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Watch Me Sound Off About Donald Trump on A&E

Last April I sat down with a TV crew to film an interview about the current resident of the White House, who was the subject of
Trump: The Saga of America’s Most Powerful Real Estate Baron, a biography by my father that was published back in 1985. Logically enough, the TV crew would have preferred to speak with my old man, but he’s only communicating via ouija board these days. So they settled for me, since I helped research the book and stay current as a political journalist.

Our interactions with Trump himself in the course of preparing that biography were limited–but interesting. They consisted of a combination of vague hand-waving about maybe cooperating, interspersed with threats from Trump himself, in his John Baron alter-ego, and from legendary hatchet man Roy Cohn. Really, there’s a certain historical cachet in having your family threatened by Cohn. Anyway, there was no doubt back then that Trump and company were nasty pieces of work. This was widely known among journalists of the day, and among the business and government types with whom Trump rubbed shoulders, and who differed from him less in substance than in style. He was more flamboyantly and openly an example of what anybody thriving in New York’s real estate and political environment was to some significant degree.

In fact, in the course of the interview I emphasized how Trump’s political style is very common for New York. It continues to this day in the festering corruption of the administrations of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. Blatant corruption is so commonplace that state residents don’t even seem that bothered by conduct that would be seen as outrageous almost anyplace else. Trump differs from other New York pols primarily in being seemingly less self-aware about image than the likes of Cuomo and De Blasio, who know to present themselves as idealists while selling favors; The Donald, by contrast, rubs his cynicism in people’s faces.

We’ll see how much of what I had to say made the final cut.

The results of that interview, along with interviews with many other people, have been rolled into Biography: The Trump Dynasty, airing for three nights, beginning tonight, February 25, 2019, on A&E.

It’s a Changing World, and It’s Probably Changing Into the 1930s

In the aftermath of a presidential election, the outcome of which some people predicted, but I’m not one of them, Dave Barry points to the ever-morphing nature of “serious” politicians’ political beliefs.

In Washington, Democrats who believed in a strong president wielding power via executive orders instantly exchange these deeply held convictions with Republicans who until Election Day at roughly 10 p.m. Eastern time believed fervently in filibusters and limited government.

That’s a point that happens to be both clever and true–politicians do seem to take to heart Groucho Marx’s maxim, “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”

But, as Matt Welch writes over at Reason, those “others” are sounding awfully familiar. With nationalism and populism rising across America, Europe, and beyond, the ideological center of gravity is shifting in a familiar–and frightening direction.

In the post-neoliberal era, parties of the left are going hard democrat-socialist (think Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn), while parties of the right increasingly adopt the welfare-state nationalism of Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, and France’s ever-advancing Le Pen family. The areas around the center are as dead as the political careers of, well, Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush.

Shades of the 1930s! Everything old is new again, indeed–especially withdrawing inward, and looking for a strongman to reclaim imagined past glory by force of will. And by force of arms, if need be.

Not that the lost center was much of anything to mourn, but as elitist and warlike as it was, people from America to France to the Philippines seem to be rejecting it in favor of a rawer, more grassroots authoritarianism.

There may be an opening here for people favoring liberty and autonomy. But I suspect that most libertarian relief for the near future will be achieved outside of and despite government policy, not through the political system.

In the meantime, break out your copy of The Road to Serfdom. The insights in there, put on paper in reaction to another moment when faith in individualism and freedom was waning, seem strikingly current.

Gary Johnson’s Big Sin? ‘Poaching’ Votes from Hillary Clinton (and Sucky Media Savvy).

“Gary Johnson’s poll collapse is happening, as predicted,” trumpets the Washington Post‘s Philip Bump. “Gary Johnson flames out,” smirks Steven Shepard at Politico. “Right on Schedule, Gary Johnson’s Poll Numbers Are Crashing,” adds Ed Kilgore at New York magazine. It’s the most coverage the Libertarian presidential candidate has received since he couldn’t come up with the name of an international political leader he really digs, or since he stumbled on the name of the Syrian city of Aleppo during an abrupt topic change during an interview.

Which, come to think of it, may have something to do with those dropping poll numbers.

To be honest, Johnson makes some of his own trouble. As is frequently and correctly pointed out, he’s not quick on his feet in interviews, he’s awkward before a camera, and he comes off as a bit eccentric. When he stumbles, he doesn’t easily recover. But these qualities were treated as largely positive qualities early on, when it looked like he would provide an alternative for Republican voters disgusted with Trump. “Johnson is a bit of an oddball. But he’s an endearing one, which is more than we can say about Trump and Clinton, two very strange people in different ways,” CBS News’s Will Rahn pointed out in June. Rahn also noted that the Libertarians had “a lot of executive experience for any ticket, let alone a third-party one.”

I think a more serious problem is that Johnson often comes off as if he wants everybody to like him. That might be a good quality in your neighbor, but it’s a dangerous vulnerability in a political candidate sparring with those journalists who are just doing their jobs–let alone hostile interviewers. If you view the people with microphones as the adversaries they are rather than buddies, you’re going to be better prepared for gotcha questions and out-of-context presentation of your comments.

Well, if you’re quick on your feet you will.

But Gary Johnson ran into another very serious “problem” not of his making: He started gathering up voters that Democrats and political forecasters expected to go to Hillary Clinton. “Democrats thought he would take from Trump,” Politico explained last month, “but polls show he’s attracting voters who like neither candidate.” The Hill added, “Democrats panicked by third-party candidates drawing support away from Hillary Clinton are ramping up their attacks against Gary Johnson.” In particular, he began pulling in up to a quarter of millennial voters–younger participants in the political process who might not only break away from the Democratic candidate, but establish long-term voting habits favoring another political party.

Since then, Johnson’s portrayal in the national media has been almost exclusively as a dummy, rather than an “endearing” former two-term governor with very different policy proposals from his Republican and Democratic rivals. You’ve heard an awful lot about his failure to name an international political leader he respects (that’s a gaffe? Why should he be a fan boy for Angela Merkel?), and almost nothing about him, say, polling higher than Hillary Clinton among military voters (the Christian Science Monitor did run a hand-wringing piece that managed to ask “why?” without talking to any actual troops).

But is this really a media pile-on? Maybe it’s journalists in a feeding frenzy, or being lazy, rather than series of a partisan attacks on a candidate who threatens their preferred contender.

But that’s not what some journalists who have held their own shit together see happening with their colleagues.

“The number of mainstream media reporters who are out there expressing their explicit opinions, that tend to be decisively pro-Hillary and anti-Trump, to me is scary,” commented Jim VandeHei, who co-founded Politico and is no longer with the publication.

The media is “not even trying to hide it anymore” in terms of political leanings noted an op-ed in The Hill by Joe Concha, one of the publication’s own media reporters.

“Journalists shower Hillary Clinton with campaign cash,” the Center for Public Integrity reported just last week.

And indeed, among the more interesting revelations (in a series of them) to come out of the Podesta emails published by Wikileaks has been the “Clinton campaign’s cozy press relationship,” as noted by The Intercept (there is a very good reason why so many journalists have fallen out of love with the transparency site). Clinton staffers discussed “friendly journalists” with whom they could place stories, wined and dined them at off-the-record parties, and signed off on articles about the campaign.

And that coziness does seem to have an impact. You’ll find plenty of discussion of the Aleppo gaffe. But just try to find media mentions of the British Parliament’s report last month condemning American-British-French military intervention in Libya in 2011, which it held responsible for “political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gaddafi regime weapons across the region and the growth of ISIL in North Africa.” Clinton, you’ll remember, was Secretary of State at the time with responsibility for U.S. foreign policy, including our part in that Libyan catastrophe.

And try to dig up a story or two outside the ideological or foreign press about the Clinton Foundation accepting donations from the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar after her State Department identified them as funders of ISIS.

Yes, Trump has (a few) media supporters too. Many of them are at Fox News which has several overt cheerleaders for the populist-nationalist candidate on its schedule. And yes, most journalists target the blustery Republican candidate while favoring Clinton. While he makes much of his own trouble, there’s no doubt who the majority of news people want to see in the White House.

And that leaves little room for anything but hostile coverage of a presidential candidate who challenges the overtly preferred candidate of the majority of journalists, and the favorite of a small minority, and who, frankly, kind of sucks at publicly fencing with interlocutors who are out for blood. Johnson is being skewered on camera and in print by reporters who are essentially operatives for his opponents in the election, and he’s pretty terrible at turning the tables on them.

Would any candidate be better in this position?

Any Libertarian nominee who started eating into Hillary Clinton’s presumed voting base would certainly have faced media hostility. But we can imagine candidates who would be faster on their feet in fielding surprise questions, more realistic about the inclinations on the journalists facing them, and more combative and energetic in responding to spin.

The problem comes in turning that imagination into an actual human being who wants to run for office. Johnson’s main opponents in seeking the Libertarian nomination this year were John McAfee, of tech and venture capital fame, and Austin Petersen, a libertarian activist and media entrepreneur.

McAfee is media savvy and cultivates his own image; the “crazy” persona he presents is at least partially intentional. I’m told by those who have interviewed him that he’s rather more serious and balanced in person. He might well have pursued some version of the down-the-middle strategy favored by Johnson-Weld, drawing votes from those who would otherwise have favored both Clinton and Trump. But charismatic and savvy as he is, his edgy image is only partially cultivated–he really is a “person of interest” in a murder in Belize, and he faced drunk-driving and firearms charges just last year. McAfee’s explanations may be perfectly truthful, but there’s no way that a hostile press would have passed up a chance to fill headlines about a strongly polling McAfee candidacy with the words “murder,” “drugs,” and “guns.”

Petersen doesn’t have the government or business credentials of Johnson or McAfee, but he does have media experience and polish. He would have likely run a different campaign, leaning toward the right with an eye to scooping up “never Trump” voters. To the extent that they’re sincere, the pro-life, conservatarian Petersen is what disappointed Republicans mean when they say they wish the LP would run a “real libertarian.” (That some of them then go and support a hawkish, authoritarian, ex-CIA, former Goldman Sachs mini-candidate–something of a larval Hillary Clinton–demonstrates the limits of that sincerity). It’s unlikely that he would have faced the same media hostility if he was gathering mostly never-Trump Republican voters, but it’s also unlikely that he would have made anything like Johnson’s headway among millennials and Sanders supporters.

The other contenders for the nomination were relative unknowns outside of the Libertarian Party. They came off as perfectly sincere activists devoted to the cause, but without much to grab the attention of people not already committed to the movement. Could one of them have risen to the occasion and molded a credible campaign that ventured into double-digit polling support–and then fended off a full assault by a hostile media? It’s possible, but none demonstrated that potential during the campaign for the nomination.

So yes, we can imagine a candidate for president better prepared than Gary Johnson to not only mount a serious run for the presidency but also to duel with hostile pundits. That candidate may well exist as a real person or multiple people. But it’s not apparent from the evidence that such a candidate actually sought to run in 2016.

But the Libertarian Party is going to need that sort of a candidate in the future as it seeks to build on this year’s high profile and make bigger waves in 2020 and beyond. If Johnson ultimately wins 5 percent or better of ballots, the LP qualifies for public funding from voluntary taxpayer checkoffs for the next general election. Given that the money is freely given, not coerced, the LP should seriously consider accepting what could be millions of dollars–and an enhanced opportunity to disrupt what will probably, again, be a contentious presidential campaign.

And given that the media has demonstrated its overwhelming pro-Democratic partisanship, and is highly unlikely to become more diverse in its views or less enthusiastic in its activism over the next four years, Libertarians (or any serious third-party candidates who threaten to “poach” donkey party votes) will need to be not just credible contenders for office, but accomplished sparring partners for their media opponents.

Election 2016 Mercifully Ends for Me! (See How I Voted.)

Arizona not only allows early voting, it actively encourages the practice with a registry where you can sign up to receive mail-in ballots in preference to trudging to a polling station on election day. My ballot arrived today, I promptly filled it out. And so I’ve entered my preferences, irrelevant though they may be, into the maw of the democratic machine for the hideous national election that would not end, 2016 edition.

At right, you’ll see a photograph of my presidential selection. Before you go telling me that I’ve broken the law, fuck you, no I haven’t, and I wouldn’t care if I had. Anyway, Arizona explicitly allows the practice of posting images of your own vote: “A voter who makes available an image of the voter’s own ballot by posting on the internet or in some other electronic medium is deemed to have consented to retransmittal of that image and that retransmittal does not constitute a violation of this section.”

Anyway, no surprise, I voted for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate for president. I consider the former two-term governor of New Mexico and somewhat squishy advocate of liberty to be the best qualified candidate for the office this year, as well as the most ideologically compatible with my own views. He’s also not evil, which is a major consideration in a mid-20th-century-ish campaign season when the Democratic Party is represented by Eva Peron without the charisma, and the Republicans are fronted by a less-stable Benito Mussolini.

Down-ballot, I selected Libertarians where available, Greens where not. I skipped those races (quite a few, since the state deliberately made it tougher for smaller political parties) where only Republicans and Democrats had candidates. Let me clarify that: I voted for no Republicans and no Democrats. Not one.

I think it’s time for those parties to die and make way for something that doesn’t stink up the joint.

I voted in favor of Prop. 205, a measure which would introduce imperfect but real improvements in marijuana laws, partially legalizing the stuff for people 21 years of age and older.

I voted against Prop. 206, a measure which would reduce job opportunities for new and unskilled workers by raising their cost to employers in the form of a hiked minimum wage. It would also dictate paid sick time practices, further raising the cost of hiring people.

Those are the high points.

As you can see, I didn’t throw my vote away on inferior contenders for public office.

Dear Trumpkins and Clintonistas, Your Candidates Are Evil

Choose the form of your destructor!

Corrupt-ilicious or tyrant-tastic?

As I write these words, the FBI is reportedly investigating, after an aborted earlier attempt, Hillary Clinton’s use of the Clinton Foundation to, essentially, peddle access and government positions to generous donors. The revelations are actually just the culmination of a long-festering pattern of behavior that has seen suspicious favors done for individuals and companies including UBS, Uranium One, and the Saudi government.

Her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, is busy trying to shrug off reports that his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, pocketed millions of illegal dollars in payments from a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party. Trump, famously, has a man-crush on the thuggish Russian strongman and has even gone so far as to deny Russian military designs on Ukraine after Putin seized Crimea. Or maybe the money is unrelated–after all, he praised North Korea’s ruthless dictator, Kim Jong Un and the Chinese government’s brutal suppression of protests at Tiananmen Square without obvious compensation. This is independent of Trump’s attack just yesterday on freedom of the press.

Oh, and both Trump and Clinton have very serious problems with free speech in general.

Let’s face it: These are two of the shittiest creatures to ever to crawl out from under a rock and scurry into American politics, which is saying something, considering that it’s not an industry that brings out the best in people. But even compared to the control freaks, Klansmen, and grifters who have long made their livings by seeking government office, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton bring an unprecedented degree of overt grasping corruption and explicit contempt for the rest of the human race to their quests for the vast powers of the U.S. presidency. It’s no stretch to say that they embody evil in a way that we rarely have so openly rubbed in our faces.

Choose the form of the destructor, indeed.

To their credit, a good many Americans have glanced at what the Republican and Democratic parties left on the carpet and immediately gagged at what they’d stepped in. Clinton and Trump have consistently scored record high unfavorable ratings with voters. But they went on to win the nominations of their respective political parties anyway, testifying to the sad shape of these two senile and creaky organizations. Since then, “a full 13 percent of Americans would rather have a meteor hit Earth than vote for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton,” according to pollsters.

And yet…I’m still hearing people say that we have to choose between the psychopath and the sociopath. We must choose the form of the destructor, because it’s irresponsible to vote third party/refuse to vote. They insist that Gary Johnson and Jill Stein can’t win the election (because you shouldn’t vote for them, I guess) and not voting makes you responsible for the the destructor who ultimately triumphs. We must embrace evil, or else the other evil will win.

I think Julian Assange of Wikileaks had it right when he said, “You’re asking me, do I prefer cholera or gonorrhea?” Neither for me, please.

Look, you can talk the inevitability of the two-party system all you like, but that doesn’t mean it has to be these two parties. In healthy democracies, political parties rise and fall. In recent years, Canada’s Reform Party competed with and then supplanted the Progressive Conservative Party before changing its name to “Conservative.” Before that, Britain’s Labour Party bumped the Liberal Party out of the ranks of the two dominant parties (though the displaced entity, now known as Liberal Democrats, hung on and is part of the current government as a junior partner to the Conservative Party). Even in the U.S. the Republican Party croaked the Whig Party in the 1850s and took its place. Political parties are private organizations. They live only so long as people see a need for them, and can be replaced when they do awful things like nominating evil people as their candidates for president.

Did I mention that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are both horrible human beings and that to pick between them is to choose different brands of malevolence?

Look, if you really just can’t get enough of corrupt-ilicious Hillary or find the Donald just tyrant-tastic, knock yourself out with your chosen destructor. Just don’t act astonished when the rest of us back away with a frozen look of horror on our faces.

Because we’re better than that. And we’re still trying to scrape your candidate off our shoes.

Trump (and Sanders) Damage Not Just America, But the Liberal Democracy Brand

Lee Kuan Yew

Lee Kuan Yew / Photo by U.S. Department of Defense

A few days ago, the editorial page of China’s Global Times basically pointed at America’s political system and laughed. Look at what the nagging democrats coughed up!

Big-mouthed, anti-traditional, abusively forthright, [Trump] is a perfect populist that could easily provoke the public. Despite candidates’ promises, Americans know elections cannot really change their lives. Then, why not support Trump and vent their spleen?

The rise of a racist in the US political arena worries the whole world. Usually, the tempo of the evolution of US politics can be predicted, while Trump’s ascent indicates all possibilities and unpredictability. He has even been called another Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler by some Western media.

Mussolini and Hitler came to power through elections, a heavy lesson for Western democracy. Now, most analysts believe the US election system will stop Trump from being president eventually. The process will be scary but not dangerous.

Even if Trump is simply a false alarm, the impact has already left a dent. The US faces the prospect of an institutional failure, which might be triggered by a growing mass of real-life problems.

Pundits immediately (and rightly) jumped on this, pointing out the flaws that the paper was ignoring in China’s own authoritarian system of government, which not only excludes public input but also suppresses dissent. “Of course, there are a couple of glaring lacunae in that argument,” noted the Washington Post‘s Simon Denyer. “The most obvious being the tyranny and mass insanity unleashed by Mao Zedong, who killed tens of millions of his own people, (as indeed Stalin did in the Soviet Union). But hey, that bit of history is officially glossed over here.”

And no matter the populist lunacy into which democracies descend, they’re pretty good at peaceful shifts in political leadership. Dictatorships are a bit clumsy at that whole transition of power thing.

But Denyer and other commenters missed the fact that the Global Times editorial wasn’t a one-off. It’s part of a much larger reconsideration of the principles of government by much of the world that hasn’t fully (or at all) adopted liberal democratic values.A lot of that “reconsideration” is self-serving twaddle by autocrats looking to retain power while granting their subjects sufficient access to prosperity that they don’t revolt. But there’s enough truth to the analysis of the West’s flaws and the growing political crisis in supposedly stable, established systems that editorials criticizing democracy can gain traction among educated people who are deciding on their own future path.

Similar criticism could also be directed at Bernie Sanders–a surging politician who would and should be the year’s astonishment if Americans weren’t flocking in even greater numbers to support an orange authoritarian narcissist. The Vermont socialist’s promises to loot prosperous Americans to support a ludicrous grab-bag of unaffordable goodies are excellent examples of a prevailing problem with western democracies that dominated attention before the emergence of an open thug on the U.S. scene.

In 2014’s The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State, John Micklethwait, then editor-in-chief of The Economist, and Adrian Woolridge, management editor of the same magazine, sketched the “revolution” in government through the nation state, the liberal state, and the welfare state. Published just two years ago, the book seems almost quaint as it discusses the crisis in which the modern welfare state finds itself–before the political eruptions of the last year which drove a populist thug to prominence in the Republican Party, an economically illiterate socialist to draw crowds of young Americans, a crazy Trotskyite to gain the leadership of Britain’s Labour Party, the surge of nationalist-populists in Germany, France… But though overshadowed since, the authors’ points about the crisis of the modern western political system remains valid. Describing the condition of Britain in the 1970s, they write, “Ever-bigger government meant ever-greater social dysfunction. Vested interests competed ever more viciously for their share of the pie.”

More importantly, those flaws have been picked up by those seeking an alternative–an alternative to western democracy, and also an alternative to loosening their own grip on power.

“When you have popular democracy, to win votes you have to give more. And to beat your opponents in the next election, you have to promise to give more away. So it is a never-ending process of auctions–and the cost, the debt being paid for by the next generation,” they quote Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew as commenting. Lee, who died last year, famously created an economically free and socially authoritarian city state that has limited  democratic input–and stiff penalties for too vigorously criticizing the powers-that-be.

Lee was listened to and is eagerly studied, partly because he tells many people what they want to hear, but also because even when his tightly controlled system suffers an economic setback, it still seems to be doing better than the much freer democracies of the West.

And his example has been adopted and touted elsewhere. At the China Executive Leadership Academy in Pudong (CELAP) which trains the country’s future government apparatchiks and considers models to take the massive country into the future “there are better places to look than gridlocked America–most notably Singapore.”

The Singapore model is also admired, write Micklethwait and Woolridge, in places including Russia, Dubai, and Rwanda.

So the Global Times editorial fits into the ongoing erosion and disparagement of the western model of liberal democracy–often on a very calculated and deliberate basis–by people considering what system of governance should take them into the future. Many of those people obviously want an authoritarian model that maintains their clout and privileges. But to the extent the established western democracies keep shitting the bed, the Lee Kuan Yews of the world will find an increasingly receptive audience among those who need a system that effectively allows them to get rich while protecting lives and property. Civil liberty…well, if it leads to Trump, maybe they’ll pass.

While critical of libertarianism–at least in quasi-anarchist form–Micklethwait and Woolridge call for a revival of classical liberal solutions which most people would recognize as libertarian. They want to see the state restrained and reduced in size, power devolved, and rights protected. They see that–convincingly I think–as reinvigorating liberal democracy and securing its continued existence where it is already established, as well as its status as a model for the rest of the world.

“It is time to put the ‘liberal’ back into ‘liberal democracy’: to persuade both voters and governments to accept restraints on the state’s natural tendency to overindulge itself.”

Yes, I think that’s convincing. But how to accomplish that is the trick. How do you convince people to rein it in when they’re reveling in the use of the state as a bludgeon (Trump voters) or a mugger-for-hire (Sanders supporters)? Because if they don’t limit themselves, the system will fall apart–and then the Lee Kuan Yews of the world will happily do the limiting for them.

With Clinton Campaign Collapsing, Brace Yourself for a Brown vs. Red Election

Offered, for your edification, this comment from Hillary Clinton’s campaign spokesman, Brian Fallon:

“It is alarming that the intelligence community IG, working with Republicans in Congress, continues to selectively leak materials in order to resurface the same allegations and try to hurt Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.”

The offended protest came in response to revelations from an inspector general for the intelligence community that some of the emails the presidential candidate stored on her home-cooked email server when she was secretary of state included “special access program” information. That’s the sort of super-secret label slapped on black projects and other we’d-tell-you-but-then-we’d-have-to-kill-you data.

I’m guessing that the latest details are a deliberate intelligence sector leak, but not necessarily as a gimme to Republicans. I have to think that the country’s spooks are pretty damned appalled at the prospect of a chief executive who cavalierly leaves sensitive data lying around her apartment rather than stored at the office as an attempted end-run around freedom of information requests. Slipping that nugget to the press is probably a shot at torpedoing Clinton’s candidacy and/or pressuring the Justice Department to prosecute, without regard for who else may benefit as a result.

I'm trying to pass one of my policies now. Anybody got some prune juice?

Bernie Sanders/Photo by Gage Skidmore

But the obvious beneficiaries include not just Republican presidential hopefuls, but also Bernie Sanders. The socialist from Vermont is the only serious remaining alternative for the Democratic nomination at a point in time when it’s really too late for anybody else to jump into the normal selection process with hope of getting the donkey party’s nod. He’s already leading Clinton in New Hampshire, competitive with her in Iowa, and gaining nationally. I’m not sufficiently versed on party bylaws to know if there’s still a chance of something being engineered at the convention (both major parties have democratized their procedures over the decades so that the process is far more grassroots-driven than in the past), but it would be exceedingly difficult to foist a top-down establishment pick on the party if Sanders shows up with the requisite delegates.

Would you believe it started as a Y-O-O-O-J joke?

Donald Trump/Photo by Gage Skidmore

With Donald Trump chewing up the scenery on the GOP side, there’s a very real chance of seeing two outsiders seize the major party nominations based on populist campaigns exploiting the collapse of establishment efforts. Sanders is a self-described socialist, while Trump is a personality-driven authoritarian centrist who stirs up nationalist sentiments while vilifying out groups–a fascist at least in the broad sense, if not a Mussolini fanboy.

That means America’s major political parties (which have effectively delegitimized competitors through the schools and media) are within a whisker of handing us a brown vs. red presidential race in the fall of 2016.

For what it’s worth, I recommend bourbon. Or Victory Gin, if you wait a year.

Between the devil and the deep blue Santorum

The list of presidential candidates over whom I’d prefer Barack Obama is a short one, indeed. I’ll admit that I never had high expectations for old Barry — honestly, how could anybody? In 2008, when he was running for the presidency for the first time, he was a TV-ready politico-academic dilettante with an obvious social-democratic view of the ideal relationship between individuals and the state — a good-looking guy who wanted to turn the U.S. into Holland, but was ill-equipped to do so. (But he’s well on his way to turning it into Greece! Bring on the retsina!)

But, at least, I hoped, he could nudge the U.S. away from its Bush-driven role as the bombs-and-waterboarding capital of the world, right? Maybe a little more peace and a little less security state. That would be a good thing.

Now, of course, we’re reading headlines about the widespread popularity of President Obama’s scheme for using drones to assassinate American citizens living abroad who have been accused (but not convicted) of terrorist ties.

Yeah. So much for that plan (I say as I nervously watch the sky).

But, even so, Obama remains … less horrendous than some people who want to be president. I’m looking at you, Rick Santorum, you liberty-hating, authoritarian freak. I mean, really … This gay-baiting, collectivist control-freak is now the leading contender (for the next five minutes) among the Republican faithful?

Well, sure. When campaigning against an incumbent president who favors an expanded role for the state in people’s lives, why not go with a guy who favors an expanded role for the state in people’s lives, but in a different way.

That’s choice, American-style!

Democracy didn’t look so good yesterday

Well, I tried keeping these two links open in adjacent browser tabs, but then they started beating on each other (and liking it — you never can tell about these media stories):

I really am happy to see Prop. 8 knocked down, and no, I really don’t give a shit about the “undemocratic” nature of a court voiding the hateful, anti-liberty will of the people. I believe in freedom and am willing to use democracy as a tool — or to push it aside as needed — in order to maintain and expand freedom and minimize the constraints placed on human action by the coercive power of the state.

My chastity belt is pinching my junk

Rick Santorum, when last he sucked off the public tit

As further support for my disdain for democracy, I point to the fact that Rick Santorum topped the polls in three states, yesterday. That’s Santorum who not only hates the chaps-and-flannel-wearers who prevailed in yesterday’s court decision against Prop. 8, but also the libertarians and fellow-travelers who were equal victors in that case. Santorum has openly denounced those of us who “have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues. You know, people should do whatever they want.”

And people voted for this intolerant, authoritarian tool.

So those two browser tabs were a double exercise in juxtaposition: bigotry vs. tolerance and democratic betrayal of liberty vs. antidemocratic support for it.

Interesting.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/calif-same-sex-marriage-ban-ruled-unconstitutional/2012/02/07/gIQAMNwkwQ_story.html?tid=pm_pop

Ron Paul polls strong as opponent to Obama

The latest CNN poll is out, including a variety of hypothetical matchups between potential GOP nominees and the sitting president. The strongest contender is … Rep. Ron Paul!

That’s right, in a what-if race between Barack Obama and Ron Paul, polling 1,034 Americans, the results come in at 52% for Obama and 45% for Paul. The next strongest candidate is (gag) religio-fascist Mike Huckabee at 8 points behind the president. Supposed favorite Mitt Romney trails by 11 points.

It’s way early yet, so take this poll with a grain of salt — although it taps the leading advocate of libertarian ideas in the Republican party as a serious contender.

A serious contender with the general public, that is. Among Republicans, Paul comes in with 10% support as a potential nominee, behind Huckabee at 16%, Trump, Romney and Palin. That still puts him in play, of course — and let’s see if the numbers move after this poll and today’s debate.