11/7/24

 Thursday, November 7, 2024

D+2

1876 President Rutherford B. Hayes and challenger Samuel J. Tilden claimed presidential victory as Tilden (D) won the popular vote but Electoral College votes were disputed with Hayes (R)

1972 Incumbent President Richard Nixon was re-elected, defeating Democrat candidate George McGovern in a landslide by winning 49 states

In bed at 10:30, awake and up at 5:40 from a pleasant dream of visit a pleasant dream of visiting with Ed Felsenthal's large family at their cottage on a lake Up North somewhere.  It was clearly a dream because he had a couple of sisters, instead of only 6 brothers as was true in life.  Perhaps my brain was mixing up his birth family and his family of 5 daughters with Helen.  I recall visiting him in flight training at Pensacola, FL in 1964, when their eldest Mary Fran was an infant.  Such a good friend for so many years.  I miss him and burn a candle in his memory this early morning.  In this world of too many unpleasant dreams, Ed gave me a good one.  . . . Let Lilly out at 5:55.

By 7 a.m. the sun has risen just above the rooftops of our neighbors.  The sky is clear, a lovely autumn morning   The chickadees are arriving as usual, one after another, like jets returning to their home aircraft carrier.  They remind me of how starlings coming to rest on a lawn remind me of A-4 Skyhawks landing.  All the birds remind me of how mind-bogglingly capable they are: capable of flight, capable of stopping on a dime, capable of surviving brutal Wisconsin winters, capable of building wondrously engineered nests, . . .

At 11:25, I see good neighbor John out for a walk with his walker.  God bless him. 

Shortly after 2 p.m., our dead leaves are sucked up by the village;s mobile power snorkle.  Ssswwooosh!  I think back to our years outside Saukville on our 3.4 acre lot covered with leaves every Fall.  I burned them in our back yard burn pit when the weather permitted after blowing them into big piles with the John Deere tractor /mower.  What a job.  Now our lawn care contractor sucks up our leaves with his tractor which collects in an a big tank on the back of the tractor to be deposited on the side of the street for the village snorkle.  

Prednisone, day 177, 15 mg., day 3/5.   Prednisone at 6, followed by some doughnuts and morning meds.

Family matters.  I picked up Andy at the Goodyear Store at 8 a.m., and took him to Walgreens for some medicine for Anh, who is down with the respiratory malaise that had Andy down, then Drew with pneumonia, and now Lizzie but no pneumonia.  I will pick up Lizzie at Nicolet at 3:15 this afternoon and get Andy's keys and pay for the wheel alignment at Goodyear.  Peter has been accepted at MSOE and Iowa State and is waiting to hear from Purdue and Notre Dame.  At 4:15 I picked up Drew and drove him to Nicolet then drove to Goodyear to get key to Andy's Lexus and pay the bill.  At 5:30, I picked up Andy and took him up to Goodyear to get the car.  Busy day!  Being useful for a change!

Blame Biden: Harris was probably doomed from the jump.  by Tyler Austin Harper in yesterday's The Atlantic.  Excerpts:

The reason is that she had an 81-year-old albatross hanging around her neck: Joe Biden. When Biden got into the 2020 presidential race, he said he was motivated to defeat the man who blamed “both sides” for a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Five years later, Biden’s inability to see his own limitations handed that same man the White House once more. Nobody bears more responsibility for Trump’s reascension to the presidency than the current president. This failure lies at his feet.

Biden was supposed to be a one-term candidate. During his 2019 campaign, he heavily signaled that he would not run again if he won. “He is going to be 82 years old in four years and he won’t be running for reelection,” one of his advisers declared. Biden himself promised to be a “transition” candidate, holding off Trump for four years while making room for a fresh Democratic challenger in 2024. “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not anything else,” he said at a Michigan campaign event with Governor Gretchen Whitmer, one of those promising younger Democrats Biden was ostensibly making room for.

Of course, that’s not what happened. Scranton Joe, supposed paragon of aw-shucks decency, ultimately wouldn’t relinquish his power. He decided in the spring of 2023 to run for reelection despite no shortage of warning signs, including a basement-level approval rating, flashing bright red. He also ignored the will of the voters. As early as 2022, an overwhelming percentage of Democratic voters said they preferred a candidate other than Biden, and support for an alternative candidate persisted even as the president threw his hat back in the ring. This past February, one poll found that 86 percent of Americans and 73 percent of Democrats believed Biden was too old to serve another term, and another revealed that only a third of Americans believed that he was mentally fit for four more years.

The idea that Americans would vote for a man who they overwhelmingly thought was too old and cognitively infirm stretched reason to its breaking point. And yet Biden and his enablers in the Democratic Party doubled down on magical thinking. This was a species of madness worthy of King Lear shaking his fist before the encroaching storm. And like Lear, what the current president ultimately raged against was nature itself—that final frailty, aging and decline—as he stubbornly clung to the delusion that he could outrun human biology. 

Nature won, as it always does. After flouting the will of his own voters, after his party did everything in its power to clear the runway for his reelection bid, and after benefiting from an army of commentators and superfans who insisted that mounting video evidence of his mental slips were “cheap fakes,” Biden crashed and burned at the debate in June. He hung on for another month, fueling the flames of scandal and intraparty revolt and robbing his successor of badly needed time to begin campaigning. And yet when he finally did stand down, Biden World immediately spun up the just-so story that the president is an honorable man who stepped aside for the good of the country.

He did not stand down soon enough. The cake was baked. The powers that be decided the hour was too late for a primary or contested convention, so an unpopular president was replaced with an unpopular vice president, who wasted no time in reminding America why her own presidential bid failed just a few years before. The limitations of Harris’s campaign are now laid bare for all to see, but her grave was dug before she ever took the podium at the Democratic National Convention.

Harris could not distance herself from Biden’s unpopular record on inflation and the southern border. She could not distance herself from his unpopular foreign policy in the Middle East. She could not break from him while she simultaneously served as his deputy. And she could not tell an obvious truth—that the sitting U.S. president is not fit for office—when asked by reporters, and so she was forced into Orwellian contortions. If the worst comes to pass, if the next four years are as bad as Biden warned, if the country—teetering before the abyss—stumbles toward that last precipice, it will have been American democracy’s self-styled savior who helped push it, tumbling end over end, into the dark. 

 I agree with the writer although I am less inclined to find fault with Harris and more inclined to find fault with Biden.  I've distrusted and disliked Joe Biden for years, at least since his misfeasance as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings in 1991.  Barack Obama is apocryphally reputed to have said "Don't underestimate Joe's ability to fuck things up."  Franklin Delano Roosevelt said of Army General Douglas MacArthur "“Never underestimate a man who overestimates himself.”  Joe Biden is a man who has long overestimated himself.  He was a mediocre student in college (like me) and worse than mediocre at Syracuse Law School.  He took a job as a public defender probably because he couldn't land a more lucrative and prestigious position, but he claimed it was because of his devotion to the cause of the underprivileged.  He's an ordinary guy who aspired to positions of extraordinary power and prestige.  He's always been power-hungry, envious, and inclined to engage in deceitful self-puffery.  He willingly put the nation at risk when he greedily chose to run for reelection at age 81.  He'll be 82 in two weeks.  He has placed the nation in great peril.  He has laid low his own political party.  It was a foolish, selfish act by a foolish, selfish man.  His legacy will be all the damage Trump does in his second term.  “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interrèd with their bones."  So be it.

What's with guys and their cowboy hats?  On one of my visits to Italy, while touring ancient Catholic churches and Jewish synagogues, I often thought how curious it was that I was instructed by the churches to keep my head uncovered while inside and instructed by the synagogues to keep my head covered while inside.  I knew it was a cultural thing with no inherent significance,  I also remember how bothered my father was whenever seeing men wearing baseball caps indoors, especially if the caps were worn bill-backward.  In fact, I feel a little discomfiture about similar behavior, perhaps because we Marines always had to remain "uncovered" when indoors.  A matter of custom codified into regulation.  Something that still bugs me, however, is guys who insist on wearing their cowboy hats indoors.  I suspect it's a signal that 'my dick is bigger than your dick.'  Or perhaps a visual variation of the lines about Tom Buchanan from The Great Gatsby: ""Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final. Just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are."  The fellow in the photos was identified as Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist and I was surprised that although he must have considered the cowboy hat de rigeur or perhaps even a matter of personal privilege, he wasn't wearing cowboy boots.  Indeed he wore business shoes of some sort with horizontally-striped socks.  Boots, not necessary on a news show set but cowboy hat, de rigeur.  Wha'supwidat?

Anniversaries.  The election of 1876 led to the Great Compromise of 1877 in which Hayes and the Republicans sold out all the Blacks in the South by agreeing to withdraw federal troops from the last two states former Confederate where they were stationed during Reconstruction in order to put Hayes in the White House.

At least as long ago as the 1972 election, it was obvious that America was not capable of electing a very liberal presidential candidate.  McGovern ran on ending the Vietnam War.  He won only Massachusetts.  Nixon got 61% of the popular vote.  McGovern had a grandchild or nephew at Shorewood High School and we used to see him on occasion at school events.