PMC Commentary

Super Tuesday could knife the Democratic Party

The superb Timothy Egan re-offers the one piece of truly sensible, indispensably useful advice that Democrats need right now, but are ignoring:

"If [Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Tom Steyer, Mike Bloomberg and perhaps Elizabeth Warren] don’t leave the race now, we could have a situation on Tuesday where Sanders wins, say, 30 percent of the vote in California, but no other candidate gets any pledged delegates. [From CalMatters.com: 'Under the terms set by the national party, candidates can only win delegates … if they nab at least 15% of the popular vote. Those with vote totals under that all-important threshold get a grand total of zilch.'] So, two-thirds of Democrats could vote for someone other than Sanders, and he would be the only one with something to show for it. That’s insane."

(The latest poll, CNN (B+): Sanders 35, Warren 14, Biden 13, Bloomberg 12, Buttigieg 7, Klobuchar 6, Steyer 3.)

The other day a Bernie admirer took me to task on Facebook for failing to show support for his candidate, whom he appeared to earnestly believe had majority support among rank-and-file Democrats. I wasn't being a team player, he implied, and therefore was harming the party at large.

Sen. Sanders seems to possess some gobbledygooky, dark artsy, magical ability to bamboozle his followers into believing wildly conspicuous falsehoods — not only, for instance, that we can upend 20 percent of the U.S. economy overnight and please everyone in the process while stripping millions of their preferred health insurance, but also that Bernie is now the chosen candidate of most Democrats.

As Egan, I and whole armies of other political commentators have been noting for weeks, the senator has squeezed out a plurality — never a majority — of caucus-primary votes only because his competition is a fractured muddle of muddledness. Warren is pretty much out of the counterproductive progressive picture by now; she can stay or go, makes little difference. But Bloomberg is siphoning from Biden, as are Klobuchar and Buttigieg and the combined drain on the majority moderate Democratic vote is nothing less than inexcusable.

Or, as Egan put it, on Super Tuesday, "two-thirds of Democrats could vote for someone other than Sanders, and he would be the only one with something to show for it." And that, indeed, is "insane."

"Sing Along with Sullivan" by following the bouncing ball

Reading Andrew Sullivan, I am often reminded of perhaps America's kitchiest musical iconography of the 1960s — that being Mitch Miller and his follow-the-bouncing-ball, "Sing Along with Mitch" television program.

Not more than five weeks ago, I noted this contemporaneous, "astonishing leap of either Kierkegaardian faith or Nietzschean will.... Sullivan, the moderate American and British conservative, is now pulling for … clear throat … socialist Berne Sanders."

Yet the ball has had more than a month to carry Andrew forward - or backward, or possibly even sideways, I can't really tell which — to a change of heart?

"I much prefer Bernie to [the Labour Party's manifestly catastrophic Jeremy] Corbyn, but the closer you look, the more parallels you can see…. We’ve learned in the past couple of years that a real left revival [in both the U.S. and United Kingdom] — one that could win power and govern effectively — is often more a mirage than a reality."

Next Friday, I'll half-expect Mr. Sullivan to wholeheartedly endorse either former governor John Hickenlooper or Mayor de Blasio.

Only one fresh post below; headed to the hospital for chest x-ray, probable pneumonia. I hope to be back, raring to go, this afternoon.  

Yeah! no pneumonia, merely some precious "pleural effusion." So steroids, antibiotics and a bucket codeine syrup should have me back on my feet just as fast as Trump can say, for the 16,241+ time, "Gotcha! — I'm lying again."

It's not the "Do-Nothing Dems"; it's the "Does Everything Wrong" president

Because he's buffoonishly inept, indifferent to others' suffering and just plain inhuman, Trump has launched cheap political attacks against Democrats rather than overseeing any serious response to the coronavirus pandemic.

So, the Coronavirus, which started in China and spread to various countries throughout the world, but very slowly in the U.S. because President Trump closed our border, and ended flights, VERY EARLY, is now being blamed, by the Do Nothing Democrats, to be the fault of “Trump”.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 28, 2020

The Do Nothing Democrats were busy wasting time on the Immigration Hoax, & anything else they could do to make the Republican Party look bad, while I was busy calling early BORDER & FLIGHT closings, putting us way ahead in our battle with Coronavirus. Dems called it VERY wrong!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 28, 2020

In fact, as Politico reports, there has been "fierce bipartisan backlash" against his inadequate funding request — of new spending, only $1.25 billion — as well as the administration's endless lying and perpetual incompetence.

As television chyrons blast warnings of fresh U.S. coronavirus cases, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said on Tuesday that the administration has "contained" the threat. At a congressional hearing, Republican senator John Kennedy blasted the clueless acting Homeland Security Secretary: "The American people deserve some straight answers on the coronavirus, and I'm not getting them from you." The secretary had testified, for instance, that the virus' death rate is akin to little more than the common flu, when even a casual consumer of the news knows better.

But, of course, topping every administration official's ignorance and willful misdirection was the chief buffoon himself, asserting at a press conference that the U.S. is "very close” to a vaccine, only to have the eminent immunologist Anthony Fauci immediately step to the presidential podium and clarify that "very close" means 12 to 18 months.

What's more, Trump has now muzzled epidemiology authorities. He lives in that much fear of truth. 

The very gentlest admonition of this administration is, simply: Look out!

Trump appoints even dumber vice president to pray away a lethal virus

To aid in furthering the coronavirus pandemic, Trump has thoughtfully chosen Vice President Mike Pence, because, said the president, "He’s got a certain talent for this." Which was an understatement.

As governor of Indiana in 2015, Pence permitted, through official sloth and religious insanity, a rapid spread of the HIV virus in the state. The vice president, then-governor and lawyer with no medical training whatsoever, "didn’t agree with [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] that distributing clean needles was a good idea," reports the Washington Post.

After two months of the virus raging unchecked and Pence's intransigence toward medical experts, the governor and now sort of Coronavirus Czar said "he was going to go home and pray on it." Evidently God understood that clean needles were indeed a good idea, since, finally, Pence allowed a one-month needle exchange program.

Yale epidemiologists were later tasked with studying Gov. Pence's public health actions. Said one, he was "a textbook case for how not to do it. It was a total collapse of public health leadership and a dereliction of duty in Indiana. They could have avoided this epidemic if science took the lead instead of ideology."

Here's another mind-bender for you: As late as 2000, Congressman Pence averred on his office's website that "smoking doesn’t kill," and anyone who said it does was merely being "hysterical."

In brief, to battle the deadly coronavirus in the United States, we've Vice President Jacques Clouseau in charge. Gives you a warm feeling of personal security, does it not?

I'm still here, still breathing, or at least still coughing, which, happily, attests to the continuing serviceability of my respiratory system. I hope to be in shape to get a little writing done soon; with incompetent Trump at the head of a collapsing nation, the writing never stops. 

The old comeback guy?

​​​​​This was all that was needed:

"'Strong answer from @JoeBiden on earning the African-American vote in South Carolina and throughout the country.' — Kurt Bardella, Democratic media strategist and former Republican congressional spokesman."

"'@JoeBiden had a strong night, which was a must. He’ll win South Carolina on Saturday and change the trajectory of the race.' — John Weaver, co-founder of Project Lincoln and former strategist for John Kasich."

"'Best debate performance yet from @JoeBiden — he’s best when his back is against the wall.' — Jennifer Palmieri, former spokeswoman for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama."

As for Bloomberg? This bashing, from the humanly superior Marc Lamont Hill, has the ironic effect of generating sympathetic support for sexist, dismissive Mike:

"Bloomberg looks so agitated and uncomfortable when held accountable by Warren. His whole 'enough is never enough for her' line felt sexist and dismissive."

Is this the cost of shooting the king but not killing him?

Notice the hashtagged R.I.P. of the tweeting "ReaalAmerican." (One wonders if that was a typo or the idiot just can't spell.) Evidently the Trumpeteers no longer see the erstwhile party of Reagan as the Republican Party, the GOP. That, it seems, is a relic of some unwanted, partially sane yesteryear; now it is solely the autocratic party of Trump.

And by the weirdest of chronological coincidences, the world's oldest party — the Democracy — may soon transmogrify into nonexistence as well, in the selfsame manner of Trumpism.

With the exception of Hollywood film plots, American madness has never been contagious. Until now.      

American Governance and You

Biden did the job, and Bloomberg … failed?

This was all that was needed:

"Strong answer from @JoeBiden on earning the African-American vote in South Carolina and throughout the country." — Kurt Bardella, Democratic media strategist and former Republican congressional spokesman.

"@JoeBiden had a strong night, which was a must. He’ll win South Carolina on Saturday and change the trajectory of the race." — John Weaver, co-founder of Project Lincoln and former strategist for John Kasich.

"Best debate performance yet from @JoeBiden — he’s best when his back is against the wall." — Jennifer Palmieri, former spokeswoman for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

As for Bloomberg? This bashing, from the famously ignorant yet humanly superior Marc Lamont Hill, has the ironic effect of generating sympathetic support for sexist, dismissive Mike:

"Bloomberg looks so agitated and uncomfortable when held accountable by Warren. His whole 'enough is never enough for her' line felt sexist and dismissive."

Bernie wants to barbecue your dog

​​​​​A frightfully spot-on analogy, from Jonathan Chait:

"As a general rule, politicians for every position from dog catcher on up understand that advocating unpopular things makes winning elections harder. Not impossible, but harder. All things being equal, a candidate for dog catcher who promises to round up and cook stray pets at random has less chance of winning. Sanders can still overcome this and win, of course. One can even imagine circumstances — like a sudden, deep recession — in which he would  probably win. One could likewise imagine a town that elects the dog-barbecue candidate for dog catcher. All that said, the scale of the downside risk seems unnervingly high."

I have yet to grasp Sanders' followers' prodigious minimization of the "unnervingly high" risk of a Sanders nomination. Chait speculates that their casual dismissal of such is grounded in a "calculation [that] is perfectly rational. Even if Sanders is likely to lose, the small chance of success is worth the risk to a party they don’t care for to begin with."

That much — a disdain for the daftly named Democratic "establishment" — I do grasp. Yet why would a grievously anti-Trump crowd favor rolling three-spot dice against the odds of first rolling a seven? The downside risk seems more than just unnervingly high. It's disturbingly insane.

Let us recall the less than mass enthusiasm behind the multiple presidential candidacies of Eugene Debs — and his runs occurred when socialism was riding relatively high in the public's opinion because of the robber baron effect and J.P. Morgan et al.'s ravenous financial power. (Debs' highest electoral percentage was, however, merely 6 percent, in 1912). Or, against even the manifestly tricky Dick, ultraliberal George McGovern's candidacy garnered all of one state's (Massachusetts) Electoral votes, against Nixon's 520.

I have rightfully been charged with becoming hysterical over the looming electoral catastrophe that is Bernie Sanders. One of America's grandest historians, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., would perhaps have been disappointed in this historian's rather severe case of neurological frenzy. "Knowledge of the past," he wrote in his 1986 Cycles of American History, "should inoculate against hysteria."

In Schlesinger's era, though, the soon desperately wannabe dictator Donald Trump was merely grifting along as always and phoning laughably incognito self-promotions to the New York Post. Yet a caveat finished Schlesinger's observation: "but [knowledge of the past] should not instill complacency."

As a sage observer of the vital center's criticality in American politics and foreign policy, Schlesinger would have modified, I'm rather certain, his aphoristic warning against hysteric's onset. Mere non-complacency comes nowhere close to effectively battling the disastrous plague of 2020 Sandersism. Thoughtful male strategists such as Arthur would first unravel in a 21st-century version of women's 19th-century frenetic neurosis, and only afterward regain some semblance of oppositional equanimity. That, I am still seeking.

Regrettably, I doubt my hysteria will subside until the Democratic Party's dog-barbecuer has been either flattened by Mike's billions of bucks or humbled by Joe's incomparable political experience. Meanwhile, I have a sufficient store of morphine, Valium and mind-calming Mary Tyler Moore sitcoms to somewhat settle my nerves.  

A little something different

​​​​​There is, we all agree, timeless, divinely inspired classical music because of its very divinity, if you will. One instantly thinks, perhaps, of the works of the three Bs, Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach. The first is indisputably sublime; the second little heard and thus woefully underrated these days, notwithstanding his breathtaking brilliance; and the third, if I may be so bold, somewhat overrated.

One hears, and by now it's a cliché, that Bach's music is "mathematical" in its rhythm. This tedious insight into his musical compositions is so bloody obvious as to cause nothing but face-palming among it auditors. This is not to say that Bach is unworthy. From his six Brandenburg concertos — my personal favorites, as was the second concerto of Bill Buckley's opening musical theme to "Firing Line" — to his ingenious fugues and multifarious variations on themes, Bach was — and this is just as tedious in well-known opinion — one of the greats.

Permit me, however, to reinstate the greatness of Gustav Mahler, whom none other than the exquisitely cultural Fraser Crane once said to brother Niles, Nobody likes Mahler. That may be, unless they have listened with care to his most prominent work, his first symphony. The subtleties, the rapturous explosions, the beautifully pieced togetherness of "The Titan" cause me, for one, to bawl like a babe with each listening.

You needn't put aside an hour devoted to Mahler's 1st to appreciate what I say. For now, just skip to 41:00 of this 48:00 magnificent rendition; hear the straining, the yearning, the ultimately impossible reaching out for understanding by an early 19th-century European Jew. I should add that this 1954 recording, conducted by the majestic Bruno Walter, is the only recording to which one should ever, ever listen; his scored emphasis on the concluding, which is to say the coda's, timpanis, will swell your heart to near bursting, assuming you have one. (This requires headphones, cranked to max.)

 

Presently I'm fighting, with steroids and antibiotics, the onset of yet another pneumonia assault, because of weak lungs. Such an infirmity tends to tire one severely, indeed to the point of involuntary dreamland. So if I go absent for a couple morning hours, now you know why.  

When oh when will this evil, bloated gasbag croak?

There are some people one wishes would just go ahead and drop dead​ — I'm thinking, clinically anti-social personalities doing great harm to others through calculated malevolence — rather than taking their time to drop dead. Person of particular interest: Rush Limbaugh.

(I'm getting my farewell-and-good-riddance-Rush shots in now, before that hallowed day when he does us all the favor of indeed dropping: see, dead, since my online rule — excepting George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Trump — is to never slander even the villainous dead on the day of their welcome death.)

For now, though, Rush is still clamoring crap like this — and I'm kinda hoping his fellow, dittoheaded, anti-social listeners believe him:

"It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump," said Rush Limbaugh on his Monday show. "Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus... Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks."

Good men and women, mostly young, have died for their country in war, and yet this skanky motherfucker lives on. 

Finally, Biden goes for Bernie's jugular - and there's more

This should do the trick in South Carolina.

For everyone else, here's another little item that seems to never make the news: In 2015-2016, Sanders' chief campaign strategist was Tad Devine, who, in concert with serial grifters Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, had worked as a media consultant for the now-exiled, wanted-for-high-treason Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. Devine continued to beg Manafort for yet more political employment until just one year before joining Sanders' campaign; he also briefly worked for its 2019 incarnation.

Unfair it would be to accuse Devine of supporting the brutal Ukrainian autocrat once he became such. With that grisly occurrence, Devine left. What troubles is that he was so willing to work with overt sleazebag Manafort.  

And yet Bernie Sanders hired him. Twice. 

Perhaps it was Tad Devine's glitzy media idea to propose a dozen or so vastly exorbitant federal programs, à la Huey Long, or maybe Viktor Yanukovych, absent any fussing about their present affordability. Or future finance base. Or realistic, political possibilities.       

One is reminded of President Reagan's reply to OMB director David Stockman, who had told the former that his tax-cutting scheme would not, in fact, raise revenue, but slash it, and thereby create a massive (for then) budget deficit: Oh well, maybe it'll work out, said the Gipper. Uh-huh.