour and Tories see the Brexit Party as a threat, there’s an easy way to get rid of it: Keep their promise to voters, respect the results of the referendum, and withdraw the UK from the EU. It’s the endless dishonest shirking of the inevitable that’s driving voter contempt of Britain’s ruling class. Brexit and be done with it, or face the prospect of being replaced.

    Norman Podhoretz Is Not Pleased With His Former Colleagues

    April 20th, 2019

    Proving that “neocons” are not a monolithic bloc, Norman Podhoretz had some sharp words for his former fellows.

    About Donald Trump:

    CRB: Let’s start by talking about Donald Trump and you. In the first sentence of the first chapter of your book Making It, recently republished by the New York Review of Books Press, of all people—

    NP: Hell froze over!

    CRB: —you write famously, “One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan….” How does your journey compare to Trump’s journey from Queens to Manhattan?

    NP: Well, of course that’s very dated now. Nobody can afford to live in Brooklyn anymore. Escaping from Brooklyn was the great thing in my young life, but I have grandchildren who would like nothing better than to have an apartment there.

    Trump’s move from Queens to Manhattan was, as I understand the real estate business, a quite daring move. Maybe that was the longest journey in the world because the Manhattan real estate world is a world unto its own. The competition is very fierce, you’re dealing with many, many clever people. I think it was Tom Klingenstein who said he always thought Trump was Jewish because he fit in so well with the real-estatenicks in Manhattan, most of whom were, and are, Jewish.

    CRB: What does that comparison mean?

    NP: I take it as an affectionate remark. He had the qualities that all those guys had in common, and you might have thought, other things being equal, that he was one of them. And in a certain sense he was, but not entirely. I know a few of those guys and they’re actually very impressive. You have to get permits, and you have to deal with the mob, and you have to know how to handle workers who are very recalcitrant, many of whom are thuggish. You’re in a battlefield there, so you have to know how to operate politically as well as in a managerial capacity, and how to sweet talk and also how to curse. It’s not an easy field to master.

    CRB: Some people say that Trump has a blue collar sensibility. Do you see that?

    NP: I do see it and even before Trump—long before Trump—actually going back to when I was in the army in the 1950s, I got to know blue-collar Americans. I’m “blue collar” myself, I suppose. I’m from the working class—my father was a milk man. But in the army I got to know people from all over the country and I fell in love with Americans—they were just great! These guys were unlike anybody I had ever met in New York or in England or France. They were mostly blue-collar kids and I think Trump has, in that sense, the common touch. That’s one of the things—it may be the main thing—that explains his political success. It doesn’t explain his success in general, but his political success, yes. Also—I often explain this to people—when I was a kid, you would rather be beaten up than back away from a fight. The worst thing in the world you could be called was a sissy. And I was beaten up many times. Trump fights back. The people who say: “Oh, he shouldn’t lower himself,” “He should ignore this,” and “Why is he demeaning himself by arguing with some dopey reporter?” I think on the contrary—if you hit him, he hits back; and he is an equal opportunity counter puncher. It doesn’t matter who you are. And actually Obama, oddly enough, made the same statement: “He pulls a knife, you pull a gun.”

    CRB: “The Chicago way.” Your own attitude towards Trump as a political figure has changed over time. How would you describe that evolution?

    NP: Well, when he first appeared on the scene, I disliked him because he resembled one of the figures that I dislike most in American politics and with whom I had tangled, namely Pat Buchanan—I had tangled with him in print and I had accused him of anti-Semitism. And he came back at me, and I came back at him. And it was a real street fight. And I said to my wife: “This guy [Trump] is Buchanan without the anti-Semitism,” because he was a protectionist, a nativist, and an isolationist. And those were the three pillars of Pat Buchanan’s political philosophy. How did I know he wasn’t an anti-Semite? I don’t know—I just knew. And he certainly wasn’t and isn’t, and I don’t think he’s a racist or any of those things.

    CRB: But you still think he’s an isolationist and a nativist?

    NP: No, that’s what’s so interesting. At first, I disliked him because I thought he was a Buchananite, and then when he said that they lied us into Iraq—that put me off, because that is itself one of the big lies of the century, and no matter how often it’s been refuted and refuted decisively, it just stays alive. And when Trump committed himself to that, I thought, “well, to hell with him.”

    CRB: You refuted that lie in your book World War IV.

    NP: Yes, and I’m actually quite proud of that section of the book—it certainly convinced me! So for a while I was supporting Marco Rubio and I was enthusiastic about him. As time went on, and I looked around me, however, I began to be bothered by the hatred that was building up against Trump from my soon to be new set of ex-friends. It really disgusted me. I just thought it had no objective correlative. You could think that he was unfit for office—I could understand that—but my ex-friends’ revulsion was always accompanied by attacks on the people who supported him. They called them dishonorable, or opportunists, or cowards—and this was done by people like Bret Stephens, Bill Kristol, and various others. And I took offense at that. So that inclined me to what I then became: anti-anti-Trump. By the time he finally won the nomination, I was sliding into a pro-Trump position, which has grown stronger and more passionate as time has gone on.

    Snip.

    CRB: So you began by looking at Trump as a kind of warmed over Pat Buchanan—

    NP: Yeah, without the anti-Semitism.

    CRB: Did he do anything as president or as a candidate that accelerated your reevaluation of him? Did a lightbulb go on at some point?

    NP: Well it wasn’t a lightbulb, and it wasn’t the road to Damascus revelation. It was that as I watched the appointments he was making even at the beginning, I was astonished. And he couldn’t have been doing this by accident. So that everything he was doing by way of policy as president, belied the impression he had given to me of a Buchananite. He was the opposite of a Buchananite in practice. The fact is he was a new phenomenon. And I still to this day haven’t quite figured out how he reconciled all of this in his own head. Maybe because, as I said earlier, he was not dogmatic about things. He did what he had to do to get things done.

    Wow, it’s almost as if Podhoretz took in new data and changed his opinion based on those new inputs. If only his former neocon colleagues would do the same.

    CRB: I think you said he didn’t have principles.

    NP: Well, okay, but he had something—he had instincts. And he knew, from my point of view, who the good guys were. Now, he made some mistakes, for example, with Secretary of State Tillerson, but so did Reagan. I used to point out to people that it took Lincoln three years to find the right generals to fight the civil war, so what did you expect from George W. Bush? In Trump’s case, most of his appointments were very good and they’ve gotten better as time’s gone on. And even the thing that I held almost sacred, and still do really, which is the need for American action abroad—interventionism—which he still says he’s against. I mean, he wants to pull out all our troops from Syria and I think it was probably Bolton who talked him out of doing it all in one stroke. Even concerning interventionism, I began to rethink. I found my mind opening to possibilities that hadn’t been there before. And in this case it was a matter of acknowledging changing circumstances rather than philosophical or theoretical changes.

    On the Iraq War:

    CRB: You were an avid supporter of the Iraq war. He’s a pronounced critic of it. Are you persuaded by his opinion?

    NP: No, I am intransigent on Iraq. I think it was the right thing to do at the time. I’ve even gone so far as to say Bush would have deserved to be impeached if he had not gone in. Every intelligence agency in the world said that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction—nuclear weapons, actually—every one of his own intelligence agencies said so. Saddam himself said so. Especially after 9/11, there was almost no good reason not to go in. The administration had gone through all the diplomatic kabuki, which I always knew wouldn’t work. It’s inconceivable that they could have been lying. Who would be stupid enough to lie when you’re going to be exposed in a week? It’s ridiculous! Nobody was lying, except Saddam.

    I was once on a panel on a National Review cruise. Bill Buckley was still alive. They posed the question: “Knowing what you know now, would you have gone into Iraq?” And everybody, including Bill, said no. And I said yes, for the reasons I just gave. And I said, “Anyway, if I knew the outcome of every decision I’ve ever made, I probably would have made the opposite of each one. You act on the basis of what you know now and what looks probable now—not under circumstances five years later.” I thought it was a stupid question, to tell you the truth. I still feel it was the right thing to do and the story’s not over yet, by the way. I mean, it’s assumed Iraq is a disaster and Iran is taking over—that’s not quite true. Many Iraqis are trying to resist Iran. I’m told that Baghdad has become what Beirut used to be—full of cafés and nightlife and traffic jams and liveliness; and they had a decent election.

    CRB: Invading Iraq—toppling Saddam—was one thing. Occupying and trying to democratize the country was another. How do you regard the latter now?

    NP: I know, it’s as if the effort to democratize was somehow ignoble instead of just misplaced. I mean, let me put it this way, we obviously did a bad job of the occupation and we are not an imperial power despite what the Left says. We’re not good at it. Although, in the case of Germany, Japan, and Korea, we’ve stationed troops there for 50 years. If you’re going to do it, you need to be prepared to do what is necessary when it’s over—when you’ve won. And we were not prepared. Many mistakes were made, and the will to see it through to the end was absent. So that I agree to. But my hope was not that we could have an election and overnight everything would be fine, but that we could clear the ground a bit in which seeds of democratization could be planted. That was what I used to call “draining the swamp.” And that swamp, we knew, was the swamp in which terrorism festered. So it seemed to me to make sense as a policy.

    CRB: Would you call Trump an isolationist? He didn’t use the term.

    NP: No, he didn’t; he was against what he called stupid wars or unnecessary wars. But I think that, again, he’s willing to be flexible under certain circumstances. I think that if we were hit by any of those people, he would respond with a hydrogen bomb.

    CRB: And you’re not speaking metaphorically.

    NP: No, I’m not. But again, I was a passionate interventionist. I was a passionate believer in democratization before I was a paleo-neoconservative—when I was just a plain neoconservative. But it was a totally different world.

    On his former neocon colleagues and the new left:

    CRB: But many of your new set of ex-friends, as you call them, were with you on Iraq and democratization, which explains partly at least, why they are against Trump. You deviated from them, or they deviated from you.

    NP: Well some of them have gone so far as to make me wonder whether they’ve lost their minds altogether. I didn’t object to their opposition to Trump. There was a case to be made, and they made it—okay. Of course, they had no reasonable alternative. A couple of them voted for Hillary, which I think would have been far worse for the country than anything Trump could have done.

    But, basically, I think we’re all in a state of confusion as to what’s going on. Tom Klingenstein has made a brilliant effort to explain it, in terms that haven’t really been used before. He says that our domestic politics has erupted into a kind of war between patriotism and multiculturalism, and he draws out the implications of that war very well. I might put it in different terms—love of America versus hatred of America. But it’s the same idea. We find ourselves in a domestic, or civil, war almost.

    In 1969-70, we neocons analyzed the international situation in a similar way, behind a clarifying idea that had a serious impact because it was both simple and sufficiently complex in its implications. I had by then become alienated from my long-term friend Hannah Arendt, whose book The Origins of Totalitarianism had had an enormous effect on me. Although she had become an ex-friend, her book’s argument still inspired me, and I think a lot of other people, to fight. And that argument was that the Soviet Union was an evil, moral and political, comparable to Nazi Germany. As we had fought to defend the West in World War II from the evil coming from, as it were, the Right, so we had to fight it coming from the Left in the Cold War, which I liked to call World War III. (And I’ve tried to say since 9/11, we have to fight an evil coming from the 7th century in what amounts to World War IV—but that name hasn’t caught on.) But the important point is we offered a wholehearted, full-throated defense of America. Not merely a defense, but a celebration, which is what I thought it deserved, nothing less. It was like rediscovering America—its virtues, its values, and how precious the heritage we had been born to was, and how it was, in effect, worth dying for. And that had a refreshing impact, I think, because that’s how most people felt. But all they had heard—though nothing compared to now—was that America was terrible. It was the greatest danger to peace in the world, it was born in racism, and genocide, and committed every conceivable crime. And then when new crimes were invented like sexism and Islamophobia, we were guilty of those, too.

    CRB: The fight against Soviet Communism ended in victory for the West, but not, it seems, in the rehabilitation of Americanism. What happened to “the new American patriotism” as Reagan called it?

    NP: Well, one of the Soviet officials, after the fall of the Soviet Union, actually put it correctly when he said: “You’ve lost your enemy.” And that’s, I think, the largest cause.

    CRB: You mean the only thing that really inspired us was the external threat?

    NP: No, the external threat inspired us, but it also gave rise to a new appreciation of what we were fighting for—not just against. I was a Democrat, you know, by heritage, and in 1972 I helped found a movement called, “The Coalition for a Democratic Majority,” which was an effort to save the Democratic Party from the McGovernites who had taken it over. We knew exactly what was wrong, but it metastasized. The long march through the institutions, as the Maoists called it, was more successful than I would have anticipated. The anti-Americanism became so powerful that there was virtually nothing to stop it. Even back then I once said, and it’s truer now: this country is like a warrior tribe which sends all its children to a pacifist monk to be educated. And after a while—it took 20 or 40 years—but little by little it turned out that Antonio Gramsci—the Communist theoretician who said that the culture is where the power is, not the economy—turned out to be right; and little by little the anti-Americanism made its way all the way down to kindergarten, practically. And there was no effective counterattack. I’m not sure why. I mean, some of us tried, but we didn’t get very far.

    CRB: How do you assess the American Left today?

    NP: The crack I make these days is that the Left thinks that the Constitution is unconstitutional. When Barack Obama said, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming this country,” well it wasn’t five days, but he was for once telling the truth. He knew what he was doing. I’ve always said that Obama, from his own point of view, was a very successful president. I wrote a piece about that in the Wall Street Journal which surprised a lot of people. Far from being a failure, within the constraints of what is still the democratic political system, he had done about as much as you possibly could to transform the country into something like a social democracy. The term “social democrat,” however, used to be an honorable one. It designated people on the Left who were anti-Communist, who believed in democracy, but who thought that certain socialist measures could make the world more equitable. Now it’s become a euphemism for something that is hard to distinguish from Communism.

    And I would say the same thing about anti-Zionism. I gave a talk to a meeting of the American Jewish Committee, which was then the publisher of Commentary, two years or so after the Six Day War. And I said what’s happened since the that war is that anti-Semitism has migrated from the Right, which was its traditional home, to the Left, where it is getting a more and more hospitable reception. And people walked out on the talk, I mean, literally just got up. These were all Jews, you understand. Today, anti-Semitism, under the cover of anti-Zionism, has established itself much more firmly in the Democratic Party than I could ever have predicted, which is beyond appalling. The Democrats were unable to pass a House resolution condemning anti-Semitism, for example, which is confirmation of the Gramscian victory. I think they are anti-American—that’s what I would call them. They’ve become anti-American.

    CRB: What are they pro-?

    NP: Well, some of them say they’re pro-socialism, but most of them don’t know what they’re talking about. They ought to visit a British hospital or a Canadian hospital once in a while to see what Medicare for All comes down to. They don’t know what they’re for. I mean, the interesting thing about this whole leftist movement that started in the ’60s is how different it is from the Left of the ’30s. The Left of the ’30s had a positive alternative in mind—what they thought was positive—namely, the Soviet Union. So America was bad; Soviet Union, good. Turn America into the Soviet Union and everything is fine. The Left of the ’60s knew that the Soviet Union was flawed because its crimes that had been exposed, so they never had a well-defined alternative. One day it was Castro, the next day Mao, the next day Zimbabwe, I mean, they kept shifting—as long as it wasn’t America. Their real passion was to destroy America and the assumption was that anything that came out of those ruins would be better than the existing evil. That was the mentality—there was never an alternative and there still isn’t. So Bernie Sanders, who honeymooned in the Soviet Union—I mean, I don’t know him personally, but I have relatives who resemble him; I know him in my bones—and he’s an old Stalinist if there ever was one. Things have gone so haywire, he was able to revive the totally discredited idea of socialism, and others were so ignorant that they picked it up.

    As for attitudes toward America, I believe that Howard Zinn’s relentlessly anti-American People’s History of the United States sells something like 200,000 copies a year, and it’s a main text for the study of American History in the high schools and in kindergarten. So, we have miseducated a whole generation, two generations by now, about almost everything.

    CRB: And President Trump offers a path up from ignorance and anti-Americanism?

    NP: The only way I know out of this is to fight it intellectually, which sounds weak. But the fact that Trump was elected is a kind of miracle. I now believe he’s an unworthy vessel chosen by God to save us from the evil on the Left. And he’s not the first unworthy vessel chosen by God. There was King David who was very bad—I mean he had a guy murdered so he could sleep with his wife, among other things. And then there was King Solomon who was considered virtuous enough—more than his father—to build the temple, and then desecrated it with pagan altars; but he was nevertheless considered a great ancestor. So there are precedents for these unworthy vessels, and Trump, with all his vices, has the necessary virtues and strength to fight the fight that needs to be fought. And if he doesn’t win in 2020, I would despair of the future. I have 13 grandchildren and 12 great grandchildren, and they are hostages to fortune. So I don’t have the luxury of not caring what’s going to happen after I’m gone.

    CRB: What are his virtues, if you had to enumerate them?

    NP: His virtues are the virtues of the street kids of Brooklyn. You don’t back away from a fight and you fight to win. That’s one of the things that the Americans who love him, love him for—that he’s willing to fight, not willing but eager to fight. And that’s the main virtue and all the rest stem from, as Klingenstein says, his love of America. I mean, Trump loves America. He thinks it’s great or could be made great again. Eric Holder, former attorney general, said, “When was it ever great?” And Michelle Obama says that the first time she was ever proud of her country was when Obama won. By the way, I make a prediction to you that the democratic candidate in 2020 is going to be Michelle Obama, and all these people knocking themselves out are wasting their time and money. The minute she announces that will be it.

    Let’s hope he’s wrong.

    CRB: The Never Trumpers agree with you that Trump is an “unworthy vessel” but see nothing whatsoever to redeem his vices.

    NP: Mainly they think he’s unfit to be president for all the obvious reasons—that he disgraces the office. I mean, I would say Bill Clinton disgraced the office.

    LinkSwarm for April 19, 2019

    April 19th, 2019

    Happy Good Friday! Yesterday was a very good Thursday for President Donald Trump, and a very bad one for the media outlets that lied about the Russian Collusion fantasy for two years.

  • After the Mueller Report release, Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer says that impeaching President Donald Trump is not worth pursuing. Take that, hard left base and Democratic House freshmen! (Hat tip: Sean Davis.)
  • Orange Man Bad!

    For approximately 3 million people, nothing in the Mueller report could exonerate President Trump of “Russian collusion,” obstruction of justice, and various other high crimes and misdemeanors of which they are certain he is guilty. For those 3 million people (a number reflecting the combined average weekday primetime audience of CNN and MSNBC) Trump’s guilt is an indisputable fact, his presidency an ongoing crime against humanity, his 2016 election a fraud. In a nation of 325 million people, of course, 3 million is less than a single percentage point. However, that hard-core audience of obsessive Trump-haters includes every Democrat in Washington and the vast majority of our nation’s journalists, university faculty, and other such members of the intelligentsia. Therefore, their deranged idée fixehas enormous influence, calling into existence a sort of anti-Trump industry that manufactures a constant output of rage-inducing propaganda. The CNN/MSNBC bubble is the cable-TV equivalent of a cult compound, where dissent from their political religion is forbidden. For the past two years, the fanatics have been told every night by Rachel Maddow, Don Lemon, et al. that the final destruction of Trump was at hand — “the walls are closing in!” — and the left-wing faithful awaited their deliverance from the evil man in the White House.

    “Orange Man Bad” — that’s a shorthand label for the anti-Trump mentality, coined by an anonymous contributor on a Reddit forum in 2017, mocking the robotic mindlessness of the president’s enemies. No fact that might contradict their Trump-hating beliefs has any validity to them, because Orange Man Bad. By obverse principle, anything done to harm Trump or his supporters, including libel and violent assault, is considered legitimate, because Orange Man Bad. Living inside a media-generated echo chamber where everyone shares their simplistic worldview, the Trump-haters tune in nightly to their MSNBC/CNN religious revival and are catechized, so to speak, with the latest reiteration of the Orange Man Bad gospel.

    What else can explain what happened Thursday, after Mueller finally delivered his 448-page “Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election.” The delivery of the special counsel’s report was preceded by a press conference at which Attorney General William Barr summarized the result of the investigation. Barr “made clear that, after two years of investigation, thousands of subpoenas, and endless media speculation, the ‘Russian collusion’ story was, as some of us had noted all along, a story about nothing,” as Professor Glenn Reynolds observed. “No member of Trump’s campaign — and in fact, no American anywhere — colluded with the Russians to influence the campaign.” Contrary to what MSNBC and CNN viewers had been told night after night for month after month, Trump is not a Kremlin stooge and yet: “Orange Man Bad!”

    Proven wrong on the matter of “Russian collusion,” the anti-Trump media sifted through the Mueller report in search of evidence of other wrongdoing by the president, who of course must be guilty of something. The Twitter feeds of media types filled up with excerpts of the report proving… what? Well, Trump was very angry about being falsely accused of “collusion,” and he didn’t enjoy watching his former associates being investigated and prosecuted as part of what he considered a partisan witch hunt, inspired in large measure by the phony Steele dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign. But we already knew that. Trump’s animus toward the Mueller investigation was certainly no secret, but being angry is not a crime and, however angry he was, nothing Trump did amounted to obstruction of justice. Because there was no “collusion,” and thus no crime to conceal, it would be hard to figure out how or why justice could be obstructed in such a case. The innocent don’t fear justice, and if Trump was innocent of “collusion” (as Mueller concluded) why should he engage in obstruction? Never mind basic logic, cried the Trump-haters, because Orange Man Bad!

    “Their minds are made up, and mere facts cannot penetrate their ironclad certainty about Trump’s maliciousness.”

  • Watch Democrats move the Mueller goalposts.
  • Editorial in the New York Times: “Barr Is Right About Everything. Admit You Were Wrong.”

    The American political and media elites that spent the first two years of the Trump administration promoting the Russian collusion hoax have some explaining to do. And not merely explaining: They owe the president an apology.

    As Attorney General William Barr said on Thursday before releasing the Mueller report, “After nearly two years of investigation, thousands of subpoenas, and hundreds of warrants and witness interviews, the special counsel confirmed that the Russian government sponsored efforts to illegally interfere with the 2016 presidential election but did not find that the Trump campaign or other Americans colluded in those schemes.”

    And yet nearly the entire complex of elite media was actively complicit in promoting the biggest political conspiracy theory in American history: that Hillary Clinton lost the election because Donald Trump conspired with Vladimir Putin to — well, that was always a moving target — but to somehow deprive Mrs. Clinton of victory. What we now know definitively is that Robert Mueller, the special counsel, and a team of very accomplished, mostly Clinton-supporting, prosecutors were unable to find evidence of a conspiracy that had been taken as an article of faith by Trump haters.

    Journalists don’t like being called “fake news,” but too many of them uncritically accepted the Trump-Russia narrative, probably because of their strong distaste for Mr. Trump himself. But that lack of objectivity represents a major professional failure, and it’s Exhibit A in why Mr. Trump’s taunt resonates with so many Americans. Gallup polling shows that for 69 percent of Americans, trust in the media has fallen over the last decade. Among Republicans, it’s 94 percent; for independents, it’s 75 percent and for moderates it’s 66. Only among self-identified liberals and progressives does a majority continue to trust the media. They like what they hear.

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • “CNN Ratings Continue To Plummet To All-Year Low.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • CNN: God Allowed The Mueller Report To Test Our Unshakable Faith In Collusion.
  • Related:

  • “Prosecutors Ask To Present Evidence That NXIVM Sex Cult Leaders Illegally Bundled Money For Hillary Clinton Campaign.” Good points: Juicy! Bad points: The use of “sex cult” and “Hillary Clinton” in the same sentence. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Details on a Democratic dark money network under Arabella Advisors founded by Clinton Democrat Eric Kessler.
  • Leftists express respectful disagreement with Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw over his criticism of Ilhan Omar. Ha, just kidding! They mocked him as “captain shithead, “Nazi,” and “eyeless fuck.”
  • What happens when the government turns your apartment building into public housing. “The SWAT team, the overdose, the complaints of pot smoke in the air and feces in the stairwell — it would be hard to pinpoint a moment when things took a turn for the worse at Sedgwick Gardens, a stately apartment building in Northwest Washington.” Bonus: they’re handing out vouchers for up to $2,648 a month, which is more than my mortgage payment. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • “The Trump administration on Wednesday imposed new sanctions and other punitive measures on Cuba and Venezuela, seeking to ratchet up U.S. pressure on Havana to end its support for Venezuela’s socialist president, Nicolas Maduro.” Good.
  • Journalist shot to death in Northern Ireland, in an incident police are blaming on the New IRA.
  • Six MS-13 members charged in two murders.
  • Four truths that will get you banned from a college campus in 2019. Including: “To pretend that a man is a woman if he believes he is a woman…[is] objectively untrue.”
  • Shocker: University head doesn’t cave in to Social justice Warrior pressure, refuses to fire Camille Paglia.
  • Change your gut flora, change your thoughts. (Hat tip: Jordan Petersen’s Twitter feed.)
  • Black immigrant MAGA hat wearer beaten by thugs. Washington Post: “Meh. Somebody did something to somebody.”
  • Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot says he will no longer prosecute theft cases under $750. Governor Greg Abbott is mighty pissed.
  • Related:

  • CDC: “Hey, our guidelines didn’t mean ‘Screw you, pain sufferers.'”
  • Apple, Qualcomm settle their patent dispute. Immediately after that was announced, Intel announced they were exiting the 5G modem business. Apple continues to be something of a monopsony in the space.
  • “Federal Judge Tosses Defamation Lawsuit by Teachers’ Union Leader Against Project Verita.”
  • Don’t California my Texas:

  • The Postal Service took away the doughboy’s gun.
  • Only in New York: Hermit gets $17 million to move out of his tiny dilapidated hotel room. (Hat tip: Baseballcrank.)
  • Gene Wolfe, RIP.
  • Ouch! (Consider yourself warned.)
  • MUUUUEEELLLLEEERRRR MAAAAAAAANNNNIIIIIAAAAA!!!!!

    April 18th, 2019

    It’s Heeeeerrrreeeee!

    Yes, now you too can read the Mueller Report, on which so many liberal hopes were pinned, only to be dashed (at least for that ever-dwindling pool of liberals capable of ration thought) by Attorney General William Barr’s summary that there was no collusion and no obstruction, a fact confirmed by Barr in his press conference this morning. Since then, those who swallowed the Trump Russia Collusion Fantasy hook, line and sinker have been clinging to ever more fanciful theories in order to continue believing that the 2016 Presidential election could somehow still be undone by the report. Others, against all evidence, swore up and done that the Mueller Report would “never be released.”

    Of those who continued to cling to the Trump Russia Collusion Fantasy after Barr’s summary, one wonders how many of them will be convinced by actually reading the report. I suspect many Democrats are simply too invested in the delusional belief structure to ever give it up, and no amount of evidence can ever change their minds.

    Skimming the report itself, it appears that less than 10% of it has been redacted, and each redaction has been labeled with the reason for the redaction (Harm to Ongoing Matter (i.e., continuing investigations into other criminal or spying activity), Personal Privacy, Investigative Technique (such as confidential NSA electronic intercept techniques), and Grand Jury).

    A few Democrats asserted (some jokingly, some not) that the entire report would only consist of page after page of black boxes completely blotting out the text. Thus far I see exactly one page that meets that criteria (page 30).

    Unfortunately, one of the sections I was most interested in reading (that on Russia hacking the Clinton campaign), is also one of the most heavily redacted (pages 176-179).

    I do wonder if some of the redactions are information that implicate the Clinton campaign on working with foreign sources to fabricate the Steele report. Time will tell…

    But Barr’s overall assessment of the report still stands no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

    Hopefully I’ll get a chance to read the entire report over the next week.

    Now some reactions:

    And a callback to a classic:

    For Democrats still clinging to the Trump Russia Collusion Fantasy, I’ll leave the final word to William Shatner:

    Bernie vs. The DNC: Round 2

    April 17th, 2019

    In 2016, it was obvious to neutral observers that the DNC had put their thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton and against Bernie Sanders. From mysterious coin flips to Debbie Wasserman Schultz rigging the superdelegate count to Clinton using the DNC as her personal money laundering service to evade federal campaign limits, the entire process was rigged against Sanders.

    This presents a two-fold problem for Democrats in 2020: Sanders is still bitter about it, and Democratic establishment still wants to screw him out of the nomination:

    WASHINGTON — When Leah Daughtry, a former Democratic Party official, addressed a closed-door gathering of about 100 wealthy liberal donors in San Francisco last month, all it took was a review of the 2020 primary rules to throw a scare in them.

    Democrats are likely to go into their convention next summer without having settled on a presidential nominee, said Ms. Daughtry, who ran her party’s conventions in 2008 and 2016, the last two times the nomination was contested. And Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is well positioned to be one of the last candidates standing, she noted.

    “I think I freaked them out,” Ms. Daughtry recalled with a chuckle, an assessment that was confirmed by three other attendees. They are hardly alone.

    From canapé-filled fund-raisers on the coasts to the cloakrooms of Washington, mainstream Democrats are increasingly worried that their effort to defeat President Trump in 2020 could be complicated by Mr. Sanders, in a political scenario all too reminiscent of how Mr. Trump himself seized the Republican nomination in 2016.

    Yes, it’s ever so “complicating” when you actually let voters choose the candidate they prefer rather than foisting the Jeb Bushes of the world on them.

    How, some Democrats are beginning to ask, do they thwart a 70-something candidate from outside the party structure who is immune to intimidation or incentive and wields support from an unwavering base, without simply reinforcing his “the establishment is out to get me”’ message — the same grievance Mr. Trump used to great effect?

    But stopping Mr. Sanders, or at least preventing a contentious convention, could prove difficult for Democrats.

    He has enormous financial advantages — already substantially outraising his Democratic rivals — that can sustain a major campaign through the primaries. And he is well positioned to benefit from a historically large field of candidates that would splinter the vote: If he wins a substantial number of primaries and caucuses and comes in second in others, thanks to his deeply loyal base of voters across many states, he would pick up formidable numbers of delegates.

    To a not-insignificant number of Democrats, of course, Mr. Sanders’s populist agenda is exactly what the country needs. And he has proved his mettle, having emerged from the margins to mount a surprisingly strong challenge to Hillary Clinton, earning 13 million votes and capturing 23 primaries or caucuses.

    His strength on the left gives him a real prospect of winning the Democratic nomination and could make him competitive for the presidency if his economic justice message resonates in the Midwest as much as Mr. Trump’s appeals to hard-edge nationalism did in 2016. And for many Sanders supporters, the anxieties of establishment Democrats are not a concern.

    That prospect is spooking establishment-aligned Democrats, some of whom are worried that his nomination could lure a third-party centrist into the field. And it is also creating tensions about what, if anything, should be done to halt Mr. Sanders.

    Some in the party still harbor anger over the 2016 race, when he ran against Mrs. Clinton, and his continuing resistance to becoming a Democrat. But his critics are chiefly motivated by a fear that nominating an avowed socialist would all but ensure Mr. Trump a second term.

    In this they’re probably right.

    “There’s a growing realization that Sanders could end up winning this thing, or certainly that he stays in so long that he damages the actual winner,” said David Brock, the liberal organizer, who said he has had discussions with other operatives about an anti-Sanders campaign and believes it should commence “sooner rather than later.”

    I remember them talking about “damaging Hillary” in 2016 as well, as though it was Sanders’ and his supporters’ loyal duty to lay down and allow themselves to be crushed rather trying to win. “The mere rank and file voter must not be allowed to interfere with the desires of their betters!”

    But to some veterans of the still-raw 2016 primary, a heavy-handed intervention may only embolden him and his fervent supporters.

    You don’t say!

    R. T. Rybak, the former Minneapolis mayor who was vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 2016, complained bitterly about the party’s tilt toward Mrs. Clinton back then, and warned that it would backfire if his fellow mainstream Democrats “start with the idea that you’re trying to stop somebody.”

    If the party fractures again, “or if we even have anybody raising an eyebrow of ‘I’m not happy about this,’ we’re going to lose and they’ll have this loss on their hands,” Mr. Rybak said of the anti-Sanders forces, pleading with them to not make him “a martyr.”

    The good news for Mr. Sanders’s foes is that his polling is down significantly in early-nominating states from 2016, he is viewed more negatively among Democrats than many of his top rivals, and he has already publicly vowed to support the party’s nominee if he falls short.

    “Bernie Sanders believes the most critical mission we have before us is to defeat Donald Trump,” said Faiz Shakir, Mr. Sanders’s campaign manager. “Any and all decisions over the coming year will emanate from that key goal.”

    Or, as former Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri put it: “One thing we have now that we didn’t in ’16 is the uniting force of Trump. There will be tremendous pressure on Bernie and his followers to fall in line because of what Trump represents.”

    This is what professional observers call “a lie.” You didn’t have the uniting force of Trump back in 2016? I’m pretty sure you were all united in your hatred of him back then as well. And Bernie and his supporters had just as much pressure (if not more so) to fall in line.

    But Mr. Sanders is also taking steps that signal he is committed for the duration of the race — and will strike back aggressively when he’s attacked. On Saturday his campaign sent a blistering letter to the Center for American Progress, a Clinton-aligned liberal think tank, accusing them of abetting Mr. Trump’s attacks, of playing a “destructive” role in Democratic politics, and of being beholden to “the corporate money” they receive. The letter came days after a website aligned with the center aired a video highlighting Mr. Sanders’s status as a millionaire.

    See Monday’s clown care update for details.

    Snip.

    “If anybody thinks Bernie Sanders is incapable of doing politics, they haven’t seen him in Congress for 30 years,” said Tad Devine, Mr. Sanders’s longtime strategist, who is not working for his campaign this year. “The guy is trying to win this time.”

    But such outreach matters little to many Democrats, especially donors and party officials, who are growing more alarmed about Mr. Sanders’s candidacy.

    Mr. Brock, who supported Mrs. Clinton’s past presidential bids, said “the Bernie question comes up in every fund-raising meeting I do.” Steven Rattner, a major Democratic Party donor, said the topic was discussed “endlessly” in his orbit, and among Democratic leaders it was becoming hard to block out.

    “It has gone from being a low hum to a rumble,” said Susan Swecker, the chairwoman of Virginia’s Democratic Party.

    All these anti-Sanders quotes seem to have the same undercurrent “It is Bernie’s duty to do the will of the Party, and it is we party elite, not mere voters, who channel the true will of the Party.”

    Howard Wolfson, who spent months immersed in Democratic polling and focus groups on behalf of former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, had a blunt message for Sanders skeptics: “People underestimate the possibility of him becoming the nominee at their own peril.”

    The discussion about Mr. Sanders has to date been largely confined to private settings because — like establishment Republicans in 2016 — Democrats are uneasy about elevating him or alienating his supporters.

    The difference between Republicans and Democrats in 2016? RNC chairman Reince Priebus, even though he was a Scott Walker guy, acted as fair, neutral overseer of the election process, refusing repeated calls to “derail Trump” for the “good of the party,” while DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz put her thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton at every turn. The end result was that Trump won and Clinton lost. The danger of thwarting the actual will of voters once again seems lost on Democratic Party insiders.

    The matter of What To Do About Bernie and the larger imperative of party unity has, for example, hovered over a series of previously undisclosed Democratic dinners in New York and Washington organized by the longtime party financier Bernard Schwartz. The gatherings have included scores from the moderate or center-left wing of the party, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California; Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader; former Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia; Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., himself a presidential candidate; and the president of the Center for American Progress, Neera Tanden.

    “He did us a disservice in the last election,” said Mr. Schwartz, a longtime Clinton supporter who said he would support former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in this primary.

    Remember: actually trying to defeat the party’s One True Anointed Candidate is “a disservice.”

    But it is hardly only Mr. Sanders’s critics who believe the structure of this race could lead to a 50-state contest and require deal-cutting to determine a nominee before or at the convention.

    “If I had to bet today, we’ll get to Milwaukee and not have a nominee,” said Ms. Daughtry, who was neutral in the 2016 primary.

    The reason, she theorized, is simple: Super Tuesday, when at least 10 states vote, comes just three days after the last of four early states. After that, nearly 40 percent of the delegates will have been distributed — and, she suspects, carved up among candidates so that nobody can emerge with a majority.

    Unlike Republicans, who used a winner-take-all primary format, Democrats use a proportional system, so candidates only need to garner 15 percent of the vote in a primary or caucus to pick up delegates. And even if a candidate fails to capture 15 percent statewide, he or she could still win delegates by meeting that vote threshold in individual congressional districts.

    Should no bargain be struck by the time of the first roll call vote at the 2020 convention in Milwaukee — such as a unity ticket between a pair of the leading delegate-winners — the nomination battle would move to a second ballot. And under the new rules crafted after the 2016 race, that is when the party insiders and elected officials known as superdelegates would be able to cast a binding vote.

    The specter of superdelegates deciding the nomination, particularly if Mr. Sanders is a finalist, is highly unappetizing to party officials.

    Sure it is. I have absolutely no doubt that, if push comes to shove and Sanders comes into the convention with the most delegates but short of a majority, the DNC is going to find some way to screw him out of the nomination yet again, and by whatever means necessary. And it’s going to be hilarious. Also, I think many political junkies are secretly (or not-so-secretly) hoping for a brokered convention, since one hasn’t happened since 1952.

    “If he is consistently raising $6 million more than his next closest opponent, he’s going to have a massive financial advantage,” said Rufus Gifford, former President Barack Obama’s 2012 finance director, noting that Mr. Sanders would be able to blanket expensive and delegate-rich Super Tuesday states like California and Texas with ads during early voting there.

    Mr. Gifford, who has gone public in recent days with his dismay over major Democratic fund-raisers remaining on the sidelines, said of Mr. Sanders, “I feel like everything we are doing is playing into his hands.”

    But the peril of rallying the party’s elite donor class against a candidate whose entire public life has been organized around confronting concentrated wealth is self-evident: Mr. Sanders would gleefully seize on any Stop Bernie effort.

    “You can see him reading the headlines now,” Mr. Brock mused: “‘Rich people don’t like me.’”

    Fair enough, but a whole lot of the “rich people” who absolutely hate Sanders seem to be Democratic Party insiders and Hillary backers. And don’t forget that DNC Chair Tom Perez is a Clintonista who ruthlessly purged Sanders supporters from all DNC staff positions.

    Related thoughts from Robert Stacy McCain:

    All the “experts” on the Democrat side (most of whom are connected to the Clinton machine, in one way or another) believe Bernie Sanders can’t possibly defeat Trump, so they’re doing everything they can to stop him. Ask yourself why there’s been so much enthusiasm in the liberal media for Pete Buttigieg. That’s got all the hallmarks of a Team Clinton propaganda operation. After the attempt to launch Beto O’Rourke as a “rock star” candidate fizzled, Team Clinton looked around for some other available weapon to hurl at Bernie — they really hate Bernie — and apparently Buttigieg got the nod. Another hallmark of a Team Clinton operation? It’s failing. Despite everything his enemies have done to try to boost other candidates, Bernie’s support keeps growing. He’s gained more than five points, from 16.5% to 21.7% in the Real Clear Politics national average, in just the past couple of months.

    This is very good news for Republicans, by the way. Team Clinton’s meddling in the Democrat primary campaign will only add to the paranoid cult mentality among Bernie’s supporters, intensifying their commitment to their candidate, so that if anyone else gets the 2020 nomination, at least one-fifth of Democrats will believe that Bernie got cheated again. Anything that convinces the rank-and-file that the Democrat Party is essentially corrupt — yeah, that helps Trump.

    I’m not sure I buy the Buttigieg Boomlet as Clinton Op theory, but I do admit that it makes a certain amount of sense…