RIP!

^[1]2,294 words

Last week was deliciously bad for the Democrats. Utterly humiliated and reduced to impotent rage, they have been slammed with one major loss or crisis after another. Are we witnessing the self-destruction of a political party? Are the Democrats coming apart at the seams? Yes to both.

The results of the Iowa caucus are still in doubt due – among other things – to the failure of an app designed to report final vote tallies for precincts. It turned out that the app was reporting only “partial data” from what had been recorded. This left the results of the vote uncertain, and the head of the Democratic National Committee, Tom Perez, has now called for Iowa precincts to be recanvassed. But things just got worse and worse for the Democrats as reporters and analysts began exploring exactly what went wrong with the app.

Appearing on CBS News ^[2], CNET senior producer Dan Patterson called the app “an amateur, slapdash job.” On analysis, it was found that it contained code clearly copied and pasted from other applications. Some of the code was so sloppy it included email addresses and links to personal websites. Most disturbing of all, the app was found to be sending data to IP addresses that couldn’t be identified. Said Patterson, “The security of your vote and the tally was being sent to unknown locations.” Had this been a Republican app, we can be sure that the media and the Democrats would have seen Putin’s fingerprints all over those IP addresses. Patterson summed things up by saying “there was no security protocol.”

Speaking to reporters, President Trump called the caucus results “fried,” and stated, “They couldn’t even take a simple tabulation and they’re telling you how to run the country and how to run health care.” Indeed. The Iowa debacle is incredibly embarrassing for a party whose leading candidates want to establish a single-payer government-run health care system and enact a “Green New Deal” that would dramatically overhaul our economy and impact the lives of all working Americans. With ambitions like those, you need to at least seem competent. The Democrats couldn’t run a lemonade stand, let alone grasp the economic principles behind it.

Some news outlets have refused to report the results of the caucus until the recanvass takes place (if it even does). Others, however, have claimed Mayor Pete Buttplug the winner. And here we arrive at another Democrat catastrophe in the making, for this claim is almost certainly a lie. In fact, according to the results we have so far, Bernie Sanders got more votes than Buttigieg in the first and second rounds of voting. Both Sanders and Buttigieg have declared themselves the winner of the caucus, but some legacy media outlets like CBS are now declaring them tied, each with 26.1% of the vote. Based on polling data, this will likely shift in Sanders’s favor if there is a recanvass. Polling in New Hampshire, where the next primary will take place, has Sanders leading with 25%, and Buttigieg in second place with 19%.

Democrats are terrified that Bernie will sweep the primaries and arrive at their Milwaukee convention as the nominee presumptive. This is, of course, how Trump won the Republican nomination. The Republicans played a fair game in their primaries, and Trump proved unstoppable. The party establishment was dead set against him, but had they nominated someone else they knew that voters would abandon them in disgust and indignation and hand the election to Hillary. So Plan B was to give the nomination to Trump, and then try to control him. Democrats had their own anti-establishment candidate to deal with in 2016, but they managed the situation rather differently: they simply rigged the primaries against Bernie.

Now, to everyone’s surprise, Bernie is back and bigger than ever. What to do? If things are rigged against him once more, Bernie’s supporters, who are a sizeable chunk of the Democrat base, will stay home on election day. It is unlikely that Bernie will once again play nice and endorse the establishment’s choice if he is cheated a second time. Perhaps he will even run as an independent and siphon off votes from the Democrats, thus guaranteeing Trump’s re-election. (After all, Sanders actually is an independent, not a Democrat.) However, choosing Bernie as the nominee is equally undesirable – for the simple reason that he is unelectable. In the midst of a major economic boom, America is unlikely to elect a New York Jewish Communist who would be 80 by the time he took the oath of office.

The obvious alternative is Buttigieg, who is more moderate, more manipulable, and more likable than any of the other Democrat candidates. And Buttigieg is well ahead of the competition. Biden’s share of Iowa was a mere 17.9%. This is another blow to the Dems, as conventional wisdom held that Joe was their most electable candidate. But voters are rejecting this senescent old perv: polling for New Hampshire also has him coming in third. As for Pocahontas, she garnered 15.8% in Iowa, finishing a surprising fifth place in Pocahontas County ^[3].

Hence the eagerness of some in the media to push the idea that Buttigieg is the real victor in Iowa. Push him hard, push him early, give him the momentum to push past Sanders. As I have predicted in an earlier essay ^[4], the Democrat convention in Milwaukee this summer is going to be as big a circus, or bigger, than the notorious ’68 convention. The factions and division, the jazz hands and pie in the sky, the bearded ladies and preferred pronouns will be on display for all to see. And normal Americans will collectively heave and reach for the Dramamine.

On the heels of the Iowa caucus, came the President’s State of the Union Address on February 4th – followed by the rip heard round the world. Everyone expected Trump to deliver an address filled with barbs aimed at the Democrats, who have spent the last several months wasting millions of taxpayer dollars on an incredibly lame case for impeachment. Trump and others have accurately referred to this as a farce: Everyone is aware that the Democrats have been out to impeach Trump since the day after the 2016 election, they have just been searching for an excuse.

But Trump’s State of the Union surprised everyone, and it was brilliantly strategized. The speech was entirely focused on good news, principally economic good news, and was devoid of political attacks. A lot of the good news was prefaced with “since my election,” thus setting up the typical post hoc ergo propter hoc argument that we have come to expect of all presidents. Nevertheless, the speech was remarkably upbeat and positive (though Trump himself seemed more subdued than usual, and seldom went off script). By taking the high road and focusing on his (claimed) accomplishments, Trump made the Democrats look petty and vindictive. Most of all, however, they looked ineffectual – since they have done absolutely nothing for the nation since Trump’s election, so focused have they been on taking out Orange Man.

Moreover, the speech was laden with traps for the Democrats. Republicans cheered and applauded at every piece of good news, every positive word said by the President. Democrats, throughout all of this, consistently sat on their hands, for they long ago adopted the position that they must oppose everything Trump says and does. As he remarked several years ago, “If I cured cancer tomorrow, the Democrats would say I am unfair to cancer.” Thus, the nation witnessed Democrats refusing to applaud a ten-year-old girl who received a scholarship from Trump to attend a better school; the lowest unemployment in 50 years; 7 million Americans lifted off food stamps; and the widow of a man killed by an illegal immigrant. Several Democrats refused to stand and applaud the elderly Tuskegee airman introduced by Trump. Almost all refused to applaud Trump’s declaration of a “blue-collar boom,” including the lowest unemployment rate for workers without a high school diploma ever recorded in US history. It was principally blue-collar Americans who handed the 2016 election to Donald Trump – yet apparently Democrats did not think it prudent to applaud the betterment of those voters.

In short, Trump brilliantly maneuvered the Democrats into looking bad – really bad. But no one could have predicted what would happen at the conclusion of the speech. As I watched, I found that I kept looking at Nancy Pelosi rather than at Trump. Throughout the speech she seemed tense and fidgety. Several times she began nervously shuffling through the pages of Trump’s text, which she had been handed earlier. “She looks like she’s about to meltdown,” I said to no one in particular. And moments later she did, standing and ripping Trump’s speech into several pieces. Without question, this is the most infantile and classless thing I have ever seen a major politician do. What was Pelosi thinking?

We tend to overestimate the intelligence of the people who rise to the top of the political system. We assume that those in charge may have the wrong ideas, but that they must be clever; they must have a strong sense of their own interests, and be capable of acting prudently. But the last several years have completely disproved this charitable assumption. If there was any lingering belief that there must be some method in the Democrats’ madness, that for all their nonsense they must at least be shrewd, this got ripped into pieces by Nancy Pelosi on February 4th. The optics of this are so bad, it is clear that Democrats have lost even the capacity to curb their worst impulses for the sake being image-conscious. This was the impotent rage I referred to at the outset of this piece. After the speech, C-SPAN opened its phone lines to viewer response, and later posted them. They were flooded with calls ^[5] denouncing Pelosi’s behavior is inappropriate, some callers swearing they would never vote for the Democrats again.

Bear in mind that Trump appeared before Congress as a defendant: at the time of the speech, his impeachment trial was ongoing in the Senate. Yet he spoke not a word about it. How galling it must have been to the Democrats to see Trump so confident in his acquittal he felt no need even to address the gorilla in the room (and, no, I am not referring to Maxine Waters). How galling it must have been to know that whatever half-truths there may have been in Trump’s speech, he nevertheless won the evening by positioning himself as the man of action who keeps on winning for the nation, while the do-nothing Democrats still try to undo the 2016 election.

To add injury to insult, the very day after the State of the Union, Trump was acquitted of all charges by the US senate. The Republicans have even promised that if they retake the House in November, the entire impeachment will be expunged from the Congressional Record, as if it had never even happened.

The Democrats now seem feeble, incompetent, and unhinged. They have gone so low and so radically silly they are now impossible to parody. How many times have they cried wolf? For two years the Democrats and the news media talked of little other than “Russia collusion.” And that certainly ended with a whimper – though most Democrats are not willing to let it go. During his closing statement in the impeachment trial, Adam Schiff issued the dire warning that “Trump could offer Alaska to the Russians in exchange for support in the next election ^[6].” While I am tempted to describe this as a new low in desperation that would, again, be too charitable. This isn’t a strategy; Schiff seems to really believe it.

At this point, the Democrats don’t seem to actually care if their bad behavior and kooky claims cost them the House, and this year’s Presidential election. In other words, they really are nuts. “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is not a joke, it’s a real thing. Everywhere one looks, at every level, the Democrats are freaking out and falling apart. What happened to Jeremy Corbin and Labour in the last UK general election has been heralded by American conservatives as a portent of things to come for the Democrats. Not surprisingly, Democrats have learned no lessons from it. They seem incapable of self-criticism. We saw this in the aftermath of the 2016 election, when they failed to ask themselves why they had lost and proceeded to deny that they even had!

The only hope for the Democrats is demographics, and they know it. The only way for this pathetic bunch of deranged fanatics and losers to seize power is by promising free stuff to non-whites and accelerating non-white immigration. Purveyors of a failed, bankrupt ideology, they have given up trying to persuade the people, and seek instead to replace the people with another people. This is a strategy so evil it defies belief. Thankfully, as of late it feels like the hand of the Almighty has reached out to smite the Democrats, to visit upon them one defeat and humiliation after another, exposing their incompetence and malignancy for all to see. The Democrats can be stopped – we are not yet at the demographic tipping point. It remains to be seen whether Trump will do enough in his second term to reverse those demographic trends, if they can be reversed. One thing is certain, Trump and the Republicans are not what we would like them to be, but they’re our last shot at saving the country. If they fail, then our future is almost certainly the partitioning of the country along racial and ethnic lines.

Speaking of the Almighty, the Democrats’ recent woes really are taking on biblical plague proportions. These things come in tens, don’t they? What’s next?

I’m hoping for boils.