PMC Commentary

Memories of an honorable man on the Supreme Court. Today we have none.

Major political donors give to dark-money organizations.

Dark-money organizations give their money to super PACS.

Super PACs are required by law to identify their donors.

Their donors, the dark-money organizations, are not required to identify their donors.

Consequently, when super PACs identify their donors to the Federal Election Commission, they'er identifying donors whose donors are unidentifiable.

Such was, and remains, the law's logic as promulgated by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 2010 Citizens United v. F.E.C. decision. A proximate simulacrum of the Justices' deliberations is that of a snake eating its tail, since the majority's ruling was both circular in logic and self-induging. Citizens' most common metaphor has been the opening of big political money's floodgates, though I tend to imagine the yawning of a bottomless abyss.     

In my youth's rebellious generation the Supreme Court's most respected Justice was the famously irreverent William O. Douglas, appointed admiringly by FDR and retired under a very delighted Gerald Ford. Their enmity was somewhat akin to LBJ and Robert F. Kennedy's. (Nevertheless, in a political era now galactically distant and unrecognizably foreign, President Ford sent Justice Douglas a note of thanks for his "distinguished years of service ... unequaled in all the history of the Court.")

I mention Douglas because of a line he wrote in one of his many books, a line I've seen misinterpreted by attorneys who should have known better. "It is the one governmental agency that has no ambition," he wrote in We the Judges. But, misunderstanding his words is perhaps understandable. Having been written by an Associate Justice, one would assume he meant the Supreme Court. But he was writing of juries. Ironically, however, what Douglas wrote then about the jury system is indeed more applicable to the Court today: "It is as human as the people who make it up. It is sometimes the victim of passions," continued Douglas.  

More applicable, yes, though I suppose only Buddha, Jesus Christ and Donald J, Trump could find it in their hearts to be so charitable. The year 2010 was a dark one for American justice and straight-up poisonous to our politics. The unremitting wreckage the Court inflicted on representative democracy was at first disastrous and by now catastrophic. 2010's Big Money has become 2024's Himalayan Titanic; 99,9% of us are its passengers. while 0.1% are legally licensed to ram us.

If you dropped by this site yesterday then you probably noticed and possibly even read a piece subtitled "How to Blow $100 Million in 7 Days." The post was based on Politico's reporting of an 11th-hour, "record-breaking messaging deluge" by the pro-Kamala Harris super PAC Future Forward. My unfavorable comments on the diluvial messaging are irrelevant to this piece. To be addressed instead is the massive nine-digit dollar amount ... in one week ... the last week. All of which is the thrust of a NY Times report on this kind of gargantuan cash having "become increasingly popular in both parties, particularly for late spending that operatives and donors want to mask."

The spending is masked because a) the super PACs — a bit too obvious here — are using dark money and b) dark contributors wish to stay that way, some because c) their motivations may be even darker and d) if the spending sources ever do come to light, the mountainous cash will be a historical footnote. The Harris-friendly super PAC is nearly a commonplace already; there's no one-way partisanship about these last-minute torrents of high political finance. And at least Future Forward's spending, $10.2 million of which has come from the dark-monied Evidence for Impact, has been in straightforward support of its candidate.

That differs from many other super PACs funded by opaque sources. Pro-Democratic Civic Truth Action has spent $4 million of Evidence for Impact's dark money in support of two third-party presidential candidates who could harm Trump's vote, just as super PAC Voters of These 50 States of America was backed by Evidence for Impact's $2 million. On the Republican side, Badger Values had all of $0 in the bank as of 16 Oct., yet on 18 Oct. its super PAC account grew to $225,000 and then into what the Times calls "a seven-figure campaign" in support of the Green Party's presidential candidate Jill Stein in Wisconsin, hoping to hurt Harris' chances there. My favorite, a Republican super PAC that shelled out $19 million in dark money to associate Trump with the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg because of the nominee's, shall we say, desperately ecumenical opinions on abortion.  

This is but a sample of the quadrennial squalor that seems to double every presidential cycle and to which the highest court in the land has consigned this nation. We know who the 0.1% are, we know the super PACs and many behind the dark money, notwithstanding their intended obscurity. We know who wrote the rules that allowed the 50 top donors to inject more than $2.5 billion into this year's elections. And among the top 10 billionaires of the top 50 donors, only two gave to the one party still devoted to actual governing.  

It is well we think back to William O. Douglas, to the sanctity of the law and to the respect he had for it. What would he think of the jackanapes of today's Supreme Court? Having heard Justice Douglas' interviews, I believe he'd be amused at how his statement was misunderstood  — "It is the one governmental agency that has no ambition" — and even more amused at how the misunderstanding has tortured itself into mockery. But of Citizens United? There his amusement would stop — and he would be stopped in astonishment at its mockery of us all. 

Douglas would stop at the Court's PAGE 7: that the law would "insure that the voters are fully informed about who is speaking": at PAGES 51 & 52.: that "there was evidence in the record that independent groups were running election-related advertisements 'while hiding behind dubious and misleading names' — and that barring such deception "would help citizens 'make informed choices in the political marketplace'"; at PAGE 55. that "transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions"; and at PAGE 57: that "civic discourse belongs to the people," 

I know for a fact that William O. Douglas would be shocked at how the Supreme Court has mocked us. I can know this for a fact because if I as a layman can still be shocked in rereading Citizens United v. the F.E.C., then for damn sure a former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court would be.  

Why the WH's version of Biden's "garbage" is correct

Yesterday, I first heard something rather muted about yet another "Biden gaffe." I then turned up the volume on BBC News to hear more about it. Then I read a couple press reports on this especially earth-shattering and this time Harris-destroying Biden gaffe. 

Based on hearing his words discussed — not rebroadcast, just discussed — on a news program and then reading his words as reported, I thought yes, Joe, you really screwed the pooch this time.

Here's CNN's version of his remark: "The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters," Biden said, pausing for a moment before continuing. "His, his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable and it’s un-American." 

I then heard on the news that the White House was disputing reports that Biden had insulted all Trump supporters as nothing but "garbage." He actually meant something else, said administration officials. My reaction to that was the same reaction I have to most every, and any, White House attempt to "walk back" a conspicuous presidential blunder.

Then I had the really bright idea to do the bloody obvious thing: listen to what President Biden said. So to YouTube I went.

Three critical items then instantly clashed in my mind over the press' quotes I had read and the video I just listened to.

First, the press assumed the word supporters was just that: the plural of supporter, therefore no apostrophe s after a singular r. This is a critical point.

The second item — also critical — is that press reports arbitrarily inserted a "." (period) after supporters. Thus "His, his demonization ..." began a distinct and separate sentence.

Let's take one more look at CNN's wording: "The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters," Biden said, pausing for a moment before continuing. "His, his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable and it’s un-American."

The third overlooked item every bit as critical as numbers one and two is that just prior to Biden's mistaken two-sentence "garbage" remark is that he had consigned garbage back specifically to "a speaker,"   

Keeps all three critical factors in mind as you listen to Biden, his remark becomes syntactically impossible to rectify with press quotes. That is, the quotes as printed make no sense when you her  the syntactical construction of Biden's remark.  

Which was this. 

"The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter's — his, his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable and it’s un-American."

Clearly, indisputably — the words supporter's (singular) and his (singular) are directly linked,  and then linked back to garbage. To detach them with a "." is, as noted, a strictly arbitrary, meaning-distorting butchery of President Biden's sentence.    

Let Republicans howl all they like. They'd do it anyway, about something else, anything else. But linguistically, grammatically, syntactically, the above is the only possible, intelligible interpretation.  

Andy Borowitz's "Report" takes a bold editorial stand

I've read somewhere around 20 articles on The Washington Post's eccentric decision to pass on issuing a presidential endorsement for the first time since 1976, nearly all of them seething, and a few that are pleading, such as Dana Milbank's argument of Don't take your anger out on us journalists and columnists. Sorry, Dana, but sustaining your lifestyle can't quite compare with retaliating against the national insult committed by your employer; plus, I'm sure you'd find equivalent pay elsewhere, given your notoriety.

The Post's publisher, William Lewis, compounded his pitiable lapdog status before Bezos the Great and Powerful behind management's curtain by writing, or having had written, two successive editorials ripping into Donald Trump and thus his incomparable unfitness for the White House. These, one gathers, were to atone for the paper's initial, non-Harris endorsement blunder. Yet in neither editorial was there an apology for the Post's original sin or a reconsidered, follow-up, thumbs-up for Harris.

I'll add only that many readers — and perhaps Mr. Borowitz himself — seem to believe that Bezos passed down his anti-endorsement diktat because of, as Andy writes, "the mainstream media’s most sacred duty: to maximize profits." First, the paper's non-endorsement was destined to do the opposite, so that argument fails to hold up. But more than that, Jeff Bezos could not care less about The Washington Post as a profit-making venture. He himself is worth $206 billion. In 2013 he reached into his pocket for some change, with which he bought the paper. Last year it lost $100 million, less than half the change that Jeff paid out originally.

To him it was a shiny new toy, is my guess. This year he hedged his bets on the presidential race to protect his much bigger, fancier, shinier toy, Amazon. My guess now is that Jeff has had enough of the publishing business, and will be happy to unload the paper on some other billionaire who also wants a shiny new toy.  

At any rate, The Borowitz Report's endorsement of Ms. Harris is in my estimation of much greater value than Mr. Bezos' opinions — and certainly his cowardice. But if the latter really was undecided and a trifle torn between which nominee the Post should endorse, Andy's second paragraph extends the most logical of all reasons.  

The Borowitz Report Endorses Kamala Harris

NEW HAMPSHIRE (The Borowitz Report)—The Borowitz Report, the last surviving media outlet not owned by a billionaire, broke with its longstanding policy of impartiality in elections on Monday by endorsing Kamala Harris for president of the United States.

“We did not take this decision lightly,” TBR’s editorial board wrote. “But after carefully weighing the strengths and weaknesses of the two presidential candidates, The Borowitz Report has decided to endorse the one who does not resemble Hitler.”

The decision to endorse Harris caused the resignation of TBR’s top business executive, Harland Dorrinson, who called it “a violation of the mainstream media’s most sacred duty: to maximize profits.”

“Others at The Borowitz Report may be able to stomach this decision, but I cannot,” he wrote in his resignation letter. “It contradicts everything I learned at Harvard Business School and McKinsey.”

You've seen movie titles like this: "How To Blow $100 Million in 7 Days"

Politico reported yesterday that a pro-Kamala Harris super PAC, Future Forward, is shelling out $100 million in ads during this last week of the campaign "to broadcast her closing message to voters."  

Excellent tidings. Politico described Future Forward's marketing exploit as a "record-breaking messaging deluge" — again superb, uplifting, really tickety-boo news. The ads, continued Politico with some specificity, "lean heavily into voters’ economic concerns and Harris’ effort to contrast her plans to improve people’s lives with those of Donald Trump."

There is room for opposing opinions on any strategy; there's just nothing like healthy debate, genteel agreement to disagree, and old-fashioned sportsmanship in resolutions and rebuttals. That's true in the case of Future Forward's game plan as well, even though its approach is dead wrong and I'm absolutely right. 

For too many decades Democratic politicians have stressed policy in campaigns while Republicans blew right by them with impassioned appeals to the emotional gut. Policy is the heart of officeholding, and policy should be at the heart of tub-thumping. It was, once. Voters heatedly debated issues such as abolitionism, silver versus gold, American imperialism, a U.S. central bank — the pros and cons.  

Those days are long gone, the fires pissed on, the heat departed.  Republicans' introduction of cultural and religious issues into national campaigns — by now, a six-decade partisan obsession — is abhorrent, for sure. Yet we must be realists. This is where we are, and though we'll crawl out of this rabbit hole of irrelevance someday, that day is a distant one.

Meanwhile, however, Democrats persist in stump-chattering about the remarkable, magnificent, ever-so-splendid policies they'll institute once elected. All this goo-goo government yakety-yak they then reinforce in television, radio and digital ads. It's heartwarming and truly impressive but for one little item. Most voters don't give a damn about any of it, assuming they even comprehend it.

And that takes us back to Future Forward's $100 million extravaganza. Rather than warming my heart it breaks it. Politico reports the super PAC is running two versions of the ad, both "focused on helping Americans get ahead." One, called "Plans," argues that "Trump will seek personal revenge" — that part is laudatory — but the rest is devoted to how Harris "fights for you."

The other ad, "Get By," seeks more "Black voters with specific dollar promises on home-buying and small businesses." While Harris has been pushing variants of this line since July, Trump has been increasing his support among Blacks. Does that not suggest a bit of counterproductive head-banging? A portion of the ad will also "make sure to needle Trump’s viral 'Black jobs' comment." Needle. That's it?

Tell me they're joking. Tell me Politico has it all wrong. Or in the name of God someone please tell me that both ads will be taken down, refitted overnight and re-devoted to airing every vile, vindictive, malign remark Trump has made about all minority groups, women, the rule of law, nonChristian-Judeo religions, sexual orientations, Hitlerian "vermin" and national "blood-poisoning," political opponents, the Constitution, killed and wounded soldiers, the United States itself — a garbage can.

Did I mention his public boner for a dictatorship? And if still stuck for ideas, the super PAC could simply run choice segments of last weekend's Bund rally at Madison Square Garden. This isn't hard.   

Some object that voters already know this, all of it, about Trump. But the some are mistaken. There are swarming legions of voters in possession of the very faintest knowledge about current events, past events, politics, the two parties, political players and most important, the ghastly, ghoulish personage of Republicans' presidential nominee.

The immensity of electoral ignorance is astonishing to the point of genuine unbelievability among informed Americans. In a way they're projecting; they're informed, hence most others are at least somewhat informed. Would that it were so.

Harris has of late picked up the Trump-bashing pace in her speechifying appearances, but such events reach small numbers. His inhuman abnormalities demand every manner of nationwide broadcasting.   

There's a touch of irony here. Someone on the Harris-Walz staff — someone tuned into what voters should be hearing, or perhaps someone tuned into what a media consultant knows they should be hearing — produced and directed what could be called a near-perfect Trump-disembowelment advertisement.

Yet though the ad is perfect, its placement is far from it. It's running digitally only, when it should be on every network and streaming channel with whatever frequency the campaign's remaining tens of million of dollars can buy (it began Oct. with $187 million on hand) throughout seven days — which, I imagine, would be roughly every 1o minutes on every airtime known to the cosmos.

If only the super PAC Future Forward had produced and aired this ad.

From only this one angle, imagining the U.S. as Russia - and the worst to follow

The Bulwark this morning takes a moment for some preparatory panic, which is probably wise, just as a bracer. It asks what Trump's first 100 days might look like. Although some, including The Bulwark, say we have only our best guesses and speculation, I say we know as an empirical fact that those initial three months — and, doubtless, the next three years and nine months+, possibly — would be a period of uninterrupted, unmitigated, and currently almost unimaginable chaos and ruin.  

The publication looks at several themes of Trump's post-inaugural mayhem, one of them being how many and in what way he can cram his cabinet and other high-ranking officials as loony as he is into their appointed offices. As I was reading its post, momentarily I thought The Bulwark might overlook the most obvious method, but it did at last make note of it: "dispens[ing] with the entire Senate confirmation process entirely" — that would be, altogether, in case you missed the double reference to entireties.  

Before arriving at this more probable method of "officially" surrounding himself with former felons, future felons, crackpots and wannabe S.S. officers, The Bulwark ponders the difficulties Trump might have obtaining Senate confirmations with "a simple Republican majority." He had trouble in his first term with Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, thus something larger than "simple" would be required. That, however, is a probable unprobability, at least according to polls.  

So we're back to ignoring the Senate and going Trump's preferred route — interim appointments; "acting" secretaries and all their little acting subordinates. The question then arises, just how interim does interim mean? To answer this, I visited everyone's favorite reading room, the independent federal agency, the Administrative Conference of the United States, and found its Bulletin — No. 003, if you're interested — titled "Acting Officials Under the Vacancies Act."

The reader almost immediately recognizes that the words acting and interim are a trifle loosey-goosey in definition. From Bulletin No. 003: "Acting officials may serve for 210 days from the vacancy date." As I read it, a president can wait these nearly 18 months before even submitting the name of the acting official to the Senate. He or she may continue serving while the Senate's snails ponder the affair. If the nomination is rejected or returned, or if the president withdraws it, the same acting official may serve for another 210 days "from the date of the rejection, return, or withdrawal."

Under these rules, then, Trump's attorney general, let's say — perhaps one the former felons he adores because of the Trump-unfriendly laws they broke — could serve roughly three years out of four as the nation's highest law enforcetment officer, possibly even longer, since there's the additional time allowed for the Senate to weigh all its considerations. And we know the rapidity with which any Senate moves on any given issue.

To my mind, though, there's no rule, bulletin, law or known constitution fffthat would particularly bedevil Herr Trump and prevent him from doing whatever he damn well wants to do. Goodness me, if nothing else his fellow dictators would all gather, giggle and make fun him if he were to reveal his hand as anything but iron, like theirs. What's more, he already played the run-around game with appointments in his first term precisely because he desired the company of the crackpots who had no chance of Senate confirmation. In 2019, The NY Times took note of his attraction to acting this and acting that.

In April, his next homeland security secretary would be securing the homeland on an acting basis only, given the resignation of the confirmed secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen. She had nearly resigned in 2018; Trump had lambasted and humiliated her in a cabinet meeting for allowing too many border crossings. Also, Trump wanted a big p.r. push on immigrant crackdowns two weeks before the 2018 midterms, so various officials recommended deploying a military-designed "heat ray" against immigrants; it would "make people’s skin feel as if it is burning." The device had already fallen into "morality"-concerns disuse, Nielsen said no way at the ray-gun meeting, and added that it"should never be brought up again in her presence." All told, goodbye Kirstjen.

In 2019 Trump's secretaries of defense and interior were serving on an interim basis, as were the directors of the Office of Management and Budget and the Small Business Administration, and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Even Trump's Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney was acting as a temp worker, though no confirmation was needed for that office. "I like acting," said the world's most ignorant man to the press in January 2019. "It gives me more flexibility. Do you understand that?" We do. He could threaten them with instant unemployment and avoid the rigorous process of Senate confirmation. 

It's worth noting that Paul Light, a New York University professor of public service and authority on the procedure, said at the time that "we haven’t heard a word from the Senate on the Trump administration’s abuse of its acting authority." Added law professor Stephen Vladeck of the University of Texas, Trump's avoidance of Senate confirmations was because either he knew his proposed officials would never make the cut, "or because he’s worried about the kinds of questions they’d have to answer.... Either way, that’s an alarming argument for bypassing a Senate controlled by his own party."

If Trump makes his way back into power, I'll take any odds offered and bet whatever amount suggested that he in his second term will make himself in his first term look like Dudley Do-Right. In the next manifestation of Trumpism, the cronyism — much of it through acting officials, the corruption, the incompetence and chaos will so outstrip the depravity and malevolence of all that once transpired in the White House name of Trump, neither we nor the world will any longer recognize America.

The United States will have joined the putrid, festering ranks of Russia, China, North Korea and Iran — and Western civilization as a whole will be rendered defenseless. 

A (probably final) roundup, states and national

This is likely our final look at polling and polling averages. A possible exception will be next Monday, but barring any last week eruption, I don't anticipate any significant change. It certainly wouldn't come from Trump's side, since there is no vulgarity too outrageous to disaffect his automatons. Here's a hodgepodge, since Friday.

Some of Nate Silver's state averages, not included in RealClearPolling's: 

North Carolina    49.9    47.6

Arizona                   49.3.   47.3

Georgia                   49.0.   47.6

Nevada                    47.9.   47.9

And Silver's national average:

Trumpian grift isn't old-fashioned graft; it's more like organized crime's self-interested homidices

As a man who grew up in a city once run by a powerful political machine — that of Kansas City, Missouri's Pendergast operation, Harry Truman's semi-benevolent benefactor and that of the city's downtown — I retain a certain admiration and even respect for the older Tammany Hall types such as George Washington Plunkitt (seated). He too was somewhat of an idiosyncrasy in that genre in that he prided himself on "honest graft," or as he also framed it, "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em." Each of 'em legal.

Nearly all the city machines are gone now, be that a good thing or bad. But the mostly illicit graft of yore has become the commonplace grift of modernity — and virtually all of it bubbling up in the corruption of Trumpism. In this vilest of all American political movements, not a soul within it harbors so much as even one lonesome principle. Yet every one of them, from the most sinister at top to the grungiest at bottom, is wholly, devoutly dedicated to self-interest and self-enrichment only — in brief, grifting. Aside from the obvious one himself, two of Trumpism's grifters have performed the most brilliantly. 

Brad Parscale was Trump's campaign manager, 2018 to 2020, and his first fleecing struck instantly. In brazen opposition to campaign law, he founded a "digital-services" firm by the name of Red State Data, which the America First super PAC then took on as its only client. (No doubt Brad was the best, though, right?) So there was a campaign manager working directly with the campaigning candidate's super PAC. And in classic Trumpian form, they all said to hell with the law. Parscale? He personally took in nearly $1 million from Trump's America First. 

The next year, 2019, another pro-Trump super PAC shelled out thousands of dollars to a company owned by Parscale's wife. Then, after her husband got canned as campaign manager in 2020, staffers first realized that the campaign had paid him more than $800,000 just to promote his own social media pages. But that was a mere pittance, they soon learned. The crew next discovered they had paid two of Parscale's businesses the staggering sum of $39 million. 

Which brings us to Trump's co-campaign manager this year, Chris LaCivita. The former Swift Boater is a true piece of grift-work. Two years earlier he somehow managed to pilfer $19 million by acting as a "strategic consultant" to two of Trump's super PACs. (If you're curious, that's more tha $50,000 a day.) LaCivita was also raking in $75,000 a month in retainers. He then signed on to the Trump campaign.

So single-mindedly obsessed with Trump's presidential success, among LaCivita's first acts was to arrange three contracts between the campaign and his home-based LLC that brought him $3 million — that being his take from Trump’s TV, digital and direct mail spending. LaCivita is now set to haul in another $5 million by Election Day. I'm not quite sure why he bothered with these peanuts, but if Trump wins, he also gets a $150,000 bonus. But, greed is greed, I suppose, whatever the amount to be grifted. 

George Plunkitt's graft was indeed of the legal sort, yet most of yesteryear's graft of machine politics was ultimately intolerable less because the grafters were stuffing their pockets than they were depleting the pockets of citizens. Today, though, political grifting is personal; it pilfers from fellow grifters like Trump and robs only the country's voluntary imbeciles.

The whole political scheme of incestuous Trumpian grift rather reminds me of the mobster Bugsy Siegel's defense of his own profession's scheming corruption: "We only kill each other."   

The apex of Crazy is now spoken right out loud

How Crazy has Crazy become? Its latest iteration just might top every stratum of heretofore Crazy. Just a touch of background: Whole teams of dedicated social scientists of diverse disciplines have been working 24/7 throughout the last several weeks to determine both the level of all Crazy in U.S. politics and on which side it is most influential. Unsurprisingly, Crazy's overall presence has been pegging at 100% (while straining to exceed this impossibly unexceedable maximum).

These tireless, nonpartisan researchers have, also unsurprisingly, calculated that 99.348% of all Crazy is coming from the Trumpian side — its eponymous baboon, JD, their congressional layabouts often mistaken as parrots by Capitol tourists, Fox News, Newsmax, radio talk-show hosts and ethically disfigured characters on Twitter, namely Charlie Kirk (head of the renamed Hitler Youth, TurningPointUSA) and Benny Johnson (who, when writing at BuzzFeed, committed "more than 40 instances of plagiarism," which he alternatively called "writers who were not properly attributed.")

But I hear the mathematically inclined among you asking, if Crazy is at 100% and virtually 100% Trumpy, how could any recent occurrence of Crazy outCrazy Crazy? The answer is a new variable introduced by researchers into their formulations: the quality, calibre and inventive craftsmanship of Crazy. And last Thursday, from the depths of Trumpian Crazy a fallen angel appeared — and bang went the Crazy meter's peg, busting right through 100% and then straight beyond Plato's very darkest of Forms.  

I've been meaning to get to this for three days, but, you know, malodorous droppings happen, as they say. So yes, I know you're almost certainly aware of The Honorable United States Representative Andy Harris' meter-banging, but I wanted to make this observance, no matter how superfluous. Mr. Harris, he of Maryland — first glued to his House seat in 2016 by 67% of the 1st district's non-institutionalized — has risen to the chairmanship of the House Freedom Caucus, where Crazy churns perpetually. And last week, Andy attended a Republican Party dinner where a keynote speaker started him thinking, at which point America should have trembled. 

There at the dinner his thoughts traveled not to his home state, but that of hurricane-damaged North Carolina. Given all its wreckage and mayhem, how will these poor, overburdened citizens be able to vote? he wondered. Whereupon panic seized Andy's mind, followed by his statement, "You statistically can go and say, 'Look, you got disenfranchised in 25 counties. You know what that vote probably would have been. Which would be — if I were in the legislature — enough to go, 'Yeah, we have to convene the legislature. We can’t disenfranchise the voters.'"

By which he meant — and this "makes a lot of sense," he added — let's disenfranchise the voters by having the state legislature simply award the state's 16 Electoral Votes to Donald Trump now, like, right now — waiting for Election Day, bad idea. After all, "you" already know what the legitimate vote "probably would have been." Here was Andy's fresh approach to U.S. representative democracy, sort of a mix of Stalin's "Hey I know how this'll go anyway" and ingenious democracy-by-statistical-probability and a pre-taste of American democracy under Trump's July 2024 plan as expressed to true-American Christians, "You don't have to vote again [in 2028].... You're not gonna have to vote." 

Trump: “Get out and vote just this time. You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years it will be fixed. It'll be fine. You won't have to vote anymore...In four years you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good your not gonna have to vote.” pic.twitter.com/Ig91KpOeCl

— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) July 27, 2024

I erred, somewhat, in the preceding paragraph. Astounding though it may seem. Andy the Republican congressman is actually something  less of a profound, original thinker. Still, I take nothing away from him; his musings on a "fresh approach" I'll always regard as the kind of bold, fearless creativity which can spring unexpectedly from the brains of the psychotically touched. Yet, earlier I tipped my hand. At the dinner, you'll recall, it was the keynote speaker who encouraged the congressman to crank up his antsy synopses — the speaker, Ivan Raiklin.

This fanatically pro-Trump idiot had jumped on his Twitter machine back in December 2020 and wrote a seditionist piece of drivel which he titled "Operation Pence Card." He had conceived a way the then-vice president could filch the White House for its occupant — nothing new there, but Trump retweeted it. With that, Raiklin became a neofascistic star of the neofascistic Republican Party, also an object of curiosity by the House J6 committee and Special Counsel Jack Smith (bonus points). And from there he became a blithering gasbag fixture at the party's Bund dinners. 

At the dinner Andy attended, not for the first time did Raiklin propose that state legislatures automatically award their 2024 Electoral Votes to Trump should they suspect fraud had taken place. He at least further suggested that states wait until Election Day to preempt the voters' will. One assumes state officials would know straightaway that such fraud had occurred. In his 52-minute speech, Raiklin said his "strategy" should not stop at North Carolina's borders; nay, the Republican-controlled legislatures in New Hampshire, Arizona, Nebraska, Georgia and Wisconsin could do the same.

That, however, was too much for even the Freedom Caucus chairman. "How do you make the argument in other states? I mean, otherwise, it looks like it’s just a power play," he said. Some pretty sharp thinking there from Andy. As for North Carolina? "It makes a lot of sense," he continued. "I mean, it’s legitimate." Minor detail, but no. "Such a maneuver doesn’t appear to be possible under current North Carolina law," reports the AP, and "appears to run afoul of the recently passed Electoral Count Act." Moreover, Rep. Harris seemed not to know that N.C. has been adding early voting sites and making absentee ballots available to voters displaced by the storm and currently living outside their county.

Is there some enormously important lesson to be drawn from all this Crazy? You bet there is. I've already referenced it. From Rep. Harris and "strategist" Raiklin we might well be seeing the future — what American democracy could look like after four years of Trump's Stalinist manipulations of this country's electoral system. In 2028, we won't "have to vote again," as he assured his Christian audience. Or if we do vote, the system will be under one-party rigging, and the man at the top of the ticket will be the guy who blew right by the 22nd Amendment, if the cheeseburgers haven't yet done their patriotic duty.     

Or, collectively we can act next week and put an end to this hideous spectre. We can send Trump back to whatever Floridian swampland he keeps sliming his way out of. Otherwise, we have yet to see just how Crazy Crazy really can get. 

Take a guess on the state in which this Harris event recently occurred

A hope-giving panorama. 

Donald Trump will shit his diaper if you share this clip of Texas showing up BIG-TIME for Kamala tonight!!! 💙💫#KamalaForFreedom 🇺🇸pic.twitter.com/DfnHdnsRdN

— Morgan J. Freeman (@mjfree) October 26, 2024

Then again, who haunts me when I watch this video? Walter Mondale, 1984. To paraphrase him but still quite accurately, because his words were so true in this politics racket: "Goddamnit I go out and speak before huge, roaring crowds of approval and feel good about the race and then I rejoin my consultants and campaign team and they tell me I'm getting my ass kicked."   

Huge, roaring crowds can be illusory. There's no are in that sentence, though. One of the opposing crowds will win. (Now there's insight worth paying for.)

Yesterday afternoon I spent about three hours reading polls, models, analyses of both and then contest assessments of both sides' odds of winning from slide-rule professionals and the only answer to emerge from it all: This thing is a coin flip.  

No longer will WaPo be among my sources. Resignation below.

My message last night — in the form's subject line, my entry: "Up yours" — to the subscription folk herein addressed:

"I was about to cancel my subscription to the once-venerable Washington Post. I then noticed that no refunds are allowed on existing subscriptions. Since you already have my fucking $120 for this year, despite your goddamn betrayal of this entire nation, being the silent Trumpian trash that it is, I see that my subscription is due to expire in mid-December anyway. So perhaps I'll just leave it alone. Because the credit card number in your files, I noticed, is an outdated number. You can ping it to the Post's most dark-hearted content; it will avail you nothing. And then I'll be officially free of the paper's journalistic cowardice and national treachery. Should Mr. Bezos meet an overdue timely untimely demise — for which my own, nonreligious heart is praying — and should some consortium of ethical human beings then restart the Post, I shall resubscribe. Until then, your publisher can take the remainder of the money I could not afford in the first place and shove it into his brain, which, as he so stupidly revealed in his pitiable announcement of journalistic poltroonery, is located right next to his anus."

Replies within 24 hours are promised by the subscription department. No word yet, but a few hours to go. 

***

Jeff Bezos Sells Washington Post's Integrity in Latest Amazon Prime Deal

SEATTLE (The Borowitz Report)—Urging Prime customers not to miss out, on Friday Amazon founder Jeff Bezos offered to sell the Washington Post’s integrity as a “once-in-a-lifetime Black Friday Deal.”

Calling the Post’s integrity “a signature feature that made this former newspaper great,” the product page for the item listed it at $4.99 with free shipping.

According to the product page, Amazon customers interested in the Post’s integrity were also interested in the Los Angeles Times’s integrity, which was priced at $3.99.

Customers shopping for Bezos’s spine, soul, and human decency got an "Uh oh, something went wrong" error message, indicating that the products did not exist.

°°°

I'll have more on WaPo's worst-ever decision, probably tomorrow.

Should Dems act as the Rs act?

I did not intend to write today. I wanted last night's post to stay up, in all its brazenness and possible drivel. But a friend said to me privately a couple days ago, in reference to my reposted 12-Step recommendations for political retaliation, So we are to become as they are?

His was a noble, honorable question. To which, my answer is yes. If you were in battle with Beelzebub himself, would you allow him to crush you with your honor intact? Or would you avail yourself of any means to crush him first — including those of his own. You know my answer. Yours is yours, and it may be much more honorable than mine. But in politics, I prefer not only survival, I seek victories.  

And in today's what are laughably called public affairs, the Evil One is, of course, Donald Trump. He'd treat Beelzebub himself to a steak dinner at Trump Tower in exchange for whatever advice he could get. Indeed, he's already done so, and he's using it to its fullest advantages. He may yet crush us before we can ever crush him. And I don't like today's odds.

So yes, if the worst comes, Democratic pols should visit the 12 steps — especially #3, treating rumors as fact. Theirs needn't be an existing one, anything heard or read but unconfirmed. Moreover, dishonesty is essential fact #1 of Step #3. Be creative. Just make shit up. The other side does it every day. Dems' choice: Make the rumor believable.

There's an alternative to that, however. Make it fantastically unbelievable, in modern parlance, something Hitler learned early on and used to his vast benefit. So too has Trump. Democrats should give thought to the Biggest Lie of an oppo-assault that they can conceive. Then bellow it uniformly and post it somewhere, anywhere, day in and day out, until it catches Hell's fires. They then will have done a patriotic duty, however dishonorable it may be.    

So yes, it seems to me that the Dems must become as they are. They have no scruples, and so neither should their victims. The latter must wallow in Republicans' filth for a while. After the Rs have had a good taste of what they themselves have been feeding the country, perhaps they'll close that shop. Then we can all return to honestly debating policies.

Such is my pre-5 November dream. And who knows, salvation might arrive that day, courtesy Kamala Harris. The other partisan knives would then be out for Trump: "No more, not again," they'd say, "we've had enough of you, Donald. Thus you are hereby banished to whatever little third, insignificant party you might wish to hobble together.

"Its insignificance willf be assured via your famed incompetence. So good luck, you unholy prick, but our best wishes for you follow not. Begone."      

An American allegory, or, letter from an allegorical American

A friend of a Canadian friend is a Brit who repatriated too close to the United States. Which is to say, the British friend of my Canadian friend recently imparted to said friend that should Trump win the White House, "The only sensible thing to do is to drink ourselves to death."

I find his recommendation both sensible and wise, mostly in a preemptive way. Trump will kill the U.S., day by bloody day, to use a Britishism, which will be a hard thing to watch and live through unbesotted, fully conscious. "A hard thing" is a weak description, intentional; I shall not yet depict the descending circles of hell to which we'll be introduced by our chosen Virgils.

I will however advise now that if you've not yet read the first of Dante's trilogy The Divine Comedy, dither no longer. The Inferno is the scariest work I've ever read, barring Shakespeare's Othello and its muted thoughts from Iago.

I am reminded of the latter because of a recent conversation with another Canadian friend, both of us inquiring into our truest natures, the healthy exercise of self-examination and self-assessment. From Othello, as I related to her, a literal chill went up my spine when I first encountered Iago's words, I am not who I am.

Shakespeare wrote what I'd call "universally" — i.e., for each his own, no dictates, each reader must decide, choose or interpret the Bard's words in his or her own way. My spine lit up because of the always guilty inner workings of my conscience: Am I who I am? How much is pretense, how much is real? We all have such thoughts. Mine, because of earlier decades of sloth and Shakespearean debauchery, are perhaps just a bit chillier, a trifle sharper, in pain.

All of which is not a digression from The Inferno, America's future, should the Age of Trump be given a life extension of at least four years. To Hell he will take us, take us all, nearly to its iciest depths, that which is chilliest because of its farthest distance from the sun, or God, in Dante's words. No flaming, burning existence there — there where Satan resides, as he must.

Just outside Satan's residence in the Ninth Circle is that reserved for those cast down for the worst of all sins: the betrayal of one's family, friends, benefactors — and country. Trump's resurrection will be (I write the verbal auxiliary non-conditionally, let us assume the worst) a national sin, for there are millions more who could have saved us but did not. They stayed home on Election Day. And we others somehow failed to inspire them otherwise. 

On our daily, tick-tock journey to these depths, with the satanic Donald at the center of it all, how should we proceed? Again, Shakespeare, at his most familiar: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by opposing end them?

In taking up arms, the kind with triggers, perhaps I could spare myself the Ninth Circle, landing myself instead in the Seventh, set aside for murderers. But in asking am I who I am, I cannot imagine myself the instigator of killing. No problem with firing back, only with pulling the trigger first.  

Which would leave me with .. what? Writing of our outrageous fortune to editors of newspapers still permitted to print under a censorious Trump regime? Tapping out furious writings on this under-the-dictator's-radar site, post-national destruction? What manner of good, benefit or uplift would this provide the few present? For years more we would go along, screaming our indignation and protest — to what avail?

Perhaps membership in some underground movement of a nonviolent sort. Yet there again is a rub. The French resistance in the early 1940s would have been somewhat less effective absent machine guns and train-tunnel bombs. Their Trumplike S.S. overseers might have stopped short of hunting them down, exchanging such efforts for mild chuckling. What a pathetic bunch of resistors. 

One other option. Strap on a Trumpian armband and become a collaborator. Sell out every last principle, ethic, and fiber of soul. Enrich myself via conversion — every radical movement's most beloved, such as former Trotskyites warping into Bill Buckleyian archconservatives. My conversion, however, would be a false one, there's no Whittaker Chambers in me. Yes I might thrive, but it would end with a bullet at my unbearable temple.  

A rather unpleasant thought, that. Aye, but another option comes into view. Take this post's introductory Brit's words to heart and do the really sensible thing: Drink myself to death. The prerequisite time would be brief, I should think, given my earlier years of sustained self-destruction. Yet another thought: Was that who I am? Some walking being of a death wish? An urge finally fulfilled by the Second Coming of Trump?  

Is that why the now-precursory years of sober reflection on our national descent into inexplicable madness? A sobriety infused with the creeping, perhaps even certain knowledge of our collective destruction? Were these but the times of self-catharsis, an uninebriated farewell to this ever-crueler world?

I have found myself thinking back more and more often to my preceding generation, born into a maturity of an ungreat depression and global fireball. How misborn was I. My mind longs for those two decades of which I was no part. I belonged there; of that I am sure. I am misplaced, a freak of nature's miscalculations. I should have endured the financial blights of the 1930s and then lost my life after voting for FDR the third time, going down blissfully before a Wehrmacht machine gun, but not before lobbing a grenade into its nest.

Or so I hope I would have made my departure: a death wish with purpose, if said wish has ever been real. That, I know not, but what worthier way to go: sending straight to hell a few of Trump's preexisting fascists. I do know the personally annihilating and slouching beast, to use an overused phrase, will haunt me again when our earthly Satan commits his first act of perjury — swearing to uphold the Constitution, 20 January 2025. From there, down we shall go, having sentenced ourselves to Dante's Ninth.      

Could it be my life has carried a kind of survivor's guilt? One that becomes increasingly clearer through years of living historically in books? A past time of self-sacrifice that we as Americans seem to have squandered on electronic gadgets of joy and other frivolities of quiet desperations in flight from what's real, from what really matters, from what, indeed, is so fucking important and pressing?

You noticed, I trust, this narrative's sudden, allegorical shift from the self to the us. These words are not intended as a cleansing self-flagellation erupting from soul searches and their engrained anxieties of remorse. I have used myself only as the most minor of microcosms of what I see around me — of what I have witnessed for too many years; a self-absorbed nation fully deserving of guilt, blame, and everlasting damnation.    

And from this narrative a revelation, also of the minor sort, looms and lunges right at me. It is not I burdened by a death wish. It is we — we the self-willing victims of Pogo's most famous saying. And in reaction to that saying, because it is we, it is not I who can defeat the enemy; nor can I be some Christlike figure assuming the sins of 330 million.

Rather, if anything once celestial but cast down, I am Satan's brother, an apple-eating participant in the wholesale ruination of Americans' soulful innocence, one nevertheless once anointed with that most essential of all divine knowledge: How to recognize the serpent as he slithers our way. From this, notwithstanding how strenuously I might try, I cannot remove myself from oversight. In 2015 I saw and treated the snake as a joke, a prodromal phantom of giddy ugliness, nothing more.  

As did most of us. We had the means to kill the sidling serpent in 2016 and we blew it. Boy did we blow it. Hillary wasn't heaven sent, but neither from Hell did she crawl. And yet through ignorance, indifference or admiration of what would kill us, we allowed a national boa constrictor to enter our highest office. He's been squeezing us to death since, and rather than organizing a determined phalanx of plague removal, we have placed this sinister creature back into the center of our own little hell.  

Inexplicable is the word I used above. But maybe it's not so inexplicable after all. Americans have been on a death-wish jag for nearly a decade. And it could be we will, at last, cut our own throats, come November. Please don't mistake, this allegory is no prediction. Neither is it a tale from the Brothers Grimm, soon to be realized. The last chapter is yet to be written, and we are its authors.

This narrative is also morphing into widely unread lengths, assuming that failed to occur many paragraphs ago. So I shall cut to the very quickest: Where I began. Should my aforementioned auxiliary usage of will become fact, whereupon the serpent slithers again into the White House, take heart, my fellow countrymen (or is it countrypersons?) in my friend's expatriated advice: "The only sensible thing to do is to drink ourselves to death."

That will be less painful than opening our jugulars. Myself, I've plentiful experience in that endeavor, so no problem there — brainless ashes to ashes. Until that possible time, however, take more heart in the words above: "The last chapter is yet to be written, and we are its authors."

So ends this narrative. Let us remain sober until 5 November. Let us do all that can be done to kill the serpent. Remind yourself now that this has been a national narrative. The beast can be killed. Let us, then, blast it to its proper — and I should add to keep the Secret Service at bay — figurative demise, sitting alongside Hitler and Stalin in Hell.

Handling a sea of red

I hadn't scanned the polls in a while. Last night, I was rather sorry I did. I suppose you can look at this string of red — the one blue, TIPP's Harris +3 and The Wall Street Journal's result I dismiss; they're from less reliable pollsters — in one four ways. 1) Polls suck, they mean nothing, so they don't trouble me. 2) Polls are reasonably good guides to where an election stands, but each of the results are within the margin of error. 3) That's it, Harris is cooked, the swing from so many blues to so many reds is a harbinger of doom. 4) My take would be: The polling suggests danger for Harris, so getting out the vote is of supreme importance; I'll do whatever I can to shuttle voters to the polls on Election Day or for early voting.     

I was dearly hoping this article's argument would make mincemeat of mine

I'm a great admirer of Anne Applebaum's writing, by which I mean not only her style, but her vividness of thought, historical insightfulness and lifelong familiarity with Russia and Eastern Europe; she's a scholar of both and resident of the latter. As a counterweight to my rather despairing piece of yesterday about world affairs, then, I just now eagerly read "The Case Against Pessimism," her latest for The Atlantic. Here, I thought, would be words destroying what I gather she would label mine. I've read Ms. Applebaum's books and dozens of her articles. Never was I disappointed. In "The Case Against Pessimism," however, I could find no case.  

She brilliantly opens with an overview of Russian brutality following its aggressions against Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. She recalls the assorted names the West has given the aggressor's treatment of those it approaches uninvited: Sovietization, now Russification, and Germany's word, Gleichschaltung (Synchronization.) Call it what you like, writes Applebaum, but it has always meant the same: "the imposition of arbitrary autocratic rule: a state without the rule of law, without guaranteed rights, without accountability, without checks and balances. It means the destruction of all stirrings or survivals or signs of the liberal democratic order."

She then moves to the "logic" of autocracy and its need for "imperial wars of conquest." The logic transcends just Russia. I would add that most strikingly it was that of Nazi Germany's. Before Hermann Göring popped a cyanide capsule at Nuremberg in 1946, he chillingly, unapologetically explained the superior logic of Naziism against that of its political enemies. In brief, Hitler had the right answer to government, encapsulated in national socialism.

Applebaum explains autocracy in essentially the words of Göring: "If you truly believe that you and your regime have the right to control all institutions, all information, all organizations—that you can strip people not just of rights but of identity, language, property, life—then of course you also believe that you have the right to inflict violence on whomever you please. Nor will you object to the human costs of such a war: If ordinary people have no rights, no power, no voice, then why should it matter whether they live or die?" It's a tidy form of political philosophy, no doubt about that, yet its human subjects soon tend to object. 

I'll skip over her other introductory remarks and go right to the question — the one to which I so anxiously desired an answer; the answer that would blow to pieces my preceding pessimism: "How should we react to the revival of a form of government that we thought had disappeared from Europe forever?" As did my post yesterday, she addresses the Ukraine crisis as — for now — the totality of what should distress and trouble the West. 

Initially, Russia's opponents coalesced as they should have, she writes. I disagree, I believe we should have been far more forceful. At any rate, "More than 50 countries joined a coalition to aid Ukraine, militarily and economically, an alliance built at unprecedented speed." Then the bad news. "But as the war has continued, doubt has crept in." Most significant among her list of doubts I'd say is that "since 2014, faith in democratic institutions and alliances has declined dramatically, in both Europe and America." The U.S. is known for spreading its worthy values throughout parts of the world, mostly Europe. But it cuts the other way. We also spread our very worst, such as Trumpism.

Applebaum then conflates our reluctance to engage Russia militarily with "pacifism" — two different creatures, I'd say. She is correct, however, that either approach — timidity or pacifism — "in the face of an aggressive, advancing dictatorship can simply represent the appeasement and acceptance of that dictatorship." The United States and Europe are not pacifist nations, excepting Germany's recent past, but that too has changed. She notes that Thomas Mann, my favorite German novelist who fled Nazi Germany, observed that "pacifism ... brings about war instead of banishing it." And George Orwell wrote during WW II that "pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other."

I've never been a war lover but never a pacifist, either. No rational person would invite war or embrace it, Pattonlike, as a manly, romantic exercise. It is everything but. It's a bloody conflagration to be avoided at all costs — except the appeasement of those who do seek hostilities. Of Mann and Orwell, writes Applebaum, "it was because they hated war with such passion, and because they understood the link between war and dictatorship, that they argued in favor of defending the liberal societies they treasured." Precisely. Applebaum's concise, even elegant defense of counteraggression is what should have applied in Ukraine by all who treasured their liberal societies. And its application should have been immediate. This, again, is why I disagreed, above, with her remark that the West initially coalesced as it should have.   

What has transpired instead? Or rather, what will transpire should the West never come to Ukraine's aid with boots on the ground? Applebaum writes of the consequences of pacifism. My argument is that these consequences apply to the non-pacific who are nevertheless opposed to confronting Russia head on. "If followed to the logical conclusion,"she writes, "[it] mean[s] that we should acquiesce to the military conquest of Ukraine, to the cultural destruction of Ukraine, to the construction of concentration camps in Ukraine, to the kidnapping of children in Ukraine. We are nearly three years into this war. What would it have meant to plead for peace in Nazi-dominated Europe in early 1942?" Hence a negotiated peace at this point would be tantamount to surrendering Ukraine to perpetual slavery.

Finally, Applebaum arrives at her answer, the one I had hoped would crush the words I wrote yesterday. It wasn't to be. She concludes: "In the face of an ugly, aggressive dictatorship in Europe, we in the democratic world are natural comrades. Our principles and ideals, and the alliances we have built around them, are our most powerful weapons. We must act upon our shared beliefs—that the future can be better; the war can be won; that authoritarianism can be defeated once again; that freedom is possible; and that true peace is possible, on this continent and around the world." And there she stopped, the word act abandoned to a void. 

Principles, ideals and alliances are indeed powerful weapons against encroaching authoritarianism. Yet all three — and ultimately the third — must act as genuine weapons. Our principles and ideals are worth the equivalent of the Soviet Union's beautifully, humanistically written Constitution, which guaranteed such freedoms as those of speech, assembly and religion. In other words, principles and ideals must be backed by allied force when facing an "ugly, aggressive dictatorship." The latter doesn't really care what our principles are. It cares a great deal, though, about principles loaded with 2,000-pound bombs followed by a hundred divisions on its cratered ground. 

Earlier in Applebaum's article she writes, "Those who accept the erasure of other people’s democracies are less likely to fight against the erasure of their own democracy. Complacency, like a virus, moves quickly across borders." Agreed. And that's where we now — fevered by a viral complacency. And if Trump's elected, the erasure of our democracy will soon follow the erasure of Ukraine's.  

Hang on to this piece for 2026. You'll be glad you did.

It's a little late for me to repost this piece from April 2005. I should have reposted several months ago, when you could have used some of the itemized tips therein on destroying one's political opponent. For instance, perhaps you're in a swing state stuck with a Republican congressman in your district. Numbers 2 and 3 especially would have been usable tactics by you as an individual activist.

I'm reposting this piece today because a friend in Quebec has a particularly virulent opinion of her town's mayor — as I understand it, a really nasty sort given to handing out municipal contracts to monied friends and cronies, who together have managed to solidify their power over the community. She read this piece and has now sworn to unleash some of Karl Rove's recommendations against, in her case, the town's Trump.

She has a year before the next mayoral election to do any such untoward deeds, which are nonetheless justifiable because of the dirtball she's battling. In politics, two wrongs can often strike the perfectly right note. Anyway, I mentioned to her that I regretted not having reminded other readers of the post's possible benefits, and promised to correct my oversight.

So hang on to this list for 2026. You can begin your personal crusade in January 2025 against the GOP clown who managed to squeak out another two years on the taxpayers' dime merely so that he can frustrate and possibly obstruct every (I hope) President Harris proposal. Rove understood the underhanded tricks of the trade, as evidenced by his ability to put a clueless frat boy in the White House. But what Rove could do is what Democrats can do. And should. And so I give you what I titled in 2005, "Karl Rove's 12-Step Program to Dry-Drunk Power: A Primer"

***

The title of this piece is not a joke. The subject of this piece is not a joke, either. What I offer here is merely a reader’s digest of Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential, by James Moore and Wayne Slater.

First things first, even if a trifle fussy: Rove didn’t make Bush “presidential” as the book’s title suggests -- he made him president. That’s all. The road to becoming presidential rather than president would have had to start somewhere deep inside Bush years and years ago, and that just never happened. Too many parties; too little curiosity; way, way too much egotistical indulgence in royal entitlement to ever permit the emotional and intellectual growth incumbent on anyone aspiring to be president in the sense of the word we all grew up with.

No, Bush was simply programmed, packaged and promoted as a leader, by none other, of course, than Karl Rove. Yet after all this time there still seems to be a mystery surrounding Rove, an enduring question mark of how he managed to do so much with so little. So for those who haven’t read the book and are curious, or, especially for those wanting to run for office or wanting to help an ideological compatriot run and would like a primer on how to succeed in politics, I give you this from Rove’s career, right from the book, point by point. No joke.

I’ve numbered the brief notes I took when reading it some time ago and have added when necessary a clarifying word or two, as memory served.

1. Use surrogates to attack your opponent. Never let your guy (or yourself, if you happen to be running) rip into the other guy. Find some lackey who’s more than willing to get vicious ugly for you. Your guy will look like a disinterested prince.
2. Leak harmful information. This is pretty much your basic opposition-research stuff. But leak it; don’t announce it. And certainly it helps to develop friendly relations with journalists of a whorish bent. Devastating information on your opponent isn’t worth much if you can’t get the word out.
3. Turn rumor into fact. Better yet, start a rumor about your opponent and use the media whores with whom you’ve developed a good relationship to hammer away at whatever you’ve invented. Before long everyone will at least assume that where there’s smoke there’s fire.
4. Use well-organized 3rd-party groups to make allegations. This is closely related to #3. In short, if you can find a Swift-Boat kind of outfit to go libelous on your behalf, do it. Also see #1 – surrogates and the disinterested prince.
5. Funnel money to a 3rd-party candidate similar in ideology to your opponent’s to dilute your opponent’s vote. Self-explanatory.
6. Use ties to law enforcement to launch bogus investigations against your opponent. You’ll need to be comfortably in bed with a high-powered D.A., though, so this tactic isn’t for the chronically un-empowered. You also can’t harbor any compunctions about bankrupting an innocent person through legal expenses or even sending him to jail and destroying his family. This is rather big-league stuff, and not for the squeamish.
7. Associate your guy’s political positions with God and flag. Be creative. If needed, rewatch Animal House for inspiration, the part in which Otter defends his incredibly guilty pals before a college court in a rip-roaring burst of offended patriotism. It can be done.
8. Always position your opponent as an agent of the status quo, your guy as the candidate for change. Self-explanatory.
9. Build your messages on what the public already believes in. Closely related to #7. Don’t ever try to introduce the electorate to something unfamiliar or convince it of something new. Another angle is to play on preexisting prejudices. If the public hates freckled people, your guy hates freckled people. Always has.
10. “Explaining is losing.” This is the only direct quote I’ve lifted from the book, because it is key, absolutely critical. If your guy has to explain anything – his policies, his past, anything – then your guy is playing a losing game. Voters in general don’t want to be burdened with policy details and candidates certainly don’t want to get mired in personal explanations. Just forget explaining anything -- anything at all -- and move on. It’ll work. You’ll be amazed.
11. Use push polling. Again, this is high-powered stuff for the monied pros. Don’t call registered voters and ask if they like so-and-so’s position on something. Call and ask if they like the satanic plan your Illuminati opponent wants to shove through Congress should he get there with all his corrupt campaign cash. You get the poll results you want, and better yet, you leave the right impression of your opponent in the minds of the questioned.
12. Pick off special-interest support for your opponent. In other words, be a hypocritical flip-flopper like all get out (and don’t bother explaining it). Bush’s decision before the 2004 campaign on erecting steel tariffs is an excellent example.

So there’s your primer, in no targeted order of importance. The other side already knows all this stuff and uses it. Now get out there and do the same. This is America.