11/9/24

 Saturday, November 9, 2024

D+4

1862 US General Ulysses S. Grant issued orders to bar Jews from serving under him

1989 East Berlin opened its borders at Checkpoint Charlie when thousands arrive after a bureaucratic error announced that restrictions on travel to the West had been lifted

2018 Amid Californian forest fires US President Donald Trump accused state forest management of "gross mismanagement", threatened to withhold funding

In bed at 10 after watching Bill Maher, John Heilman & Sarah Isgur, awake at 5:54 and up at 6 to let Lilly out.   

Prednisone, day 179, 15 mg., day 5/5.   Prednisone at 6:15.  Three slices of toasted Dave's Bread at 8:30 followed by morning meds.

Postmortems.  I've read several postmortems about Trump's victory and Harris's defeat in the presidential election and avoided much more.  I am naturally drawn to critiques that primarily blame Biden because they confirm my own anti-Biden bias.  Biden should not have run for reelection.  It was stupid and vain and selfish to do so  He froze out all the potential Democratic candidates like Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, Amy Klobuchar, Gavin Newsome, and others.  He prevented enlightening and chastening and strengthening primary fights.  He compounded his sin by anointing Kamala Harris, who was  (1) so weak a candidate in the 2020 primaries that she was the first the drop out, even before the Iowa caucuses, and (2) a part of the deeply unpopular Biden administration.  She was tied to Biden more than any other Democrat outside his administration was.  He forced on the Democratic Party a candidate who was both (1) a woman and (2) a Black, making the uphill climb from the Biden headwinds (inflation, immigration, etc.) even steeper.  He tied Harris to his own complicity in what I suspect will eventually be adjudged genocide in Gaza.

I also pin the blame on Obama and the Clintons, each of whom has been more identified with the suburban liberal wing, the 'limousine liberals' than with blue-collar laboring people.  Bill Clinton attended Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale Law.  Hilary attended Wellesley and Yale Law.  Bill Clinton gave us NAFTA which devastated many American workers.  Barack Obama graduated from Columbia and Harvard Law.  He chose Tim Geithner as his Treasury Secretary and bailed out the big banks and the entire financial industry after the financial crisis of 2007-2008.  JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley and their executives, traders, and money manipulators made out like champs while millions of middle-class Americans lost their homes and much more.  In 2016, here's Barack Obama, describing to Bloomberg Businessweek his affinity for the private sector: “Just to bring things full circle about innovation — the conversations I have with Silicon Valley and with venture capital pull together my interests in science and organization in a way I find really satisfying.”  Are we to believe Democrats like this are really friends to the working class, to blue-collar workers, to those who shower after coming from work instead of before going off to work?  Should Larry Lunchbucket and Betty Babushka believe that?

It would be simplistic and reductionist and completely misleading to argue that Trump won the election because of the Clintons and NAFTA and Obama and the Wall Street bailout.  JFK: "Victory has a thousand fathers; defeat is an orphan."  Many factors have contributed to Trump's rise and the Democrats' descent, their "shellacking" in Obama's 2020 midterm comment.  The Democratic Party now represents people like me and my family and friends, liberal suburbanites, not 'limousine liberals' but still people who shower before work, not after.  And it doesn't even represent people like me really.  I hated how Obama, Geithner, and Larry Summers handled the financial crisis.  I ranted about it regularly in comments to articles in the Washington Post.  Bill Clinton gives me the creeps and I"m no fan of Hilary either.  I'm represented by no major party.  Is anyone?  No party represents 'the little guy' anymore.  No party represents people like my sister 'the cleaning lady', my mother the waitress and factory worker, or my father the factory maintenance man.  We all know the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.  And 'the best government money can buy.'