Now You See It...

A few people may have noticed that this blog disappeared for a couple of days this week.  ("Few" because, due to my own laziness and scandalously infrequent posting, it gets so little traffic now.)  On Tuesday morning I got email from Blogger notifying me that someone had flagged the blog for review, so they removed it.  I was allowed to appeal, and I did. This morning I got another message, telling me that they'd re-evaluated and "upon review, the blog has been reinstated," so here we are.

Needless to say, I'm immensely relieved.  Seventeen years of writing had gone up in smoke, and like a fool I hadn't backed it up.  The first thing I did after the reinstatement was to do just that. Coming on top of the Republican victory on Tuesday, this episode left me stunned, and I walked around in a daze for a while.  Even if no one else had read it, this blog is my intellectual journal, allowing me to revisit my thoughts on a range of subjects over the past two decades - which highlights my carelessness in not having backed it up.  I hope I've learned my lesson.

So here we are.  Looking back at November 2016, I see that I had a similar reaction to Trump's victory then.  It's worse now, because he won the popular vote this time, and the GOP won back the Senate.  The outcome for the House of Representatives is still unsettled as I write.

I've mostly avoided the usual media, because I know pretty much what they're going to say.  My timeline on Facebook is also predictable.  I've seen it all before.  Eventually I'll have more to say, I suppose, though I also have a backlog of other topics I've put off addressing, and I intend to write about them for awhile.  For now, let me quote what an old Bloomington friend from the 1980s posted on Facebook.

I think the news media bares [sic] a lot of responsibility for Trump winning. News media is now primarily entertainment media. So they cover candidates who are entertaining. President Biden did not and will not offer a daily dose of entertaining "event"s because he is too busy doing his job as President and whose ego doesn't require constant validation. Whereas Trump is entertaining and will say anything to keep attention on himself. The current news media and Trump are made for each other. Sadly the entire world will now suffer the consequences.

I don't entirely disagree with this - I've criticized the corporate media harshly and often - but my friend overlooks a few things.  One is that despite the "current news media," Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016, and Joe Biden beat Trump in 2020.  The Democrats also defied the odds and drubbed the GOP in the 2022 midterms, to the disappointment of most of the corporate media.  By my friend's logic, none of that should have happened.  So while the news media should be criticized, it seems to me that something else could have been involved; could it perhaps be issues?  Like many liberals, my friend assumes that the masses are just sheep who do what the Lying Media tell them to do.  (Not him, though - why not?)  But you don't have to remember very far back to know that they don't, not always.  And it wouldn't do to ask why.  Ironically, my friend is echoing Trump's demonization of the media here.

I strongly disagree with his evaluation of Joe Biden's ego, which led him to seek re-election and to hang on to his candidacy no matter how unpopular he became.  His dogged support for Israel's crimes also hurt him, as it did Harris.  In general US media support Israel too, no matter what, so they can't be blamed for the public's revulsion against the atrocities in Gaza and the Occupied Territories.  On the other side, Trump's notorious laziness didn't keep him from doing a lot of harm during his first term, and I expect his second term to be even worse.  I'd hoped that the Democrats would control Congress, which would have impeded Trump's agenda somewhat, but that didn't happen.

One correction I want to make to yesterday's post.  I thought that "the number of hardcore MAGA voters is dwindling," and I was flat wrong about that.  From what I've read and heard, voter turnout this year was the highest it has been since 2008, and while some of that involved voters who opposed Trump and the GOP, it wasn't enough to counter Trump's highly motivated supporters.

P. S. A correction to the correction: a reader tells me that voter turnout wasn't as high as I thought.  He thinks 2020 was higher.  I'm not going to dig into it, because it's certain that Trump's base went to the polls in sufficient numbers that he won the popular vote this time.

Honeymoon? We Aren't Even Married Yet!

After someone on Twitter criticized the Biden campaign's decision to invite the Republican governor of Ohio, John Kasich, to address the upcoming Democratic convention, a stable genius replied:

Kasich is anti-union, so it's hard to see how he's going to inspire the Democrats' union base; he's also an antigay bigot, and a former failed Republican Presidential candidate and therefore of Satan.  Or so you'd think.  Are Democratic voters such weak reeds that they need to know that Republicans dislike Trump too, or they won't be able to drag themselves to the polling stations?

Notice too that dismissive "spar over policy."  No doubt he'll say the same thing after Biden is elected and guts Social Security and Medicare, forces workers to work in a pandemic or starve, bails out Wall Street again, and vetoes the new voting rights bill.  That most people aren't just sparring, which is to say playing, but concerned about their lives and their families' lives and the lives of everyone who isn't at least a multimillionaire, escapes him.

We went through this in 2008, I remember.  Before Obama was elected, we skeptics were told that after he won we could hold his feet to the fire and make him enact good policies.  But as soon as he was elected, before he even took office, we were told to back off, give him a chance, it was too soon to judge him, wait and see what he'd do.  As I pointed out at the time, his corporate donors and friends weren't backing off: they were making sure he made the appointments they wanted, pushing him in the direction they wanted him to go.  True, he would have done it anyway, because his priorities lay in corporatism and protecting the powerful from accountability.  And it's doubtful how much pressure anyone to his left could have brought to bear on him.  His few good appointments, such as Hilda Solis, were quietly eased out in a few months.  Anyone the Right disliked had to go; Obama was very obliging.

So this is all annoyingly familiar.  Biden is already surrounding himself with some of the same people Obama gravitated to, such as Larry Summers.  His sycophants are telling us to wait and see, to give him a chance.  I look forward to seeing the last of Trump, though former Presidents rarely disappear from public life altogether.  But as Biden has said, nothing will fundamentally change under his presidency, and those who try to push him in a better direction will face not only his inertia, but the vindictive fury of his Democratic cult.  It won't be pretty.