Our Dumb Media and Trump’s Twitter Traps

July 3rd, 2017

We’re approaching half a year into the Trump presidency, and the media still won’t stop freaking out about Donald Trump’s tweets.

It’s like a guy going to the same magic show every night, and getting up and yelling “It’s fake! He’s not really sawing that woman in half!” every time.

This is the latest source of the freakout:

Normal people see that as tweet as President Trump having fun tweaking the media. The media responded to it hysterically as “inciting violence” against their sacred bodies, because of course they did. Which, of course, sets off another round of normal people mocking the media for their continued arrogant cluelessness.

The same cluelessness the media have displayed every morning for, what, a year and a half now? Because they never read or understood Salena Zito’s “seriously, not literally” essay.

Shampoo. Rinse. Repeat.

Someday someone is going to write a book on the deceptive effectiveness of Trump’s Tweets. Trump uses his tweets in a variety of ways: As a cudgel, as a tool of persuasion, as a destroyer scattering depth charges into the media ocean. (Most won’t hit an enemy sub, but the ones that do…) Scott Adams has only been explaining how Trump uses persuasion techniques for over a year, and the media doesn’t seem to have picked up on that either.

Trump’s tweets let him dominate the news cycle, starving competing story lines of attention like the oxygen destroyer in the original Godzilla. And the media, either because they’re too stupid to know any better or too addicted to Trump bump ratings, keep falling for it.

While Trump does many things with his tweets, the latest controversy displays his masterful exploitation of the vast gulf between the borderline delusional self-regard of the media in general (and CNN in specific) and the public’s low opinion of same. It’s like watching Groucho Marx humiliate Margaret Dumont every morning. Normal people are laughing their asses off, while other stuffed shirt media pundits are aghast. “How dare he keep insulting that old rich lady!”

And here it is, a year and half or later, CNN is still declaring “Well, I never!” and wondering why everyone is laughing at them. Trump’s attacks are effective because average Americans hate the news media more, and trust them less, than they do Trump. And they feel that way because of the CNN and the media’s own self-inflicted wounds, and for obvious left-wing bias visible to pretty much any non-liberal observer.

The media keeps falling into Trump’s Twitter traps because their delusional self-love keeps leading them straight in. “Why surely fiend Trump’s latest attack on America’s sacred media outlets will finally rouse the populace to outrage!” Like Margaret Dumont’s characters, the media’s moral outrage never lets them realize they’re the butt of the joke.

Which, of course, always makes the joke that much funnier…

You Want People To Die!

July 2nd, 2017

More lazy holiday weekend video blogging, with Reason extending liberals go-to argument on changing a single thing about ObamaCare to its logical conclusion:

Shoe0nHead on Sexbots

July 1st, 2017

Today’s a good day to talk about structural reform of the Export-Import Bank.*

Ha, just kidding! Here’s Shoe-On-Head on sexbots, or specifically feminism’s reaction to them. (NSFW, just in case you were unclear.)

“Why are you so upset, Mam?”

The long-term objection to sexbots is that if they get too good, they lead to the extinction of the human race. But that’s not among the feminist objections to sexbots…


*The EXIM Bank shouldn’t be reformed, it should be eliminated…

LinkSwarm for June 30, 2017

June 30th, 2017

The year is half over! Donald Trump has been the 45th President of the United States of America for over five months, and liberals still haven’t stopped freaking out about it.

  • It’s Obamacare that’s killing people, and just two classes of states are showing any immunity. Deaths from opiate overdoses are on the rise across the country, except in states that either legalized marijuana or declined Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.”
  • President Trump this morning: Repeal ObamaCare now, replace it later. Which is pretty much what Republicans have been campaigning on for the last six years
  • Ted Cruz may kill the ObamaCare mandate.
  • Lying with numbers: CBO estimates 18 million people will be covered by ObamaCare in 2017. Actual number enrolled at the end of 2016: 9.1 million. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Maxine Waters Says 700 Billion People Are About to Lose Their Healthcare.”
  • “Anthem Inc.’s decision to quit offering Obamacare plans in much of Nevada will leave large parts of the state without options on the health law’s exchanges.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • The House Democrats IT scandal just keeps getting weirder:

    Multiple members of Congress hired as their information technology (IT) administrator an individual whose most recent job experience was being fired from McDonald’s, The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group has learned.

    Spokesmen for the members won’t say what their bosses knew at the time, but the hiring decisions highlight the role — witting or unwitting — the representatives played in what turned out to be an alleged multi-million-dollar IT scam in Congress with serious implications for national security.

    Soon after Imran Awan joined the staff of Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz in 2005, his brothers Abid and Jamal, his wife Hina, and his brother’s wife Natalia all appeared on other members’ payrolls, supposedly as IT administrators. His best friend Rao Abbas landed on the payroll too. Most of them made salaries ordinarily only chiefs of staff earn, but they were rarely seen or heard from in Hill IT circles.

    The crew is now the target of a U.S. Capitol Police criminal information security probe with assistance from other law enforcement agencies as needed. Politico reported the “House staffers are accused of stealing equipment from members’ offices without their knowledge and committing serious, potentially illegal, violations on the House IT network.”

    By my count, the unqualified members of Imran Awan’s circle (who frequently failed to even show up for work) could read the emails of the 31 different House Democrats…

  • Postscript on the Georgia 6th Congressional District special election: Jon Ossoff actually got fewer votes than the ghost candidate that ran in 2016:

    One good reason why Tom Price beat his last opponent by 23 points was that his last opponent was functionally indistinguishable from a corpse or a bag of lettuce. [Democratic candidate Rodney] Stooksbury spent precisely $0 on his campaign and has never been seen in public. Jon Ossoff had the entire national Democratic Party pulling out the stops for him, and flooded Atlanta television with ten million dollars in advertising. Drastically improving on the Stooksbury numbers should be no dazzling feat. (Although, somewhat hilariously, Stooksbury actually got more total votes than Ossoff, 124,917 to Ossoff’s 124,893. Granted, special elections have lower turnout, but good grief.)

    Ghost workers in the House, ghost candidates on the ballot. Your modern Democratic Party, ladies and gentlemen… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Speaking of the modern Democratic Party: Members of the all-Democratic City Council in White Plains, New York selected party chairwoman Elizabeth Shollenberger for a plum six-figure judicial seat. Tiny problem: She’s too morbidly obese to perform her duties. If ever there was a metaphor for Democratic-run government…
  • Democrat Seth Williams, former Philadelphia District Attorney, has resigned as part of a bribery plea deal. “In addition to accepting that he could face a maximum five-year term when he is sentenced, Williams agreed to forfeit $64,878.22.” Part of the plea deal was pleading guilty to one count of bribery so he could skate on the other 28…
  • Democrats and the national media sure put the Scalise shooting behind them quickly so they could get back to saying Republicans want to kill you:

    Less than 48 hours after a multiple assassination attempt on members of Congress, there were no media vans or cameras at the Alexandria baseball field where it occurred. Just for perspective, when Republican staffer Elizabeth Lauten committed the offense of writing something critical of President Obama’s daughters on her private Facebook page, news cameras were camped on her parents’ lawn staking her out for the better part of a week.

  • The Islamic State is close to defeat in Mosul and being driven out of Iraq:

    Col. Ryan Dillon, the Baghdad-based spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition battling Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, said that Iraqi forces on Thursday cut a wedge in the middle of the area held by Islamic State, seizing the Nouri mosque and cornering the few hundred remaining fighters in half of Mosul’s Old City on one side, and an area around a hospital that has been a stronghold for the group on the other side.

    Col. Dillon predicted that the fighting would be over in a matter of days and that it would then take time to fully clear the areas the Islamic State holdouts.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Also, all Islamic State escape routes from Raqqa are now blocked off. (Hat tip: Prairie Pundit.)
  • “Since Donald Trump was elected I have seen a spate of local news stories about companies building, expanding, or investing in manufacturing plants within a 50 mile radius of Chattanooga.”
  • Based on the evidence, everything the experts know seems to be wrong, at least if those “experts” are in the news media.
  • Third Project Veritas CNN video drops. Jimmy Carr, Associate Producer for CNN’s New Day, calls American voters “stupid as shit.”
  • Have those CNN videos finally gotten the MSM to give up on their Russia fantasy?
  • House passes two border control bills. “One is known as Kate’s Law that increases penalties for illegal immigrants who keep trying to re-enter the United States, especially those who have criminal records. The second denies federal grants to sanctuary cities.”
  • Three gay Jews asked leave the “2017 Dyke March Chicago” because their Jewish pride flag bore the Star of David. “If the Star of David makes you feel unsafe, there’s a word for that …”
  • More on the same theme:

    Intersectionality functions as kind of caste system, in which people are judged according to how much their particular caste has suffered throughout history. Victimhood, in the intersectional way of seeing the world, is akin to sainthood; power and privilege are profane.

    By that hierarchy, you might imagine that the Jewish people — enduring yet another wave of anti-Semitism here and abroad — should be registered as victims. Not quite.

    Why? Largely because of Israel, the Jewish state, which today’s progressives see only as a vehicle for oppression of the Palestinians — no matter that Israel has repeatedly sought to meet Palestinian claims with peaceful compromise, and no matter that progressives hold no other country to the same standard. China may brutalize Buddhists in Tibet and Muslims in Xinjiang, while denying basic rights to the rest of its 1.3 billion citizens, but “woke” activists pushing intersectionality keep mum on all that.

    One of the women who was asked to leave the Dyke March, an Iranian Jew named Eleanor Shoshany-Anderson, couldn’t understand why she was kicked out of an event that billed itself as intersectional. “The Dyke March is supposed to be intersectional,” she said. “I don’t know why my identity is excluded from that. I felt that, as a Jew, I am not welcome here.”

    She isn’t. Because though intersectionality cloaks itself in the garb of humanism, it takes a Manichaean view of life in which there can only be oppressors and oppressed. To be a Jewish dyke, let alone one who deigns to support Israel, is a categorical impossibility, oppressor and oppressed in the same person.

  • Progressive urban policies make life harder for the working class. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • President Trump nominates former Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison as the next NATO ambassador. Not my favorite Texas Republican Senator by a long shot, but I fail to see how she would be unqualified for this role.
  • 100-year-old crime boss beats the odds, is released from prison.”
  • Lawyer who committed $600 million in Social Security fraud has evidently skipped the country, claims to be broke. Sure, sport…
  • Label drops Austin band Dream Machine for WrongThink. Including a legal immigrant who was critical of illegal aliens:

    Doris Melton, who came to the United States from Bosnia told the website she was “glad they’re finally starting to work on deporting criminal illegal aliens too. It took ages for me to get my green card here legally and because there’s so many illegals coming in they make it hard for the people who do want to become part of American society the right way. They’re handing out free money to people who come here illegally, but when you want to work hard to become an American citizen to start a family they make it so hard on you, and expensive!”

    Later in the interview, Doris Melton was asked to name something that bothers her about the music industry. She responded by saying “girls have mostly become lazy jellyfish and are starting these horrible feminist bands just to try and ‘show men what they got’.”

    She went on to say, “The safe space mentality has made them weak. They don’t even know how to play their instruments! They’ll make songs about being ‘sexually assaulted’ or about how ’empowering’ abortions are or some (expletive) and it’s (expletive) retarded, they’re embarrassing themselves. If men did that they would be crucified! You see the longing for a gender supremacy under the guise of ‘equal rights.’ What happened to the incredible female singers from back in the day with real talent, singing about finding true love and wanting to be a good woman?”

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • Sarah Palin sues the New York Times for defamation over their claim that she “incited Jared Loughner” to murder people.
  • New York Times staffers rebel against cutbacks. Hey, when you alienate half of your potential audience, a Mexican billionaire’s largess only goes so far…
  • “Wrestling’s new villain named himself ‘Progressive Liberal.'” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • I have no idea how this happened:

    I don’t recall getting into a Twitter tiff with John Cusack, and I’ve liked most of the Cusack films I’ve seen (Being John Malkovich, Grosse Pointe Blank, High Fidelity). I even had mostly kind things to say about him in 1408. I assume he must be using one of those autoblockbot things to avoid running into #WrongThink…

  • You know you suck when Phil Donahue tells you to stop being such a pussy.
  • Methhead with nine prior felony convictions given life for evidence tampering. Previous convictions include manslaughter of an Arizona State Trooper and engaging in a “deviant sex act involving a squash.” And then there’s the creepy stuff…
  • “A BBC investigation found fecal bacteria in iced drinks from Starbucks and 2 other chains.” Is this a Starbucks problem, or a UK water quality problem? (Hat tip: Todd Kincannon’s Gab feed.)
  • Mexico’s Drug War Heats Up Again

    June 29th, 2017

    Mexico’s drug war is one of those news stories that’s been crowded off America’s front pages by the tide of #FakeNews. How can the MSM find time to cover dead Mexicans if Donald Trump’s doorman might have once talked to a Russian?

    I say “drug war” but that should probably be “drug wars,” in that each government crackdown on particular cartels, wars between rival cartels, and wars between different factions of the same cartel are all different events, and different parts of Mexico experience explosive violence and relative calm at different times. Juarez, the Mexican city just across the border from El Paso, experienced horrific drug violence between 2008 and 2012, peaking at 3,766 homicides in 2010, dropping back to 256 in 2015. (By contrast, in 2010 El Paso had a total of five murders.)

    Some 2,000 dead bodies have been found in hidden graves in Mexico, and over 30,000 people have disappeared without a trace.

    in 2017, a newly hot drug war is roiling Mexico just south of the border patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector. “The Reynosa faction of the Gulf Cartel lost its boss, Comandante Toro or Juan Manuel Loaiza Salinas aka Julian Loiza Salinas. The death sparked violent infighting and clashes with Mexican authorities. Residents in the area were forced to live under complete control of Toro, with even the news outlets having to answer to him.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

    There are five border control sectors that cover Texas, from East to West: Rio Grande Valley, Laredo, Del Rio, Marfa, and El Paso. Reynosa is directly south of McAllen.

    At least 36 people have been killed in drug violence in Reynosa alone this year. Just this week, they machine gunned to death a seven year old boy during a failed carjacking.

    In other drug cartel news:

  • Just today, eight members of the La Familia drug cartel in Austin and San Antonio were sentenced to prison:
    • Oscar Maldonado, 32 of Austin, was sentenced to 78 months in prison.
    • Julio Rogel, 20 of Austin, was sentenced to 88 months in prison.
    • Jose Duenas, 35 of Austin, was sentenced to 60 months in prison.
    • Jorge Arellano, 36 of Austin, was sentenced to 88 months in prison.
    • Javier Jaimes, 28 of Austin, was sentenced to 72 months in prison.
    • Javier Alvarez, 26 of San Antonio, was sentenced to 57 months in prison.
    • Jaime Carbajal, 26 of Austin, was sentenced to 42 months in prison.
    • Hugo Rodriguez, 31 of Austin, was sentenced to 70 months in prison.

    “Investigators found 75 kilograms of methamphetamine during their investigation, along with nine kilograms of cocaine and around $175,000 in cash.” Three more members await sentencing.

  • Marciano Millan Vasquez, a hitman for the Zeta drug cartel was just sentence to seven life sentences for numerous murders in San Antonio.
  • At least three Uber drivers were executed in Monterrey, Neuvo Leon.
  • CNN Crashes, Burns and Sinks Into the Swamp

    June 28th, 2017

    Once upon a time, CNN used to be important.

    During the dawn of cable TV, CNN had real impact. No longer did you have to wait until 6 PM for updates on national stories. Crossfire, featuring Tom Braden on the left and Patrick Buchanan on the right, was hugely influential, though nobody realized it would degenerate into the “talking heads screaming at each other” format that infects so much of cable news today.

    But as time went on, CNN drifted leftward, partially due to founder Ted Turner’s own leftward drift, partially due to the overall media trends. Bill Clinton’s personal friend Rick Kaplan ran the network from 1997-2000, during which time CNN attacked Clinton’s critics and defended Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In 2003, CNN news chief Eason Jordan admitted he had downplayed Iraqi atrocities in order to maintain access.

    CNN’s increasing leftwing tilt was one of the reasons the upstart Fox News Network surpassed CNN’s ratings in 2002 and never looked back. But the 2016 Presidential Election was when CNN finally gave up even the pretense of objectivity, earning their Clinton News Network nickname and developing a full-blown case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

    It didn’t help that CNN freely exchanged DNA with the Democratic Party: Chris Cuomo, Laura Jarrett, and Virginia Moseley (CNN Vice President and Washington Bureau Chief married to Obama Deputy Secretary of State Tom Nides) to name but three.

    Given all that, it’s no great surprise that CNN has spent inordinate amounts of time pushing the Trump Russia conspiracy theory. CNN has probably mentioned Russia more in the last eight months than they did in eight years during the Obama Administration.

    Finally, this week, all that Trump Derangement Syndrome came crashing down around their ears.

    Three CNN employees “resigned” over another Trump Russia conspiracy theory story (this one about a Russian investment fund run by Anthony Scaramucci being under federal investigation) that was so bad CNN had to retract and delete it. Those “resigning” include Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Frank (not the What’s the Matter With Kansas guy), Eric Lichtblau, who CNN recently hired away from the New York Times, and Lex Haris, executive editor of CNN Investigates. (That, in turn, lead to one of the most CNN things ever: CNN refusing to comment to CNN reporter about CNN story retraction. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.))

    Then CNN producer John Bonifield was caught on camera by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas admitting that there’s no smoking gun to the “Russia hacked the election” fantasy, and that CNN CEO Jeff Zucker is only pushing the Russia narrative for ratings.

    At the end of the video, O’Keefe promises more videos to come on CNN.

    Now the question becomes whether CNN wants to continue destroying what’s left of its reputation in pursuing its fantasy of a Russia Trump conspiracy, or whether it would like to return to actually reporting the news rather than trying to manufacture it.

    (Note: I almost wrote “its white whale of a Russia Trump conspiracy,” but then I realized that was the wrong metaphor. After all, in Herman Melville’s novel, Moby Dick actually exists… )

    Update: Just after I posted this, the second Project Veritas CNN video dropped, in which CNN on-air personality admitted that the Russia story was a “big nothingburger”:

    Pinkslipapalooza

    June 27th, 2017

    A funny thing happened on the way to total Social Justice Warrior cultural domination: They finally started paying a price for their “violent eliminationist rhetoric.”

    More and more, it seems that being a left-wing racist asshat is an excellent way to earn yourself a pink slip:

  • In a followup to an item in last week’s LinkSwarm, Phil Montag, the Nebraska Democrat openly celebrating the shooting of Steve Scalise wasn’t just fired from his Nebraska Democratic Party gig, he was also fired from his day job.
  • The University of Delaware cut ties with part-time, adjunct faculty member Katherine Dettwyler, who said that North Korea detainee Otto Warmbier deserved to die at the hands of communist North Korean abuse since he was “young, white, rich, clueless.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green.)
  • Essex County College fired adjunct professor Lisa Durden for statements attacking white people and supporting pro-black segregation. “You white people are angry because you couldn’t use your white-privilege card to get invited to the Black Lives Matter all-black Memorial Day celebration.” Said Essex County College president Dr. Anthony Munroe (who himself is black): “Racism cannot be fought with more racism.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Yale dean June Y. Chu loses her job after calling people ‘white trash‘ in her Yelp reviews. (Aside: When did the New York Times start putting in Chinese ideogram subheadlines at the top of every story?)
  • in all these cases, merely refraining from being complete asshats would have been sufficuent for the offenders to keep their jobs.

    Do we want to live in a world where people can be fired from their day jobs for unrelated Yelp reviews? Probably not. But as IowaHawk once observed:

    Until very recently, left wing Social Justice Warrior mobs were allowed to go after people’s livelihoods with impunity for the most trivial of politically incorrect infractions, confident that no matter how radical or racist their own words and deeds, that they would pay no price for it. Only recently have the same rules Social Justice Warriors apply to others been applied to themselves. Only when the pain of their own reckless attack mob mentality is inflicted on them will they stop.

    Finally, the rest of the world is punching back twice as hard, and radical leftists have no one to blame but themselves.

    If pink slips are the only language they understand, then pink slips it is.

    Supreme Court Lifts Stay of Trump Travel Ban

    June 26th, 2017

    The Supreme Court mostly set aside the lower court stay of president Trump’s travel ban:

    The Supreme Court agreed Monday to allow a limited version of President Trump’s ban on travelers from six mostly Muslim countries to take effect and will consider in the fall the president’s broad powers in immigration matters in a case that raises fundamental issues of national security and religious discrimination.

    The court made an important exception: It said the ban “may not be enforced against foreign nationals who have a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.”

    In the unsigned opinion, the court said that a foreign national who wants to visit or live with a family member would have such a relationship, and so would students from the designated countries — Libya, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — who were admitted to a U.S. university.

    The court said it would hear the case when it reconvenes in October. But it also indicated in the ruling that things may change dramatically by then. It asked the parties to address whether the case would be moot by the time it hears it; the ban is supposed to be a temporary one while the government reviews its vetting procedures.

    My quick reading is that they thought the lower courts overstepped their bounds, but issued a split-the-difference ruling in hopes that the entire issue would work itself out politically and spare them from having to wade into the dense thicket of potential political and constitutional issues.

    All the Justices voted for a stay in part, while Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch arguing further for a stay in full.

    Full test of the decision is here.

    Video from the Battle for Raqqa

    June 25th, 2017

    The battle for the Islamic State capital of Raqqa continues. The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces continue to advance, but recently met a fierce counterattack featuring drones, snipers, car bombs and minefields.

    Here are some videos on the fighting, all from foreign sources, since the American MSM evidently cant be arsed to spare anyone from their Russian Conspiracy Story divisions to cover an actual war American-backed forces are fighting.

    Reportedly the Syrian Democratic Forces are just a few hundred meters from the old city, where the Islamic State has dug in for a final battle, and has a network of tunnels to move throughout the city.

    This is a longer video from about a week ago that also includes an interview with a French Middle East expert on the situation.

    Democrats Finally Face the Pelosi Question

    June 24th, 2017

    Have Democrats finally, finally, finally gotten sick and tired of Nancy Pelosi?

    It’s been a decade since Pelosi ascended to the speaker’s chair, and since Democrats lost control of the House in 2010, there have been mutterings that Pelosi is a drag on the party. Despite that, she’s continues to get elected as Minority Leader.

    But following Jon Ossoff’s loss in the Georgia 6th Congressional District special election, that finally seems to be changing:

    Democrats’ embarrassing special-election loss in Georgia, after the liberal media built up unrealistic expectations, has provoked a wave of bitter blowback that targets House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi.

    Snip.

    On Wednesday, some Democratic members of Congress publicly voiced concerns about Pelosi, raising the specter of a leadership challenge.

    “I think you’d have to be an idiot to think we could win the House with Pelosi at the top,” Rep. Filemon Vela, a Texas Democrat, told Politico.

    “Nancy Pelosi is not the only reason that Ossoff lost, but she certainly is one of the reasons.

    Representative Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, reportedly met Wednesday morning with a group of lawmakers who have been conferring about economic messaging, according to several people present who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

    Mr. Luján told the group that his committee would examine the Georgia results for lessons, but he urged the lawmakers to portray the race in positive terms in their public comments, stressing that Democrats have consistently exceeded their historical performance in a series of special elections fought in solidly Republican territory.

    It was in the meeting with Mr. Luján that Mr. Cárdenas, a member of the Democratic leadership, brought up Ms. Pelosi’s role in the Georgia race, calling it “the elephant in the room.”

    Ms. Pelosi was not present.

    On the front page of liberal heartland Silicon Valley’s paper, The Mercury News of San Jose: “Question: Is Nancy Pelosi the problem?”

    “Some of the toughest ads against the 30-year-old [Georgia Dem candidate Jon] Ossoff were those tying him to Pelosi, whose approval ratings are underwater outside California.”

    Furthermore, as NYTimes reports, in a possible omen, the first Democratic candidate to announce his campaign after the Georgia defeat immediately vowed not to support Ms. Pelosi for leader.

    Joe Cunningham, a South Carolina lawyer challenging Representative Mark Sanford, said Democrats needed “new leadership now.”

    Even Democrats who are not openly antagonistic toward Ms. Pelosi acknowledged that a decade of Republican attacks had taken a toll: “It’s pretty difficult to undo the demonization of anyone,” said Representative Bill Pascrell Jr. of New Jersey.

    So with all that said, we are left with one question, as The Economic Collapse blog’s Michael Snyder asks, are the ‘toxic’ Democrats destine to become a permanent minority party?

    Every political generation needs a “designated hate object” on the other side. In the early 1990s, a joke went around Republican circles about a direct mail guy: “I had the most horrible dream! Jesse Jackson and Ted Kennedy went down in the same plane!”

    But Jackson and Kennedy were clearly to the left of center in a Democratic Party that still included some conservatives and moderates, and neither had any formal leadership role in the party, Jackson never having held office and Kennedy having lost his role as Majority Whip to Robert Byrd in 1971).

    By contrast, Pelosi is not an ideological outlier in her Party, but emblematic of it. As Minority Leader, Pelosi is arguably the highest ranking elected Democrat in the country right now.

    The reason Pelosi was able to be elected Speaker in the first place is that Howard Dean’s “50 state strategy” helped empower a lot of moderate Democrats to run and win (at least during a wave election) in deep red states, the last gasp of the “Blue Dog Democrats.” Then Pelosi ruthlessly pushed the Stupak bloc flippers into betraying their pledges on the ObamaCare vote, and the aftermath of 2010 wiped most of them out. The congressional careers of Brad Ellsworth, Bart Stupak, James Oberstar, Steve Driehaus, Steve Chabot, Charles Wilson (the Ohio rep, not the Texas one), Kathy Dahlkemper, Paul Kanjorski and Solomon Ortiz died for Nancy Pelosi’s sins. Moreover, the uniformity of far left ideology in the current Democratic Party prevents anyone like them from running in and winning a Democratic primary.

    Nancy Pelosi is toxic because her party is toxic.

    As Rich Lowry notes:

    Stopping Trump is imperative, so long as it doesn’t require the party rethinking its uncompromising stance on abortion, guns or immigration. Every old rule should be thrown out in the cause of the resistance—except the tried-and-true orthodoxies on social issues.

    If Democrats had to choose between opposing an honest-to-goodness coup and endorsing a ban on abortion after 20 weeks, they’d probably have to think about it. And if they dared pick opposition to the coup, NARAL Pro Choice America would come after them hammer and tongs.

    Those issues, and the unpopularity of ObamaCare, and the relentless Social Justice Warrior madness, etc., are what’s hurting the Democratic Party.

    Pelosi has put down rebellions in her ranks before, but this one seems more widespread. Also, Pelosi is 77, and has recently started to have more senior moments than she used to.

    Still, something tells me that House Democrats lack the guts to oust Pelosi mid-session. But if Democrats do badly in next year’s midterms, then the knives might really come out…