Tag Archives: Ron Johnson

It Seems Democrats Are Blundering Badly (Again) with Their All-Abortion, All-the-Time Campaign

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Given the farcically erroneous, back-to-back double whammy of political polling in 2016 and 2020 there’s very little reason to get all sweaty and anuguished about the numbers here in 2022. But … if you self-identify as a liberal you are by that definition a morbid pessimist. You know full well that the grifters and fools have us outnumbered and that no matter what any poll says … things are bad and only getting worse. That’s just who we are.

That said, the current, mid-October trend lines are … all grim. Utter morons — here’s looking at you Herschel Walker — are within a “margin of error” of defeating Democrats who unlike them graduated from college, worked at serious jobs, can do basic math, study public policy and just generally don’t genuflect to a twice-impeached clown car insurrectionist or some dope who can’t remember how many children he has.

If by some miracle the polling holds up next month and the Democrats lose Senate seats they should have won — like in Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — there’s going to be some kind of reckoning over the strategy of running hard on “pro democracy” issues like abortion as opposed to counter-blitzing the usual, time-tested Republican hysteria-mongering over gas prices and “rampant, out-of-control crime.”

Last week’s New York Times-Siena College poll produced all sorts of gasping and wailing at the sight of suburban, mostly college-educated women, flooding away from Democrats and back to Republicans in reaction to (also) “out of control” inflation and … crime. While dismaying as it is every election cycle, I’ve lost to ability to find this surprising.

If you’re aware of and follow posts on NextDoor, the neighborhood site that some of us use to see who’s tossed hosta, paving bricks and used lumber out on the curb for whoever gets there first, you know that what’s indisputably rampant is crime hysteria. Every fire or police siren sets off a fresh torrent of panicked terror. Every Ring doorbell is picking up murky, horror-film scenes of “strange young men” casing the building … or maybe just looking for their dog, no one can say for sure.

I have perfectly nice neighbors who are astonished I’d dare go listen to music at the Cabooze or First Avenue. For them, downtown Minneapolis for anything other than a Sunday afternoon Vikings game is a “no-go zone”, based on what they see on TV, read on Facebook and hear from campaign ads. “Democracy” is not a life-or-death concern for them.

I can’t remember who or where, but I recall a barroom conversation where the (self-professed) social anthropologist broke down the three key phases of modern American adulthood. As he explained it, from our late teens to late 20s it’s all about getting laid. From our late 20s to late 50s it’s all about achieving status and financial security. And finally, in the years from career apogee until we drool in the Jell-O and turn out the lights for the last time, it’s all about protecting ourselves and what we’ve accumulated.

I’ve heard more elegant breakdowns of the chapters of life, but you have to admit he’s on to something.

Point being … it is a serious, fundamental mistake to think anything … and I by “anything” I mean issues as high-minded and mostly abstract as “democracy”, “Constitutional order” or “a woman’s right to choose” will ever drive a majority of older, white voters in the way $3.50 gasoline and constant, wall-to-wall fear-mongering over street crime will. And never mind nuances and the modulating statistics.

If Team Fear has the dials cranked to 11 shrieking 24-7 about “out of control” gas prices and carjackings, the general concern about a sub-culture of fat-assed authoritarians retracting basic 21st century rights — i.e. abortion — is pretty well reduced to a fringey, optional, luxury of a campaign matter. “Democracy” is something we can get back to and protect once crime and price increases are “brought under control.” (In the Times-Siena poll abortion has sunk to 5% as the “most important issue.”)

Maybe the polls will be wrong again this time. And maybe, unlike so many elections before, and to my ever-lasting amazement, worries that democratic basics are being cut apart at the seams will win the day. Maybe that fringey “democracy” issue will win out over the (nakedly implausible) assurance that packs of policy-averse right-wing politicians will somehow reduce the cost of tanking up the family Yukon or Escalade. And that they’ll flood the streets with so many (competent?) cops every black kid will think twice before trying to jack it out from under you.

Maybe that’ll happen. But being a liberal, all I see come January is the swearing in of Herschel Walker, J.D. Vance, Dr. Oz and Ron Johnson.

That NY Post Hunter Biden Story: Has Vladimir Lost His Mojo?

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I’m a little worried. Judging by this Rudy Giuliani/New York Post/Hunter Biden fiasco I’m thinking our old pal Vladimir is losing his touch.

I mean, by now I was expecting something a lot more sinister and sophisticated than, you know, another e-mail scandal. People, it’s 2020! Where are the deep fake videos? You know, a slick 4k mash-up with Joe Biden sitting down in his favorite pizza joint in front of an 18″ wood-fired pie of chopped up baby parts and a side dish of Satanic hot sauce?

Instead Vlad wheels out … Rudy Giuliani? The fearsome Russian FSB doesn’t understand that Giuliani is Functioning Adult America’s idea of a sad, over played punchline? As in: truly everyone’s babbling, drunk uncle? As “October surprises” goes, this is just sad. Pathetic even.

It gets really bad when (Murdoch-owned) FoxNews won’t touch a story — presented for your inflammation — by the (Murdoch-owned) Post. Why? Was it the combination of Giuliani’s and Steve Bannon’s and Alex Jones’ fingerprints all over the thing? Or did they have enough inside-the-family intel to know that the guy who wrote the thing demanded his name be taken off it … and that the by-line that finally ran belonged a poor woman who had never before had anything printed in the Post … and only learned her name was attached after it was published? I mean, good lord people. We need better practices nefariousness. This is amateurish.

Now, I’m guessing Vlad is saving his best moves for election day. Namely, as I’ve said before, a series of “ballot irregularities” in key states that aligns with Bill Barr’s judicial philosophy like the gears of a fine luxury sedan. (I’m pleased to see that Team Biden is stashing away cash for the court fight(s) over that inevitability.)

Bad as the Post-Hunter Biden story is, it was predictably inhaled by the right-wing bubble culture. I don’t know why I was surprised. I guess it’s because at this point I was assuming that even they would require something a bit more elegant in their flagrant con jobs. But no. If there was ever any doubt how ill-informed and sealed-off from wider culture the Trump base is, the last semblance evaporated with their whole-hearted, childishly credulous embrace of a story with so many gaping lapses of plausibility. (Here’s the best item-by-item take down I’ve read.)

Pundits and mainstream media oracles are slapping themselves on the back for recognizing … all the red flares shooting off a pile of absurdist bullshit … when they saw it lying right there on the sidewalk in front of them. Good for them, I guess. It is an improvement from 2016’s “even-handed” pursuit of Hillary’s e-mail “scandal.”

Two weeks is always an eternity in a presidential election cycle, and with the combination of Valdimir/Trump/Barr still in the game we remain very much in a kind of super duper, double secret form of eternity.

But I can’t help but wonder what Putin is thinking over there in his sealed up dacha. His investment in Trump paid off with four years of chaos and corruption, and all the international disgrace Trump has brought down on the United States. So it goes without saying he’d like a longer run. More of the same. The complete ruination of NATO for example … and on and on. But did Vlad factor in the full incompetence of Trump? The transparent buffoonery of Rudy Giuliani and the ineptitude of Republican politicians like Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, charged with … making something out of all the drunk uncle theories? I’m thinking, “no.” Being diabolical, Putin would have a hard time imagining such an broad cross-section of idiots.

So, eager as modern Republicans are to play his game, Vlad is going to have to come up with something more clever — by far — than the stale re-run he got out of Rudy and the Post.