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Issue #480 OpEd Monday, January 28, 2024

As it stands right now, the best chance Democrats have in 2024, not only for winning a second term as President for Joe Biden but for achieving possible Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate, are the Republicans themselves. We couldn’t possibly make a better argument for why they shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the room where grownups make grownup decisions about grownup things than they are demonstrating with vim and vigor every single day.

Republicans have finally figured out that just maybe they made a wrong turn when they decided to go hard on opposing a woman’s right to choose. They now have a more complete understanding of that old saying; Be Careful What You Ask For, You Just Might Get It. They asked for a majority of Supreme Court Justices who would do as they were told and overturn Roe V. Wade, and that’s what they got.

But that ain’t all they got.

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Thousands - possibly millions - of women have begun organizing against Republicans and going to the polls since that fateful day in June of 2022 when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Those women had quite a bit to do with turning back the predicted Red Wave that was supposed to flood the halls of Congress with batches of Republicans foaming at the mouth and ready to go to work in service of the Orange One. What Republicans got instead has been derisively - and correctly - labeled as the Red Dribble. They wound up with only a 5-seat majority in the House which has since dwindled to two.

So now, those wacky brainiacs have devised what we will call The Big Idea #2: Operation Scary Brown People.

Here’s how this works: Trump and his submissive flock of red sheep figure the only thing scarier than an independent woman with control over her own body (which, as it turns out, was nowhere near as scary as Republicans trying to take that control away), are brown people. Hundreds of them. THOUSANDS of them. Teeming masses and hordes and throngs and more masses of brown people and other dark-skinned types storming the borders, attempting to enter America, thereby continuing to erode the rapidly dwindling majority of white people in this country.

When Trump was pretending to be President, he railed and ranted about building a “big beautiful wall” that would be so incredibly fortified and massive and long and tall that no brown-skinned person would ever stand a chance of getting past it. The Wall would solve the immigration crisis once and for all. Period.

But now that Trump is no longer in office as a Pretend President, but is instead running for Supreme Dictator, he has convinced his followers that the best way for him to become victorious in his quest is for him to pretend to solve the problem of immigration by not solving it at all. Just leave the problem there, and keep telling people what a problem it is while it gets bigger and bigger, but don’t solve it. Just let the problem get really huge so that it looks bad for Biden. And then once it becomes too big of a problem for Biden, then (the wisdom goes), Trump will prevail in November. After which point he will actually try to solve the immigration problem that he didn’t initially want solved even though he said he did. He will probably once again propose the wall.

Phew.

OK, but there’s a problem with this, right? Because President Biden first sent an immigration bill designed to solve the problem to Congress in January of 2021. It was called The U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021. If you want to see how comprehensive Biden’s proposal was, check the link. It was serious. But Republicans didn’t want a serious solution, they wanted havoc. So the bill died.

Today, three years later, the previously unthinkable was on the verge of becoming reality; Republicans and Democrats were close to a compromise legislative solution on the border crisis. But then Trump blew it up. Why? Because if Republicans and Democrats worked together to help solve the immigration crisis - plus unblock the related issue of weapons needed for Ukraine and the Hamas/Gaza war - then Trump would lose his best (manufactured) campaign issue. And how can he become America’s first fascist dictator without a good, sturdy manufactured campaign issue?

So rather than do the right thing, even Republicans who knew it was crazy to trash this deal trashed it anyway because Trump said so. And they are actually trying to convince themselves that voters will not be able to figure this out for themselves over the next 10 months, that Biden tried first in 2021 with a comprehensive bill, and then Democrats tried again three years later. Republicans are telling themselves that this manufactured clusterfuck of an issue will cause women to forget all about wanting to control their bodies and that the Clusterfuck Uber Alles will blind everyone to the truth and cause them to see Brown People as the real threat to democracy.

Ummm…right.

So in conclusion, I say this; do we have a fight on our hands? Of course, we do, and it’s a big one. But the biggest two threats to us winning this fight is a Republican party programmed on self-destruct and single-issue Democrats who would rather take their marbles and go home if they don’t get the one thing they want than save the country from becoming a dictatorship and never getting anything they want ever again.

Is that really a choice? I dunno. You tell me.

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Why would we NOT want more of this?

Issue #469 OpEd Monday, January 22, 2024

At the time of this writing, it is almost absolutely certain that it will be a re-match of Joe Biden against Donald Trump for the 2024 Presidential Election. A reminder: Joe Biden won over Donald Trump by over 7 million popular votes and by 74 Electoral College votes.

The Republican New Hampshire Primary will be held tomorrow, and all of the Republican candidates except Nikki Haley have dropped out and endorsed Trump. Nikki Haley is poised to lose to Trump in New Hampshire and more importantly, lose to Trump even in her home state of South Carolina in February.

The Democratic National Convention (DNC) voted last year to have its first primary in South Carolina, and the Democrats are not on the ballot in either Iowa or New Hampshire, and no Democratic delegates will be awarded from either state because they did not move their contests.

For the Democrats, it’s the total number of delegates a candidate has at the end of the primaries that counts, and Joe Biden will have the majority of delegates and therefore will be awarded the Democratic nomination at the Convention this summer.

Some people have been saying that they don’t want a Biden-Trump rematch, that there should be more competition (especially with the Dems), that maybe a 3rd-party candidate could beat Trump, and that Biden is “too old.”

Those people are WRONG on all counts.

- Yes, Jimmy Carter lost his re-election bid to Ronald Reagan in 1980, but then both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama easily won their re-election bids, and that was after Bill Clinton denied George H.W. Bush a second term in 1992.

- Trump is not going to allow anyone else to be the Republican nominee, and he and his sycophants are already planting the seeds of a fraudulent 2024 election if and when Trump loses in the general election.

- Yes, Biden is the oldest president in our history, but unlike Trump, and despite all the false narratives of the MAGAs, he is not suffering from dementia or otherwise losing his faculties. He constantly fights to overcome his stutter, which may include tripping over some words, especially if he’s talking fast, but he is sharp as a tack. Even when Biden fell off his bike or tripped over a cord near a podium, he got right back up and was fine physically. How many 81-year-olds can say the same?

- President Biden has some serious challenges, especially around Israel and Gaza, but only he is qualified to eventually lead us to the right outcome, while Trump would…well we know, including re-instituting the Muslim ban.

- None of the top qualified Democrats like Newsom, Whitmer, and so on are even thinking of challenging President Biden in 2024.

- There is NO other current Democratic candidate who can defeat Biden in the nomination process, and NO 3rd-party candidate can hold a candle to President Biden.

- Dean Phillips and Joe Manchin, both Democrats, are flirting with running on the “No Labels” platform, whose goal is to take away enough Electoral College votes from Biden to throw the election to the states where there are more Republicans in charge, therefore, handing the election to Trump.

- Cornel West, Robert Kennedy Jr., or Jill Stein? Pu-leeze. Voting for 3rd-party candidates like these will yield the same results we got in 2016.

- Trump is repeatedly telling us what he will do if he gets back to the White House, and things would be much worse because the guardrails that were there in his first administration are gone. Believe him. 

 I previously wrote here about the dangers of voting 3rd party (the paywall has been removed): 

Yes, there are MAGA Republicans who say they’re going to support Trump no matter his legal or physical difficulties, even if he’s in prison. Many Republicans are voicing their support for Trump because they know what will happen to their positions, their families, and even their own lives if they don’t. But what they do in the privacy of the voting booth is something else entirely.

Top business people want Trump because they think he’s better for their bottom lines and personal fortunes.

On the other hand, there are a lot of Republicans and independents who are quietly saying that if Trump is the Republican nominee, they will either stay home and not vote at all, or vote for Biden. Trump is still the leader of the Republican Party, but his influence is certainly waning as more and more people see what is happening to him legally, physically, and mentally recently.

The Trumpsters are loud, but they are still in the minority and represent much more land than they do people. 

So, even if you don’t want a Biden-Trump rematch, that is what we will have.

President Obama only had a Democratic House and Senate in the first two years of his eight-year presidency, and that’s when he successfully pulled us out of the Great Recession and passed the Affordable Care Act. After that, he had to fight tooth and nail to get anything else passed. Also, remember that Mitch McConnell deliberately held open a SCOTUS seat during the Obama Administration until after Trump was elected.

It’s time to deal with and work with the 2024 ticket that we will have and to ensure that President Biden is re-elected in November, and also that Democrats win all up and down the state and local ballots, so that Joe will have a House and a Senate that will help him enact his policies.

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