No Hoodwinking Allowed

On Friday evening's Overtime segment on Real Time with Bill Maher, guest Vivek Ramaswamy tried to equate the refusal of Stacey Abrams to concede the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race to GOP election deniers. Bill Maher would have none of that, responding

Yeah, you know, I've heard this on the show before. I just got to call bullshit on this. It's just such silly whataboutism. You pick out the one example on the left- one example among Democrats that it's not nearly as consequential as what is going on in the entire Republican Party, including the leader of the Party, Donald Trump.

That's the answer- Stacey Abrams? It's a bullshit answer, man. with all due respect, it's a bullshit answer to a giant problem that exists almost exclusively on one side.

In May, 2019 Vox explained of the effort by Abrams' organization

The 66-page lawsuit highlights voting issues that affected the state including voter purges, registration applications put on hold, Election Day troubles at predominantly nonwhite voting precincts, and problems with voters’ absentee and provisional ballots.

Each of these issues fueled their own series of lawsuits (several of them successful) in the weeks before and after the election, but this latest lawsuit cites them collectively to make a larger point: Georgia’s current election system created an unconstitutional series of obstacles that are disproportionately likely to disadvantage, and in some cases completely disenfranchise, voters of color.

At the time of the election, the Secretary of State of Georgia, charged with overseeing elections, was none other than Brian Kemp- Abrams' opponent and presumptive winner of the election. However, the most telling factor may be that the plaintiffs proposed a series of reforms.

Donald Trump & Co. challenged the results of the 2020 election for one reason and one reason only: Donald Trump lost.  It was not about the voters; it was about him, only.

But Maher was correct. Whatever Abrams' justification, she did not incite an insurrection and she is not a leading presidential candidate. Ramaswamy argued "we're not going to have faith in either side of the electoral system" unless "everyone who at least points to someone in their tribe." To that Maher noted "Yes, but more so when the two things are of equal merit . And this a mouse and an elephant, you know. I mean, it's a cheap trick."

However, the (willfully) blind cannot be deterred and Ramaswamy stated

What role did this play where a lot of Democrats were not willing to accept the legitimacy of the 2016 election outcome on the back of the Russia collusion narrative. What role does that play in giving legitimacy to the other side to now say they're not going to accept the election. I think this has been a game of escalation going on for a long time.

Maher noted "who didn't accept the election? Hillary came down in her purple suit within- before she went to bed."  

The narrative of what the right dismisses as "the Russia collusion" included the 140+ contacts between Donald Trump and 18 of his associates with Russian nationals and Wikileaks, or their intermediaries, during the 2016 campaign and presidential transition. This was not to conduct their fantasy football draft.

After Ramaswamy again invoked "a Russia collusion narrative," Maher responded "the impeachment was not about Russia collusion. It was about Ukraine. the impeachment was about the Ukraine scandal."

The blueprint was laid with the Brooks Brothers Riot of November 2000 and included the announcement by George W. Bush of victory and nomination of a cabinet before all the votes were counted.  A week before the last presidential election, Roger Stone laid out the Republican playbook: "When that happens, the key thing to do is claim victory. Possession is nine-tenths of the law. No, we won." As noted here, Roger "Stone coordinated the program to shut down the vote count and throw the election to Bush, who had lost the election by 500,000 votes nationwide, a role Stone reprised in both 2016 and 2020." 

The game is election manipulation, there is only one side playing it. Bill Maher knew it and called it for it is.

🚨”I really do suspect it’ll still be up in the air. When that happens, the key thing to do is to claim victory. Possession is nine tenths of the law. 'No, we won.'"

- Roger Stone, Nov. 1 2020 (footage obtained by J6 Committee)

VERY closely matches what Bannon said Oct 31 2020 pic.twitter.com/0PQPcWCkZ1

— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) September 26, 2022

 

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Paving the Way

Steve M writes

As far as I'm concerned, it was clear that the right had rejected humanity a long time ago -- sixty years ago, obviously (though the segregationist hatemongers were mostly Democrats then), and certainly two decades ago, when the public learned about the Bush administration's embrace of torture. If you lurked at right-wing sites back then, and for many years afterward, you know that the rank-and-file right loved the idea of torturing Muslims.

Those such as Steve M who recognize that the Republican Party's road to villainy did not begin with Donald Trump's descent on the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 point to the GOP's decades-long flirtation with racism, deregulation of the administrative state to undermine the interests of labor and of consumers, and allegiance to, and reverence for, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.  However, the most immediate threat to the nation is the ongoing, and growing, attack on democratic governance. And while it is difficult to pinpoint the precise genesis of the racial bias and thrust to redistribute income and wealth upwards (not totally unrelated to each other), the beginning of the assault on the principles of liberal democracy can be traced to an almost precise point.

Last month, Chris Lehmann- unlike myself, an actual journalist and author- reminded us better than I could have that

In the wake of a bitterly disputed presidential election, a central hub of government operations was suddenly under siege. A group of aggrieved right-wing protesters defied security and flooded into the now-chaotic center of activity. Government officials were harassed and feared for their safety, as charges of fraud and betrayal of the people’s will rose up from the angry mob.

No, this wasn’t January 6, 2021—it was two decades earlier, on the day before Thanksgiving in the year 2000. The target wasn’t the US Capitol but instead the nondescript Steven B. Clark Government Center in downtown Miami. Election officials had congregated there to review disputed ballots marred by ambiguous or otherwise imperfect impressions of electoral intent on the part of voters in the deadlocked 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. They were met by a throng of Republicans clad in polo shirts, chanting, “Shut it down!”

The precedent set by the post-election uprising in Miami-Dade County gives the lie to the common depiction of the failed Trumpian coup as an isolated and outlying event in the annals of right-wing protest. In reality, the “Brooks Brothers riot,” staged amid the surreal, fiercely contested battle over the Florida vote, laid out the blueprint. Then, as in 2020, key legal and political strategists on the right sought to disrupt a clear procedural mandate to preserve the integrity of a vote count. The symbolic staging of the right-wing uprising conveyed the clear message that the votes of a white, upscale electorate were innately more American, legitimate, and potent than the more numerous non-white coalition that broke for the Democratic presidential ticket.

Still more remarkably, both disruptive actions aimed at flipping the election into the Republican column took shape under the guidance of fabled right-wing dirty-tricks impresario Roger Stone—an ardent student of Nixonian electoral realpolitik who moved seamlessly into the vanguard of the Trumpian right. The legal arm of the GOP’s orchestrated bid to shut down the 2000 election recount in Florida boasted no less than three future Supreme Court justices among its foot soldiers: Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. The improbable elevation of Donald Trump to the top of the GOP presidential ticket, and then the White House, during the 2016 election cycle drew directly on the racist animal spirits unleashed in the early-’90s candidacies of presidential hopefuls David Duke and former Nixon communications aide Pat Buchanan; likewise, the horrific and deadly assault on the US Capitol on January 6 built to a striking degree on the precedent set by the Brooks Brothers riot.

Putting it all together, Lehmann notes

“The closed loop of raw power here is extraordinary,” says Roosevelt University political scientist David Faris. “You have Barrett, Roberts and Kavanaugh on Bush’s legal team, who help convince the Supreme Court to issue a party-line 5-4 vote to stop counting votes in Florida. With Bush installed, Roberts eventually becomes chief justice, guts voting rights and campaign finance laws, allows Republicans to continue gerrymandering, cuts the heart out of unions and subjects the ACA to endless legal Calvinball.” At the core of this judicial revolution, Faris continues, was the logic of the electoral putsch, as test-driven in Miami: “With the Brooks Brothers riot, Republicans got their first taste of intimidating election officials, gaming the courts and playing the outrage card to tilt the scales in their favor.”

At that time, many Republicans believed it wise not to count all votes in a presidential election and the media, the Supreme Court, and other institutions were quite satisfied with that. Now, 23 Republican candidates in 18 states argue that Donald J. Trump won the 2020 election.  Most of those who win their elections will study the campaign to thwart the will of the voters in 2020, and it will be empowering.

An active opponent of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump clearly has made matters much worse. However, we need to pay homage- obviously, not in a positive way- to the (almost entirely) men who pointed the way to totalitarianism nearly twenty-two years ahead of their time.

 

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Brooks Brothers Nicole

While addressing the likely imminent  reversal of Roe v. Wade, in a stunning display of lack of self-awareness:

 

Nicolle Wallace on the imminent reversal of Roe:
"How did we get here?"
How long did you work in Republican politics again?

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) June 20, 2022

On the one-year anniversary of the insurrection, Grace Panetta in Business Insider recalled

On November 22, 2000, a group of well-dressed Republican protesters descended on a government office building in Miami. They were there to protest the Miami-Dade County Canvassing Board's recount in the disputed presidential race between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush. They wanted to stop what they regarded as a steal, and they were prepared to resort to violence to do it.

The Brooks Brothers riot revived a new blueprint for electoral disputes, one that openly deployed violence and intimidation to frighten officials into discarding legitimate votes. Like the January 6, 2021 pro-Trump siege on the US Capitol, it was sought to replace the rule of law with mob rule.

And like that brazen assault on democracy, it was orchestrated at the top levels of the GOP. The weapon-toting, MAGA hat-clad insurrectionists of 2021 directly descend from the buttoned-down, stop-the-steal rioters of 2000.

The participants of the demonstration, primarily organized by senior Bush campaign official Brad Blakeman, became irate that the three-member canvassing board had gone to an upstairs room out of the public view and entered the building to vocally protest the process.

When local Democratic official Joe Geller went downstairs to get a blank sample ballot to demonstrate something to his colleagues, he was surrounded by the protesters who loudly accused him of stealing a voters' ballot and hounded him all the way back upstairs.

Both he and then-Democratic operative Luis Rosera got caught up in a scuffle and described being kicked and punched by the increasingly unwieldy crowd, The New York Times reported, with sheriffs' deputies having to intervene to quell the brouhaha and escort the canvassing board to safety.

At this link, you will find that the Times at the time reported

The subsequent demonstrations turned violent on Wednesday after the canvassers had decided to close the recount to the public. Joe Geller, chairman of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party, was escorted to safety by the police after a crowd chased him down and accused him of stealing a ballot. Upstairs in the Clark center, several people were trampled, punched or kicked when protesters tried to rush the doors outside the office of the Miami-Dade supervisor of elections. Sheriff's deputies restored order.

When the ruckus was over, the protesters had what they had wanted: a unanimous vote by the board to call off the hand counting.

Panetta added

The incident, which is now often referred to as the Brooks Brothers riot or rebellion, intimidated the board into suspending their already-scaled back recount altogether, resulting in many votes going uncounted and lost in the "what-ifs" of history.

Nicole Wallace was not involved in the effort to stop a recount which would have contributed to determining who was legitimately elected President of the USA. However, she was part of the recount travesty in Florida in 2000 as press secretary for Governor John Ellis Bush ("JEB").  She proceeded to join the George W Bush administration, then served on Bush's re-election campaign and afterward in the second Bush administration.   

It is said "confession is good for the soul." Alas, it rarely benefits a professional career. Nicole Wallace could confess her own role in creating the modern Republican Party, which is a mere exaggeration- not a perversion-- of the Republican Party she happily and profitably participated in. But with her popularity riding high among MSNBC viewers, there is no practical reason for her to admit her complicity in the muck and mud that is- and has been- the Republican Party.

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Reprise

This guy is old, and informed, enough that he should know better:

 

I've never been prouder to not be a Republican.

— John Pavlovitz (@johnpavlovitz) January 7, 2022

Lest he- and we- have forgotten:

On November 22, 2000, a group of well-dressed Republican protesters descended on a government office building in Miami. They were there to protest the Miami-Dade County Canvassing Board's recount in the disputed presidential race between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush. They wanted to stop what they regarded as a steal, and they were prepared to resort to violence to do it.

The Brooks Brothers riot revived a new blueprint for electoral disputes, one that openly deployed violence and intimidation to frighten officials into discarding legitimate votes. Like the January 6, 2021 pro-Trump siege on the US Capitol, it was sought to replace the rule of law with mob rule.

And like that brazen assault on democracy, it was orchestrated at the top levels of the GOP. The weapon-toting, MAGA hat-clad insurrectionists of 2021 directly descend from the buttoned-down, stop-the-steal rioters of 2000.

The participants of the demonstration, primarily organized by senior Bush campaign official Brad Blakeman, became irate that the three-member canvassing board had gone to an upstairs room out of the public view and entered the building to vocally protest the process.

When local Democratic official Joe Geller went downstairs to get a blank sample ballot to demonstrate something to his colleagues, he was surrounded by the protesters who loudly accused him of stealing a voters' ballot and hounded him all the way back upstairs.

Both he and then-Democratic operative Luis Rosera got caught up in a scuffle and described being kicked and punched by the increasingly unwieldy crowd, The New York Times reported, with sheriffs' deputies having to intervene to quell the brouhaha and escort the canvassing board to safety.

The incident, which is now often referred to as the Brooks Brothers riot or rebellion, intimidated the board into suspending their already-scaled back recount altogether, resulting in many votes going uncounted and lost in the "what-ifs" of history.

The insurrection waged by Trump supporters on Congress' joint session to count electoral votes, while significantly more physically violent and destructive, harkens back to the echoes of that day in downtown Miami.

No doubt Pavlovitz, an author and Unitarian-Universalist minister, means well. However, the Republican Party he recognizes as deeply flawed is the Republican Party of 2000 and even the GOP of 1980. It's the Republican Party of George W. Bush, Ronald(6) Wilson(6) Reagan(6), Joe Scarborough, and even Dick Cheney. Donald Trump has taken the reins of that same party and put it on steroids, enhancing its corruption and bringing it into public view..

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Not The First Time

It didn't start yesterday.

George Will is accurate and being celebrated on left Twitter after noting "on Wednesday, the members of the Hawley-Cruz cohort will violate the oath of office in which they swore to defend the Constitution from enemies “foreign and domestic.” They are its most dangerous domestic enemies." And you can't beat (emphasis Will's) "Hawley — has there ever been such a high ratio of ambition to accomplishment?"  (Hawley is right about $2,000 stimulus checks but the push by him and Sanders hasn't succeeded.)

Nonetheless, Will is trying to blow smoke up our posteriors when he advances the notion that there are three discrete parties in politics:

America’s three-party system — Democrats, Hawley-Cruz Republicans, and McConnell-Sasse Republicans — will continue to take shape on Wednesday. Watch how many of these Republican senators who might be seeking reelection in 2022 have the spine to side with the adults against Hawley-Cruz et al. and the Grassy Knollers among their constituents: John Boozman, Richard Burr, Mike Crapo, Charles E. Grassley, John Hoeven, Mike Lee, Jerry Moran, Lisa Murkowski, Rand Paul, Rob Portman, Marco Rubio, Tim Scott, Richard C. Shelby, John Thune, Todd C. Young.

Today, they are assuring what was already assured, that Joe Biden will be inaugurated President on January 21, 2021. However, each one has sided with the authoritarian on nearly every vote in this regime. All of them delivered a stunning rebuke to the rule of law and American democracy when they ignored the overwhelming evidence against President Trump in order to vote not guilty at his impeachment trial.

During the impeachment hearing early this year, House impeachment manager Adam Schiff warned 

Can we be confident that he will not continue to try to cheat in [this] very election? Can we be confident that Americans and not foreign powers will get to decide, and that the president will shun any further foreign interference in our Democratic affairs? The short, plain, sad, incontestable answer is no, you can't. You can't trust this president to do the right thing. Not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country. You just can't. He will not change and you know it.

What are the odds if left in office that he will continue trying to cheat? I will tell you: 100 percent. A man without character or ethical compass will never find his way.

After the President was impeached, all 15 of those GOP senators, though (or maybe because) aware that Trump would cheat, then not go quietly if defeated for re-election, voted for acquittal.

This isn't the GOP's first rigging rodeo. CNN political analyst Julian Zelizer recalls

On November 21, the Florida Supreme Court authorized manual recounts in four counties and set a November 26th deadline. The next day, the Miami-Dade County canvassing board decided to focus solely on the contested ballots in order to meet the deadline. To hunker down and avoid the media frenzy that had descended on Miami, the officials decided to move to a smaller room on the 19th floor so they could be closer to the ballot-scanning machine, according to an account in Salon.

But Republican operatives, congressional staffers and lawyers had organized a group of protesters to fly to Florida, and the mob of "50-year-old white lawyers with cell phones and Hermes ties," as described by the Wall Street Journal, gathered in the high-rise building where the recount was taking place.

When New York Congressman John Sweeney, who was working for the Bush campaign, learned that the recount had been moved to another room, he ordered, the troops to "shut it down."

The protesters yelled and screamed, accusing the canvassers of trying to steal the election. The chants became fiercer and the demonstration increasingly raucous as they directly confronted the county officials. "Stop the count. Stop the fraud," they chanted.

Miami-Dade Democratic County Chairman Joe Geller bore the brunt of the protesters' ire. When someone handed him a sample ballot to test one of the voting machines, the protesters surrounded him and demand that he desist, accusing him of stealing ballots.

"This one guy was tripping me and pushing me and kicking me. At one point, I thought if they knocked me over, I could have literally got stomped to death," he recalled. The police escorted Geller so that he could safely leave the building. Republican organizers denied that the situation ever became violent.

The strategy worked. Hours after the riot, the board decided to shut down its operations and the manual recount in Miami came to an end. (David Leahy, one member of the canvassing board, told the New York Times, "This was perceived as not being an open and fair process. That weighed heavy on our minds." But days later he denied the protests played a role in ending the manual recount.) The Supreme Court later handed the victory to George W. Bush, and a number of the participants in the Brooks Brothers Riot went on to serve in the administration and work in conservative politics.

Nor did the lying about the election process begin in 2020 as

“This one guy was tripping me and pushing me and kicking me,” recalled Geller, who is now a state legislator. “At one point, I thought if they knocked me over, I could have literally got stomped to death.”

Brad Blakeman, a Bush campaign operative who proudly admits to coordinating what he prefers to call the “Brooks Brothers Rebellion,” denies that things got violent.

“That’s all bulls---,” he told The Post. “There was no violence. There was no threatening behavior.”

Although senators Hawley and Cruz are straight-up authoritarians, their GOP colleagues chose to condone the President's crimes when they had the chance to shut them down.  Assaulting democracy is how Donald Trump rolls. But it's also how the Republican Party rolls.

 

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Rallying The Troops

 

 

 

Politico has reported

 

Top surrogates for the Trump campaign have been told to keep their Novembers clear for potential campaign events. And Trump campaign advisers said not to rule out the possibility Trump continues his rallies even as election officials continue to count ballots after the Nov. 3 election, according to a campaign surrogate and two Trump advisers.

 

It would be an upset for Trump to decide not to hold rallies after the election, whether it appears he wins or loses.  NBC News reported on Wednesday that the President expects to hold 11 rallies in the last 48 hours of the campaign. They would help increase turnout and give the impression of massive support which, after this election, would serve a strategic purpose.

That tactic would be a particularly Trumpian thing to do, and not only because he craves attention and adulation even more than does former President Obama. (And that's not easy.)  Trump understands, as Democrats might not, that in the very likely event that this thing isn't decided on November 3, it would remain more of a political process than legal process.

But don't trust me. Trust

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh (who) wrote a concurring opinion in Wisconsin National Committee v. Wisconsin State Legislature in which he mentioned in dicta “those States [that] also want to be able to definitively announce the results of the election on election night, or as soon as possible thereafter;” and some “states want to avoid the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election;” and ‘“If the apparent winner the morning after the election ends up losing due to late-arriving ballots, charges of a rigged election could explode’” (quoting, out of context, professor Richard Pildes).

With "chaos and suspicions" and "explode," Justice Kavanaugh wasn't speaking of an orderly judicial process. He was riffing on the most important remark made by either presidential (or vice-presidential) candidate in debate this autumn.  "Proud Boys, stand back and stand by," Donald Trump threatened, 27 days before Kavanaugh's comment.

And then there is Pennsylvania, the leading candidate as the tipping point state in the election:

The pressure to shut down the PA vote count is going to be insane.

Even if the 538 forecast for PA proves accurate (Biden +5), given partisan disparities in mail-in voting, Trump could hold a 16 POINT lead by the end of Tue night.https://t.co/auZtvr1PuP pic.twitter.com/ErmMcjgDGn

— Justin Sandefur (@JustinSandefur) October 29, 2020

 

Ultimately, the dispute now being played out in court as to whether to count ballots postmarked by Election Day but received afterward will be decided in court. Ultimately. However, justice is not blind and the old maxim "The Supreme Court follows the election returns" may prevail, as it did in December, 2000 with the Brooks Brothers riot.

Those paid GOP operatives were clean-cut, fashionably if leisurely dressed, and unarmed. The Proud Boys are none of those, and Donald Trump, with rallies and otherwise, will be actively encouraging them and other vigilantes after the election. 

 

 

 

 Next up: the other, lesser, objective of the rallies.

 

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Trump Postal Delay

Allan Lichtman, who in 1980 developed a model which has accurately predicted the winner of each presidential election (except perhaps one) since 1980, believes Joe Biden will win the upcoming election. (Lichtman predicted Gore, who won the popular vote  and probably the electoral vote, would win the 2000 election.)

Nonetheless, he believes that a Trump victory could ensue from two factors: Russian involvement or voter suppression. Three major items have recently emerged which buttress that point of view.

"A few weeks ago," American Postal Workers Union President Mark Diamondstein has observed of Louis DeJoy, "something definitely changed at the post office" when "the new postmaster general put in some policies that we don't think can do anything but slow down mail.

Given President Trump's attacks on mail-in voting, this seemed to be more than a coincidence, especially because as NPR reported when Trump made the appointment in May, the new Postmaster General "has contributed more than $1.2 million to the Trump Victory Fund, and millions more to Republican Party organizations and candidates, according to Federal Election Commission records."  Then on Friday, DeJoy

unveiled a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s mail service, displacing the two top executives overseeing day-to-day operations, according to a reorganization memo released Friday. The shake-up came as congressional Democrats called for an investigation of DeJoy and the cost-cutting measures that have slowed mail delivery and ensnared ballots in recent primary elections.

Twenty-three postal executives were reassigned or displaced, the new organizational chart shows. Analysts say the structure centralizes power around DeJoy, a former logistics executive and major ally of President Trump, and de-emphasizes decades of institutional postal knowledge. All told, 33 staffers included in the old postal hierarchy either kept their jobs or were reassigned in the restructuring, with five more staffers joining the leadership from other roles.

That same day, David Dayen revealed

I want to point to something that only the (paywalled) Capitol Forum has pointed out. The Postal Service has informed states that they’ll need to pay first-class 55-cent postage to mail ballots to voters, rather than the normal 20-cent bulk rate. That nearly triples the per-ballot cost at a time when tens of millions more will be delivered. The rate change would have to go through the Postal Regulatory Commission and, undoubtedly, litigation. But the time frame for that is incredibly short, as ballots go out very soon.

A side benefit of this money grab is that states and cities may decide they don’t have the money to mail absentee ballots, and will make them harder to get. Which is exactly the worst-case scenario everyone fears.

Republicans know that sabotaging the US Postal Service is crucial to their election prospects. A recent Emerson College poll found that 43% of likely voters expect to vote by mail this fall and "of those who plan to vote in person, Trump leads 65-32. Biden leads with those who intend to vote by mail, 76-20. The depth of this partisan divide is striking.”

The GOP realizes also that it has lost the popular vote in six (possibly seven) of the last seven presidential elections, 2020 will become 7 of the last 8, and there are only two possible ways it can win this election. One is via an intelligence campaign by Russia. The other, and likely to have greater impact, is voter suppression including damaging the mail delivery system.

 

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Off-Key, Strategically

The concept of "race" is controversial and elusive. For instance, Wikipedia explains "Arabs belong to the Semitic branch of the Caucasian race, mostly Mediterranean race.. The Arabid race is a term for a morphological subtype of the Caucasoid race, as used in physical anthropology."

In the context of American politics, then, "Arab" may be considered a race, even though that is arguably anthropologically inexact.

John McCain never became President because he was unable to navigate the currents of race in the USA..  That does not reflect badly on his character or personality, or even his politics (his selection of Sarah Palin in 2008 notwithstanding). Note that Donald J. Trump was far more adept in this regard, and as a consequence (albeit aided by the FBI and the Kremlin) managed to get elected president.

Charles Pierce reminded us on Sunday, the day after Senator McCain died at age 81 of brain cancer, that during the South Carolina presidential primary in 2000

There were whisper campaigns about the daughter his family had adopted from Bangladesh—the oldest and most poisonous card in the deck, especially in the home office of American sedition. There were whisper campaigns over the telephone conversations from some of America's most famous TV preachers—especially the odious Pat Robertson. There were dozens of loaded "push polls." The entire Atwater-Rove arsenal was turned on him. Rumors were spread about McCain's captivity, his mental stability, and his wife, but it kept coming back to his daughter, Bridget, who was dark enough for the bigots. Then, McCain made a critical gaffe. He remarked that the Confederate flag, which still flew near the state capitol in Columbia, was "a symbol of racism and slavery." And he lost.

That was the pivotal primary in the GOP nominating process, and McCain was defeated by someone less bold but better able to appeal to the demons existing throughout society, but especially in the Republican Party.

It was McCain's turn in 2008 and partly as a result, he secured the Republican nomination, but then lost the general election in no small measure for the same reason he had lost eight years earlier to George W. Bush in South Carolina. We may be getting sick of repeatedly seeing the following clip this weekend, but we have spent a decade giving it insufficient attention:

Stammering, the infamous woman in red maintains "I've got to ask you a question. I can't trust Obama. I, I have read about him and he's not, he's not.... he's an Arab. He is not- no?"

The mainstream media has long properly given McCain credit for having shown decency and courage in the face of apparent bigotry. However, the media refuses to acknowledge the role of the response in the candidate's defeat, largely because it contrasts with the comforting meme that the country put aside its racial division by electing its first black President.

"More than anything else, by 2006," Pierce writes, "John McCain wanted to be president more than anyone else I've ever seen." If so. two years later the GOP nominee exhibited exceptional ineptness by failing to manipulate the racial tension by which he was victimized to in 2000,

Barack Obama understood.  In 2004 he stirred emotions at the Democratic convention and the country beyond by claiming "There is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America—there's the United States of America."

Most of us bought it, bought it because we wanted to buy it. Four years later, Obama was elected President on a wave of disgust at the previous, Republican administration and on excitement in the Democratic electorate for historic change. Additionally, he benefited from a naive, misguided hope among many other voters that his election would put the "race" issue behind us, prove they themselves were not racist, and that America no longer was racist, or maybe never was.

He defeated Senator McCain despite the warning of the man, speaking before the woman in red, that "we're scared of an Obama presidency."  McCain did not heed the warning, and fell to the candidate who had built his reputation in an extraordinary speech with the oft-admired "there is not a black America and a white America." 

A little under eight years later, as the 2016 nominating campaign wound down, Gallup recorded its highest-ever number of Americans "very worried" about race relations in America. In retrospect, that was a tailor-made situation for Donald Trump. In the manner in which Obama caught a wave by (however artificially) calming fears, Trump did the same by exploiting fears, and especially demagogically.

John McCain was a victim in February of 2000 of similar racial bias. Eight plus years later, he refused to exploit those fears, which continued to build and landed us Donald Trump in 2016.   If he had caught that wave in either of his campaigns, the obituary of John S. McCain probably would include "elected President."  It may be to his everlasting credit that it does not.

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No Thanks

The Interior Secretary is planning to undermine implementation of the Endangered Species Act and a peeved Malcolm Nance remarks

Nice. Thank You Jill Stein & @GreenPartyUS. Never ever call yourselves environmentalists. #ButHerEmails https://t.co/Dl2bDwQw6W

— Malcolm Nance (@MalcolmNance) August 11, 2018

Environmentalism is the raison d'etre of the Green Party which, among other things, helped pave the way for the Trump presidency and probably put George W. Bush, instead of Al Gore, into the White House sixteen years earlier. And so Dr. Stein and her cohorts probably are unconcerned that, as the Los Angeles Times found earlier this week

The day before she was to testify before President Trump’s school safety commission, Jennifer Johnston, an expert on media coverage of mass shootings, received a phone call from an Education Department advisor who asked her to “refrain” from any gun-control remarks.

The official, Kent Talbert, cited a section of her pre-submitted testimony that called for federal officials to “greatly restrict the sale of semiautomatic and automatic weapons across states,” Johnston recalled.

Johnston ultimately backed off and additionally

During more than 20 hours of testimony in five panels, three field visits and two public listening sessions so far, commission officials have largely avoided, limited or, in Johnston’s case, suppressed discussion of gun-control measures, according to interviews with participants and a review of official video recordings of events available on the commission’s website.

Gun safety probably is not a high priority of 77-year-old Connie Kessler, an Ohio resident of the Mahoning Valley, which is midway between Pittsburgh and Cleveland. It is an "old steel country full of labor union members," which "has been loyal Democratic turf for generations" and

"He's the one that turned me," she says at her makeshift reception desk near a giant cut-out of the president, with his signature thumbs-up gesture. "When I walked in here to sign up as a volunteer, I was a Democrat," she says. "I don't want Democrat next to my name anymore."

The Administration headed by Donald Trump continues to address the interests of such hard-working, salt-of-the-earth traditional Democrats by

- rescinding a Department of Labor regulation which required employers to pay overtime if employees worked over 40 hours a week;

- rescinding a Department of Labor regulation in which employers were barred from "tip pooling," which redistributed tips paid to service workers'

- signing a congressional resolution which required employers to report workplace injuries or illnesses to OSHA;

- blocking "the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule, which banned government contracts from going to companies with poor safety or labor records, and kept track of violations;"

- killing the fiduciary rule, in which economic advisers were bound to act in the best interests of their clients;

 - appointing to the Supreme Court Neil Gorsuch, who cast the deciding vote in a  May decision which made it more difficult to file class-action lawsuits against employers, and in June's Janus vs. AFSCME, which puts all public employees under right-to-work laws, in which unions cannot charge non-members fees for representation, and which mandates new employees opt-in for membership.

President Trump is only getting started. Laws or regulations protecting the environment, workers, the elderly, schoolchildren, poor people, and others are in his sights.  There is a whole lot of blame to go around for Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party, and many others who assisted the election of Donald Trump. It may be that the animals to which Malcolm Bunch referred are not the only endangered species.

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