The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Flooding the zone with shit

The OAFPOTUS has nominated TV personality and shameless quack Dr Oz to head up Medicare, which is of a piece with the rest of his cabinet nominations so far.

I think the OAFPOTUS has some other grievance than against the government, law enforcement, international norms, rational thought, and everything else he's railed against since 2015.

Clearly, the OAFPOTUS wants to drive The Onion out of business.

Must be November

We're having gray, rainy weather for our few hours of daylight today. We haven't yet had a freeze this fall, and none is forecast before winter officially begins in two weeks, so all the moisture in the air just hangs around and makes more fog and rain. And yet, tomorrow we might get a high of 15°C—about 8°C above normal—before flurries and "wintry mix" Wednesday night.

Yeah, it's the end of November in Chicago.

Otherwise, I'm still mulling our electoral loss from two weeks ago, even as it looks less like a disaster and more like just three million Democrats staying home. In fact, it looks like neither candidate got a majority of the popular vote, with the OAFPOTUS increasing his total popular vote count by a little over 2½ million while our side lost about 7½ million compared with 2020.

Oh, and it's the 141st anniversary of time zones, which had a far more lasting effect than the election will have.

Happy Monday.

I can't stress this enough: Don't fall for the trolling

Yesterday I posted a short video from Robert Wright reminding everyone that the OAFPOTUS and his hangers-on thrive on negative energy. The moral: don't waste your own energy on his bullshit.

For example, I haven't agonized at all about his kakistocratic nominations for top cabinet posts, for the simple reason that I think they're distractions from the Republican Party's principal goals of increasing the wealth of billionaires and stealing as much as they can rake in from the American People. I mean, the only person in Congress more hated than Ted Cruz is Matt Gaetz; I have little doubt that the Senate will bounce his ass to a bottom-feeding lobby firm.

But nominating Gaetz and having him fail miserably doesn't bother the OAFPOTUS at all. Because when Gaetz fails to get confirmed, the OAFPOTUS will nominate someone even worse. He did this sort of thing more than once during his first term.

The United States has just re-elected Zaphod Beeblebrox to the presidency. We should really care more about the six guys with the black ships, and not worry about the idiot with two heads and three arms. (I'm just waiting for some Fox News guest to finally declare, "Donald's just zis guy, you know?")

Again: let's don't let the flim-flam distract us. Oppose the policies, not the pronouncements. We'll have enough to do for the next few years without wasting our breath on every trolling utterance that comes from the Administration.

Morning roundup

I've got a couple of minutes before I descend into the depths of a very old codebase that has had dozens of engineers mucking about in it. Time enough to read through these:

Finally, everyone take six minutes and listen Robert Wright as he reminds us not to get distracted by the OAFPOTUS's trolling:

Release the Kakistocracy!

I had a completely different post in my head this afternoon, but the OAFPOTUS just nominated Matt Gaetz (R-FL) to run the Justice Department and I couldn't stop laughing for several minutes.

I expect he'll nominate high-school dropout Lauren Boebert (R-CO) to run the Education Department next.

These kinds of moves explain why I haven't worried so much about fascism as a government that couldn't find sand at a beach. As the OAFPOTUS has no competence himself, it follows that he would neither recognize nor care about competence in others. The next four years will suck, all right, but not in the ways that some of my more hysterical friends fear they will.

Still mulling

I haven't yet got my head around a couple of thoughts I had concerning last Tuesday's debacle. I've come to a few conclusions, but I'm still mulling the implications, and also the structure of the Daily Parker post that I promised over the weekend. It might take a few more days to write.

Meanwhile:

Finally, the South Shore Line lost 40% of its rail cars to wheel damage over the past two weeks, and suffered 30-60 minute delays as a result, because of leaves on the tracks.

Efficiency at SFO

Hotel to terminal, 7 minutes (Lyft); through security, 10 minutes. Boarding in an hour. Now I just need the coffee to work its magic...

I'm also tickled that the ex-POTUS will now be called the Once And Future POTUS. At least for a couple of months.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world:

Finally, 35 years ago today I called my college roommate into our dorm room to watch live as Berliners took sledgehammers to the Wall. We didn't know what it meant other than we'd won the Cold War. Too bad we were still decades away from Aaron Sorkin's prescient words, "we'll see."

* "It is difficult to get a man to understand a thing when his salary depends on him not understanding it."

Not sure I agree 100%, but he's got a point

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens suggests that a holier-than-thou attitude from Democrats contributed to Tuesday's electoral disaster:

The broad inability of liberals to understand Trump’s political appeal except in terms flattering to their beliefs is itself part of the explanation for his historic, and entirely avoidable, comeback.

[Democrats'] mistakes of calculation lived within three larger mistakes of worldview. First, the conviction among many liberals that things were pretty much fine, if not downright great, in Biden’s America — and that anyone who didn’t think that way was either a right-wing misinformer or a dupe. Second, the refusal to see how profoundly distasteful so much of modern liberalism has become to so much of America. Third, the insistence that the only appropriate form of politics when it comes to Trump is the politics of Resistance — capital R.

The effect was to insult voters while leaving Democrats blind to the legitimacy of the issues. You could see this every time Harris mentioned, in answer to questions about the border, that she had prosecuted transnational criminal gangs: Her answer was nonresponsive to the central complaint that there was a migration crisis straining hundreds of communities, irrespective of whether the migrants committed crimes.

Today, the Democrats have become the party of priggishness, pontification and pomposity. It may make them feel righteous, but how’s that ever going to be a winning electoral look?

My social media keeps blowing up with my friends catastrophizing and much rending of garments. These are the same people who believed, without doubt, we would win yesterday. I don't know how many people asked me "how do you think we'll do?" to which I had to reply "I don't know." Because I also talk to the other side, and I knew they really felt like we talked down to them all the time.

If a motivating factor for a lot of people, white and Hispanic men in particular, was feeling dissed and wanting to stick it to the liberals, antagonizing them was a pretty stupid thing to do. Moralizing at them was even worse. Because no matter how much the other side offends your morality, or how superior you feel to them, you still need to win the election.

Democrats, including me, have complained about the POTUSE engaging in identity entrepreneurialism. But the response to that cannot be our own identity politicking. And now that our side has gotten spanked, I hope we can finally move the party back to the center.

I'm off to the Bay Area today, so I'll have four hours on an airplane to think more about how we can learn from Tuesday and win the legislature back in 2026.

First reactions from the pros

Some of these may be correct, but not all of them are:

  • Rafael Baer: "The whole apparatus of voting for a candidate who might not satisfy your exact needs, and probably doesn’t embody all the values you hold sacred, but might at least make some half-decent decisions for the country as a whole over the coming years, feels oddly antiquated. It is alien to the click-and-collect spirit of digital commerce."
  • The Economist: "Mr Trump’s victory has changed America, and the world will need to grasp what that means. America remains the pre-eminent power. However, without American enlightened self-interest as an organising principle, it will be open season for bullies. Countries will be more able to browbeat their neighbours, economically and militarily, without fear of consequences. Their victims, unable to turn to America for relief, will be more likely to compromise or capitulate. Global initiatives, from tackling climate change to arms control, have just got harder. For a time—possibly for years—America may do fine. Eventually, the world will catch up with it."
  • James Fallows: "By the standards of any presidential race in modern times, Kamala Harris ran a very “good” campaign. By those same standards, Trump ran a very bad campaign. And none of it mattered. The Republican presidential candidate had won the popular vote only once in the past 32 years. Eight years ago, Trump lost to Hillary Clinton by three million votes. Four years ago, he lost to Joe Biden by seven million. Yesterday, our fellow Americans appear to have given him an absolute majority—as I type, over 51% of the total vote, and a margin of several million."
  • David Frum: "Perhaps the greater and more insidious danger is not political repression or harassment, but corruption. Autocratic populists around the world—in Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela—have assaulted institutions designed to provide accountability and transparency in order to shift money and influence to their friends and families, and this may happen in America too."
  • Carlos Lozada: "Trump is very much part of who we are. Nearly 63 million Americans voted for him in 2016. Seventy-four million did in 2020. And now, once again, enough voters in enough places have cast their lot with him to return him to the White House. Trump is no fluke, and Trumpism is no fad. The Harris campaign, as the Biden campaign before it, labored under the misapprehension that more exposure to Trump would repel voters. They must simply have forgotten the mayhem of his presidency, the distaste that the former president surely inspired. It didn’t. America knew his type, too, and it liked it. Trump’s disinhibition spoke to and for his voters. He won because of it, not despite it."
  • Josh Marshall: "[E]xhaustion is the greatest threat to continued opposition to Donald Trump. There’s no one election that saves democracy. That whole construct is wrong. It’s the enduring question of what kind of society we want to live in and what we’re going to do about it."
  • Daniel McCarthy: "Mr. Trump’s victory amounts to a public vote of no confidence in the leaders and institutions that have shaped American life since the end of the Cold War 35 years ago. Mr. Trump has shown that the nation’s political orthodoxies are bankrupt, and the leaders in all our institutions — private as well as public — who stake their claim to authority on their fealty to such orthodoxies are now vulnerable."
  • Robert Reich: "If you are grieving or frightened, you are not alone. Tens of millions of Americans feel the way you do. All I can say to reassure you is that time and again, Americans have opted for the common good. Time and again, we have come to each other’s aid. We have resisted cruelty. We supported one another during the Great Depression. We were victorious over Hitler’s fascism and Soviet communism. We survived Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunts, Richard Nixon’s crimes, Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam war, the horrors of 9/11, and George W Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We will resist Donald Trump’s tyranny."
  • Michael Tomasky: "If you go carefully through the exit polls and compare them to 2020, you actually see a fair amount of stability. Only one group of voters really stands out. Biden had won Latinos 65–32. Harris won them by only 53–45. And the biggest change of all is among Latino men: Biden won them 59–36, and this time, Trump beat Harris outright, 54–44. I kept wishing that I would see an ad by one of the prominent Black or Latino men who endorsed her that didn’t focus on praising Harris or even denouncing Trump in the normal, he’s-a-threat-to-democracy way. I wanted to see, say, LeBron James talking directly to young men of color about why Trump was not a tough guy at all; why he was a weakling and a bully, and explaining that a real man doesn’t lie or make excuses or disrespect women."
  • George Will: "Enough has been said about the Republican Party’s eight years of self-degradation. More needs to be said about the Democratic Party’s self-sabotage, via identity politics (race, gender), that made Harris vice president. Before claiming to sniff Nazism on the other party (and its supporters), Harris’s party should deal with the stench of its antisemitic faction that is pro-Hamas and therefore pro-genocide."

Meanwhile, here in Chicago, voters elected only a couple of the Chicago Teachers Union candidates in our school board vote, as well as a couple of school-choice (read: taking public money for private schools) folks. I really disliked most of the candidates, including the one who won in my district. So that will be fun. Even though I don't have a kid in school, I do pay property tax, and I'm really tired of so much of it going to pay settlements for people beaten up or killed by cops and for a totally dysfunctional school district.

Update: Jonathan Pie has the acerbic British comedian view:

Our first duty

I'm not going to lie; this one stings:

We have a lot more data to gather to learn why we lost and why slightly more than half the electorate felt comfortable returning one of the least competent and most corrupt men back to the White House. Given this ridiculous person as our opponent, we have to acknowledge that we simply failed. I'll have a lot more to say about why over the next days and weeks, but the President's decision to run for a second term is probably the precipitating cause.

This sucks. Harris failed to win over enough voters to overcome a clownish demagogue. Her job from today until November 2028 will be to help the Democratic Party find someone else who can.

Right now, though, our first duty in protecting democracy in the United States is simply to accept that we lost and start preparing for at least two years in the minority. Being in opposition sucks; but notice, Republicans, how we're not storming the Capitol.

We can wallow in self-pity for the next 57 days, but come January 3rd, we need to be a disciplined, focused opposition party until we win the Senate back in two years and the White House two years after that. Resist the temptation to blame or point fingers; we Democrats have a long history of circular firing squads that we need to put behind us. We need to look at the data figure out what worked and what didn't, learn from our mistakes, and win the next election. We're not going to be in the desert for long unless we choose not to look at a map.