Kamala Harris Will Win

Kamala Harris speaking at the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago

The best politicians are the “happy warriors.” The people who inspire through hope rather than fear, who instill a sense of optimism and pride in the country. Ronald Reagan was one for the right. Barack Obama did the same for the left. Last night, Kamala Harris showed that she is a politician in that same mold.

It certainly helps that Donald Trump hates this country. He pretends to hug the flag, but every speech is about how terrible America is, how many problems we have, and how “only Trump can fix it.” Trump is very much a classical demagogue, playing the same playbook used by every two-bit dictator from time immemorial. The fear of the other, the idolization of brute strength, the cheap appeals to nationalism. It’s all been done before. And now it’s just boring. We’ve heard Trump rant on and on for years now. We’ve simply moved past that.

VP Harris perfectly captures the mood of the country when she says “we’re not going back.” Outside Trump’s narrow cult following, the American people are sick and tired of governance by the whim of an overgrown toddler. January 6th was a psychic scar on this country. The Dobbs decision was another. Trump’s 34 felony convictions was another. Americans are desperately looking for something newer, something better, something more optimistic.

Enter Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, probably the most powerful ticket in Democratic history. It is if they were generated in a lab to meet the moment. Harris the tough prosecutor versus the felon. Coach Walz versus the guy who manages to be a black hole for charisma. Team Ordinary versus Team Weird. And yes, the Republican Party is deeply, deeply, deeeply weird these days. Meanwhile, the DNC was an incredibly tightly-orchestrated celebration of American values.

It’s not just that the Democrats have appropriated the flag and the camo hat from the GOP. They’ve appropriated the sunny optimism and true patriotic spirit of someone like Ronald Reagan. The DNC was a celebration of America. It came off incredibly well, and optimism wins in politics.

Worse for the GOP, Trump is in a meltdown. He was constantly posting through Harris’ speech with incoherent ramblings. He then called into Fox News where he ranted for 10 minutes, hitting keys on his phone in a way that highlights is age and mental instability. When Fox finally cut him off, he ended calling into the far-right Newsmax channel to continue ranting. To put it mildly, he’s losing his fucking marbles. And that behavior highlighted the themes that Harris brought up in her nomination speech.

The GOP has to face the reality: 2016 was a fluke. Trump is not popular, he only won because Hillary Clinton had a bad campaign and Trump was the guy from the teevee. Once Trump revealed that he was not the super businessman he was portrayed on the set of The Apprentice, but an overgrown racist toddler, it was over. But the GOP became addicted to the idea of Trumpian populism being their ticket to total control. The normal people either left the party or were so cowed by Trump’s racist and violent hoards that they decided to go full Reek from Game of Thrones and suppress their common sense, patriotism, and true Christianity.

The result of all this is that Kamala Harris will be the 47th President of the United States of America, the first female President, the first President of South Asian descent, and will likely have coattails that leave the GOP realing for decades. The “conservative” movement in the United States is just a skin suit occupied by a bunch of racists, grifters, populists, fascists, and charlatans. What happens to the GOP after this is not yet known, but the chances of the GOP basically imploding and going the way of the Whigs is higher than it has been at any point in American history. The GOP has had periods of being in the political wilderness, but nothing like this.

What’s more, this shambling zombie of the GOP deserves to die. It has no principles beyond power, it no longer believes in limited government, it no longer believes in fiscal discipline, it no longer believes in the importance of America’s alliances, it no longer has anything resembling a theory of governance beyond the fascist playbook that is Project 2025. That playbook is so odious that Trump is forced to pretend that he has no involvement in it whatsoever.

The Harris/Walz ticket on the other hand, is out there capturing the mantle of sunny optimism, speaking to the better angels of our nature, and actually cares about solving problems that matter to ordinary Americans. Even though the Democrats are still Democrats and still have an overly uncautious belief that the federal government can solve problems from the top down, at least that’s an ethos. And something will be nothing any time.

Kamala Harris will win. Kamala Harris deserves to win. And the GOP deserves to lose, and lose in such a devastating fashion that Trumpism is forever consigned to the scrap-heap of history. And that is precisely the judgment that the American people will bring this November.

Biden Puts Country First

a photo of President Joe Biden

President Joe Biden shocked the political world by announcing he was ending his 2024 campaign after several weeks of turmoil. Biden’s campaign was kneecapped by donors wary of his chances after his disastrous first debate with felon and rapist Donald Trump.

There are very few people in America that could reach the very pinnacle of political power in this country but then walk away from it voluntarily for the good of the nation. By doing so, Joe Biden has cemented his legacy of faithful service to his country. Despite my political disagreements with him over the years, President Biden has always been a man who embodied the concept of servant leadership. He is a man of deep and abiding personal faith, and a man who carries that faith forward in his actions. He has suffered greatly from horrible personal tragedies, but has turned that unimaginable pain into a record of putting others first.

History will recall the Biden presidency as one of, if not the, most effective single terms in American history. Biden led the country out of the post-COVID crisis, prevented economic disaster, and helped to rebuild American alliances. His foreign policy started with a disaster in Afghanistan but will end with an American committed to freedom and democracy in Ukraine and across the world. Biden has been so effective that just about every Republican in Congress has been crowing about the projects that they voted against and would have only happened because of President Biden.

The President has endorsed VP Harris as the Democratic nominee, and the Democratic establishment is rapidly coalescing behind her candidacy. The way in which President Biden was treated by his own party was reprehensible and an example of the Democrats’ frequent love of circular firing squads that end up hurting their own. But ultimately President Biden decided that the interests of the country were best served by him stepping aside. He certainly could have continued his campaign and likely won—Trump is a simply awful candidate whose schtick his grown stale as his extremism has become blatant. But by yielding to the future President Biden gives the Democrats an excellent contrast: a young, dynamic, and effective former prosecutor against an adjudicated rapist and convicted felon that could not stay awake through his own convention or criminal trial.

The other side talks about “America first,” but President Biden has demonstrated the true meaning of the term. Sometimes giving up power is the best way of building a legacy, as our very first President did. Joe Biden will be remembered as a patriotic transitional figure who helped guide this country through one of its greatest political and moral disasters. More politicians should learn from his example of grace, humility, honor, patriotism, and service.

The GOP Ties Itself to the Trumptanic

Donald Trump is now the presumptive GOP nominee. Nikki Haley has officially dropped out of the race leaving no one to stop Trump on the GOP side. The GOP has once again chosen to tie itself to the dumbest man in American politics, an adjudicated rapist, and a man who is facing 91 felony counts and goes to trial on some of them very soon. It is altogether likely that before the GOP Convention the nominee for the Republican Party will be a convicted felon.

This is stupidity of epic proportions. It’s not as though the GOP can claim ignorance of who Trump is. There is zero hope that Trump will surround himself with decent, smart, civic-minded people. At this point the only people willing to join Team MAGA are the idiotic, the irrecoverably power-hungry, and the extreme. It’s not even the JV team anymore, Trump has surrounded himself with a coalition of paste-eating freaks. And what Trump wants to do is remake America in the same way he remade the GOP—into a tool of his own boundless self-aggrandizement. Another Trump term would be a Trump term with zero guardrails, which is a recipe for absolute national disaster. To call it potential national suicide is no longer hyperbole at this point.

If the American experiment is to survive, Donald Trump must be defeated. The GOP is a dead party—it is a shambling corpse that is being worn as a skin suit by Trump. The GOP has no policies, no ideas, no thoughts, no vision. It is just a mass of grievances. All it wants to do is “own the libs” which quickly equates to “owning” even its own members who are not sufficiently affixed to Trump’s ample derriere.

I do believe that Joe Biden will be reelected as President this November—he certainly deserves to be. And the GOP deserves to die as a party. A party this thoroughly incompetent, this thoroughly corrupt, a party that sees Donald Trump and says “this man represents everything about me” is a party that has no business existing. As someone who is prudentially conservative the GOP is not a conservative party. Perhaps some day a new conservative movement will rise from the ashes, although I suspect it will be a generation or more before that happens.

The GOP tied itself to Trump. God willing it will go down with him.

Trump Wants To Be King

I was able to listen to the hearing before the DC Circuit this week in which Trump’s lawyers argued that the President can commit literally any crime and get away with it so long as he manages to get through impeachment. It is, to be blunt, a profoundly stupid argument. What Trump says is that the political process of impeachment of the President is a prerequisite to the criminal prosecution of a President. This is a deliberate misreading of the Constitution. Here is what the Impeachment Judgment Clause actually says:

Judgment in cases of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States: but the party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment, according to law.

US Const. Art. I, §3

In other words, impeachment only removes an official from office, it is not a criminal sanction, but someone who is impeached and removed may still be charged criminally. The idea behind this clause (as made clear by the Founders at the time) was that impeachment was only a political solution, and an official still remained criminally chargeable after impeachment.

What Trump’s lawyers are arguing is that a President cannot be charged criminally unless they are convicted in an impeachment proceeding first. This argument is patently ridiculous, as the DC Circuit noted right at the outset. Under Trump’s argument, the President of the United States could order the assassination of the entire opposition party in Congress on January 19th and because there was no chance for the President to then be impeached, the President could not be criminally charged for murder. If you think that hypothetical is crazy, that is literally one of the first questions asked at the hearing, and Trump’s attorney was forced into saying that is exactly what Trump’s position is.

If there is any question why someone who was once a rock-ribbed GOP-supporting conservative is now not only voting for Joe Biden, but openly campaigning for the Democrats, that is it. The most fundamental thing in American government is that the power of the government is constrained by law. My whole disagreement with the left has been that they are too eager to use the coercive power of the state to remake society. But now the “right” is arguing that there should be no guardrails at all against Presidential power. That position is fundamentally anti-American. And while I still have a healthy skepticism of the Democratic Party, the GOP is now the biggest threat to this country out there. The January 6th insurrection was the point where anyone still supporting the GOP crossed from being a rube to being a danger. The second the GOP party line went to supporting the insurrection, it became not a political party but a terrorist organization.

Trump’s position before the Court this week is the position that the President is accountable to no one. So long as the President can either delay impeachment or keep their party to the party line, the President is free to murder, accept bribes, sell secrets, or do whatever the hell they want. That is not a position that is remotely American or remotely acceptable.

Trump wants to be a King, and the GOP is perfectly happy to let him. That is why the GOP is neither American nor conservative. That is why this conservative is all in with the Biden campaign in 2024.

The Seinfeld Impeachment

The TV sitcom Seinfeld was infamously “a show about nothing.” The GOP House of Representatives’ move to impeach President Biden is an impeachment about nothing. The House GOP cannot give a clear answer about why President Biden should be impeached other than a bunch of pablum about alleged foreign payments. And it is true that Hunter Biden was a drug addict, tax cheat, and in a horribly bad place a few years ago. But there is precisely zero evidence that President Biden did anything illegal or even unethical regarding Hunter’s problems. The most is that Hunter Biden paid his father back for money he loaned him with money he received from overseas sources. But that means nothing—even if the GOP could somehow find evidence that the younger Biden’s money was the fruit of some illicit scheme, there’s no evidence that President Biden was in any way involved.

Even members of the GOP have admitted that there is simply no evidence of anything impeachable there. The “evidence” that the GOP relies upon is largely drawn from straight-out Russian disinformation or completely at odds with reality. At the end of the day, the impeachment is just a way of throwing some red meat to the GOP’s Stupid and Delusional Caucus. The problem with this is that every single member of the GOP House voted for this farce. Not a single one stood up to say “this is a complete and utter waste of time.”

Not only is this impeachment a farce, but it is likely to engender a massive amount of blowback. The GOP has been arguing that Biden has been weak on issues like inflation and border security. And while most Americans do not care about border security, inflation and the cost of living is perhaps the issue for at least a plurality of voters. And what have the GOP done to ease inflation? I’ll let you pick from two answers: Jack and shit. Instead it’s been nothing but a relentless scramble to play to the most radical elements of the GOP base. The problem is that this GOP is not remotely smart enough to make the political plays necessary to give this impeachment scheme the chance to move the needle. If anything, it is quite likely that the GOP’s “letting its freak flag fly” will throw a lifeline to the Biden Campaign that faces what certainly appears to be a massive polling headwind.

At the end of the day, the GOP’s only guiding principle is sucking up to the far right MAGA crowd. The GOP has not even the first clue about speaking to normal Americans. And just is in 2020, 2022, and 2023 the further the GOP gets its head shoved into the cavernous sphincter of the MAGA Cinematic Universe, the less they notice the world around them.

The backlash to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision is probably the beginning of a major political realignment. Even Trump, whose only intelligence is that of a flatworm even can see the political pain that abortion has. And what is the GOP doing? Pushing for a national ban abortion ban and writing a billion attack ads through their own idiotic actions.

The biggest issue in 2024 will not be a bullshit impeachment. If anything, this stupid impeachment stunt is an in-kind contribution to the Biden Campaign. The GOP could have played the only winning political card they had: hammering Biden on inflation and the cost of living. Instead they have handed Biden the perfect attack line: that the GOP has not done a damn thing to fix inflation, but instead has played to the most radical members of its caucus. And not only that, not a single GOP member of Congress had the cojones to stand up say that this should not be a priority.

This is exactly why the current GOP is neither willing nor able to do anything but preen for the cameras. And at the end of the day, the GOP is missing a surge happening right under their feet. The 2022 and 2023 elections should have been a wake-up call. Instead the GOP is living in its fantasy world.

America needs two vibrant political parties. It only has one at the moment, and the other is acting like the Manson Family Circus. This impeachment stunt just highlights the clown car nature of the contemporary GOP, and voters will respond accordingly next year.

Donald Trump Is a Fascist

Tom Nichols has a great piece in The Atlantic in which he comes around to the idea that Donal Trump is a literal fascist. I have long thought that Trump is a textbook fascist—he has a cult of personality around him, he pines for an imagined past, and he is perfectly fine with using the power of government to punish his enemies. That America did not fall under the first Trump “administration” was due to the fact that Trump is also profoundly lazy and he had some guardrails around him. A second Trump term would still see a lazy Trump, but he would be empowered by a burgeoning movement of radical right-wing elements that have openly declared their intention to turn America into a one-party police theocracy. As Nichols defines fascism:

Fascism is not mere oppression. It is a more holistic ideology that elevates the state over the individual (except for a sole leader, around whom there is a cult of personality), glorifies hypernationalism and racism, worships military power, hates liberal democracy, and wallows in nostalgia and historical grievances. It asserts that all public activity should serve the regime, and that all power must be gathered in the fist of the leader and exercised only by his party.

That is the Trump ideology (such as it exists) in a nutshell. Trump is playing from the same old playbook that every fascist and caudillo has since time immemorial. And sadly, it is a playbook that works.

Where I disagree with Nichols is here:

But here I want to caution my fellow citizens. Trump, whether from intention or stupidity or fear, has identified himself as a fascist under almost any reasonable definition of the word. But although he leads the angry and resentful GOP, he has not created a coherent, disciplined, and effective movement. (Consider his party’s entropic behavior in Congress.) He is also constrained by circumstance: The country is not in disarray, or at war, or in an economic collapse. Although some of Trump’s most ardent voters support his blood-and-soil rhetoric, millions of others have no connection to that agenda. Some are unaware; others are in denial. And many of those voters are receptive to his message only because they have been bludgeoned by right-wing propaganda into irrationality and panic. Even many officials in the current GOP, that supine and useless husk of an institution, do not share Trump’s ambitions.

I have long argued for confronting Trump’s voters with his offenses against our government and our Constitution. The contest between an aspiring fascist and a coalition of prodemocracy forces is even clearer now. But deploy the word fascist with care; many of our fellow Americans, despite their morally abysmal choice to support Trump, are not fascists.

This is technically true—most Trump supporters might not be in favor of turning America into an anti-democratic police state. But that also does not matter in the slightest.

When the Nazis rose to power, the German people did not vote for crematoria and conquest. But they got both anyway. Most Germans were not ardent Nazis, but the Nazis controlled Germany anyway. The fact that most GOP voters are not on board with a fascist America means very little. Enough are, and history has shown time and time again that an illiberal and dangerous minority is all it takes to transform a society into a totalitarian hellhole. Anyone who supports Donald Trump is voting to end American democracy. Period. Whether they do so out of ignorance or malice does not make anything more than an academic difference.

I disagree that calling Trump what he is is dangerous. The threat that Trump poses is enhanced by euphemizing his conduct and treating him like just another political sideshow. In 2016 the media breathlessly covered his every move because it goosed the ratings. The results were Trump magnifying his bullshit personal “brand” to the Oval Office and the near destruction of this country. And today, the media is still too cowardly to openly speak the truth. The media still lavishes coverage on Trump, still tends to treat him like a normal candidate rather than an abject fascist. Trying to hide the truth will not serve this country’s interests.

We cannot afford another four years of Trump, because if he gets power again he will ensure that he remains in power for the rest of his life. There will be no guardrails, no people who will tell Trump no, no limits on what Trump will do. The best outcome we can hope for is what amounts to a civil war or coup. We cannot afford this. It might be that many of Trump’s supporters do not call themselves fascists, but at the end of the day they are enabling it. We can either grapple with that fact honestly and boldly or we can risk watching this country fall. I, for one, am tired of the euphemisms. Trump is a wanna-be dictator, a fascist, a totalitarian. He may be a stupid, unstable, and lazy dictator, but that makes him potentially more dangerous, not less.

Mike Johnson and the GOP’s Anti-American Litmus Test

Louisiana Congressman Mike Johnson is the Speaker of the House, defeating Minnesota’s Tom Emmer who was shivved by Trump and saw his candidacy last less than a day. Emmer’s grave sin in the GOP’s eyes was not supporting election denial—Emmer voted to approve the democratic results of the 2020 election, and therefore was a “RINO” in the eyes of the GOP. Speaker Johnson, on the other hand, is an avowed 2020 denialist, Christian nationalist, and extremist.

Make no mistake about it, the GOP has a litmus test: if you believe that the 2020 election was fair and the Joe Biden is the legitimate President of the United States, you are not welcome in the GOP today. Never mind the fact that the 2020 election was fair and that Joe Biden is the legitimately-elected President of the United States. Belief in a lie is necessary to be a part of the GOP now.

At one point, the GOP stood for actual values. However imperfectly, the GOP believed in democracy abroad and at home, a limited federal government of enumerated powers, a strong national defense, and having government serve as an exemplar of personal ethics. None of that matters today. Today’s GOP is about simple-minded “owning the libs” and using government to enforce a deeply broken system of values. It is a personality cult around the mentally and morally diseased Donald Trump.

Mike Johnson does not deserve to be Speaker of the House. No election denialist has any business being in government. And that means that no GOP candidate today belongs in government. And over the next year, hopefully another major electoral bloodbath for the GOP will make that closer to a reality.

The Chaos Caucus

The House of Representatives continues to be a national disgrace. Rep. Jim Jordan, an odious troll who has accomplished nothing in 16 years of public office, is trying to get himself elected as Speaker of the House. As of the date of this post he has gone through two rounds of voting and has lost ground in the second. As Tom Nichols writes in The Atlantic, this mess is exactly what GOP voters wanted all along. The GOP electorate does not give a damn about actually governing the country. It is all about “owning the libs” these days, which generally means spreading deranged conspiracy theories on Fox News or OANN. There is no GOP theory of governance, there is no GOP policy agenda, there is only the grift.

Meanwhile, the Russians continue to occupy a significant chunk of Ukraine as the Ukrainian people continue to bravely and deftly fight back. The situation in Gaza remains unstable as it appears that the destruction of a Gaza hospital was caused by an errant rocket launched by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Here in the United States, the government will shut down in a month unless Congress can get its shit together and do its job.

In other words, the country needs leadership. The GOP is not offering it. Jim Jordan is a joke, a waste of a Congressional seat, and not remotely the sort of person who belongs in political power.

The GOP has become the Chaos Caucus. Drama leads to fundraising and news hits, and that’s all the modern GOP gives a damn about. Meanwhile, President Biden went to Israel and negotiated a deal with Egypt allowing some humanitarian aid to cross into Gaza through the Rafah crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. While the GOP was fighting amongst each other like a bunch of schoolchildren that found a crate of Pixy Stix, President Biden was saving the lives of Gazans while also ensuring aid to Israel to fight Hamas.

As a former Republican, seeing the GOP in this state is horrible. The country needs two functioning political parties. Right now, it has one. Voters are noticing that President Biden is getting things done and the GOP is unable to find its own ass with a roadmap and a flashlight. And while the GOP base is never going to leave, the GOP base is not enough to win national elections as we saw in 2020 and again in 2022. Even districts like CO-3 that is “represented” by the Platonic ideal of white trash Lauren Boebert are now likely swing districts. (Boebert only barely held on in 2022 and that was before the most politically disastrous night at the theater since the Lincolns went to see My American Cousin.)

The time to show real leadership is now. The GOP cannot even select a leader amongst themselves, and the frontrunner for the job is a hysterical idiot whose only accomplishment has been in covering up rampant sexual abuse. To paraphrase Reagan, it is a time for choosing. The GOP has chosen poorly, and that was very much a conscious choice by an electorate that wants this chaos.

UPDATE:

Jim Jordan is about to announce that he will not seek a third vote and will move to give powers to the current Speaker pro term Patrick McHenry. Whether that is allowable under House rules is unclear, but what is clear is that Jordan does not have the votes to become Speaker and never will. Jordan is not formally dropping his bid for Speaker, but the chances of it going anywhere are slim to none.

Hamas’ War on Israel is a Societal Suicide Bombing

This weekend, Hamas launched an all-out assault on Israel, hitting the country with rockets, drones, and commando strikes. The death toll on the Israeli side is already approaching four digits and when the fog of war lifts that death toll is likely to increase. Hamas terrorists murdered Israelis indiscriminately, turning a music festival into a killing ground.

The Israelis have responded with their own assault on Gaza, which includes shutting off the power to the Gaza Strip. The loss of civilian lives among the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza is likely to devastating as well. Hamas is engaging of its usual tactics of placing military assets in protected locations like mosques and hospitals, daring the Israelis to attack.

This war represents a massive intelligence failure for the Israelis. The IDF thought that they had contained Hamas, and up to 19,000 Palestinians were commuting from Gaza to Israel to work. Former US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk has a detailed analysis of what happened and why in Foreign Affairs that provides some much needed context. Indyk’s thoughts on why Hamas decided to strike are important here:

The Arab world is coming to terms with Israel. Saudi Arabia is talking about normalizing relations with Israel. As part of that potential deal, the United States is pressing Israel to make concessions to the Palestinian Authority—Hamas’s enemy. So this was an opportunity for Hamas and its Iranian backers to disrupt the whole process, which I think in retrospect was deeply threatening to both of them. I don’t think that Hamas follows dictation from Iran, but I do think they act in coordination, and they had a common interest in disrupting the progress that was underway and that was gaining a lot of support among Arab populations. The idea was to embarrass those Arab leaders who have made peace with Israel, or who might do so, and to prove that Hamas and Iran are the ones who are able to inflict military defeat on Israel.

The reality is that the Palestinians have long been used as pawns for a proxy war against Israel. But the Middle East is changing—the Iranians have become the primary adversary for Sunni countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the UAE. And Israel is a buffer against the Iranians. This attack is likely directed by the Iranians to try to drive a wedge between Israel and the Sunni states. Whether or not that works depends both on how indiscriminate Israel’s actions become and how the rest of the Middle East reacts. But ultimately the economic, security, and political interests of countries like Saudi Arabia remain better aligned with rich and industrial Israel than the Palestinians that have been treated alternately like pariahs and useful tools since Israel’s founding. Iran is threatened by an Israel-Saudi alliance, and this attack may have been directed in large part by Tehran.

This war will not leave either Israel or Hamas in a better position. The Israelis have already declared open war on Hamas, and Israel has the military might to level the Gaza Strip several times over. Israel does not particularly want to re-occupy the Strip and try to govern over a population nearly a third of its own while facing Hizb’allah in the north and the restive West Bank in the east. No matter what happens, Hamas has forced a complex humanitarian catastrophe on its own people that will take years to resolve, and may leave Gaza permanently poorer. Israel has already taken heavy losses and has shown that its intelligence into Gaza was deeply flawed. The Israeli government has said that this will be a long and difficult war, and that prediction is quite likely to be accurate.

It is quite possible that the already unpopular Netanyahu government falls after all is said and done. Netanyahu’s appeal was primarily predicated on his ability to keep Israel safe from terrorism. It is now beyond question that the Netanyahu government and the IDF failed that mission, and failed dramatically. While Israel will likely not move towards elections during wartime, Netanyahu’s days are numbered now.

This war is a tragedy for the region. It is a tragedy for the innocent civilians in Gaza that were placed into harms way be the terrorists of Hamas. It is a tragedy for the State of Israel that has lost hundreds if not thousands of lives and has been shaken to the core. It is a tragedy for the Middle East that was for the first time in decades trending more towards peace. It is a tragedy for the world that the free world now faces another conflict in an era of relative peace.

Hamas bears the blame for this. Hamas has turned the entire Gaza Strip into a suicide bomb, using it to strike at Israel no matter what the costs to the people of Gaza. Hamas must be destroyed if there is to be peace, but the costs to both Israel and Gaza will sadly be severe.

The Fall of Kevin McCarthy

For the first time in American history, the House of Representatives have kicked out the Speaker of the House, as Kevin McCarthy lost a vote to keep his office 216-210.

McCarthy sold his soul for power, and lost both in the process.

Now the GOP owns this chaos, despite increasingly desperate attempts to pin this all on the Democrats. It is a testament to just how screwed up the GOP is that the former President of the United States being put under a gag order to stop threatening the clerk of the judge in his civil case is not even the biggest and most damning story of the day. The GOP is simply a party that cannot govern because it does not want to govern. The entire nervous system of the GOP is based on getting approval from the radicalized right-wing media ecosystem which requires constant performative assholery. That is why the first thing that the interim Speaker did was kick Rep. Nancy Pelosi and other prominent Democrats out of their offices. It is all about what generates clicks and fundraising dollars. The process of governing the country is not even a consideration.

Ultimately, the reason why Kevin McCarthy lost his job was because he decided for one moment to do his job instead of throw chum into the wide-open maw of the right-wing rage machine. By working with Democrats on a continuing resolution that kept the government running McCarthy committed the one unforgivable sin in the GOP world: not putting the grift ahead of everything else.

Sadly, whatever poor sap that ends up replacing McCarthy will no doubt have learned their lesson: that to “lead” today’s GOP requires commitment to the grift above everything else, Actually governing is a fatal error. This is the way for the nihilism of today’s hollowed-out shell of the GOP. And this is ultimately why the GOP has to be completely destroyed as a viable party before there can be a responsible and mature conservative party in this country again.