This is too good, at Pamela's:
Hamas-CAIR enraged after Trump signs ‘Muslim Ban’ executive orders https://t.co/0rONcmdMoY pic.twitter.com/YKIuUUnpcf— Pamela Geller (@PamelaGeller) January 25, 2017
Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education - from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
Hamas-CAIR enraged after Trump signs ‘Muslim Ban’ executive orders https://t.co/0rONcmdMoY pic.twitter.com/YKIuUUnpcf— Pamela Geller (@PamelaGeller) January 25, 2017
NY Times reports Trump issuing exec order to re-open CIA black sites, bar ICRC access. #torture. Deplorable. https://t.co/WfvJZIshsz— Craig Martin (@craigxmartin) January 25, 2017
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is preparing a sweeping executive order that would clear the way for the C.I.A. to reopen overseas “black site” prisons, like those where it detained and tortured terrorism suspects before former President Barack Obama shut them down.Keep reading.
President Trump’s three-page draft order, titled “Detention and Interrogation of Enemy Combatants” and obtained by The New York Times, would also undo many of the other restrictions on handling detainees that Mr. Obama put in place in response to policies of the George W. Bush administration.
If Mr. Trump signs the draft order, he would also revoke Mr. Obama’s directive to give the International Committee of the Red Cross access to all detainees in American custody. That would be another step toward reopening secret prisons outside of the normal wartime rules established by the Geneva Conventions, although statutory obstacles would remain.
Mr. Obama tried to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and refused to send new detainees there, but the draft order directs the Pentagon to continue using the site “for the detention and trial of newly captured” detainees — including not just more people suspected of being members of Al Qaeda or the Taliban, like the 41 remaining detainees, but also Islamic State detainees. It does not address legal problems that might raise.
The draft order does not direct any immediate reopening of C.I.A. prisons or revival of torture tactics, which are now banned by statute. But it sets up high-level policy reviews to make further recommendations in both areas to Mr. Trump, who vowed during the campaign to bring back waterboarding and a “hell of a lot worse” — not only because “torture works,” but because even “if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway.”
Elisa Massimino, the director of Human Rights First, denounced the draft order as “flirting with a return to the ‘enhanced interrogation program’ and the environment that gave rise to it.” She noted that numerous retired military leaders have rejected torture as “illegal, immoral and damaging to national security,” and she said that many of Mr. Trump’s cabinet nominees had seemed to share that view in their confirmation testimony.
“It would be surprising and extremely troubling if the national security cabinet officials were to acquiesce in an order like that after the assurances that they gave in their confirmation hearings,” she said.
A White House spokesman did not immediately respond to an email inquiring about the draft order, including when Mr. Trump may intend to sign it. But the order was accompanied by a one-page statement that criticized the Obama administration for having “refrained from exercising certain authorities” about detainees it said were critical to defending the country from “radical Islamism.”
Specifically, the draft order would revoke two executive orders about detainees that Mr. Obama issued in January 2009, shortly after his inauguration. One was Mr. Obama’s directive to close the Guantánamo prison and the other was his directive to end C.I.A. prisons, grant Red Cross access to all detainees and limit interrogators to the Army Field Manual techniques.
In their place, Mr. Trump’s draft order would resurrect a 2007 executive order issued by President Bush. It responded to a 2006 Supreme Court ruling about the Geneva Conventions that had put C.I.A. interrogators at risk of prosecution for war crimes, leading to a temporary halt of the agency’s “enhanced” interrogations program.
Mr. Bush’s 2007 order enabled the agency to resume a form of the program by specifically listing what sorts of prisoner abuses counted as war crimes. That made it safe for interrogators to use other tactics, like extended sleep deprivation, that were not on the list. Mr. Obama revoked that order as part of his 2009 overhaul of detention legal policy...
It is time for our society to acknowledge a sad truth: America is currently fighting its second Civil War.Keep reading.
In fact, with the obvious and enormous exception of attitudes toward slavery, Americans are more divided morally, ideologically and politically today than they were during the Civil War. For that reason, just as the Great War came to be known as World War I once there was World War II, the Civil War will become known as the First Civil War when more Americans come to regard the current battle as the Second Civil War.
This Second Civil War, fortunately, differs in another critically important way: It has thus far been largely nonviolent. But given increasing left-wing violence, such as riots, the taking over of college presidents' offices and the illegal occupation of state capitols, nonviolence is not guaranteed to be a permanent characteristic of the Second Civil War.
There are those on both the left and right who call for American unity. But these calls are either naive or disingenuous. Unity was possible between the right and liberals, but not between the right and the left.
Liberalism -- which was anti-left, pro-American and deeply committed to the Judeo-Christian foundations of America; and which regarded the melting pot as the American ideal, fought for free speech for its opponents, regarded Western civilization as the greatest moral and artistic human achievement and viewed the celebration of racial identity as racism -- is now affirmed almost exclusively on the right and among a handful of people who don't call themselves conservative.
The left, however, is opposed to every one of those core principles of liberalism.
Like the left in every other country, the left in America essentially sees America as a racist, xenophobic, colonialist, imperialist, warmongering, money-worshipping, moronically religious nation.
Just as in Western Europe, the left in America seeks to erase America's Judeo-Christian foundations. The melting pot is regarded as nothing more than an anti-black, anti-Muslim, anti-Hispanic meme. The left suppresses free speech wherever possible for those who oppose it, labeling all non-left speech "hate speech." To cite only one example, if you think Shakespeare is the greatest playwright or Bach is the greatest composer, you are a proponent of dead white European males and therefore racist.
Without any important value held in common, how can there be unity between left and non-left? Obviously, there cannot...
Unless progressives can turn mass Trump outrage into real pressure and power, they're in for a long 4 years https://t.co/epaJk4hrVe pic.twitter.com/lx8uLNwtqO
— Roll Call (@rollcall) January 24, 2017
President Donald Trump’s opponents spent inauguration weekend invigorated by their show of strength in Washington and around the country, but Trump brought them back down to earth Monday and Tuesday with a couple flicks of his pen on executive actions that struck against much of what they hold dear.
Trump signed executive actions Tuesday forcing the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines to go forward. Years of progressive organizing against Keystone on the grounds of environmental and climate concerns succeeded in getting former President Barack Obama to cancel it in 2015.
A ferocious direct action campaign by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe attempted to physically block the pipeline from being built on their land. In addition to concerns about the climate and the use of fossil fuels generally, activists aimed to prevent their water from being made unusable by oil spills. The Army Corps of Engineers refused permission to extend the pipeline in December, giving activists hope that the fight was won.
Now those victories appear to have been temporary...
BLACK women are the majority in the best supporting actress category for the very first time! ✨ #OscarNoms pic.twitter.com/WIC6xtx740
— Sylvia Obell (@SylviaObell) January 24, 2017
Ted Cruz Owns Deadspin in Hilarious Tweets - This might be one of the best Twitter exchanges in a long time. De... https://t.co/LW259DYSWQ
— RedState (@RedState) January 25, 2017
As far as I can tell, this WH briefing room seating chart still stands for those wondering who is being called on https://t.co/PD8uZxNFy4
— Hadas Gold (@Hadas_Gold) January 24, 2017
#PresidentTrump to 'ban migrants from Syria; sign order on border wall tomorrow. #MAGA #TRUMP https://t.co/d75GwfWcvv
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) January 25, 2017
@PatriarchTree It's Rebecca Traister, again: The Future of the Left Is Female https://t.co/OTnSmBsT3t #WomensMarch
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) January 24, 2017
A lot of people predicted that women were going to change America’s political history in January of 2017. But pretty much no one anticipated that they’d be doing it as leaders of the resistance. On Saturday, millions of women and men — organized largely by young women of color — staged the largest one-day demonstration in political history, a show of international solidarity that let the world know that women will be heading up the opposition to Donald Trump and the white patriarchal order he represents. Women — and again, especially women of color, always progressivism’s most reliable and least recognized warriors, the women who did the most to stop the rise of Trump — were the ones taking progressive politics into the future.
The Women’s March, dreamed up by a couple of women with no organizing experience in the feverish, grief-addled hours after Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton, and then organized by an expanded team in the span of about ten weeks, was an earth-shaking triumph.
According to early reports, it drew somewhere north of 680,000 to Washington, D.C., 750,000 to Los Angeles, 400,000 to New York City, 250,000 to Chicago, 100,000 each to Seattle, Denver, San Francisco, the Twin Cities, and Portland Oregon; and crowds of thousands to smaller cities, including 11,000 to Ann Arbor, 5,000 to Lexington, Kentucky, 8,000 to Honolulu, and 20,000 to Houston. There were 2,000 protesters in Anchorage, Alaska, and 1,000 in Jackson, Mississippi. Demonstrations took place on all seven continents, including Antarctica.
This mass turnout in support of liberty, sorority, and equality was conceived by women, led by women, and staged in the name of women. It also drew millions of men. It was a forceful pushback to the notion that because a woman just lost the American presidency, women should not be leading the politics of the left. Women, everyone saw on Saturday, are already leading the left, reframing what has historically been understood as the women’s movement as the face and body and energy of what is now the Resistance.
Plenty of factors made this effort so successful, but perhaps the biggest was the shock and horror that jolted portions of a long-complacent population awake after the election of Donald Trump. As it turns out, sometimes, It Takes a Villain. We’ve got one now; he lives in the White House, has the nuclear codes, and spent Saturday defending the size of his, er, inauguration crowds. In his first weeks in office, he might very well nominate an anti-choice Supreme Court nominee, begin deportations, repeal health-care reform, start the process of withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, and defund Planned Parenthood. He has already reinstated the Global Gag Rule.
Yes, Trump exposed himself as a villain long before the election, and for many on the day of the march, the question was: Where was this energy before November 8? Clearly, the vast majority of Saturday’s crowd had been Hillary Clinton supporters, at the very least in the general election if not in the primary. But it is also true that some of the apathy, some of the complacency, that many critics took as a reflection of Clinton’s “flawed” candidacy stemmed instead from the sense that Americans didn’t really need to panic or take to the streets on her behalf because she was going to win. She was going to win, the assumption went, because of course we are evolved enough that this guy could never get elected president and thus we were free to focus on the imperfections of the woman who was going to be the president.
Through this lens, those who had been out there before the election, wearing T-shirts, holding signs, and talking passionately about the sexism Clinton was facing or racist backlash toward Obama or the high stakes of this election for women and people of color were silly bed-wetters, Hill-bots, embarrassing in their fixations on “identity politics.” Those yelling about sexism were playing some dated “woman card”; those trying to explain how gender and race and class intersect were jargon-happy hysterics. There was a confidence that the country’s problems with women had been largely redressed, or at least were no longer so entrenched that we would have to put in extra work on behalf of the first one to be running for the White House. But that confidence was baseless, ahistorical. The country has a yuge problem with women, and Donald Trump is the cartoonish embodiment of that problem.
If a time traveler had been able to jump just 24 hours backward, from the night of November 8 to the night of November 7, to warn us what was about to happen, Election Day turnout would have looked a lot more like the march turnout, not just in numbers but in energy and purpose and passion. But since reverse time travel remains largely a right-wing goal, we got Donald Trump. Of course, we also got 4 million or more people to the streets on Saturday and a sense of the potential for the women’s movement to be both much larger and much broader than it’s ever been before...
Why isn't the answer to Special Agent #KerryOGrady's Trump Derangement #YoureFired? https://t.co/m13AlnzoyX#AsshatOfTheDay@AceofSpadesHQ pic.twitter.com/ntMwpG7IOw
— Evi L. Bloggerlady (@MsEBL) January 24, 2017
EXCLUSIVE: Senior Secret Service agent says she would "take jail time" rather than "take a bullet" for Donald Trump https://t.co/7WWfkFi0Sf pic.twitter.com/76v6N7VGqx
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) January 24, 2017
#DonaldTrump's Twitter presidency. #PresidentTrump #TRUMP #MAGA https://t.co/O1rEbB1T2D
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) January 24, 2017
To the extent that President-elect Donald Trump has articulated a coherent view of foreign affairs, it appears to be that the United States needs to reject most policies of the post-1945 period. NATO is a bad bargain; nuclear proliferation is a good thing; Russian President Vladimir Putin is an admirable fellow; great deals that advantage only us should replace free trade.RTWT.
In his unique way, Trump is forcing a question that probably should have been up for debate 25 years ago: Should the United States stay a global power that maintains world order — including by force of arms, what Theodore Roosevelt famously called “the big stick”?
Curiously, the death of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War did not immediately occasion that debate. In the 1990s, keeping a global leadership role for the United States looked cheap — other nations, after all, paid for the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In that conflict and America’s succeeding interventions in the former Yugoslavia, costs and casualties were low. Then in the early 2000s, Americans were understandably absorbed by the consequences of 9/11 and the ensuing wars and terror attacks. Now, for better or worse, the debate is upon us.
It is worth keeping some history in mind as we decide whether to reject the posture that the United States has maintained abroad for more than half a century.
*****
President Obama hoped to end the wars he had inherited in 2008. Instead, he launched America’s third war in Iraq, ramped up our deployments in Afghanistan, expanded by an order of magnitude our campaign of counter-terrorist assassination and ordered an air campaign against the Libyan government. He deployed warships near China’s man-made islands and began redeploying American forces to a frightened Eastern Europe. Reality, not ideology, overcame his principled reluctance to exerting American power.
The choice between global engagement and America First is bogus. As in the last century, our choice is whether to lead wisely, firmly and usually peacefully while we can, or to send men and women into harm’s way belatedly and bloodily when we must. Let us hope that the new president comes to understand that we need the “big stick” not “to make America great again,” but to keep a peace that is precious, fragile and worth protecting.
Nope.That's a common view. I've heard it a lot as a professor, usually from white working-class students, and sometimes ethnic minorities who want more spending on domestic social programs.
Let the other countries around the world find their own way to democracy. It's not our job. Our job is #MAGA. Straight up.
Since World War II, U.S. grand strategy has been shaped by two major schools of thought. https://t.co/mdCePwNtYr
— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) January 23, 2017
The distinctively American populism Trump espouses is rooted in the thought and culture of the country’s first populist president, Andrew Jackson. For Jacksonians—who formed the core of Trump’s passionately supportive base—the United States is not a political entity created and defined by a set of intellectual propositions rooted in the Enlightenment and oriented toward the fulfillment of a universal mission. Rather, it is the nation-state of the American people, and its chief business lies at home. Jacksonians see American exceptionalism not as a function of the universal appeal of American ideas, or even as a function of a unique American vocation to transform the world, but rather as rooted in the country’s singular commitment to the equality and dignity of individual American citizens. The role of the U.S. government, Jacksonians believe, is to fulfill the country’s destiny by looking after the physical security and economic well-being of the American people in their national home—and to do that while interfering as little as possible with the individual freedom that makes the country unique.RTWT.
Jacksonian populism is only intermittently concerned with foreign policy, and indeed it is only intermittently engaged with politics more generally. It took a particular combination of forces and trends to mobilize it this election cycle, and most of those were domestically focused. In seeking to explain the Jacksonian surge, commentators have looked to factors such as wage stagnation, the loss of good jobs for unskilled workers, the hollowing out of civic life, a rise in drug use—conditions many associate with life in blighted inner cities that have spread across much of the country. But this is a partial and incomplete view. Identity and culture have historically played a major role in American politics, and 2016 was no exception. Jacksonian America felt itself to be under siege, with its values under attack and its future under threat. Trump—flawed as many Jacksonians themselves believed him to be—seemed the only candidate willing to help fight for its survival.
For Jacksonian America, certain events galvanize intense interest and political engagement, however brief. One of these is war; when an enemy attacks, Jacksonians spring to the country’s defense. The most powerful driver of Jacksonian political engagement in domestic politics, similarly, is the perception that Jacksonians are being attacked by internal enemies, such as an elite cabal or immigrants from different backgrounds. Jacksonians worry about the U.S. government being taken over by malevolent forces bent on transforming the United States’ essential character. They are not obsessed with corruption, seeing it as an ineradicable part of politics. But they care deeply about what they see as perversion—when politicians try to use the government to oppress the people rather than protect them. And that is what many Jacksonians came to feel was happening in recent years, with powerful forces in the American elite, including the political establishments of both major parties, in cahoots against them.
Many Jacksonians came to believe that the American establishment was no longer reliably patriotic, with “patriotism” defined as an instinctive loyalty to the well-being and values of Jacksonian America. And they were not wholly wrong, by their lights. Many Americans with cosmopolitan sympathies see their main ethical imperative as working for the betterment of humanity in general. Jacksonians locate their moral community closer to home, in fellow citizens who share a common national bond. If the cosmopolitans see Jacksonians as backward and chauvinistic, Jacksonians return the favor by seeing the cosmopolitan elite as near treasonous—people who think it is morally questionable to put their own country, and its citizens, first.
Jacksonian distrust of elite patriotism has been increased by the country’s selective embrace of identity politics in recent decades. The contemporary American scene is filled with civic, political, and academic movements celebrating various ethnic, racial, gender, and religious identities. Elites have gradually welcomed demands for cultural recognition by African Americans, Hispanics, women, the LGBTQ community, Native Americans, Muslim Americans. Yet the situation is more complex for most Jacksonians, who don’t see themselves as fitting neatly into any of those categories...
A #shocking scene in Placerita Canyon as a teen's car is washed away in fast moving water. More video & hear from witnesses at 11pm @ABC7 pic.twitter.com/L1O2tnbtcx— Leanne Suter (@abc7leanne) January 23, 2017
WATCH: Rain creates spectacular waterfall in Dana Point https://t.co/hHHOA22P5F pic.twitter.com/xjHNBUN7rY— ABC7 Eyewitness News (@ABC7) January 23, 2017
The third in a series of powerful winter storms unleashed a deluge in Southern California on Sunday, flooding numerous roads and freeways, setting new rainfall records and stranding some in dangerously rising waters.Keep reading.
Forecasters had predicted this storm would be the strongest and several years, and it didn't disappoint. While earlier storms produced periods of heavy showers, this one delivered several hours of sustained pounding rain, with damaging results.
Coastal areas of Los Angeles County were among the hardest hit, with Long Beach Airport setting a new all-time rainfall record, 3.87 inches. The intense rain was too much for local roads. Sunday afternoon, both the 110 Freeway in Carson and the 710 Freeway in Long Beach were shutdown due to extreme flooding that left cars stranded like islands in a lake.
In Long Beach and surrounding communities, dozens of intersections were flooded and some residents reported their parked cars were damaged as the rainwater kept rising. Across the region, several people were rescued from their cars and thousands lost power.
Brett Albright, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s office in San Diego, said the storm dumped as much as four inches of rain in some places.
“Today was very intense,” said Albright. “It’s not a normal event. It was definitely a culmination of the perfect circumstances: We had a very intense atmospheric river with a lot of moisture and an area of lift in the atmosphere right over coastal Los Angeles and Orange counties. It forced all of that moisture out.”
“It’s not often we see higher rainfall totals on the coast than in the mountains,” he said.
Southern California has been mired by a 5-year-drought. But this storm is part of a larger shift toward wetter conditions that began last fall. Since October 1, downtown L.A. has received more than 13 inches of rain -- 216% of normal rainfall for this period, which the National Weather Service said was 6.26 inches.
Officials said much of the Southland remains in drought, although recent storms are helping...
#WomensMarchLA after you've stamped your foot, shouted expletives, posted tweets with the new Iphone-now time for wine & TV with the 5 cats. pic.twitter.com/Yt553mz26m
— BenGarrison Cartoons (@GrrrGraphics) January 22, 2017
Will you take the Leftist #Unity Pledge? #solidarity #1u
— Workers World (@workersworld) January 22, 2017
"We'll be the right's worst enemy, not our own" pic.twitter.com/tFu2XEhZxM
THANK GOD WE LIVE IN A TIME WHERE SOMEONE IS WILLING TO PUBLICLY PUNCH RICHARD SPENCER IN THE FACE
— T. Fivek (@fivek) January 23, 2017
FYI, if you know who the Nazi-punching hero is, keep your mouth shut. pic.twitter.com/PakYhOoqZn
— Still With Her (@feistybunnygirl) January 23, 2017
Whether you agree or disagree with punching Spencer, let's try not to frame Nazism as merely a "different opinion." (1/3)
— Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) January 22, 2017
Libertarianism is a "different opinion." Nazism is an ideology of genocide; inimical to (and corrosive of) pluralist values. (2/3)
— Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) January 22, 2017
And it is not so obvious to me that "freedom of speech" requires treating Nazis as legitimate participants in public discourse. (3/3)
— Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) January 22, 2017
Neo-nazi Richard Spencer got punched—you can thank the Black Bloc. #IntelGroup https://t.co/raEkcy0h5Y
— #J20 (@Delo_Taylor) January 22, 2017
Joshua Tree, it's like the Old West out here. #MAGA pic.twitter.com/tNjIwBMQzJ— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) January 21, 2017
We make the terror. pic.twitter.com/VpChwGOSMj
— House of Cards (@HouseofCards) January 20, 2017
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) January 20, 2017
— ≠The Frog God≠ (@FrogGod14) January 20, 2017
National Parks Service …. 👀https://t.co/J5mtu3Anit pic.twitter.com/0CjAGcBvqD— Hadas Gold (@Hadas_Gold) January 20, 2017
Leftist heads are exploding across the land. #Inauguration #DonaldTrump #MAGA
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) January 20, 2017
A Palm Beach pastor is stopping traffic in DC with custom Trump-mobile https://t.co/TIm4hQvOJz pic.twitter.com/yBE385Ynfc
— AJC (@ajc) January 19, 2017
Officers deployed chemical spray as Trump supporters, opponents clashed outside "DeploraBall" in D.C. https://t.co/S18JtKk7IN— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) January 20, 2017
Clashes in United States Capitol between antifascists, police, and #Trump supporters the night before presidential #inauguration #disruptj20 pic.twitter.com/YS3bRR1ikz
— Unicorn Riot (@UR_Ninja) January 20, 2017
Protestors: "We refuse a fascist America " pic.twitter.com/yOi08JjFyj
— Clarence Williams (@nu1wcf) January 20, 2017
Anti-Trump protesters jeered and screamed at supporters of the president-elect outside the “DeploraBall” at the National Press Club on Thursday night, in one case throwing an object that struck a counterprotester in the head.RTWT.
D.C. police closed the 1300 block of F Street NW to motor vehicles as hundreds of demonstrators filled the roadway. Some protesters raised their middle fingers and shouted obscenities and terms such as “racist” and Nazi” at those attending the celebratory ball on the eve of Trump’s inauguration.
A small group of protesters in hoods and black masks set a fire in the center of the street. Another fire was set in a trash can. A different group used a floodlight and stencil to project the phrases “Bragging about Grabbing a Woman’s Genitals” and “Impeach the Predatory President” onto the side of the Press Club building. Others inflated a 15-foot-tall white elephant with a banner attached that said “racism.”
Officers directed chemical spray at the crowd multiple times, starting around 9 p.m., after protesters began throwing trash at Trump supporters who were leaving the building. During an earlier clash, a man was struck in the back of the head by a thrown object.
About a half-dozen D.C. police officers surrounded him and escorted him behind police lines...
A New Dawn, A New Don https://t.co/sFY6nCXFsH #SteynOnAmerica #TheMarkSteynShow pic.twitter.com/68LgPw34Hx
— Mark Steyn (@MarkSteynOnline) January 20, 2017
Photo of the Decade, right here pic.twitter.com/yC7EqDf9zy
— The H2 (@TheH2) January 20, 2017
Now this is rare. They match. pic.twitter.com/AKqiYouMWC
— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) January 20, 2017
Arriving in Washington DC with my family. A very special moment! #MAGA #Inauguration2017 pic.twitter.com/whZxJdFiQ3— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) January 19, 2017
Democrats in the Wilderness https://t.co/EH0W3PkpDl via @IsaacDovere in @POLITICOMag pic.twitter.com/EPv1UbFra4
— POLITICO (@politico) January 19, 2017
Standing with some 30,000 people in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia the night before the election watching Hillary Clinton speak, exhausted aides were already worrying about what would come next. They expected her to win, of course, but they knew President Clinton was going to get thrashed in the 2018 midterms—the races were tilted in Republicans’ favor, and that’s when they thought the backlash would really hit. Many assumed she’d be a one-term president. They figured she’d get a primary challenge. Some of them had already started gaming out names for who it would be.Still more.
“Last night I stood at your doorstep / Trying to figure out what went wrong,” Bruce Springsteen sang quietly to the crowd in what he called “a prayer for post-election.” “It’s gonna be a long walk home.”
What happened the next night shocked even the most pessimistic Democrats. But in another sense, it was the reckoning the party had been expecting for years. They were counting on a Clinton win to paper over a deeper rot they’ve been worrying about—and to buy them some time to start coming up with answers. In other words, it wasn’t just Donald Trump. Or the Russians. Or James Comey. Or all the problems with how Clinton and her aides ran the campaign. Win or lose, Democrats were facing an existential crisis in the years ahead—the result of years of complacency, ignoring the withering of the grass roots and the state parties, sitting by as Republicans racked up local win after local win.
“The patient,” says Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, “was clearly already sick.”
As Trump takes over the GOP and starts remaking its new identity as a nationalist, populist party, creating a new political pole in American politics for the first time in generations, all eyes are on the Democrats.
How will they confront a suddenly awakened, and galvanized, white majority? What’s to stop Trump from doing whatever he wants? Who’s going to pull a coherent new vision together? Worried liberals are watching with trepidation, fearful that Trump is just the beginning of worse to come, desperate for a comeback strategy that can work.
What’s clear from interviews with several dozen top Democratic politicians and operatives at all levels, however, is that there is no comeback strategy—just a collection of half-formed ideas, all of them challenged by reality. And for whatever scheme they come up with, Democrats don’t even have a flag-carrier. Barack Obama? He doesn’t want the job. Hillary Clinton? Too damaged. Bernie Sanders? Too socialist. Joe Biden? Too tied to Obama. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer? Too Washington. Elizabeth Warren? Maybe. And all of them old, old, old.
The Democrats’ desolation is staggering. But part of the problem is that it’s easy to point to signs that maybe things aren’t so bad. After all, Clinton did beat Trump by 2.8 million votes, Obama’s approval rating is nearly 60 percent, polls show Democrats way ahead of the GOP on many issues and demographics suggest that gap will only grow. But they are stuck in the minority in Congress with no end in sight, have only 16 governors left and face 32 state legislatures fully under GOP control. Their top leaders in the House are all over 70. Their top leaders in the Senate are all over 60. Under Obama, Democrats have lost 1,034 seats at the state and federal level—there’s no bench, no bench for a bench, virtually no one able to speak for the party as a whole.
“The fact that our job should be easier just shows how poorly we’re doing the job,” says Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton, an Iraq War veteran seen as one of the party’s rising stars.There are now fewer than 700 days until Election Day 2018, as internal memos circulating among Democratic strategists point out with alarm. They differ in their prescriptions, but all boil down to the same inconvenient truth: If Republicans dominate the 2018 midterms, they will control the Senate (and with it, the Supreme Court) for years, and they will draw district lines in states that will lock in majorities in the House and across state capitals, killing the next generation of Democrats in the crib, setting up the GOP for an even more dominant 2020 and beyond.
Most doubt Democrats have the stamina or the stomach for the kind of cohesive resistance that Republicans perfected over the years. In their guts, they want to say yes to government doing things, and they’re already getting drawn in by promises to work with Trump and the Republican majorities. They’re heading into the next elections with their brains scrambled by Trump’s win, side-eyeing one another over who’s going to sell out the rest, nervous the incoming president will keep outmaneuvering them in the media and throw up more targets than they could ever hope to shoot at—and all of this from an election that was supposed to cement their claim on the future.
Some thinking has started to take shape. Obama is quickly reformatting his post-presidency to have a more political bent than he had planned. Vice President Joe Biden is beginning to structure his own thoughts on mentoring and guiding rising Democrats. (No one seems to be waiting to hear from Clinton.) At the law office of former Attorney General Eric Holder, which is serving as the base for the redistricting reform project he is heading for Obama, they’re getting swarmed with interest and checks. At the Democratic Governors Association, all of a sudden looking like the headquarters of the resistance, they’re sorting through a spike in interested candidates. And everyone from Obama on down is talking about going local, focusing on the kinds of small races and party-building activities Republicans have been dominating for cycle after cycle.
But all that took decades, and Democrats have no time. What are they going to do next? There hasn’t been an American political party in worse shape in living memory. And there may never have been a party less ready to confront it.
“We’re at a space shuttle moment,” says Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, who is widely expected to run statewide soon in Georgia.
“The most vulnerable time for the space shuttle is when it re-enters the environment, so that when it comes back into the environment it doesn’t blow up. The tiles need to be tight. I’m concerned about the tightness of the tiles on the space shuttle right now. We have to get through this heat.”
With the amount of people who are disgusted by him, what makes him qualified to be our president? SOMEBODY ASSASSINATE HIM BEFORE TOMORROW!!— Tracy (@tracypickerill) January 19, 2017
HEy @DenverPolice maybe you should have a word with @tracypickerill . pic.twitter.com/Z07Unyc542
— JP Brown (@JPB209) January 19, 2017
BEYOND EVIL! #CNN assassinating Trump could keep Obama in power! https://t.co/w5fQGHUKi9 #Trump45 @realDonaldTrump @LouDobbs @seanhannity
— Lori Hendry (@Lrihendry) January 19, 2017
Trump is an American Hitler. Ppl in the streets 2nite are standing on the right side of history. #TruthTeller #heroes #NoFascistUSA #FloodDC pic.twitter.com/IXauEo0kQL
— #NoFascistUSA (@RefuseFascism) January 18, 2017
"Democrats attract support from The Worst People in America ... and not by coincidence." https://t.co/O73jFLuGqV pic.twitter.com/o4LycjOEak
— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) January 19, 2017
Democrats attract support from The Worst People in America — selfish and dishonest people, criminals and perverts — and not by coincidence. The Democrat Party’s policy agenda and rhetoric are deliberately designed to appeal to the worst impulses of the vile dregs of humanity...Keep reading.
Another transfer of power happening tomorrow? The Twitter accounts. here’s a peak into how it’s happening via @MorningTech pic.twitter.com/eb836boGPZ
— Hadas Gold (@Hadas_Gold) January 19, 2017
“Why Feminism Wants to Dismantle the Family (long)” — Nikita Coulombe https://t.co/Ds1arZBOUX pic.twitter.com/nHfKow5FUy
— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) January 18, 2017
This woman -> @NikitaCoulombe <- should have THOUSANDS of followers.
— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) January 18, 2017
Maybe everyone that is never Trump will find this helpful. pic.twitter.com/FomzdYzhgO
— Russian Hotties (@hottiesfortrump) January 17, 2017
.@MelissaTweets Image from today's Obama #PressConference: 'All hail oh great one!' pic.twitter.com/wMBSja2BkV
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) January 18, 2017
Putin: Trump attackers 'worse than prostitutes' https://t.co/RCpieZQvEy pic.twitter.com/JtGHj4rDZY
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) January 17, 2017
Vladimir Putin: 'our prostitutes are the best in the world, but I doubt Donald Trump would fall for them' https://t.co/KOXGkXCQvE
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) January 17, 2017
Kendall Jenner steals the Kardashian spotlight with a racy bikini selfie https://t.co/MwuYrtXJ0X pic.twitter.com/7qejcfphQH
— Daily Mail Celebrity (@DailyMailCeleb) January 15, 2017
Writing my inaugural address at the Winter White House, Mar-a-Lago, three weeks ago. Looking forward to Friday. #Inauguration pic.twitter.com/S701FdTCQu
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 18, 2017
#fakenews #FakePolls Left lies! #Democrats Lost! #MediaLost #SoreLoser #Mediasaurus #CNN #BenGarrison #Cartoons https://t.co/Oj98iIxEAZ pic.twitter.com/RpHMxzARma
— BenGarrison Cartoons (@GrrrGraphics) January 18, 2017
Has @lindsaylohan converted to Islam? Star’s social media activity sparks speculation about her faithhttps://t.co/jsIwX8NiLq
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) January 17, 2017
Robert Spencer in The Hill: Lindsay Lohan may have made her worst life choice yet https://t.co/BtZNQU2E67 pic.twitter.com/ME49uMDe7n
— Robert Spencer (@jihadwatchRS) January 18, 2017
Why Lindsay Lohan Is a Muslim Now: Understanding 21st-Century ‘Oikophobia’ https://t.co/k5SE2KvGfq pic.twitter.com/yDRbYiNzFf
— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) January 18, 2017
Lindsay Lohan is a drug-addled celebrity dimwit from a broken home who was pushed into show business as a child. Like so many other former child stars produced by the Disney movie/cable-TV fame factory — including Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus — Lohan’s young adulthood seemed to be a constant trainwreck of public shame, played out in tabloid headlines.RTWT.
Lots of teenagers who aren’t rich, famous and beautiful struggle with similar problems — drugs, alcohol, sexual promiscuity, mental illness — but we never read headlines about those troubled youth unless and until they commit some horrible crime. Ordinary adolescent trauma cases don’t fascinate us the way the Troubled Starlet does, because the celebrity trainwreck is so ostentatiously blessed with everything our popular culture values — youth, wealth, beauty and fame.
Here was Lindsay Lohan, who had captured America’s hearts as a wholesome freckle-faced girl in Disney’s 1998 remake of The Parent Trap and who, at age 18, became one of the most promising young actresses in Hollywood when she starred in the hit comedy Mean Girls. She had everything in the world going for her, it seemed, but by the time she was 21, her career and personal life were in disarray. She broke up with her boyfriend, That ’70s Show star Wilmer Valderrama, her movies flopped, and her substance-abuse problems escalated to the point that directors were no longer willing to work with her. Eventually, as it became obvious that she would probably never work again as an actress, the tabloids lost interest in Lindsay Lohan, and her brief stint in a “reality TV” show on Oprah’s network fizzled out in 2014, inspiring me to comment:It’s wrong to say that Lindsay Lohan ever had a drug and alcohol problem. No, Lindsay Lohan had a Lindsay Lohan problem.
Wonderful (aka 'great') read by @ktumulty on how Trump saw his moment coming. HIs first thought: Brand it! https://t.co/OcJIoxsGzH— Margaret Sullivan (@Sulliview) January 18, 2017
“Make America Great Again.”Of course. Democrats "slam" everything. They're so hateful.
The four words that would help propel Donald Trump to the White House were an inspiration born years before, when hardly anyone but Trump himself could imagine him taking the oath of office as the 45th president of the United States.
It happened on Nov. 7, 2012, the day after Mitt Romney lost what had been presumed to be a winnable race against President Obama. Republicans were spiraling into an identity crisis, one that had some wondering whether a GOP president would ever sit in the Oval Office again.
But on the 26th floor of a golden Manhattan tower that bears his name, Trump was coming to the conclusion that his own moment was at hand.
And in typical fashion, the first thing he thought about was how to brand it.
One after another, phrases popped into his head. “We Will Make America Great.” That one did not have the right ring. Then, “Make America Great.” But that sounded like a slight to the country.
And then, it hit him: “Make America Great Again.”
“I said, ‘That is so good.’ I wrote it down,” Trump recalled in an interview. “I went to my lawyers. I have a lot of lawyers in-house. We have many lawyers. I have got guys that handle this stuff. I said, ‘See if you can have this registered and trademarked.’ ”
Five days later, Trump signed an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, in which he asked for exclusive rights to use “Make America Great Again” for “political action committee services, namely, promoting public awareness of political issues and fundraising in the field of politics.” He enclosed a $325 registration fee.
His was a vision that ran against the conventional wisdom of the time — in fact, it was “much the opposite,” Trump said.
“I felt that jobs were hurting,” he said. “I looked at the many types of illness our country had, and whether it’s at the border, whether it’s security, whether it’s law and order or lack of law and order. Then, of course, you get to trade, and I said to myself, ‘What would be good?’ I was sitting at my desk, where I am right now, and I said, ‘Make America Great Again.’ ”
Democrats slammed it.
To save itself, the Republican establishment was convinced, the GOP would have to sand off its edges, become kinder and more inclusive. “Make America Great Again” was divisive and backward-looking. It made no nod to diversity or civility or progress.
It sounded like a death wish.
But Trump had seen something different in the country, and in the daily lives of its struggling citizens...
#Democrats aren't ready for the #Trump Era: https://t.co/H427TQs0nq
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) January 18, 2017
British PM #TheresaMay puts curbing immigration at heart of 12-point plan for leaving #EU. https://t.co/ohGPI4tN7M
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) January 17, 2017
"Ready as soon as UK is..."
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) January 17, 2017
How Europe's leaders reacted to Theresa May's Brexit speech https://t.co/p58WmpAP4R
As Theresa May set out her 12-point plan for #Brexit, she vowed to take control of the number of foreigners coming to Europe #MATTcartoons pic.twitter.com/b8GPW7qQzl
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) January 17, 2017
Wednesday's @Telegraph front page: pic.twitter.com/5VAGOvS6ua
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) January 17, 2017
"Sympathy for the Devil "
Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit "AND THE ROLE OF EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN WILL BE PLAYED BY…: Liberals’ Knives Come Out for Nate Silver After His Model Points to a Trump Victory..."
R.S. McCain, "'Jews Are Dead, Hamas Is Happy, and Podhoretz Has Got His Rage On ..."
Ace, "Georgia Shooter's Father Berated Him as a "Sissy" and Bought Him an AR-15 to 'Toughen Him Up'..."Free Beacon..., "Kamala Harris, the ‘Candidate of Change,’ Copies Sections of Her Policy Page Directly From Biden's Platform..."