Monday Reads: I can’t even …
Posted: January 4, 2016 Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: Bundy, Christian Patriot Defense League, Malheur Wldlife Refuge, militia, Posse Commitatus, Right wing militias 12 Comments
Well, it’s the first Monday of the New Year and I’m already wishing I could stay under the covers. Yes, it’s cold and yes, the to do list is full of things I simply don’t want to do.
While I had a nice quiet weekend, the usual angry white male militia suspects were inciting violent over throw of the US Government. Yes. It’s Christian Patriot Defense League time again. The Posse Commitatus crew just never sleeps but dreams those great dreams of federal government conspiracies met by their armed insurrection. You know there’s only a little time left to thwart the nation’s first black president before they have to thwart the nation’s first woman president. They have a bunch of trinkets, signs, and slogans to use before they become outdated.
So, over the weekend Clive Bundy’s spawn decided to join a protest in Oregon on the sentencing of two poachers who basically set fire to federal land to cover up their crimes. The pair received a light sentence from the original judgement so the pair were taken back to court by the federal government. Public protests over the judicial process and the criminal system have been a frequent event recently and are protected by the Constitution unless things get out of hand. So, we’re talking about a group of gun-toting militia types here so a simple protest never suffices.
The ranchers, Dwight Hammond, Jr., 73, and his son Steve, 43, were convicted of federal arson charges, stemming from a pair or fires on federal land near their ranch. The first was reportedly set in 2001 to cover up their illegal poaching of a deer on government property. It burned 139 acres. The second was reportedly set in 2006 as a defensive measure, to protect the ranch from an approaching lightning-sparked wildfire. That arson reportedly endangered volunteer firefighters camped nearby. The government would seek $1 million in damages. (For a deep dive of the backstory read this piece in The Oregonian.)
I’m quoting from a Rolling Stone article that gives a high level outline on the background of what has now become an armed occupation of “the Malheur Wildlife Refuge — a remote, marshy oasis in Oregon’s high 
desert famed for its spectacular migratory birds” to quote author Tim Dickinson. The basic reason for the protest and supposedly the armed takeover and occupation is a Clinton Era law used to extend the sentence of the poacher/arsonists.
The ranchers’ case became a cause celebre in the patriot/militia movement because the pair were sentenced for their arson crimes under a provision of a law called the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. And they were oddly sentenced twice.
The federal law in question doesn’t just deal with terrorism. It created a five-year mandatory-minimum sentence for arson on federal land: “Whoever maliciously damages or destroys… by means of fire…any…real property…owned or possessed by…the United States…shall be imprisoned for not less than 5 years…”
The first federal judge to handle the case concluded that the mandatory sentence was too stiff and gave the pair far lighter sentences, which they served. But the U.S. attorney in the case called foul; the federal government took the rare step of appealing the sentence. In October 2015, the Ninth Circuit imposed the mandatory minimum, ruling that: “given the seriousness of arson, a five-year sentence is not grossly disproportionate to the offense.” The ranchers are due back in federal prison Monday to serve out their five years each.
But this odd re-sentencing, under a statute that makes it sound like the cattlemen were being prosecuted for terrorism, inflamed the paranoid passions of the anti-government patriot and militia movements, and brought the militants to Burns for a rally on Saturday.
So, protesting is never enough for this bunch of gun-toting, cowboying, gubmint-hating, law breaking white men. The nice people of Burns and the communities surrounding the Wildlife Refuge are quite unhappy being the center of an armed insurrection. You can find two locals that are covering the siege on twitter. One is Michael Oman-Reagan, an anthropologist. (The protest sign pictures are from his feed,) The other is Amanda Peacher who is a central Oregon reporter for OPBS. (h/t to my friend Elaine Leyda for the names.) The national news was a little slow getting there and never know the area. Peacher’s been busy since the take over.
Ammon Bundy emerged from a small brick building at the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge shortly after 11 a.m. Sunday.
He wouldn’t say how many protesters were present at the site of the occupied federal complex, but fewer than 20 people were visible Sunday afternoon.
The leader of the occupation spoke in cool, calm tones as he explained why he and other self-described militiamen broke into and took over the complex Saturday.
“This refuge, from its very inception has been a tool of tyranny,” said Bundy. He believes the federal government overstepped its constitutional bounds in its original purchase of the land back in 1908.
The occupiers said their mission is to put the federal lands under local control, although it’s unclear by what means. Bundy said the protesters have a plan that will take “several months at the shortest to accomplish.”
The refuge is a popular destination for spring birdwatchers, and the headquarters include a visitor’s center, museum and housing.
Yes folks, a Wildlife Refuge is a “tool of tyranny”. That’s why we now have children as human shields there. Oh, and that’s why they want to overthrow the Federal Government. Remember, these are the dudes whose father has been using Federal land to feed his cattle for years and years and years. Now. mind you, all of this was basically Indian lands when the Bundys got there. But, you know, it’s theirs and they want it back because “LIBerty”.
Despite claims by Cliven Bundy that there are 150 armed militiamen now occupying a federal building in Oregon, his son Ammon Bundy has only about 20 people. Three of Cliven Bundy’s sons reportedly broke into and took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters on Saturday. The men reportedly are heavily armed, have taken children into the occupied area, and have terrorized locals, forcing schools to be closed all this week and other nearby federal buildings to shut down out of safety concerns.
Militia movements are not new to this country. Far-right political movements usually have some aspect of gun-toting, gubmint-hating, cowboying, angry white men and have had so for years. We’ve also had run-ins with them from time to time. You may remember the entire Ruby Ridge thing. Oregon has a history with them.
Despite the talk about supporting the Hammond family in Burns, Oregon, the takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters is actually part of a long-standing campaign by radical right-wingers to dismantle federal land ownership in the West. Some elected officials are working through mainstream channels to get lands transferred to state or county governments, or to allow them equal say over their use. But the Malheur takeover seems to be an attempt to spread a tactic of armed federal land takeovers. These armed groups are part of the “Patriot movement”—the successor to the 1990s militia movement—which has seen a rebirth since the election of Barack Obama in 2008.
Like most right wingers, these dudes love them some conspiracy theories and hate them some President Obama but they’ve been like that for some time. If you’re old like me, you’ll remember Possee Comitatus. Most of them are white supremacists so hating on a black president is just a natural by product.
Many of the tactics and talking points being used were popularized in the 1970s by the white supremacist group Posse Comitatus. This group promoted the “Christian Patriot” movement, advocated the formation of “Citizens Militias,” helped forge an idiosyncratic reading of the Constitution, said the county sheriff was the highest elected official that should be obeyed, and opposed federal environmental restrictions.
Many of these gun-toting, gubmint-hating, cowboying angry white men are now Republicans. Hence, we see a posse of very quite Republican Candidates for President with the exception of Marco Rubio.
Members of the media tour the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Oregon January 3, 2016. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart
Republican presidential candidates are staying mum as an armed group has taken over part of a national wildlife refuge in Oregon — even those who supported the father of at least one of the group’s leaders, who had his own standoff with the government in 2014, and have called for limits on federal control over Western land.
Some of the issues involved in the standoff — constitutional rights, allegations of federal government overreach and individual liberties — have come to the fore in the GOP primary race. And as Western states are poised to play a larger role in the contest, so has the issue of property rights in a region where the federal government controls about half of the land.
But few candidates seemed willing to wade into any of these issues Sunday as the leaders of the group said they are standing up against government overreach and are prepared to remain there for “as long as it takes.” The group said it is protesting the case of two Oregon ranchers who were convicted of arson in 2012 and are scheduled to report to federal prison Monday. The ranchers were convicted on a broad terrorism charge. Many ranchers and land users in the West lease public land.
Rubio just denounced “lawlessness” this morning but with a militia ass-kissing addendum.
Marco Rubio on Monday addressed the armed standoff at a federal building in Oregon, saying the occupiers “can’t be lawless” and should instead pursue lawful channels to change policy.
A small militia is occupying the headquarters building at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in rural Oregon as part of a protest against the federal government and the impending imprisonment of two Oregon ranchers.
“Let me just say, first of all, you’ve got to follow the law,” the Florida senator and Republican presidential candidate said on Iowa radio station KBUR Monday morning. “You can’t be lawless. We live in a republic. There are ways to change the laws of this country and the policies. If we get frustrated with it, that’s why we have elections. That’s why we have people we can hold accountable.”
Rubio said that he did agree, however, that the federal government did control too much land in western states.
“And I agree that there is too much federal control over land especially out in the western part of the United States,” he continued. “There are states for example like Nevada that are dominated by the federal government in terms of land holding and we should fix it, but no one should be doing it in a way that’s outside the law. We are a nation laws, we should follow those laws and they should be respected.”
I guess he doesn’t get that folks that want armed insurrections of the government basically aren’t going to “pursue lawful channels to change policy”. But, as we’ve mentioned before here, Rubio isn’t exactly a Rhodes Scholar.
As an armed militia took over federal buildings and property in Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and declared their willingness to “kill or be killed” on Saturday, one of the group’s best defenses has received little media coverage — their whiteness.
Indeed, the white skin of the armed men and women who’ve taken over the federal property serves as a powerful force field protecting them from the shoot-first, ask-questions-later style of law enforcement that permeates communities of color every day.
There must be no Rhodes Scholars in the majority of news outlets these days. However, New York Daily News does have the highly observant Shaun King.
You know and I know that if a group of heavily armed Muslim Americans took over a federal building, proclaimed they were ready to kill or be killed, and made a public announcement for other armed Muslims from around the country to join them, the National Guard, State Police and FBI would’ve already shut the whole thing down with violent force. I’d be surprised if one person survived.
The FBI has taken charge of law enforcement efforts to bring a peaceful end to the armed takeover of a national wildlife refuge in rural eastern Oregon.
The agency issued a statement late Sunday saying it is “working with the Harney County Sheriff’s Office, Oregon State Police and other local and state law enforcement agencies.”
The Oregon sheriff whose county is at the heart of an anti-government call-to-arms said Sunday the group occupying a national wildlife refuge came to town under false pretenses.
Sheriff David Ward said protesters came to Harney County, in southeastern Oregon, “claiming to be part of militia groups supporting local ranchers.” In reality, he said, “these men had alternative motives to attempt to overthrow the county and federal government in hopes to spark a movement across the United States.”
In a statement issued Sunday afternoon, Ward said he was working with local and federal authorities to resolve the situation as quickly and peacefully as possible.
So, this is–as they say–a developing story. I say we just put a fence around them, a group of Marines, call it a FEMA camp and treat them like the prisoners at Guantanamo who are also enemy combatants. But, hey, that’s just me.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Oh! A little blog business! The small bill of keeping up the TypeKit font for this site is due on the 9th! I could use a few donations. You don’t have to worry about a huge amount since it’s smaller than the October bill for the site itself but any bit helps. It helps us maintain our banner.
Lazy Saturday Reads: Trump May Have Bitten off More than He Can Chew
Posted: January 2, 2016 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: agism, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Sexism 29 Comments
Good Morning!
In the past week or two Donald Trump has begun directing his crude and crass public attacks at Hillary Clinton rather than his Republican rivals for the presidential nomination.
Trump claimed that it was “disgusting” that Hillary went to the ladies room during a break the last Democratic debate. He said that Obama “schlonged” Hillary in the 2008 presidential primaries. He announced that it was “fair game” for him to use Bill Clinton’s infidelities in the 1990s against Hillary. Will it work?
From the NYT: Poll Show Attacks on Bill Clinton May Only Help Hillary Clinton.
Survey data from the Pew Research Center show’s [sic] Mrs. Clinton’s favorability rating jumping to 63 percent in August of 1998, four months before Mr. Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives. In December of that year, as controversy about their marriage continued to swirl, her popularity climbed higher, reaching 66 percent.
“In contrast to her husband, Hillary Clinton continues to draw high marks from the public,” Pew found at the time. “Two-thirds of Americans say they admire Hillary Clinton’s decision to stand by her husband and nearly as many have a favorable opinion of the first lady.”
Figures from Gallup also showed Mrs. Clinton’s favorability rating rising as accounts of Mr. Clinton cheating dominated headlines. That rating, which was at 39 percent in 1992, remained high through 1999 before leveling off. It hovered from 40 percent to 50 percent in the 2000s and topped 60 percent again when she joined President Obama’s cabinet.
Shawn J. Parry-Giles, a communications professor at the University of Maryland, explained in her 2014 book about the role of gender in American politics that Mrs. Clinton was seen as more sympathetic and authentic as she endured the fallout from her husband’s affair.
“As she showed a clear sense of marital fortitude by staying with her cheating husband, her poll numbers would rise,” Ms. Parry-Giles wrote. “As the scorned and sad woman attracting sympathy from others, Clinton would more closely resemble the traditional ideals of authentic womanhood.”
Paul Waldman at The Week: Bill Clinton’s sexual history is fair game for Donald Trump. But it’s bad politics.
…since Hillary Clinton often mentions her husband’s presidency as an example of the kind of successful approach she would bring, that presidency — warts and all — is certainly relevant. But if Republicans want to re-litigate the Monica Lewinsky matter, they probably shouldn’t hope that things will turn out differently this time. You may recall that they were unable to remove Clinton from the presidency, and two years after being impeached he left office with approval ratings in the high 60s. In the end, the public decided that though his private behavior was deplorable, they were happy with the job he was doing as president. They also concluded that a bunch of prurient Republicans had become positively obsessed with Clinton’s sexual life and dragged the country through a needless impeachment crisis.
It’s fair game to talk about all that again (which, I must point out, members of the media would absolutely love to do). What’s much harder to figure out is why Bill Clinton’s behavior provides a reason to vote against his wife. That’s the substance of the question, which still awaits an explanation.
One might even ask what relevance Donald Trump’s obvious sexism has for the presidency. Unlike with some of the other large groups he has alienated, it’s less clear what the connection would be between Trump’s sexism and his actual policy positions. Yes, he finds women’s bodily functions “disgusting,” in the word he repeatedly uses (see here or here), and has a history of dumping his wives when they hit their 40s so he can get himself a younger model. But his positions on issues of particular concern to women are little different from those of most Republicans, even those who are perfectly polite and respectful to everyone (you can argue that things like opposing abortion rights are inherently sexist, but that doesn’t tell us anything about Trump specifically).
But it would be “fair game” now, right? Please go read the rest of the piece at the link. It’s good.
Mary Sanchez at the Chicago Tribune: Donald Trump should think twice about taking on Bill Clinton.
Donald Trump might be picking the wrong schoolyard fight. His modus operandi is to bully. And it’s proved to be an ideal strategy for tying his Republican rivals in knots. But now he’s trying it on someone whose powers of political legerdemain are legendary: Bill Clinton.
The 69-year-old former president is wilier than Trump could ever dream of being. This is the man who hung the 1995-1996 government shutdown around the neck of his chief political adversary, House Speaker Newt Gingrich. A formidable huckster in his own right, Gingrich was the It Boy of conservatism and the leader of an ascendant “Republican Revolution,” but after losing his budget showdown with Clinton, his career went into permanent eclipse.
Gingrich’s oafish understudies then mounted an ill-advised impeachment campaign against Clinton, which only burnished the president’s credentials as a victim of partisan fanaticism.
Trump, by contrast, is a cad whose vulgarity and brutishness are given cover by the fact that those very qualities are cheered by a large portion of the Republican base. He’s making the P.T. Barnum bet on the Republican electorate, and so far it’s paying off.
In recent days, Trump has pounced on Hillary Clinton’s husband, in particular his record of cheating, as a new stratagem to upend her campaign. On Twitter, he asserted: “If Hillary thinks she can unleash her husband, with his terrible record of women abuse, while playing the women’s card on me, she’s wrong!”
But this only underscores another difference between Bill Clinton and Donald Trump: The former president’s record on so-called women’s issues is stellar. He appointed the first women to become U.S. attorney general and secretary of state, added Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the U.S. Supreme Court and signed the Violence Against Women Act, along with other measures that benefited women.
Most recently Trump has been claiming that Hillary is “weak” and “low energy” and that she “lacks .”
From the Washington Post:
For as long as Hillary Clinton has been in the public eye, she has answered questions — and sometimes volunteered information — about how much and how hard she works to get it all done.
Few, even her political enemies, have questioned her work ethic or staying power — until Donald Trump.
“She’ll do a couple of minutes in Iowa, meaning a short period of time. And then she goes home,” the GOP presidential front-runner said in Davenport, Iowa, a few weeks ago, as his attention turned to those areas. “You don’t see her for five or six days. She goes home, goes to sleep. I’m telling you. She doesn’t have the strength. She doesn’t have the stamina.”
Ever since — and increasingly in recent days — the magnate has lobbed a barrage of insults at Clinton from onstage at his campaign rallies, on television and online. The former secretary of state is “low-energy,” Trump says. She lacks stamina. She’s physically weak.
The attacks — often coded, always personal — seem to be aimed at raising questions in voters’ minds about a factor that has long been whispered in some GOP circles: how Clinton’s age could affect her ability to serve.
Trump is older than Clinton, but I guess he thinks he’s not affected by aging. Or maybe he thinks only women are?
“I think that my words represent toughness and strength. Hillary’s not strong. Hillary’s weak, frankly. She’s got no stamina; she’s got nothing,” the billionaire said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “She couldn’t even get back on the stage last night.”
Her energy level, he has said, should disqualify her from the presidency. “Hillary is a person who doesn’t have the strength or the stamina, in my opinion, to be president,” Trump told ABC’s “This Week.” “She doesn’t have strength or stamina. She’s not a strong enough person to be president.”
Trump, who often takes credit for saddling former Florida governor Jeb Bush (R) with a “low-energy” label, has lately used the same line on Clinton.
“She’s even lower-energy than Jeb Bush,” he told a South Carolina crowd on Wednesday.
Trump has looked tired by the end of every GOP debate. I’d love to see him sit through 11 hours of hostile questioning at a Congressional hearing as Hillary did not too long ago. Who know what’s in Trump’s fevered brain, but I think these are all sexist attacks designed to make people believe a woman couldn’t handle the presidency. I don’t think this line of attack is going to work for Trump either.
A few more reactions to Trump’s attacks on Hillary and Bill Clinton:
Joe Conason at The National Memo: Below Par: Donald Trump’s Ardent Courtship Of Bill And Hillary Clinton.
Janelle Ross at the WaPo: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and how sexism is now partisan.
Lanny Davis at The Hill: Thank you, Mr. Trump — keep attacking the Clintons.
What do you think? What stories are you following today?
New Year’s Reads: Things Can Only Get Better!
Posted: January 1, 2016 Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: and other Bullshit, Donald Trump, lies, Myth, New Year's Eve, politics, religion, Ronald Reagan 13 Comments
I’m still recovering from whatever flu virus hit me last weekend. I do have my voice back and I’m coughing a bit less so I’m beginning to catch up with reading this and that. I stayed in bed with hot tea and a marathon of “Drunk History” while trying to figure out if the noise I was hearing last night was gunfire or fireworks. I have no idea what the mix of one to the other was. That’s one of those things that keeps me indoors on NY’s Eve because I really don’t want to be the one out there gathering the data. Most folks try not to think about about it.
One of the things that always amazes me is how vulnerable people are to wishful thinking and things easily demonstrated to be complete bullshit. I suppose I suffer the hubris of the scholar on this account. I didn’t have access to the internet in my home until 1980 but you generally could find me in whichever library housed the government documents drop. Yes, the University of Nebraska libraries had huge basements dedicated to the stuff at one time and I was a basement dweller. Now it’s all on spreadsheets on my hard drive. It really doesn’t take much to figure out what is what. However, everything experiences variation and intellect and curiosity are no different.
I guess the same thing that makes folks vulnerable to religion also makes them vulnerable to political myth. My first experience with all the ploy to keep people well-behaved and hopeful was as a child when I learned my parents were deliberately lying to me about Santa Claus for my sister’s sake. I later studied 3rd and 4th century Roman history and lost religion. It’s basically the same MO but with much better data. But the Santa episode really sunk in. I went to the basement, screamed at myself for being so stupid then wondered what else they’d been lying to me about. Well, it turned out that it was about a lot of things that I could easily find out about in my handy dandy local library’s reference section. I’ve spent my professional and personal life gleaning through data looking for truths. I hate being taken in.
We’ve all been stumped about why Donald Trump could gain ground in any national level political race. He says things that are blatantly hateful and false, yet he gains ground. Polls showing his demographics illustrate his base. It’s basically the ugly underbelly of the US that shows up in our history quite frequently. These folks love being taken in.
Donald Trump holds a dominant position in national polls in the Republican race in no small part because he is extremely strong among people on the periphery of the G.O.P. coalition.
He is strongest among Republicans who are less affluent, less educated and less likely to turn out to vote. His very best voters are self-identified Republicans who nonetheless are registered as Democrats. It’s a coalition that’s concentrated in the South, Appalachia and the industrial North, according to data provided to The Upshot by Civis Analytics, a Democratic data firm.
Mr. Trump’s huge advantage among these groups poses a challenge for his campaign, because it may not have the turnout operation necessary to mobilize irregular voters
The Civis estimates are based on interviews with more than 11,000 Republican-leaning respondents since August. The large sample, combined with statistical modeling techniques, presents the most detailed examination yet of the contours of Mr. Trump’s unusual coalition.
We’ve seen this set of nutcases before. It appears to be the return of the Reagan coalition. This turns my mind back to the Santa Claus story, and for that matter, any particular dead religious figure you can 
conjure up that people have turned into something not quite like the original narrative. Ronald Reagan was an affable fool. Any economist that has studied the time period and his policies will tell you a completely different, data-based narrative than most of the people taken in by him. BB sent me this link a few days ago. I’ve only been able to really digest it today.
Any of us that have intensely studied some aspect of his regime–in my case the economic data–know that the myth is no where close to the truth. These narratives always seem to serve the current group of rich, powerful, assholes. It doesn’t matter if you’re told to submit yourself to your husband or master or render unto Rome, it’s pretty much the same thing. These so-called populist heroes lead sheep to slaughter.
Ronald Reagan was not only intellectually ungifted, he was incurious and ignorant about the details of the day. It’s amazing to me that as historians go back and sift through their form of data on the ground, so little of it manages to take down the public id. The link to Salon takes you to an excerpt from “The American President: From Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton” by WILLIAM LEUCHTENBURG whose thesis on Reagan is summed up thusily: “No one ever entered the White House so grossily ill-informed”. This says a lot given he was followed relatively shortly by Dubya Bush who didn’t even appear to have a command of his primary language let alone nuanced policy. Remember, Dubya’s the guy that declared war on a lot of Muslim-majority countries without a real grasp of the difference between Sunni and Shia let alone the minority ones.
No one had ever entered the White House so grossly ill informed. At presidential news conferences, especially in his first year, Ronald Reagan embarrassed himself. On one occasion, asked why he advocated putting missiles in vulnerable places, he responded, his face registering bewilderment, “I don’t know but what maybe you haven’t gotten into the area that I’m going to turn over to the secretary of defense.” Frequently, he knew nothing about events that had been headlined in the morning newspaper. In 1984, when asked a question he should have fielded easily, Reagan looked befuddled, and his wife had to step in to rescue him. “Doing everything we can,” she whispered. “Doing everything we can,” the president echoed. To be sure, his detractors sometimes exaggerated his ignorance. The publication of his radio addresses of the 1950s revealed a considerable command of facts, though in a narrow range. But nothing suggested profundity. “You could walk through Ronald Reagan’s deepest thoughts,” a California legislator said, “and not get your ankles wet.”
In all fields of public affairs—from diplomacy to the economy—the president stunned Washington policymakers by how little basic information he commanded. His mind, said the well-disposed Peggy Noonan, was “barren terrain.” Speaking of one far-ranging discussion on the MX missile, the Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton, an authority on national defense, reported, “Reagan’s only contribution throughout the entire hour and a half was to interrupt somewhere at midpoint to tell us he’d watched a movie the night before, and he gave us the plot from War Games.” The president “cut ribbons and made speeches. He did these things beautifully,” Congressman Jim Wright of Texas acknowledged. “But he never knew frijoles from pralines about the substantive facts of issues.” Some thought him to be not only ignorant but, in the word of a former CIA director, “stupid.” Clark Clifford called the president an “amiable dunce,” and the usually restrained columnist David Broder wrote, “The task of watering the arid desert between Reagan’s ears is a challenging one for his aides.”
I actually was convinced that Reagan was so obviously ignorant and wrong about so many things that you could run any one against him and he’d never get a second term. I was obviously young and not jaded enough to grasp the demographic that supported him because they believed what they wanted to believe because he told them so in such a “nice” way. Now, this same group of yahoos is angry and they believe what Donald Trump tells them because they believe what they want to believe because he tells them in such an “angry” way. ‘Morning in America’ does sound an awful lot like ‘Make America Great Again’ doesn’t it? All of this is basically code for ‘Save White Privilege’ even if I don’t really benefit that much from it. As long you as you can make me feel superior to (fill in the blank), I’ll wishfully hope and then vote for you.
I try to tell myself that there’s no way that Donald Trump could ever be elected but then I would not be learning from my obviously wrong hypothesis that Ronald Reagan could ever get a second term. Reagan raised taxes. He ran up the deficit hugely. There’s the Reagan “recession” and there was Iran Contra which all of these folks conveniently never heard about or forgot when they voted for the affable buffoon. The same demographic could care less about Trump’s lies and the tremendous internet base of fact checking.
Donald Trump is the “King of Whoppers”.
But in this year’s presidential campaign, the fact checkers say one candidate has achieved truth-bending royalty.
“This is the first time we have named someone the ‘King of Whoppers,'” Eugene Kiely of FactCheck.org said.
Donald Trump earned that crown with the biggest whopper of 2015:
“I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down,” he said in a Birmingham, Alabama, rally in November 21.
The fact checkers found evidence of just a few people celebrating. But that wasn’t the only tall Trump tale of the year.
“He’s certainly keeping us busy… It is the worst that we have seen in the 12 years we have been doing this,” Kiely said.
“You know, the president’s thinking about signing an executive order where he wants to take your guns away,” Trump said at a South Carolina rally on October 19.
Then in New Hampshire, on September 30: “You know, it started off with 10,000. The other day I heard 200,000. We are going to take in 200,000 Syrians or wherever they come from,” Trump said.
“It’s just way over what the actual number is,” Kiely explains.
It’s not like this isn’t pointed out daily in places other than newspapers that none of Trump’s demographic appear to read. Bernie Sanders mentioned it just a few days ago.
“It appears that Donald Trump, a pathological liar, simply cannot control himself. He lies, lies and lies again. Today, he repeated his lie that I want to raise taxes to 90 percent. Totally untrue. And PolitiFact gave Trump’s same statement last October a ‘Pants-on-Fire’ rating.
Even Trumps Republican opponents point this out. Unfortunately, the most verbal are Kasich and Jeb who appear to be on their way out the door.
Bush talked to CNN on Wednesday and reinforced his point from the debate that Trump is “not a serious candidate.”
“I got to post up against Donald Trump,” Bush said. “I don’t think he’s a serious candidate.”
He added, “And I don’t know why others don’t feel compelled to point that out, but I did. And I think I got a chance to express my views and compare them to someone who talks a big game but really hasn’t thought it through.”
But, again, the only candidates gaining traction in the Republican field are the “know nothings”. This includes Marco Rubio who has to be as intellectually ungifted as the gipper and is taken somewhat seriously despite the stupid and despite a very shady history of deal making for shady people.
Didn’t we say all this about a gawky rogue presidential candidate named Barack Obama? Sure. But Obama had the advantage of not looking and sounding like a complete fucking idiot. Obama was on the Harvard Law Review, not the Santa Fe Community College football team. Then again, that’s not really fair to community collegians and football players: Plenty of each are smart enough to run the country. It just so happens that Rubio isn’t one of them.
For proof, simply look to Rubio’s campaign message, a bizarre simulacrum of “hope and change” focus-grouped by Red Stripe-swilling blue blazers who are slightly scared of hope and change because they’ve witnessed its power but never fully understood its appeal, like those crouched simians sizing up the galactic monolith in 2001.
This scares me. It should scare you. 
I will also admit that I didn’t think Obama was going to be as good of a President as he has turned out to be. I really thought he’d continue to let the Republicans play him like a violin, but he learned, and learned well. His last few years defy the lame duck theory.
So, I’m doing a mea culpa on the two failed hypotheses today just because I do not want to be lulled into a third one. We clearly have one great candidate that is experienced, flawed, and capable. Then, we have a set of figures that look religiously mythical, are supported by people who have a lot to gain from populist ignorance, and appear to be impossibly unqualified for making national policy on all levels. They may have one area upon which they are knowledgeable but most have absolutely nothing but being able to say blatantly wrong things because they have no clue how wrong they actually are.
Work in the right campaigns and vote in 2016. Don’t make me write another mea culpa in 2017. Please.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
And, have a great NEW YEAR!!! I love you all!!!
Thirty years ago from 1985 and deep from Reagan d0o d0o land.
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
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