The other day, I ran into a guy I hadn’t seen in more than a year. He and I used to argue about politics, but then he morphed into this full-blown Trumpthing, so there was nothing left to argue about except sexual predators. My position is that sexual predators, especially those who brag about it (like Trump) are bad. The guy, with his formerly sacred vote and his dumb-ass hat, obviously feels that sexual predation is OK if it gets rich people a tax break.
Anyway, the guy said, “So, are you ready to admit that you were wrong?”
I asked about what and he said, “About Trump. About all that (vitriol) you were spewing during and after the election.”
I readily admit that I had been wrong about America. As the campaign chugged along and I slowly and painfully came to the realization that Trump might actually win, I still clung to this abiding faith in the average American. I figured that for whatever reason they had voted for Trump, mostly because doing so would keep THAT WOMAN out of the White House, they would eventually come around to seeing that Trump was beneath the office and that voting for him—even as a temporary “screw you”—was beneath their dignity.
But I was wrong and, to this day, one-third of my fellow Americans shrug at his lying, revel in his bullying, and choose to ignore (or secretly join in) his sexism and racism. If that stuff hasn’t changed by now, it’s not going to.
He then told me that I had to at least acknowledge that Trump has kept all of his campaign promises. Well, he had me there. That 700-mile border wall is almost complete and Mexico is paying for the entire thing. Plus, he got rid of Obamacare and replaced it with a much better plan that has lowered health-care costs for all Americans.
He then started telling me about Trump’s Exoneration Tour. I pointed out that in the speech at that rally, Trump said, “Democrats don’t like me because I’m smarter than them. I went to better schools than them.”
If he really were intelligent, he would know that proper grammar is “I’m smarter than they,” as in “I’m smarter than they (are).” Or, “I went to better schools than they (did.)”
This is what we’re up against. Every third person supports this festering turdpile and is never going to change his/her mind. That is why, 572 days away from Election Day 2020, I’m nervous. It’s going to take a generation to fix some of the things he has done in his first couple years to our environment, relations with our allies and our economy. If he wins another term, it will take 50 years or more to set things right.
In the afterglow of November’s mid-term elections, I felt rather confident that a substantial majority of Americans had figured it out. We elected a representative group, chased a lot of Trump apologists out of office and established a ground game that only promised to get better in 2020. But now I’m not so sure.
I wish we could have run the 2020 election the week after the midterms. We could have run a cardboard cutout of the love child of Don Knotts and Mr. Rogers with the campaign slogan, “I’m not THAT guy!” Not being Donald Trump should be good enough for a landslide so long as the Democrats don’t screw things up.
Around Christmas time, Bruce Ash asked me on his radio show whom I would have as the Democratic candidate. Without hesitation, I said that I would have Joe Biden run with two campaign promises. One would be to restore basic decency to the White House and the other would be a promise that he would not, under any circumstances, run for reelection in 2024. I thought it sounded so clever.
Then, a couple weeks back, a rumor was circulating that Biden was going to announce that he was running, that he would only serve for one term, and that his running mate would be Stacy Abrams, the African-American woman who lost a tight, voter-suppressed race for Governor of Georgia last November. When the TV people said it, it didn’t sound clever; it sounded cynical.
I’m seriously concerned that we Democrats could blow this thing, like a knucklehead running back spiking the football two yards before he enters the end zone. Do I support Medicare For All? Oh, hell yes, but don’t make that a campaign issue because it would be too easy for Trump to attack it using one-syllable words. A Green New Deal? A lot of it (but not all of it) makes sense, but let’s win the White House first.
The odds should be pretty high that Donald Trump will lose next year, but it’s not a sure thing. What we (and Nate Silver of 538) learned the hard way in 2016 is that, no matter how good your algorithm is, there’s no Greek symbol for closet racism that you can plug into an equation.
That one-third is out there, emboldened and happy as hell that Der Trump is running again. Whaddya say the rest of us find a disciplined message, a charismatic messenger and make the next 572 days a living hell for their fearful leader?
This article appears in Apr 18-24, 2019.
Great column. Perceptive. Important for everyone who loves the United States to read and heed.
And I’ll bet you also think that we don’t have an immigration problem.
I saw a map of San Francisco yesterday and I think I saw a few spots where you would fit right in Danehy.
Idiot!!
Perfect timing for a hate Trump screed as today is the day America gets to see the results of two years of democratic lies. Russia, Russia, Russia. What fools they think Americans are. Pay back the thirty million.
Has Uncle Joe smelled your daughter?
Hey 2020 tRump Sheep boy:
First, let’s have your fearless (Ha!) leader pay back the damn near $100 million that he has bilked from the American taxpayer for his weekend jaunts to Mar-a-Lago. Shit, let’s make him repay for all the emoluments that he’s collected from that shit also.
You tRump Sheep boys are Way Too Easy. All you do is ignore the real facts and go for the scraps. Once again, you expose yourself for the pathetic troll which you truly are.
The Democrats could do something about immigration. They could make sensible reductions in legal immigration. They could pass legislation making E-Verify mandatory to punish employers who scoff at the law and who hire cheap illegal workers instead of raising wages and hiring poor and working class Americans.
But no, they’ll revel in identity politics, advocate socialism and open borders, collect campaign contributions from cheap labor industries, and lose big in 2020.
That’s unfortunate, especially for the few things my party gets right these days like addressing climate change.
You still do not get it.
AG Barr has confirmed that Democrats have no acceptable governing theories. Tin foil hats all around. And, insulting others here proves it even further. Let’s deal with the crisis democrats created at our border.
Check back with me in a year and a half. Tommy, I remember the last election where Miss Hillary was the odds on favorite. What did that get you?
MAGA
Well, the one sure way that Dumbocrats could blow this election would be to repeat the same stupid strategy they employed to blow the last election: namely, to run an even-more-tired-stale-old-retread-loser-than-Hillary named “Joe Biden”.
Biden–whatever you may think of his creepy-handsy-habits and his apparent belief that it’s his divine right as an Old White Guy to aggressively invade the personal space of women and girls whenever and wherever he pleases–is a quintessential, perfectly distilled, blazingly clear representation of everything that’s wrong with the corrupt corporate Democratic party leadership.
Creepy Joe hails from the Great Corporate State of Delaware, so of course he believes that “500 billionaires are not the problem.” He’s never met a profit margin he didn’t like, and he’s repeatedly, for decades, prioritized those profits over the people he’s supposed to represent.
Creepy Joe made common cause with Republicans to enthusiastically push through an incredibly toxic and racist criminal justice “reform” that ended up eviscerating an entire generation of African American youth and their communities.
Creepy Joe presided over the public shredding of Anita Hill and the elevation of a profoundly unqualified candidate to the U.S. Supreme Court. He was the CHAIR of that committee, yet he has the revisionist gall to pretend that there was nothing he could do to stop it. This is not only morally reprehensible from the perspective of gender politics, it paved the way for a whole parade of other zealous ideologues to ascend to the Supreme Court, leading right up to and including serial abuser Brett Kavanaugh.
Creepy Joe was a big cheerleader for the vast criminal exercise known as the Iraq War that was founded in bald-faced, demonstrable lies, had nothing to do with 9/11, and resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. A fair amount of responsibility for the war crimes of the Bush-Cheney mafia can be laid at the feet of witless Dumbocrats like Biden who gave them the blank check they needed to commit them.
I could go on, but I would suggest that all Dems read the recent roundup of Joe’s toxic career in Harper’s Magazine before deciding that he’s the savior-grampa they really need.
Alas, polls indicate that Joe is running out in front of the D pack, even though he has yet to declare his candidacy. Polls this early in a presidential race mean precious little in terms of who is actually going to win, but these numbers do indicate one thing very clearly–far too many Dumbocrats are in denial about the true lessons of the 2016 election and seem to be intent on repeating its mistakes and facilitating the reelection of the very troglodyte they are so obsessed with defeating.
In what fantasy world is supporting a wildly popular initiative like Medicare-for-All, which is consistently polling with 70 percent support, a hindrance to a campaign? The ONLY reason Dems hesitate to support such a proposal is that the party leadership is actively pressuring them to resist it and undermining those candidates who don’t. Why? because they are beholden to the behemoth corporations who profit handsomely from our current criminally corrupt, incredibly inefficient health care system at the expense of sick people.
If this country is really going to change for the better and be the more humane, rational, equitable society that so many Ds claim to want, then the Ds must get busy crushing the power structure that is stifling progressive elements of their own party and platform. And they must start NOW, in this Democratic primary, if they want to have any hope of unseating Tchump in 2020.
The further left theDems go, the greater the chance that the Liar in Chief will be re-elected.
You have hit the nail on the head Mike. If democrats can’t pull the hard left back towards Mao, we will lose the party.
Let people enter the country unchecked. Free college. Single payer,government run health care. Guaranteed paycheck for no-show govt. jobs. No more fossil fuel. What’s not to love? I’d ask where all this money is coming from but I’d only get pooh-poohed.
Instead of the usual blathering about right and left, I prefer the admittedly old-fashioned concepts of right and wrong, tempered by a skeptical examination of the facts. That means neither mindlessly rejecting “left-wing” ideas like universal healthcare and student loan forgiveness, nor accepting them without looking at the realistic and practical details. We basically look like slope-headed knuckle-draggers to many modern, industrialized countries these days and, unfortunately, we deserve the criticism (and, is obvious upthread, far too many Americans are accurately described by this criticism).
agree that Biden would be a huge mistake, what is this, candidate #21 whose, like the others, total sum of ideas and platform is Trump bad, me good! We’ve heard this unending rant for the last 2+years, listening to paid experts express opinion as fact, over and over. Enough already, there are other problems in our society, but no one wants to talk about improving healthcare, lowering higher education costs,+ job growth,+ spending cuts and how to get there, other than just making everything free for everyone. Yeah that’ll work, 4 more years unless a real leader emerges speaking truth, SS benefits need to be means tested so we can cut entitlements, the defense budget and all gov’t spending needs to be less or at least stop increasing every year.
no free lunch kids, you’re not gonna get Trump on collusion, on conspiracy, or impeachment despite what Ms Maddow tells; you. Get off your asses, donate, volunteer, knock on doors advancing the agenda and working for a candidate who can win, not make you feel good about yourselves. Otherwise stop this constant whining , its boring all ready.
First, studies have shown that people who correct other peoples grammar outside of an academic setting are jerks and miserable human beings.
Second, Lying Tom shows he isnt really as smart as he thinks he is.
Yes, in formal, technically correct usage the nominative “they” should be used following the comparative conjunction “than”. Lying Tom in clinging to a formal usage of “than” shows he is ignorant of common/native usage of language which is just as valid as formal usage.
Language is a living, changing thing and not static, especially English. Using “than” as a preposition which would take the objective “them” is acceptable, normative and common usage.
People who far exceed Lying Tom’s brainpower support the prepositional use of “than”.
Lexicographers.
Merriam-Webster:
In short, you can use “than” either as a conjunction or as a preposition.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language:
“… “than” is quite commonly treated as a preposition when followed by an isolated noun phrase, and as such occurs with a pronoun in the objective case: John is taller than me. Though this usage is still widely regarded as incorrect it is predominant in speech and has reputable literary precedent.”
What literary precedent?
William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Johnson, and William Faulkner as well as others.
William Safire:
“I’m with you, Lady Antonia; you write better than him. (I mean, of course, “than he does,” but I do not write than he , because I treat “than” as a preposition, taking him, her, them and me rather than he, she, they and I .) Lady Antonia and I are writers; we have an ear attuned to native speech; we can tell when the tide has turned, the conjunction has prepositionated and the writing must follow the speaking. If not us, whom? (Make that “If not us, who?” But not “If not we” anything.)”
“Why is “than me” better than “than I”? Not only does it sound less strained to native speakers, but also it saves the reader or hearer from having to figure out the unstated verb: “who is more evenhanded than I [ am ] .””
If Lying Tom walked into his house and his wife called out to him and asked “Lying Tom is that you?”, Lying Tom wouldn’t say It is I. He and everyone else would say “yeah, its me.”
Remember that Lying Tom is also the middle aged white guy who tells African Americans how to speak.
Lying Tom in his effort to prove the stupidity of Donald Trump only ended up proving he is dumber than him.