WILL DEFENDING ROY MOORE BE A #MAGA LITMUS TEST?

It was predictable that Roy Moore would be defiant in the face of allegations that he fondled a 14-year-old girl and was involved with other teenagers when he was a thirtysomething assistant district attorney given the fact that defiance has been Moore's reaction to all criticism throughout his career. Here's part of a statement he released today:

"Judge Roy Moore has endured the most outlandish attacks on any candidate in the modern political arena, but this story in today's Washington Post alleging sexual impropriety takes the cake. National liberal organizations know their chosen candidate Doug Jones is in a death spiral, and this is their last ditch Hail Mary....

"Judge Roy Moore is winning with a double-digit lead. So it is no surprise, with just over four weeks remaining, in a race for the U.S. Senate with national implications, that the Democratic Party and the country's most liberal newspaper would come up with a fabrication of this kind...."

And it's not really surprising that fellow Alabama Republicans would imply that the Good Lord would look kindly on Moore's fondness for teenagers:

“There is nothing to see here,” Alabama State Auditor Jim Ziegler told the Washington Examiner....

“Take the Bible. Zachariah and Elizabeth for instance. Zachariah was extremely old to marry Elizabeth and they became the parents of John the Baptist,” Ziegler said choosing his words carefully before invoking Christ. “Also take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus.”

But now we have an out-of-state Moore defender, and it's someone you've met before on this blog: Paul Nehlen, who put up a primary challenge to Paul Ryan in 2016 and briefly became the toast of Breitbart:



Nehlen would go on to lose the primary 84%-16%, and not just because he made this dorky ad in which he tries and fails to look like an American badass:



He's running against Ryan again in 2018, and he announced today that has Roy Moore's back:

Paul Nehlen told The Gateway Pundit today:

“I’m calling bullshit on the Judge Moore accusations,” says Paul Nehlen, the true conservative challenger to Paul Ryan in Wisconsin’s 1st congressional district. “This is a desperate ploy by Mitch McConnell using the Paul Ryan / Dan Senor playbook utilized to bring down candidate Trump with the Billy Bush tapes. It didn’t work with Trump, it won’t work with Moore.”

McConnell has said that Moore should step aside "if these allegations are true." But note the reference to Dan Senor. That's becoming a favorite name to drop when you want to accuse Republicans of being deep state swamp creatures who are just as bad as Democrats and the liberal media. (Roger Stone invoked Senor when it was revealed that GOP donor Paul Singer was an early financier of Fusion GPS's anti-Trump opposition research.) I assume the entire #MAGA crowd will fall in lockstep -- Hannity, Coulter, Ingraham, and the rest, all arguing that this is a deep state/cuckservative/Bush family/George Soros hit job.

And while we're on the subject of Gateway Pundit, here's Jim Hoft with a deep dive into the statute books:

According to the Code of Alabama 1975 list of rules (Section 13A-6-69.1) it was a crime to have sex with a minor 12 or under....

The legal age of consent was later raised to 16 in Alabama.

So, y'know, it was totally cool.

Coming soon, I predict: Moore didn't want to grope teenage girls, but '60s/'70s culture made him do it!

RIGHT-WINGERS WILL DEFEND ROY MOORE AND CLAIM THAT PREDATOR-HATING LIBERALS ARE THE TRUE CODDLERS

Wow:

Leigh Corfman says she was 14 years old when an older man approached her outside a courtroom in Etowah County, Ala. She was sitting on a wooden bench with her mother, they both recall, when the man introduced himself as Roy Moore.

It was early 1979 and Moore — now the Republican nominee in Alabama for a U.S. Senate seat — was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney. He struck up a conversation, Corfman and her mother say, and offered to watch the girl while her mother went inside for a child custody hearing....

Alone with Corfman, Moore chatted with her and asked for her phone number, she says. Days later, she says, he picked her up around the corner from her house in Gadsden, drove her about 30 minutes to his home in the woods, told her how pretty she was and kissed her. On a second visit, she says, he took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes. He touched her over her bra and underpants, she says, and guided her hand to touch him over his underwear.

That's from The Washington Post, which got confirmations of this from friends of Corfman (who says she regularly votes Republican and voted for Donald Trump in 2016). The Post also recounts the stories of three other women who say Moore pursued them when they were teenagers and he was in his thirties.

So far, Moore is hanging tough -- even before the Post story appeared, he cooperated with Breitbart on its version of the story, which leads with his denials (“This garbage is the very definition of fake news and intentional defamation”) and ends with, um, George Soros:

The Post is owned by Nash Holdings LLC, a holding company for billionaire Amazon founder and open borders champion Jeffrey Bezos.

The newspaper formally endorsed Moore’s Democratic opponent Doug Jones in the senate race.

In a series of articles, Breitbart News has documented Jones’s close associations with far-left groups financed by George Soros that push open borders and a host of radical causes.

I'm guessing that more women will come forward and charge that Moore pursued them as teenagers. I imagine Moore will deny those allegations as well. It's quite possible that none of this will stick to him, that he'll be widely defended in the right-wing media, and that he'll still win his election in December.

This should be awkward for conservatives, because they've tried to portray the recent wave of sexual predation stories as a massive liberal scandal. Even though Hollywood and media predators have been exposed exclusively by non-conservative journalists, and even though the predators have been made extremely unwelcome after their exposure, the party line on the right has been that liberals have coddled sex criminals. Here was Milo Yiannopoulos last week, in a column (his first and last) for the Daily Caller, arguing that Kevin Spacey was being treated with kid gloves by the "liberal media":

... consider how differently the media treats the sins of left-wing celebrities.

ABC News’s original summary of the allegations against Spacey was that the actor had “come out” in an “emotional tweet.” In other words, Spacey was blithely excused for something he did, because he’s gay and left-wing. I, on the other hand, was viciously attacked for speaking about something that happened to me, because I’m gay and right-wing. Identity politics has always made exceptions for wrong-thinkers.

Hey, Milo, the Caller hired you, if briefly, even after you defended pedophilia. Your defense of pedophilia didn't prevent right-wing readers from putting your book on the bestseller list. By contrast, Spacey is so toxic right now that he's being deleted from a movie he just filmed, after he lost his TV series, his agent, and his publicist.

Spacey, Harvey Weinstein, James Toback, Leon Wieseltier, Michael Oreskes, and other predators might have been shielded for years, but there's too much public outrage for them to be shielded anymore. But Donald Trump soldiers on, Bill O'Reilly still sells books as he looks for a TV comeback, and I'm guessing that Moore will survive this story as well. Yet on the right, this will still be seen as a liberal problem first and foremost, while conservatives tell themselves that their values are solid.

BREITBART GOES PEACENIK

The top story on Breitbart's front page right now seems to have wandered over from The Nation or The Intercept:



It's a straightforward story making the point that endless wars have really picked our pockets.

The United States is expected to spend nearly $6 trillion through 2018 on government-wide costs related to the wars waged in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria since 2001, reveals a study by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

According to Brown University’s Cost of War project analysis, authored by Neta Crawford, the total estimated cost of U.S. wars between 2001 and 2018 amounts to about $23,386 per individual American taxpayer, which is more than three times the amount ($7,740) calculated by the Pentagon....

Unlike assessments conducted by the Pentagon and other analysts, Crawford’s estimate takes into account trillions in conflict-linked spending appropriated mainly through the U.S. Departments of Homeland Security, State, Defense, and Veteran Affairs.

On top of direct war spending through the Pentagon, the Brown University study includes $880 billion in new base defense costs linked to combat operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, in addition to nearly $780 billion in Department of Homeland Security costs.

Moreover, the study notes that spending on veterans benefits has increased by nearly $300 billion since 2001 due to those wars.

Well .. okay. I guess I'm grateful that this was published.

I know why the story is getting prominent placement at Breitbart. Steve Bannon regards himself as an anti-"globalist." He sees his conservatism as diametrically opposed to Bushite neoconservatism.

Which is nice, but Breitbart also rouses the rabble with stories like these:

Why Trump’s Winning: 9 Facts About Islam The Media Doesn’t Want You To Know

Gorka: America Is Losing War on Terror

From Cairo to Riyadh, Trump Urged Action on Terror Where Obama Offered Islamic Apologism

The West vs Islam Is The New Cold War — Here’s How We Win

If you look at that last piece (from 2016, and co-authored by Milo Yiannopoulos), you see where the Breitbartniks try to thread the needle. The argument is that the U.S. won the Cold War because "western governments poured money into programs designed to undermine the idea of communism." That was cost-effective, and there was no blood expended! "Sure, there were proxy wars around the world, but they weren’t at the root of communism’s failure," we're told. So I guess that victory was peaceful and didn't pick our pockets at all! Vietnam, the arms race -- not relevant!

At least libertarians and Pat Buchanan paleocons sometimes refrain from rousing the rabble against the enemies we're fighting in wars while opposing those same wars. The Breitbartniks want us to hate "radical Islamic terror," then are shocked, shocked, when politicians actually spend blood and treasure going to war based on that anger.

BANNON: YOU'D BE IMPRESSED AT HOW WELL TRUMP GETS THIS TRUMPISM THING

Sounding like a guy who's worried that the suckers are starting to figure out his pyramid scheme, Steve Bannon appeared on a Breitbart satellite radio show today and argued that Republicans need to redouble their commitment to Trumpism:

Bannon said the lesson from Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie’s defeat on Tuesday night is that “if you’re going to win, you’ve got to embrace the entire Trump agenda, and you’ve got to do it early, and you’ve got to be dedicated to it.”

“You can’t phone it in,” he said. “You’ve got to do rallies. You’ve got to get the president out with you. You’ve got to go all-in on this....

“There’s just not enough of those Establishment types left to make a significant difference. You’ve got to bring out the Trump voters, and you’ve got to bring them out in a way that they’re enthusiastic in getting other Trump voters out. I think it’s incumbent upon people. You know, we won in a coalition.... That coalition has to stick together. But the key thing is we won in a coalition but we were selling the Trump program. I think that’s a lesson that hopefully candidates throughout the country learn.”

And do you know who's really committed to Trumpism? Donald Trump! No, really.

“We’re celebrating the one-year anniversary on the Eighth of this great accomplishment we had last year. Remember, we had a candidate in Donald Trump that believed it to the marrow of his bones because he’s really the embodiment of the Trump movement,” [Bannon] said.

Isn't that weird? I mean, of course Donald Trump is the embodiment of the Trump movement. But Bannon says this as if it might not necessarily be the case.

He continues:

“Remember, the powerful thing about Trump is that he’s had these beliefs and articulated these beliefs over 20, 25, 30, 35, 40 years, so it wasn’t like you had to program him. In fact, all we did when I took over was just make sure the message was a little more coherent and presented every day, and hammered every day....

“He knew the topic, knew the material, so well because it’s his belief system,” Bannon said of Trump.

It's clear what Bannon is really saying: This is my belief system. I define what Trumpism is -- it's whatever I believe. It just so happens that Trump is a Trumpist -- I mean, obviously Trump wasn't a Trumpist when he endorsed that swamp dweller Luther Strange, or when he hired Globalist Gary Cohn. But apart from that and a few other ideological deviations, Trump is a reasonably solid Trumpist.

We know that Bannon said privately during the campaign that Trump was an "imperfect vessel" for the Bannon message. Now Bannon calls his own message "the Trump agenda," and he seems pleasantly surprised that Trump is on board with it -- until Trump's inevitable next deviation from Trumpism, I guess.

IT WASN'T JUST VIRGINIA: THERE WAS GOOD NEWS ALL OVER THE COUNTRY (updated)

The big story yesterday was Democrats winning all statewide offices in Virginia, and winning at least 14 seats in Virginia's House of Delegates, with several races too close to call, which gives them a shot at control of a legislative body where Republicans currently have a 66-34 advantage.

But there was more good news, and I don't just mean Democrat Phil Murphy trouncing Chris Christie's lieutenant governor in the New Jersey governor's race, or Bill de Blasio becoming the first Democrat to win reelection as mayor of New York since Ed Koch in 1985 (and the first liberal to win reelection since John Lindsay in 1969), or Maine approving Medicaid expansion in a referendum that defied the will of proto-Trump governor Paul LePage.

Here's a rebuke of Trumpism: Remember these flyers from the school board race in Edison, New Jersey?



Shi and Patel both won seats on the board, finishing first and second in the at-large election. Also, Ravi Bhalla, a Sikh who wears a turban, was elected mayor of Hoboken, New Jersey, despite being targeted as a "terrorist" in racist flyers.

Yesterday, a flyer w/ word “terrorist” above a pic of me was circulated in Hob. Of course this is troubling, but we won’t let hate win. pic.twitter.com/Ri9xrYF4Al

— Ravinder S. Bhalla (@RaviBhalla) November 4, 2017

A black transgender woman, Andrea Jenkins, was elected to the Minneapolis city council, and another trans woman, Danica Roem, was one of the Democrats who beat an incumbent Republican for a seat in Virginia's House of Delegates. You may know that the man Roem defeated, Bob Marshall, proudly referred to himself as the state's "chief homophobe" and sponsored an anti-trans "bathroom bill" in Virginia, while referring to Roem throughout the campaign as "he." But he was also an across-the-board wingnut. He proposed the mandatory arming of some personnel in every school in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre. He wanted Virginia to study the possibility of minting its own money "in the event of a major breakdown of the Federal Reserve System." He said God punishes women who have abortions by making children they bear after an abortion disabled:

“The number of children who are born subsequent to a first abortion with handicaps has increased dramatically. Why? Because when you abort the first born of any, nature takes its vengeance on the subsequent children,” said Marshall, a Republican.

“In the Old Testament, the first born of every being, animal and man, was dedicated to the Lord. There’s a special punishment Christians would suggest.”

There's more:

Bob Marshall’s take on the Obama Agenda: "Suicidal deficits, enemies lists, abortion, euthanize seniors, health care that kills capitalism … ‘Live and let die,’ Obama theme song!"

Bob Marshall compares the economic stimulus package to slavery: "It is as much a chain as ankle bracelets were as to African-Americans in the 1860s in this state. It’s just invisible. But it is a chain of death that we’re not going to escape."

On Abortion in the case of incest and rape Marshall said: "Sometimes incest is voluntary." Marshall added, with regard to rape, that "the woman becomes a sin-bearer of the crime, because the right of a child predominates over the embarrassment of the woman."

Marshall on the Morning After Pill: "We have no business passing this garbage out and making these co-eds chemical Love Canals for these frat house playboys in Virginia."

Buh-bye, Bob.

In Washington State, Democrat Manka Dhingra won a state senate race that gives the party control of the only legislative house on the Pacific Coast currently controlled by Republicans. Democrats also have the governors' mansions in California, Oregon, and Washington, so those states now form a "blue wall" on the coast.

And in Westchester County, New York, Democrat George Latimer soundly defeated Republican Rob Astorino, a two-term incumbent, in the county executive's race. Astorino lost despite being backed by an independent expenditure committee that received a million dollars from Steve Bannon's sugar daddy, Robert Mercer.

So yesterday was a very good day.

****

UPDATE: This is good, too:

A Republican New Jersey official who posted a meme mocking the Women’s March was defeated in an election last night by a female candidate who was inspired to run by his remarks, the Associated Press reported Wednesday.

Democrat Ashley Bennet defeated Republican John Carman Tuesday for the Atlantic County freeholder seat, according to the AP.

Carman posted a meme on the day of the Women’s March that featured a woman in a kitchen and the message, “Will the women's protest be over in time for them to cook dinner?"

Also this:

Chris Hurst, a former Virginia TV news anchor from the Main Line whose journalist girlfriend was fatally shot during a live broadcast in 2015, was elected Tuesday to the Virginia legislature, defeating an NRA-supported Republican incumbent in a come from behind race.

And this:

Wow. Meet the first black mayor in the ENTIRE HISTORY of Montana.

Wilmot Collins, who arrived in the US as a refugee from civil war in Liberia, was elected Mayor in Helena, Montana. PROGRESS! pic.twitter.com/hhuzpEsIfp

— Shaun King (@ShaunKing) November 8, 2017

RUSH LIMBAUGH BLAMES MASS SHOOTINGS ON DAY CARE

Rush Limbaugh said this on the radio today:

... I would really love to know how many of these mass shooters went to day care? How many of them were separated from their mothers at age two, at age three, and were farmed out to day care centers?

He cites a story from PJ Media about a psychoanalyst and social worker named Erica Komisar, who published a book earlier this year titled Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters. She now claims that she was blackballed by the New York media, although she was a guest on Good Morning America. In her telling, however, she was insulted before the segment began:

She did appear on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” but seconds before the camera went live, she says, the interviewer told her: “I don’t believe in the premise of your book at all. I don’t like your book.”

I assume ABC has between-segment video that would prove or disprove this. I'd love to see it. You can watch the segment at YouTube, which seems perfectly respectful.

But I was talking about Limbaugh. He, of course, thinks this is all a left-wing plot to destroy civilization (hey, what isn't?).

Anybody with any sense knows in their soul that mothers need to be with babies. There’s nothing beneficial about farming a baby out to state-run child care. But we’ve been hammered for 50 years about how good it is for babies to be in child care, how good it is for mothers to leave their babies to go do some job somewhere, have a career.

And so this is how they hide the truth. This is how they have been able to make families weak. This is how they have been indoctrinating people to believe that parenthood, it’s not necessary, a village raises the kids, not parents. Thank you, Mrs. Clinton.

This stuff, it all made me wonder just how many of these mentally disabled people or people with mental disorders, how many of them actually have been farmed out to, I don’t care who runs it, day care, state-run or not, during the early formative years. Family’s family for a reason. But the left has come along because the political necessities of feminism by design require women to abandon everything traditional about motherhood. Hell, even giving birth is now considered a sickness. A pregnancy is a sickness. It’s a societally imposed penalty. It’s just absurd.

Yup -- according to Limbaugh, the person ultimately responsible for all those deaths in Sutherland Springs was Hillary Clinton. We should have known he'd say that.

SOME INFORMATION ABOUT THE CHURCH SHOOTER WAS SENT TO THE FEDS, FOR ALL THE GOOD IT DID

We know that Devin Patrick Kelley's military conviction for domestic violence didn't prevent him from passing gun background checks. This is being described as a failure on the part of the Air Force, although we're being told that failure to report domestic violence is routine in the military:

A scan of active records shows that the Department of Defense has just a single misdemeanor conviction for domestic violence on file with the National Criminal Instant Background Check System, or NICS.

In part, this is because the military doesn't convict servicemembers of domestic violence specifically:

... the military has no distinct charge for domestic violence, notes Grover Baxley, a former judge advocate general who now practices military law as a civilian. “We see this all the time,” Baxley said. “There is no specific domestic violence article.” Instead, military prosecutors charge abusers with other offenses, like assault.

So it's all the fault of the Air Force -- right? And we can all agree on that, even gun control opponents like the right-wing media -- right?



Well, the story just got a little more complicated:

The gunman who killed 26 people in a rural Texas church on Sunday escaped from a psychiatric hospital while he was in the Air Force, after making death threats against his superiors and trying to smuggle weapons onto the base where he was stationed, a 2012 police report shows.

Police took the man, Devin P. Kelley, into custody at a bus station in downtown El Paso, where he apparently planned to flee on a bus after escaping from Peak Behavioral Health Services, a hospital a few miles away in Santa Teresa, N.M. He was sent there after being charged in a military court with assaulting his wife and baby stepson, charges he later pleaded guilty to.

The report filed by the El Paso officers says that the person who reported Mr. Kelley missing from the hospital advised them that he “suffered from mental disorders,” and that he “was attempting to carry out death threats” against “his military chain of command.” The man “was a danger to himself and others as he had already been caught sneaking firearms onto Holloman Air Force Base,” it added.

So the military failed to provide information to the NICS about the domestic violence conviction and the mental illness diagnosis and the hospitalization and the escape and the death threats and the efforts to sneak guns onto the base. Nice.

So it's a really serious screw-up. But it's all the military's fault, isn't it? Not entirely, as we learn from Houston TV station KPRC:

The final page of the [incident] report states that there was an entry submitted to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center database.

You can read the incident report here. The story is there on the report's last page -- the escape, the sneaking of firearms onto the base, the death threats. But we're also told, as the KPRC story notes, that the El Paso police surrendered Kelley to New Mexico cops:

Kelley was released to police officers from Sunland Park Police Department in New Mexico, located just across the state line. Peak Behavioral Health Services [the facility from which Kelley escaped] is located a few miles from Santa Teresa, New Mexico.

So we don't know what the El Paso police reported to NICS. Maybe it was only the bare facts of his appearance in El Paso. And then the Sunland Park cops also failed to do a full report. And so did the military.

A lot of people dropped the ball, and now 26 people are dead.

THE IDIOT ILLOGIC OF TRUMP'S ANSWER TO THAT "EXTREME VETTING" QUESTION

So this happened today.

SEOUL — President Trump on Tuesday asserted that tougher gun laws would not have stopped the mass shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas, last weekend and in fact “hundreds more” would have died had another man not been able to “neutralize” the alleged killer with a gun of his own.

Asked during a news conference here whether he would entertain “extreme vetting” on guns, Trump appeared irritated by the question and suggested it was not appropriate to talk about “in the heart of South Korea.”

He then answered by saying “if we did what you are suggesting it would have made no difference three days ago.” Devin Patrick Kelley opened fire with an assault rifle killing 26 people in a church. Another man, Stephen Willeford, later grabbed his own gun and exchanged fire with Kelley outside the church. Police found Kelley dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound but authorities said Willeford helped stop Kelley and called him a “hero."

Trump referred to Willeford as a “brave man” and said “if he had not had a gun, instead of having 26 dead, you would have had hundreds more dead... It’s not going to help.”

On the subject of Trump's irritation: Remember that he's the president of the United States. Presidents routinely talk about important domestic news stories when they're on overseas trips, especially traumatic events that take multiple lives. Would he have been irritated if there'd been an attack in America by a jihadist over the weekend and he was asked about it?

But here's the illogic of his main argument: He's suggesting that if we had extreme vetting of gun purchasers, Devin Patrick Kelley would have been approved for gun purchases -- and Stephen Willeford wouldn't have. Is that really what he believes? That Kelley, who spent a year in military confinement for assaulting his wife and infant stepson, cracking the child's skull, would have passed the extreme check, but Willeford -- who, as far as we know is completely law-abiding -- wouldn't have?

Therefore, by Trump's logic, extreme vetting is a process potentially riddled with error? Or a process meant to reject everyone, even the deserving?

Or perhaps he believes that Willeford would have failed the check and gone without guns, while Kelley would have failed and gone to the black market. But what evidence do we have that Kelley would have bought guns illegally? He had a bad conduct discharge from the military after being found guilty of domestic violence. He had reason to believe he might fail at least his first background check -- yet he bought four weapons over the past four years from licensed dealers who subjected him to checks.

No one is proposing a background check system that everyone fails. But it's not hard to imagine a system that catching Kelley and doesn't catch Willeford. By American standards, that would be extreme.

****

On the subject of the Air Force's failure to enter Kelley's domestic violence conviction into the federal database used for background checks, David Frum tweets:



He's right. McClatchy reported on this in 2013:

Even as lawmakers look for ways to curb gun violence, the federal government and various states haven’t sent millions of mental-health and drug abuse records to the database that’s designed to keep firearms from people who are barred from owning them, according to recent studies....

Seung Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech senior behind the worst school shooting in the nation’s history, was able to purchase a pair of semi-automatic pistols that he used to kill 32 people on campus in April 2007 because he passed a federal background check. That’s because the state of Virginia didn’t submit a crucial piece of information: that a court had earlier ordered Cho to seek treatment for mental illness.

Virginia quickly passed a law requiring that type of data to be sent. The federal government can’t mandate that states submit records to the background check database.... as of October 2011, 23 states and the District of Columbia each had sent fewer than 100 mental health records to the database, according to a report by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a coalition of more than 900 mayors co-chaired by New York’s Michael Bloomberg, a leading gun-control advocate.

Fifty-two out of 61 federal agencies, which are required to send the information, did not, the report says....

At the time of the Virginia Tech shooting, only four states had required agencies to send mental health records to the database, according to a November 2011 report from Bloomberg’s group. After the shooting, 18 states required it. And four states that hadn’t permitted the information to be sent began to allow it.

What else isn't being reported? And in a country largely controlled by Republicans, where would the pressure come from to ensure that reporting is more rigorous?

IT'S SIMPLE: TURN OUT MORE DAMN DEMOCRATIC VOTERS

This is good news for Democrats, but...

Voters say they prefer Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives over Republicans by the widest margin in over a decade, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll....

... 51 percent ... of registered voters say that if the election were held today, they would vote for or lean toward the Democratic candidate in their congressional district, while 40 percent say they would choose the Republican.

That’s the biggest spread in a Post-ABC survey since October 2006, just weeks before a midterm in which Democrats won back control of the House and Senate amid deep dissatisfaction with then-President George W. Bush and the Iraq War.

... there's also not-so-good news for Democrats in the same poll:

A Democratic advantage in preference for the 2018 midterm elections fades to insignificance among the most likely voters in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll....

In a hypothetical national ballot, Democratic congressional candidates hold a robust 11-point lead over their GOP counterparts, 51-40 percent, among registered voters overall. But winnow down to those who say they voted in the last midterms and are certain to do so again and the contest snaps essentially to a dead heat, 48-46 percent.

In fact, Republicans were trailing Democrats in Post/ABC poll just before the last two midterms, even though the GOP went on to win both midterms in blowouts.

On the eve of the 2014 and 2010 midterms, both banner elections for the GOP, Post-ABC surveys found Republicans trailed Democrats by three and five percentage points among registered voters, respectively. Those margins flipped in Republicans’ favor among the smaller population of likely voters who were more motivated to turn out.

Republicans routinely win far more House seats than their overall vote totals would suggest they should -- Democrats won 50.59% of the popular House vote in 2012, but won only 46.21% of House seats, and though Republicans had a popular vote plurality in 2016 House races (49.9% to the Democrats' 47.3%), they won a far greater share of seats (55.2% to the Democrats' 44.8%). So it'll take a large overall Democratic advantage for the Democrats to win back the House.

But that won't happen unless Democrats turn out less-likely voters. The voters seem to be there -- they're just not voting in non-presidential contests.

Better to turn Democrats out than to hunt for the elusive, possibly mythical swing voter. Take a look at the latest Monmouth University poll of tomorrow's Virginia gubernatorial race. The poll shows Democrat Ralph Northam up by 2 -- fairly good news, assuming Democrats turn out -- and it shows that the search for crossover voters can be an exercise in futility:

"Early in this race, it appeared that both candidates were shooting for crossover appeal, with Northam doing better than expected in Republican areas and Gillespie performing respectively well in Democratic-leaning counties. The electorate has since reverted to partisan norms as the campaign has taken a decidedly nasty turn," said Murray [Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute].

It's the Hillary Clinton campaign all over again: When Democrats reach out to moderate Republicans, Republicans summon up their most awful stereotypes of the Democrat, either personal (Crooked Hillary) or ideological (Northam wants MS-13 gangs to kill you in your beds!!1!1). Result: wavering Republicans come home, and Democrats have wasted time on voters they can't reach.

Register more Democrats. Motivate more Democrats. Turn more Democrats out.

THE GUN CULTURE NEEDS TO DO A BETTER JOB OF POLICING ITS OWN

There are two Americas, and yesterday's church massacre took place in the one I don't live in. The shooter and his victims grew up in Texas, where it's widely assumed that guns are very, very good for society. A "good man with a gun" shot the assailant, but only after he'd killed 26 people. Gun culture helped end this tragedy, but gun culture also caused it.

A lot of people in my America believe in gun control, but we've been strictly forbidden from having any influence on gun laws at the national level, and certainly in Texas. We also have no cultural influence, except in the negative sense. What I mean by that is that when we say critical things about guns, the other America reacts with outrage, and then embraces guns even more. In the other America, while it's acknowledged that bad people do sometimes get their hands on guns and do regrettable things, feelings about guns are overwhelmingly positive. Guns are fun. Guns can help you feed your family. Guns will protect you from crime. Guns prevent government tyranny. Guns -- they're wonderful.

Devin Patrick Kelley grew up in that culture. It's part of the conservative culture, the culture of the America I don't live in. But nobody ever says to this culture what the conservative culture says to Muslims when one Muslim commits an act of violence: Why don't you police your own people? Why don't you do a better job of identifying those who adhere to a perverted version of your belief system? Why don't you report the dangerous ones to the authorities?

In the gun culture, it's believed that guns can solve a lot of problems. Devin Patrick Kelley obviously believed that, too -- his problem was rage, and a gun helped him channel that rage. So it was an effective tool for him.

If you're part of the gun culture and you say that Kelley had a distorted view of your culture's faith, then I have to ask you whether you've noticed how many people in your culture have this distorted view and have committed horrible crimes, and whether you've turn a blind eye to them. Do you think that there's nothing worrisome about a young man with a domestic violence conviction in a military court buying multiple weapons and identifying one rifle in particular as "a bad bitch"? You don't, do you? You think we should err on the side of assuming that everyone is entitled to as many guns as he wants unless a very high bar of previous criminality is cleared. Right?

I don't believe that Muslim communities in America embrace Muslim extremism. I do believe that the gun culture in America embraces an extremist view of guns -- a belief that it's always good to have more guns, it's always good to have more intimidating guns, and it's always good to remind people that you're part of the gun culture and they should be a little bit afraid of you for that reason. Texas governor Greg Abbott spoke solemnly about yesterday's tragedy, but here's a tweet he posted in 2015:

I'm EMBARRASSED: Texas #2 in nation for new gun purchases, behind CALIFORNIA. Let's pick up the pace Texans. @NRA https://t.co/Ry2GInbS1g

— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) October 28, 2015

This shooting is on you, members of the gun culture. You tell these shooters that guns are good. And they believe you.


(Abbott tweet via Holly O'Reilly.)

THERE ARE TWO AMERICAS, BUT THIS ISN'T WHAT THEY LOOK LIKE

In response to a new Trump poll from The Washington Post and ABC, Axios illustrates a Mike Allen post with these photos:



It's true that there are two Americas right now. But the the split isn't riled-up Trump supporters vs. angry progressives. It's Trump vs. everyone else in America.

Look at the numbers in the poll.



It isn't just Democrats who oppose Trump -- 63% of independents do as well. And among Democrats, it isn't just the ones on the left who oppose Trump. Moderate and conservative Democrats do, too, by an overwhelming margin:



In fact, Trump is opposed by 65% of moderates across party lines -- and even 31% of conservatives:



As you can see, the only people who like Trump are conservative Republicans. They're the outliers.

Only part of the anti-Trump America is angry resisters marching in the streets. But when the pro-Trump/anti-Trump split is framed that way, the implication is that we're at war in America because of loud, angry partisans on both sides (who are always a minority of Americans), while everyone else is arrayed somewhere in the middle.

But everyone else isn't arrayed in the middle right now. The vast majority of people between the two poles also dislike Trump.

Disliking Trump is normative. Liking Trump is not. Everyone needs to understand that.

BRAZILE'S HILLARY REPLACEMENT SCENARIO WAS IMPERMISSIBLE, UNWORKABLE, AND INSULTING

This is insane:

Former Democratic National Committee head Donna Brazile writes in a new book that she seriously contemplated replacing Hillary Clinton as the party’s 2016 presidential nominee with then-Vice President Biden in the aftermath of Clinton’s fainting spell, in part because Clinton’s campaign was “anemic” and had taken on “the odor of failure.”

In an explosive new memoir, Brazile details widespread dysfunction and dissension throughout the Democratic Party, including secret deliberations over using her powers as interim DNC chair to initiate the process of removing Clinton and running mate Sen. Tim Kaine (Va.) from the ticket after Clinton’s Sept. 11, 2016, collapse in New York City.

Brazile writes that she considered a dozen combinations to replace the nominees and settled on Biden and Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.), the duo she felt most certain would win over enough working-class voters to defeat Republican Donald Trump. But then, she writes, “I thought of Hillary, and all the women in the country who were so proud of and excited about her. I could not do this to them.”

So not only did Brazile believe that she could remove Clinton from the ticket essentially by fiat, presumably citing the candidate's fainting spell as an excuse, she also believed she could remove Kaine, who was perfectly healthy. And she planned to reject all the candidates who had actually run in the primaries, including, of course, one runner-up in particular.

Donna Brazile considered ignoring the votes of not just nearly 17 million Clinton voters, but also those of over 13 million Sanders voters

— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) November 4, 2017

And while she was at it, she was going to pick her presidential nominee's running mate for him.

Did she have the right to do this? Absolutely not. Three days after the fainting incident, The Washington Post's Joshua Tucker interviewed Richard Pildes, an NYU law professor and election law expert. As Pildes noted, the decision to remove a Democratic nominee is up to the entire Democratic National Committee, not the DNC chair:

In the Democratic Party, the formal decision-making body is clear. The chair of the Democratic National Committee (currently Donna Brazile) would call a special meeting of the DNC, which is roughly a 447-person body. That body has the power to replace the party nominee, as far as the party is concerned. This is how the Democratic Party replaced Thomas Eagleton with Sargent Shriver as the VP candidate after the 1972 convention.

But how the DNC goes about making the choice — under what rules, through what process — is not spelled out further in the party rules.

It's Josh Marshall's belief, after a look at the DNC's charter and bylaws, that the process can be initiated only in the event of a vacancy. In other words, Clinton would have had to agree to removal from the ticket, and Kaine as well. The charter says:

The Democratic National Committee shall have general responsibility for the affairs of the Democratic Party between National Conventions.... This responsibility shall include:

...filling vacancies in the nominations for the office of President and Vice President

There was no vacancy on September 11, 2016. And if there had been, it wouldn't have been Brazile's sole responsibility to fill it.

And if Clinton and Kaine had been replaced, could they have made it onto state ballots? In many states they might not have. Ballotpedia explains:

States require political parties to submit names of presidential nominees in order to certify them for the general election ballot. Every state has some sort of official or unofficial deadline for this.... Some states have earlier deadlines than others because of early voting, voting by mail, and absentee voting. As of February 2016, 34 states offered early voting in some form or another, and several states allowed voting as early as late September....

In 2016, the bulk of the dates for certifying the names of major party presidential candidates were in August and September. Mid-August was the point at which either party could have found a replacement nominee and still have been able to get its candidate's name on the ballot in enough states to be competitive in November without having to navigate the courts and ballot access issues. For example, if a nominee had dropped out in late August, his or her name would already have been certified to appear as the party's candidate for president in about 20 states. If he or she had dropped out in late September, that number would have risen to almost 40 states.

So the Democrats would have had to go to court to get Biden/Booker on the ballot in many states -- the majority of states if the process dragged on for a couple of weeks after September 11.

It's true that courts have shown flexibility in allowing major-party candidates onto ballots after certification deadlines:

As Politico noted on August 4, 2016, the courts have shown a willingness to work with the parties on the issue of deadlines: "Courts have tended to discard ballot deadlines in favor of having two parties represented on the ballot.” ... In 2002, for instance, the New Jersey Supreme Court allowed Democrats to replace their nominee for a U.S. Senate seat 15 days after the certification deadline.... In addition to this, election officials in the states have been known to show some leeway on the deadlines. Richard Winger, an expert on ballot access laws, told Ballotpedia by email, “even when major parties have missed deadlines for certifying presidential and vice-presidential nominees, or presidential elector candidates, election officials have always set the deadline aside.”

But then what would have happened?

The other factor to consider, however, is whether or not the opposing party would have filed lawsuits seeking to enforce state laws as they are written in order to prevent a replacement nominee from appearing on the ballot.

Trump? The most litigious person ever to run for president? You think he might have filed a lawsuit or two -- while also denouncing this as an effort to rig the election, a charge that would have found agreement not only among the deplorables but among the Chris Cillizzas and Chuck Todds of the political press?

I'll say it again: This is insane.

DEAR DEMOCRATS: DEMOGRAPHIC MATCHING WON'T HELP YOU WIN RURAL VOTERS

Politico says that Ralph Northam, the Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia, isn't doing as well in the rural parts of the state as he'd hoped:

Virginia gubernatorial hopeful Ralph Northam looked like the perfect candidate to help Democrats regain traction with rural voters after a disastrous 2016, with his Southern drawl, upbringing in the state’s rural Eastern Shore and military background.

But despite substantial efforts in the far reaches of the commonwealth increasingly ignored by Democrats, Northam appears to be coming up short of a big improvement, according to his own internal polling.

... the predominant issue may be that no Democrat, no matter their rural credentials, appeals to rural voters who have been turning away from the party for years....

It's not clear how poorly Northam's doing in rural Virginia. His polling says he's outperforming Hillary Clinton, though he's still losing badly:

Northam’s own internal polling in October showed Republican Ed Gillespie getting 49 percent to Northam’s 36 percent in the rural Bristol, Roanoke and Harrisonburg television markets — which President Donald Trump won 62 percent to 34 percent in 2016 (while losing Virginia to Hillary Clinton).

However:

While Gillespie wasn’t hitting Trump's heights, a potential warning sign of his own, Northam's rural polling was little better than Clinton's final result in last year's presidential race — and below the levels President Barack Obama, John Kerry and Al Gore reached in the previous four presidential elections, when they lost the region but still squeezed more votes out of it.

Here's the solution: make an ad in which Northam tries to look like a good ol' boy!

The Northam campaign released a television ad earlier this month designed to appeal to rural voters, featuring Northam working to restore a 1953 Oldsmobile and explaining that classic car restoration has been a hobby of his since high school.

“I'm from rural Virginia, and when I'm governor, you won't be forgotten,” Northam says in the 30-second spot.

Shocking, this hasn't turned everything around.

You know what voters don't care about? Candidates being similar to themselves. Please note who won 62 percent of the vote in those rural Virginia counties: Donald Trump. Did he grow up in rural America? Did he serve in the military? Does he restore 1953 Oldsmobiles on weekends?

And who's the most popular politician in America on our side? Bernie Sanders. He serves a rural state, but it's clear he's not a farmboy every time he opens his mouth.

It used to be an article of faith that Democrats couldn't win a presidential election unless the candidate was a white Southerner. Then a mixed-race guy from Chicago via Hawaii and Indonesia won two elections in a row. And before that, the blueblood Kennedys and FDR were widely admired by people, urban and rural, with far less money than they had.

Democrats aren't going to win elections by making demographic matches. In this race, Northam isn't an immigration hard-liner, and that's probably what's killing him in rural counties, because it's the Trump era. When your positions are anathema to one group of voters, you just have to turn out more voters on your own side -- that's all you can do. Your drawl isn't going to help you.

TRUMP AIDES HAVE BEEN INDICTED -- AND NOW THE DEPLORABLES LIKE TRUMP MORE

On Wednesday, a couple of days after we learned about the first Robert Mueller indictments, Vanity Fair's Gabriel Sherman published a piece about Trump World that contained this memorable quote:

“Here’s what Manafort’s indictment tells me: Mueller is going to go over every financial dealing of Jared Kushner and the Trump Organization,” said former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg. “Trump is at 33 percent in Gallup. You can’t go any lower. He’s fucked.”

When Nunberg said "You can't go any lower," I think he meant that Trump's approval ratings are so abysmal there'll be no one left to catch him when his inevitable downfall occurs -- which would imply that Trump can go even lower in the polls. But as it turns out, what Nunberg said appears to be literally true -- Trump seems to have bottomed out in the Gallup tracking poll and is now staging a mini-comeback. Look at what happens at the right edge of this chart:



The good folks at Polling Report have the numbers in table form:



In the three-day rolling survey conducted on and after October 30 -- Indictment Day -- Trump's approval went up three points and his disapproval went down three. In the next survey, his approval went up another point and his disapproval went down a point.

My conclusion: Disillusioned deplorables see the guy they voted for under attack and are rallying to his side.

Obviously, they're still not a majority. But I'm calling it now: If Trump is impeached, if anyone in his current inner circle is indicted, or if collusion is demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt, his poll numbers are going to go up -- they may remain low, but he'll never reach Nixon's 24%, never mind Chris Christie's 15%. Too many angry heartlanders have too much emotionally invested in him, or at least in their idea of him.

SAD, POUTY TOTALITARIAN WANNABE DONALD TRUMP

It's frightening that we have a president who'd like to turn the Justice Department into his own vindictive legal goon squad -- but it's reassuring that he's accepting the impossibility of this with a pout.

This morning President Trump tweeted the following out of frustration:

Everybody is asking why the Justice Department (and FBI) isn't looking into all of the dishonesty going on with Crooked Hillary & the Dems..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 3, 2017

....People are angry. At some point the Justice Department, and the FBI, must do what is right and proper. The American public deserves it!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 3, 2017

Yesterday, in a radio interview, he whimpered about this:

Trump opened up to talk-radio host and Mediaite contributor Larry O’Connor on Thursday, in an interview broadcast on Washington radio station WBAL. “The saddest thing,” Trump told O’Connor, “is because I’m the president of the United States, I’m not supposed to be involved in the Justice Department.”

This is quite the quote from Trump, saying he hopes the DOJ will be 'doing something' about Clinton. https://t.co/cUbcujm3pi pic.twitter.com/KtaiKWojQ8

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) November 3, 2017

You can interpret this as the first step toward a crackdown on Justice Department independence, but I see it as a sign that -- as I've been saying -- he doesn't have the brazenness to upend the system. He's not firing the attorney general or the new FBI director or the special counsel. He seems to have accepted the notion that, after dismissing James Comey, he can't fire any of these people. You can say that the seizure of power by dictators is often gradual, but I don't think very many dictators, even in the early days of their rule, say anything as whiny as "I'm not supposed to be doing the kinds of things I would love to be doing and I'm very frustrated by it."

Also see Trump's reaction to the temporary deletion of his Twitter account last night by a customer support contractor:

My Twitter account was taken down for 11 minutes by a rogue employee. I guess the word must finally be getting out-and having an impact.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 3, 2017

I think this is one of Trump's saddest tweets ever. He tweets incessantly and finally, as he sees it, he's challenged by a (presumably liberal) Twitter employee, which means people are finally paying attention to him. It's the reaction you might have if you're commenter #974 in an online thread and you get a rise out of someone. But Trump isn't commenter #974 -- he's the freaking president of the United States. Of course what he's saying is "getting out"!

Deep down, Trump still feels like an angry guy watching the news and thinking he could do a much better job than all those clowns, if only he could have the chance -- except that he has the chance now. But in his gut he's still just grumbling in his easy chair with his remote in his hand (which, of course, is also literally what he's doing much of the time). And not being able to personally order a Hillary Clinton witch hunt just reinforces his sense that he's essentially powerless.

This is how all his fans feel about themselves, of course. They're also frustrated grievance-nursers. So no wonder they love him.

JOE RICKETTS: DINESH D'SOUZA PATRON, JEREMIAH WRIGHT OBSESSIVE

Given the popularity of Ayn Rand within the plutocrat class, I suspect that billionaire Joe Ricketts would describe what he did yesterday as "going Galt":

A week ago, reporters and editors in the combined newsroom of DNAinfo and Gothamist, two of New York City’s leading digital purveyors of local news, celebrated victory in their vote to join a union.

On Thursday, they lost their jobs, as Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade who owned the sites, shut them down.

We know that Ricketts donated $1 million in PAC money to help elect Donald Trump in 2016 and posted a pro-Trump essay ("Attacks on President Trump Show the Political Class Has Learned Nothing") on his blog yesterday. His son Todd was a Trump pick to be deputy commerce secretary, but withdrew because, in CNN's words, he "struggled to reconcile his family's complicated finances with the Office of Government Ethics."

But here are a couple of Joe Ricketts moments you may not remember. In May 2012, he set out to spend $10 million in order to prevent Barack Obama's reelection, commissioning an elaborate proposal for an anti-Obama ad campaign focused on the Reverend Jeremiah Wright:

A group of high-profile Republican strategists is working with a conservative billionaire on a proposal to mount one of the most provocative campaigns of the “super PAC” era and attack President Obama in ways that Republicans have so far shied away from....

The plan, which is awaiting approval, calls for running commercials linking Mr. Obama to incendiary comments by his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose race-related sermons made him a highly charged figure in the 2008 campaign.

“The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way,” says the proposal, which was overseen by Fred Davis and commissioned by Joe Ricketts, the founder of the brokerage firm TD Ameritrade. Mr. Ricketts is increasingly putting his fortune to work in conservative politics....

The $10 million plan, one of several being studied by Mr. Ricketts, includes preparations for how to respond to the charges of race-baiting it envisions if it highlights Mr. Obama’s former ties to Mr. Wright, who espouses what is known as “black liberation theology.”

The group suggested hiring as a spokesman an “extremely literate conservative African-American” who can argue that Mr. Obama misled the nation by presenting himself as what the proposal calls a “metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln.”

A few days after that was reported, we learned that Ricketts was helping to finance an anti-Obama film by Dinesh D'Souza:

... the billionaire investor Joe Ricketts ... is involved in another effort slated for this summer, a documentary film based on a widely criticized book, "The Roots of Obama's Rage" by Dinesh D'Souza, which asserts that Mr. Obama is carrying out the "anticolonial" agenda of his Kenyan father.

Mr. Ricketts's aides said he was one of roughly two dozen investors, providing only 5 percent of the film's budget. But ... Mr. Ricketts's aides also said that he had helped pay for newspaper and Internet advertisements promoting Mr. D'Souza's book in late 2010, one of which called it "the book the White House doesn't want you to read," and warned, "The real Barack Obama is even worse than you think." ...

Here's the trailer for that movie, which tells us, "Obama has a dream, a dream from his father: that the sins of colonialism be set right and America be downsized."



So Ricketts was a terrible person long before he shut those news outlets down.

FOR THE THOUSANDTH TIME: THE PROBLEM IS THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, STUPID

Dave Weigel reports on a disheartening survey from a couple of Democratic pollsters:

Warning of a “weakening Democratic brand,” pollsters working for a progressive nonprofit are encouraging the minority party to run on a clear, populist platform in 2018 — or risk an election where voters don’t see them as alternatives to the Trump administration.

“Trump is hated, but he is not collapsing and is stable on many parts of his identity and job performance,” pollsters Stan Greenberg and Nancy Zdunkewicz wrote in a polling memo prepared for Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund, a nonprofit organization. “Democrats must make the main choice in this election about how the Republicans in Congress have gone back on their promises on health care and protecting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.”

The poll results ... revisit a pool of voters from the “rising American electorate” — young, diverse and less prone to voting — that was first studied in June. Since the summer, despite President Trump’s struggles, those voters told the pollsters that they’d become a bit less inclined to vote for Democrats in 2018. A 31-point Democratic margin shrank to a 21-point margin....

One of the best-testing messages mirrored what Democrats had said for years: “Trickle-down has failed and the richest need to pay their fair share of taxes.” They had just not said so effectively about Trump and Republicans in Congress.

I keep hearing that Democrats should either talk about economic issues or pitch their message to the emerging, more-diverse electorate -- but I don't understand why this has to be an either/or choice. Democrats who can't figure out how to do both should get the hell out of big-league politics, in favor of people who can walk and chew gum at the same time. Note that the voters surveyed were young and diverse -- and they responded well to an economic message. Enough Midwestern whites responded well to a message about a diverse America in 2008 and 2012 to elect Barack Obama twice. So find a way to get both messages out.

But please, please, please: Make the point that the Republican Party is the problem. The Republican Party has contempt for you if you're non-white or LGBT or if you're unemployed or need health care for a child with chronic illness or live downstream from a chemical plant. The key to changing America is not electing Republicans.

But what are we doing? We're fixating on Donald Trump and portraying him as an anomaly, not as the culmination of long-term trends in his party. We're cheering on supposedly brave Republicans such as Bob Corker and Jeff Flake, ignoring the fact that the entire GOP, including, on most votes, Corker and Flake, has circled the wagons to protect Trump. We're rehabilitating George W. Bush, which, as Ryan Cooper writes, is nuts:

The Iraq disaster killed 4,500 U.S. soldiers, something like 400,000 Iraqis, and radically destabilized the entire region. It led directly to the rise of ISIS and contributed powerfully to the Syrian Civil War. It was the worst foreign policy blunder in American history....

(And all this is leaving aside Bush's grotesque domestic policy record — the massive handouts to the rich, ... the wretched economic performance, letting New Orleans drown, and, of course, the world-shattering financial crisis.)

... Democrats polishing the Bush presidency turd ... badly misleads people as to the nature of the political fix America is in. Trump is not some aberration in an otherwise-normal political party. He is merely every despicable Republican impulse cranked up to 11 — only this time, he's so incompetent that he hasn't managed to actually achieve much. So let us stop pretending otherwise.

We're falling into the trap Hillary Clinton fell into: We're assuming that "real Americans" don't trust any idea unless it's ratified by a Republican, so we're seeking Republican validation for our opposition to Trump. That just reinforces the notion that Democrats aren't worthy of respect.

Democrats: Be proud of who you are, speak up for yourselves, and talk about what Republicans have done over the past few decades and how their extremism hurts ordinary people. The problem is the Republican Party, stupid.

MORE PROOF THAT TRUMP DOESN'T HAVE WHAT IT TAKES TO BE A TRUE FASCIST

About an hour ago, the president of the United States tweeted this:

Would love to send the NYC terrorist to Guantanamo but statistically that process takes much longer than going through the Federal system...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 2, 2017

Here's the perfect response:

Literally too dumb and lazy to do fascism properly https://t.co/5Ff12jDFJf

— Miles"Tails"Standish (@PraxisKenzie) November 2, 2017

This is what I've been saying for months: Trump is awful, and he'd probably enjoy being a fascist dictator, but he just doesn't have the imagination, the will, or the get-up-and-go necessary to fully transform America into a totalitarian state. He's violating norms and perverting our institutions, but he's not systematically challenging the limits on his own power that protect American citizens. He's not killing journalists. He's not defying court orders. He hasn't even fired Bob Mueller.

As terrible as his presidency is, he's still thinking within the lines. He's filling his Cabinet and the federal courts with right-wing extremists, but he's doing it through the standard appointment processes. He's shamelessly violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution, but he's arguing that the language of the Constitution doesn't apply to him, and that he's exempted from statutory restrictions on his profit-seeking.

A true fascist would dispatch troops to seize the Manhattan terror suspect and have him sentenced to death in a one-hour trial by a special kangaroo court, after which he'd be swiftly hanged or shot in a football stadium on prime-time TV. We don't need no stinking due process.

On some level, Trump seems to like the restrictions on his power that continually frustrate him. He may be the president of the United States, but he's also a Fox viewer, which means he believes the world is arrayed against him in a vast conspiracy to thwart common sense, which, of course, he defines as his political opinions. Trump always liked having squabbles with people, even before he became political. I think he likes fighting more than winning. (In his lifetime he's certainly donethe former more consistently than the latter.)

So he'll continue to be a horrible president, but he'll never be a true fascist.

TRUMP'S MARKS ARE STILL FALLING FOR THE CON

In Pennsylvania coal country, the unemployed really believe coal is coming back, and they're hurting themselves, Reuters reports:

When Mike Sylvester entered a career training center earlier this year in southwestern Pennsylvania, he found more than one hundred federally funded courses covering everything from computer programming to nursing.

He settled instead on something familiar: a coal mining course.

"I think there is a coal comeback,” said the 33-year-old son of a miner....

"I have a lot of faith in President Trump," Sylvester said....

Although there have been small gains in coal output and hiring this year, driven by foreign demand, production levels remain near lows hit in 1978.

Despite broad consensus about coal's bleak future, a years-long effort to diversify the economy of this hard-hit region away from mining is stumbling, with Obama-era jobs retraining classes undersubscribed and future programs at risk under President Donald Trump’s proposed 2018 budget....

In Greene and Washington counties, 120 people have signed up for jobs retraining outside the mines, far short of the target of 700, said Ami Gatts, director of the Washington-Greene County Job Training Agency. In Westmoreland and Fayette counties, participation in federal job retraining programs has been about 15 percent of capacity, officials said.

"I can't even get them to show up for free food I set up in the office," said Dave Serock, an ex-miner who recruits in Fayette County for Southwest Training Services....

One $1.4 million ... project to teach laid-off miners in Greene County and in West Virginia computer coding has signed up only 20 people for 95 slots. Not a single worker has enrolled in another program launched this summer to prepare ex-miners to work in the natural gas sector, officials said.

We're told that this isn't happening everywhere -- in West Virginia and Kentucky, there's less self-delusion about the future of coal. But there's a slight uptick in coal mining in Pennsylvania, and now President Trump has people there believing that the industry will come all the way back. But the few new coal jobs aren't even good ones -- they pay about $13 an hour. And yet people are falling for the con.

At least Trump University was the product of pure greed. That's understandable. But all Trump got out of this was the ego boost of being elected president. Sure, he's working all the emoluments angles, and maybe his plan was to make a lot of money in return for favors to Russia, but, so far, becoming Leader of the Free World hasn't been all that lucrative for Trump, as grifts go.

Trump used to be a common crook. Now he's cheating people largely for personal psychic gratification. But I think he's such a bone-deep con artist that he can't not lie to people. It's nothing to him, but it has real consequences for them.

TRUMP DOESN'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT ANYTHING, BUT HE KNOWS EVERYTHING SUCKS

I just watched this clip of the president talking about the Lower Manhattan terrorist attack, and it's appalling:

Trump lashes out at US federal justice system as "joke" and "laughing stock." pic.twitter.com/Aa5vJumWvd

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 1, 2017

TRUMP: That was a horrible event. We have to stop it and we have to stop it cold. We also have to come up with punishment that’s far quicker and far greater than the punishment these animals are getting right now. They’ll go through court for years. At the end, they'll be -- who knows what happens. We need quick justice, and we need strong justice, much quicker and much stronger than we have right now. Because what we have right now is a joke, and it’s a laughingstock. And no wonder so much of this stuff takes place. And I think I can speak for plenty of other countries, too, that are in the same situation.

The phrase that disgusts me most: "who know what happens." Dude, you're the president of the United States. Terrorism prosecutions are federal prosecutions. Why don't you know? You could know just from reading some news once in a while -- not watching Fox & Friends but reading the news.

Do you know what happened to the Chelsea bomber, Mr. President? Do you even know there was a Chelsea bomber? You should -- you tweeted about it.

I would like to express my warmest regards, best wishes and condolences to all of the families and victims of the horrible bombing in NYC.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 18, 2016

He was convicted on October 16, less than thirteen months after the incident. He'll probably get life.

A jury convicted a New Jersey man Monday in a bombing last year that injured 31 people and sparked a frantic two-state manhunt. The verdict means the bomber, Ahmad Khan Rahimi, is likely to spend the rest of his life in prison.

A jury in Manhattan federal court deliberated for just a few hours between Friday afternoon and Monday morning before finding Rahimi guilty of all eight counts against him for planting bombs in the Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea on Sept. 17, 2016. One bomb left on a sidewalk did not explode, but another, left inside a metal trash container, detonated, causing the injuries.

Trump has no motivation to learn facts like these, because he already "knows" what's important: that decent Americans (no, that doesn't include you, hippie) always get rooked, that vicious scum criminals get all the breaks because of legal technicalities and political correctness, and that if he were running the country (which I thought was already the case) everything would be much better. In other words, he "knows" what every angry drunk at the end of the bar "knows." Once you're certain of all that, who needs to bother learning any pesky facts or details?

It's quite possible that Trump believes life imprisonment -- even life at the brutal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, where Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, shoe bomber Richard Reid, and underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab are held -- is too soft a punishment. But I'm sure he has no idea what it's like. I'm sure he doesn't know any details about how prisoners are treated there (23 hours a day in solitary and so on). I'm not sure he even knows that we have a supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, even though it's a federal prison, and therefore it's run by people who ultimately report to him.

He just believes that everything sucks, because everyone except him is weak, lily-livered, and hopelessly PC. This is what every heavy consumer of Fox News and talk radio believes.

Trump also said this morning that he would "certainly consider" sending suspect Sayfullo Saipov to Guantánamo. He wasn't asked whether Saipov should be tortured, but I imagine that sounds like a swell idea to him -- on the campaign trail in 2016 he said he'd "bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding." Never mind the fact that the ostensible reason the U.S. tortured terrorism suspects in the Bush years was to obtain information, and Saipov already appears to be talking quite freely about what he did.

Again, I don't think Trump has given this any serious thought. He just knows that it's quick, it's emotionally satisfying, and it's something other people have been too scrupulous to consider. So it must be good.

DONALD TRUMP, FUTURE RINO?

Politico reports that the president is leaving Robert Mueller alone:

Firing special counsel Robert Mueller? That might open up the president to an obstruction of justice charge.

Defunding the Russia investigation? Influential Republicans are warning the White House to avoid such a direct attack.

... on Tuesday, several of the president’s top aides did their best to signal that Trump would be staying out of Mueller’s way.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders gave reporters a flat “no” during her daily briefing when asked whether the president would take aim at Mueller’s budget, as former White House strategist Steve Bannon has suggested.

... White House attorney Ty Cobb, personal attorneys John Dowd and Jay Sekulow, and White House chief of staff John Kelly have ... coached the president to pull back from making explicit, direct attacks against Mueller.

The Washington Post concurs:

Bannon in recent days has spoken with Trump by phone to relay his concerns about the president’s position and to counsel a shift in strategy, according to three people with knowledge of the conversation. The president — so far — has not accepted Bannon’s advice, these people said....

But many people in Trump’s orbit recommend that he stay the course with cooperation — encouraging him to harshly criticize media coverage of the investigation but avoid engaging Mueller....

Bannon is demanding that GOP leaders move swiftly to end congressional probes into Russian interference, undermine Mueller’s investigation and increase scrutiny on Democratic controversies.

“The Republicans are like church mice,” Bannon said Tuesday. “No support of the president. Totally gutless. The Hill needs to step up.”

A lot of people hope that the end of the Trump presidency will break the fever in America -- they hope we'll have a government that respects laws and norms again, and there'll be less political polarization. But Bannon is putting down a marker here: If Trump leaves office before his term is over, or as a scandal-plagued loser in 2020, the message to Republican voters will be Trump is gone because no one would stand up and fight for him. The people who failed to stand up and fight will include Trump himself.

The message after that will be We need a real fighter. We need someone who'll never back down. Voters won't revert to the right-center -- they'll want someone even nastier than Trump. Trump might be seen as a RINO, a phony Republican who listened to swamp-dwelling advisors (some of them Democrats) and allowed the Deep State to take over.

It won't end -- not until there aren't enough Republican voters to matter. And I don't know when that will be, if ever.