Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.
Mark Twain
Last week in this space I counseled calm, but then some right-wing loon tried to kill the Republican Party candidate and the entire Democratic Party began an all-out antidemocratic coup on its presumptive nominee and current president of the United States. Then, before what can only be described as a parade of surreal narcissistic fantasies at the Republican National Convention, the ticket absorbed a vehement proponent of a national abortion ban and one of the main architects of the dangerous Project 2025, who once called his running mate “America’s Hitler.” These events proved with nimble swiftness my influence on the vox populi continues its uninterrupted run of obsolescence.
And so… now what?
In a strange reflection of a distant Twilight Zone episode (pick any, they’re pretty much metaphorically the same), I wake up to rising poll numbers for President Joe Biden, despite the deluge of bad press and calls from inside his party and every middle-aged white guy with a Twitter account to drop out of the race. At the time of this writing, the rightfully lauded 538 election model shows Biden beating former president Donald Trump 56 out of 100 times in millions of statistical permutations and that as of mid-July the president is on track to win 276 electoral votes, which is more than the 270 needed to win the election. And, in case no one likes cold, objective data, I went to other poll-driven sources with less credentials and Biden is within four points of Florida and three in North Carolina, deep red states he lost in 2020, a few points down in swingy Arizona and Georgia, states he flipped from Republicans that year, and dead heats in the Rust Belt states, which, again, give hand him the election. All of them within the margin of error in a political environment that since 2018 Democrats have outperformed polling by six to 10 points.
So, why is the Democratic Party engaged in utter chaos and public disharmony 120 days out from an election (less than two months before early voting, which Dems dominate)?
There are two theories that I am floating for the hell of it.
One: There is something genuinely and seriously wrong with Biden, and Party insiders have only recently been privy to this. It cannot be the terrible debate performance, because according to the polls referenced above, that event has stabilized back to even.
Two: The donor class, the billionaires funding the campaign has frozen funds and the Party elites are tossing out 14-million primary voters’ wishes and a close race with an incumbent sitting on a solid economy to toss this race into a cauldron of uncertainty and a coming shit show at the Democratic National Convention for money. Less has been destroyed over the almighty dollar, but had they stood strong instead of running around like feckless amateurs for the past three weeks, the money would be there. Not to mention the ugliness of a major political party openly bowing to rich elites, especially the “working class” Democratic Party.
I have stated again, as an independent who has hitched his wagon to Democrats after the disastrously unconstitutional striking down of Roe v Wade in 2022 that this is a mistake. I will vote for anyone other than the Trump ticket but, again, must state emphatically that to change candidates – especially for one that is not the president – at this juncture is political suicide. I could be wrong, but since this Party has shown no backbone and seems in complete flux right now, who can seriously trust that they will make any decision that leads to victory with any modicum of confidence?
On the other side, the unabashed embrace of fascism by the Trump ticket by choosing J.D. Vance for its vice-presidential candidate is complete. Firstly, Vance is a charlatan, who in 2016, like most Republican sycophants (Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham), did an about face from calling Trump a dangerous madman to getting on the power train. He has also emphatically stated he would have pissed on the constitution on January 6 and handed the government over to the loser of that election, and, as stated, is on record as calling for the criminalization of abortion and banning of contraception in a complete Christian takeover of the Republic, which, again, is outlined in frightening detail by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 that I urge all Americans to at least become familiar with before entering a voting booth this November.
Of course it was Vance who advanced the outrageous notion that the Biden Administration was responsible for the attempted assignation of Trump last week, when the shooter was found to be an extremely vocal conservative who emerged from the Never Trump wing of the once important but now flaccid Nikki Haley movement to bring the Party back to the long-dead Reagan / Bush era of free trade, geo-political international leadership, moral guidance, and personal responsibility platform to this spastic revenge blather that will take the strongest economy in the Western hemisphere and plunge it into an isolationist quagmire that will abandon NATO and hand Europe to the Russians.
Oh, and Vance supports Vladmir Putin and doubles down on the anti-Ukraine wing of the Party.
So, yeah, chaos abounds. Not sure where this goes from here. I’ll remain at this post as I have coming on 27 years now and watch the chips fall, but know this: none of it appears to be falling in service of America and its citizens.
