Some encouraging news from Minnesota
Six Democratic mayors in Minnesota endorse Trump:
“Today, we don’t recognize the Democratic Party. It has been moved so far to the left it can no longer claim to be advocates of the working class,” wrote the mayors. “Lifelong politicians like Joe Biden are out of touch with the working class, out of touch with what the country needs, and out of touch with those of us here on the Iron Range and in small towns like ours across the nation.”
Their letter also thanked Trump for bringing prosperity and hope back to their citizens and the country overall.
Of course, there’s also this from a few days ago:
As the Republican National Convention kicks off in Charlotte, N.C., three Minnesota Republican politicians are rejecting their party nominee President Donald Trump and are endorsing his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden.
According to a Monday news release from Biden’s campaign, former Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson, former U.S. Sen. Dave Durenberger and 2010 gubernatorial candidate Tom Horner have joined a list of “Republicans for Biden” across the country favoring the former vice president.
In a joint statement, the three Republicans said Biden is “a leader that can unite Minnesotans” with “the knowledge, experience, and fundamental decency to unite our state and our country.”
Knowledge? These days, Biden displays a fundamental lack of knowledge. As for experience, most of what he has is bad. Decency? Plagiarism, inappropriate touching, getting lucrative contracts for his ne’er-do-well son?
Note also in that second paragraph of the quote, the word “former” is used for the first two Biden endorsers. The third, Horner, doesn’t seem to ever have held office in the state. The oldstyle GOP. Former governor Carlson, for example, endorsed Obama in 2008. Republicans, sure.
“Republicans, sure.”
The only good thing about this is that there are a fairly large number who are finally showing where their true allegiance lies.
SueK +1
Carlson and Durenberger have their own sordid baggage. I worked on Capital Hill when both were elected officials for Minnesota and knew people involved. There are terrible stories about both of them. Some involved affairs with much younger staff, departing office in shame, and ugly, nasty elections that propagandised vulgar lies on their opposition. In the end, ruining the lives of their opposition. They are your typical slimy opportunistic politician. Of course they support Biden. They are like him.
The GOP needs to revoke membership in the Republican party for any and all “Republicans for Biden”.
Any politician who favors Biden is either corrupt or guilty of an inexcusable level of ignorance and/or criminally negligent.
Republicans, sure.
The iteration I’ve seen of the ‘Republicans for Biden’ had 29 names on it, of whom the circulator was Jeff Flake. On the list were Flake, two retired Governors (Christine Todd Whitman and John Kasich), and 26 other quondam members of Congress. (Kasich was both a governor and a member of Congress). Flake had to scrounge to put this list together.
1. Six of these ‘Republicans’ have changed their party registration in the last dozen years and a seventh was an admitted Obama voter.
2. Their median age is 75; 25 of them are eligible for full Social Security and 3 of the remaining 4 are so for a federal employee pension; three of them are over 90; Flake, at age 58, is the youngest bar one.
3. Flake, who entered Congress in 2001, hadn’t served with half of them because they’d already retired when he arrived in that body.
4. Half of them haven’t run for public office in at least 20 years.
5. For most of them, the midpoint of the time they spent in Congress and statewide office is more than 25 years in the past.
IOW, he got signatures from people he as often as not wasn’t acquainted with who are as often as not manifestations of the pre-Gingrich era in the Republican Party.
The American Conservative Union compiles some helpful metrics on consequential votes in Congress. Of these 29 people:
1. About 16 of them were throughout their time in Congress a problem for party whips, siding with the opposition > 25% of the time. Some were programmatic temporizers and some were liberals. As a bench mark, look at Bill Nelson, Joe Manchin, and Joe Donnelly, the most unco-operative members of the Senate Democratic caucus in recent years. Their level of dissent is the lower bound of what these people demonstrated during their time in Congress. NB, three of these people took jobs in the Obama Administration.
2. Two others (Jim Kolbe and John Warner) were not dissenters throughout their time in Congress, but they were during the terminal part of their time there. In the case of one, this covered his last 10 years in that body (in which he sat for 22 years) and in the case of the other the last 5 of his 30 years. One of these two also affiliated with a menu of squish lobbies.
3. Two others had starboard records in Congress, but affiliated with liberal outfits later. One sat on the national board of Common Cause while another took jobs with the Kennedy School and NPR (and also voted for Obama).
4. Another, Gov. Whitman, doesn’t have a voting record in Congress. However she was the founder or a principal of a menu of squish letterheads, including It’s My Party Too, Republican Main Street Partnership, and the Republican Leadership Council. You read her account of herself and it occurs to you that she’s the issue of blueblood family for whom electoral politics was an amusing hobby, and the Republicans were their preferred club; the main issue that engaged her viscerally was her property tax bill.
5. Three others have a history as business lobbyists. I think they still take clients.
6. Two – Flake himself and another fellow named Inglis – had starbaord records generally but have been at the same time advocates of open borders (I’m sure they’d deny it, but those are the practical implications of what they agitated for).
So the man fixing to rally the defenders of muh principles comes up with a jumble of antiques who can be described, variously, as liberals, temporizers, careerists, fair-weather friends, hustlers, and advocates of Mexican colonization.
@SueK:
That’s the thing about Interesting Times. We’ve had 75 years of Happy Times where nobody really had to take much of a stand on anything.
Now that History is rushing back in with a roar, all the Vicars of Bray are flopping around like fish out of water.
(Is there a prize for the most egregious abuse of the English Language involving discordantly mixed metaphors?)
We’re not going to like much what we see of many once trusted figures, friends, acquaintances, or sometimes even our own selves.
Wouldn’t go quite so far as to claim that it’s bliss to be alive in this dawning moment, but we’re going to be gifted the gift of Clarity whether we want it or not.
I don’t know much about Horner, but Carlson and Durenberger are no longer Republicans. They have both said so on separate occasions in the past. So, that article is misleading. They’re also political dinosaurs. I’m sure they still think of Democrats in terms of Bill Clinton circa 1992 and assume the Joe Biden 2020 is the same as Joe Biden back then.
Nothing impressive about 80something ex-Republican (and Rockefeller Republicans, when they were) fossils supporting Biden (talk about a fossil!). The six Democrat mayors is significant in that they are current politicians who actually have something to lose. I am more and more convinced Trump will flip Minnesota.
Carlson and Durenberger have their own sordid baggage. I worked on Capital Hill when both were elected officials for Minnesota and knew people involved. There are terrible stories about both of them. Some involved affairs with much younger staff, departing office in shame, and ugly, nasty elections that propagandised vulgar lies on their opposition. In the end, ruining the lives of their opposition.
Durenberger ran for Congress 3x. One of his opponents in those races recently retired as Governor of Minnesota. If he’s ruined, it’s a consequence of his own short-comings, not anything Durenberger did to him running for office decades ago. Another of his opponents was Hubert Humphrey’s son. He’s not ruined either. The third of his opponents was a wealthy businessman who wasn’t ruined, either; the man died in 1982.
Durenburger’s voting record in Congress was like these others, only moreso.
The mayors who endorsed Trump are from Northern Minnesota, an area roughly west and north of Duluth called the Iron Range. It’s where taconite is mined. Kevin McHale and Bob Dylan are from there. The area has been staunchly Democrat for as long as I’ve been alive. The people there vote for Democrats because their daddies did, because the Democrats were pro-union, pro-middle class, etc.
But there are cracks in the foundation. The Democrats aren’t for them anymore, primarily because of the environmental movement. Iron Rangers tear taconite out of open pit mines using heavy equipment, send it to Duluth by rail, where it gets shipped east and put into blast furnaces.
But that kind of manufacturing is just the kind of thing President Trump has been touting the last five years. They’re the kind of jobs President Obama was happy to let wither and die, without a care for those who’d be bereft without them. And why bother? The Twin Cities, a bright spark of blue in a sea of red, would be enough to keep MN in the Democrat column. But Trump only lost MN by 40,000 votes. There aren’t a ton of people on the Iron Range, but 40,000 people disillusioned by globalism and energized by an economic resurgence could make the difference.
Add them to the people in the Twin Cities terrified by the riots, looting, and threats to defund the police. Minnesota is in play.
Bravo! Kudos to those Democrat mayors brave and dutiful enough to cross the aisle and endorse “The Donald”.
I was powerfully struck, as a teenage law student, by Richard Nixon’s Memoirs where he recount his experience on coming out of the navy after WW2 and seeking work as a young lawyer in Washington.
He had at least spent time before the war as a lawyer in private practice so the young RN would at least have brought some knowledge of the realities and imperatives of the real economy to his government work.
As it turned out, RN was conspicuously unsuccessful in his governmental job search, failing to gain a place in any of the agencies he applied to, (including the FBI apparently), but did secure some work at a minor government agency charged with repatriating rubber tyres, or some such, back to the US. His point in recounting his time with that agency wasn’t to point out that much government work is tedious, (just as much work in the private sector is), but that government environments, at all levels, are far more tolerant of waste and inefficiency than private enterprise can ever afford to be. What irked him most, he wrote, was the way that red tape was manufactured for its own sake and for the sake of justifying empire building within departments.
Any thinking person who has ever worked in government surely knows something of what Nixon encountered and was disgusted by. Unlike the rest of us who need to satisfy our highly demanding clients in order to be to be paid, (let alone to win repeat work), the pay of professional politicians and their public servants rains down each month from heaven regardless of how they have performed.
No wonder that such people come to regard everyones’ money as no-one’s money. With that mind set no wonder they can be so profligate in spending it and become so detached from whether or not their policy initiatives, if any, have had any beneficial effect for the people they purport to serve. Put simply, nothing: no policy failure or societal damage wrought by their programs ever impacts them. And that’s a serious problem.
People like Biden, Pelosi, et al, who have served decades in the government may have done yeoman work in the early days but over time, (as most of us would to varying degrees), morph from being leaders into mere office-holders and their priorities from changing things for the better to winning re-election to their cosy sinecures.
I saw this myself in a similar experience to Nixon’s. Tasked as a junior Army reserve officer to render full time service for a couple of years in Canberra at Russell Hill, our version of your Pentagon, I was appalled at the laziness and inefficiencies I encountered not just from lower level civilian public servants but from high-ranking officers.
It is quite likely that most of the lazy, disconnected colonels and brigadiers with whom I spent most of each day were not always such. But by the time I met them they were spending hours each day in the bathrooms reading newspapers and magazines “on the Queen’s business” as they’d only half-joke, or drinking and dining in the Mess. These officers, like most career politicians, were probably once very keen, effective, hard-working and altruistic young officers intent on serving the interest of the people in uniform. But somewhere at some point over the decades the uniform ended up wearing them.
“These officers, like most career politicians, were probably once very keen, effective, hard-working and altruistic young officers intent on serving the interest of the people in uniform. But somewhere at some point over the decades the uniform ended up wearing them.” – Scipio Australianus
Well-said, and thanks for your very interesting anecdotes.
Nixon was targeted for take-down, as we now know, and Watergate was the precipitating incident, but if the burglary had never happened, something else would have been pressed into service (analogous to the death of George Floyd: if it hadn’t happened, something else would have been the “go signal” for Antifa).
I can’t remember where I read it today, but some pundit pointed out that (in my interpretation) “no one expects the Watergate Inquisition,” but President Trump was at least aware that such a thing could happen, and Nixon had no reason to anticipate the uproar that ensued in the wake of what was, relative to historical precedent, a fairly banal bit of partisan intrigue.
It also helps that Trump didn’t actually do any of the nefarious deeds charged, and Nixon participated in his own downfall.
Sic semper praesidens.
Well, the pandemic is old news now, but this is kind of encouraging news, and it is certainly setting the record straight about the danger of jumping to conclusions before enough evidence is in to evaluate, and the governmental malfeasance of ignoring the evidence once it IS in.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/08/shock-report-week-cdc-quietly-updated-covid-19-numbers-9210-americans-died-covid-19-alone-rest-serious-illnesses/?ff_source=Twitter&ff_campaign=websitesharingbuttons
Evil: governors, mayors, health professionals who have access to the data.
Terribly misinformed: all of the people who get their news solely from DeMedia.
Some good details about the Iron Range in this post:
https://www.redstate.com/shipwreckedcrew/2020/08/29/why-minnesota-is-likely-in-trumps-column-already-implications-from-the-iron-range-mayors-letter/
Some encouraging news from Red State
https://www.redstate.com/bradslager/2020/08/29/908598/
Some encouraging news … when you’ve lost Michael Moore…
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bethbaumann/2020/08/29/michael-moore-comes-out-of-his-basement-to-warn-dems-about-the-november-election-n2575304
Some encouraging news … when you’ve lost Andrew Sullivan …
https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2020/08/28/andrew-sullivan-democrats-walked-right-trap/
Well, he’s still a little confused about which label belongs on which Party.
Sooo…the GOP tricked Antifa into burning down cities when they didn’t really want to?
Got that right.
Democrats today aren’t liberals, and the majority have not been for some time, even if some of them were once upon a time.
Which was nonsense, of course — it would only have harmed people out rioting in the streets and burning down buildings and — oh, well — never mind — I get it now.
The sad thing is that Andrew does not see that the extinction of liberal democracy is occurring through the opposition to Trump, not through his own actions. In fact, he has been very scrupulous about following legal guidelines (even if the Democrats don’t like the results), and the only norms he has trampled are not liberal but solely Democrat: the norm being always whatever suits their agenda at the time.
Some very encouraging news!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8675799/McConnell-campaign-hires-student-viral-DC-encounter.html
This picture isn’t really encouraging, but it should be part of any Republican ad campaign.
https://twitter.com/OrwellNGoode/status/1297921550226804737?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1297921550226804737%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.redstate.com%2Fnick-arama%2F2020%2F08%2F24%2Fthe-mayhem-and-aftermath-in-kenosha-heres-more-evidence-of-peaceful-protesting-mr.-barack-obama%2F
Steal this book.
The author said theft is an accepted tool of protest.
https://pjmedia.com/columns/tyler-o-neil/2020/08/29/new-book-provides-a-terrifying-glimpse-into-how-antifa-justifies-looting-and-rioting-n864754
People like Biden, Pelosi, et al, who have served decades in the government may have done yeoman work in the early days but over time,
They didn’t do anything of the sort. Pelosi has no history of shepherding consequential legislation through Congress and some of Biden’s projects are embarrassments. The most notable thing the two have in common is that they had little in the way of an adult work life ‘ere getting involved in politics. They differ in that Biden put together his network of retainers himself, while Pelosi inherited that of her patron, Sala Burton.
https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2019-10-16/former-governor-stands-by-tweet-comparing-trump-to-hitler
I’m sure Gov. Whitman is charming over lunch, or at golf, or over a game of bridge. She’s not improving the civic culture at all.
Art Deco-
The trouble with our present freedom of speech is it is a one-way street. Comparing Trump to Hitler is somehow OK. But no one has the security of true freedom to stand up and loudly say, for example, “George Floyd was full of fentanyl and meth. He was a druggie headed for certain death after a totally useless, empty life”. Instead, we have a new St. George, in whose name countless criminal acts have been committed.
NPR published a fawning interview with the author of the looting book.
I have actually seen someone declare that such topics should be discussed, though to be sure, some should be past the pale. Like slavery.
As if looting were not slavery: the forcible confiscation of the labor of another.
Mary Catelli:
Somewhere I saw a comment to the effect that the more people see of something like that looting book, the more they realize that the left is batsh*t crazy.