Politics

I write today not as an analyst, but as an advocate. Joe Biden has nominated Neera Tanden to be the next director of the Office of Management and Budget. Republican senators must confirm her. Neera Tanden is one of the better-known luminaries of the Beltway commentariat. The head of the Center for American Progress, a close advisor to Hillary Clinton, and a frequent presence on television news panels, Tanden has been a tireless advocate for a kind of corporate liberalism. Progressive but not radical; redistributive but not confiscatory; never a threat to persistent powerful institutions. She is perfectly at ease pushing this line from the clubby green rooms of NBC to the sprawling, brawling swamps of Twitter.

Right-wingers on social media are calling for Trump supporters to refuse to vote for Republican candidates Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue in the Georgia Senate race. Instead, tweets with the tag #boycottGArunoff are encouraging voters angry at alleged fraud in the presidential race to write in President Trump for both seats. The instruction is a bit confusing since Georgia law does not even accept write-in candidates for a runoff election. A protest vote in this case might make someone feel better, but it won’t be counted and we’ll have no idea how many people actually opted to ‘boycott’ the election. There is a reason Newsmax’s Joe Pinion dubbed the Georgia boycott his ‘whiff of the week’ on his show Saturday.

Everyone knew some husky chap in college who smelled like onions and called himself a libertarian. He may or may not have worn a fedora. He wasn’t cool enough to do drugs but he figured that, if he never stopped talking about how much he wanted to legalize them, he’d get a bit of second-hand cool. This fellow was never seen without a copy of The Road to Serfdom tucked beneath his sweaty armpit. He never missed a seminar (again, lame) and would say the name of Ayn Rand out loud at least once per class. Sometimes he wouldn’t even raise his hand first; he’d just whisper it lovingly under his breath.

To say out-loud that you find the results of the 2020 presidential election odd is to invite derision. You must be a crank or a conspiracy theorist. Mark me down as a crank, then. I am a pollster and I find this election to be deeply puzzling. I also think that the Trump campaign is still well within its rights to contest the tabulations. Something very strange happened in America's democracy in the early hours of Wednesday November 4 and the days that followed. It’s reasonable for a lot of Americans to want to find out exactly what. First, consider some facts. President Trump received more votes than any previous incumbent seeking reelection. He got 11 million more votes than in 2016, the third largest rise in support ever for an incumbent.

Once again, President Trump has done the right thing. This afternoon, he announced that earlier today he had pardoned Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the man who was framed by the corrupt administration of Barack Obama and mercilessly hounded for four years by a rogue FBI and out-of-control deep state apparat. The case was so embarrassing that the Department of Justice eventually intervened and dropped the prosecution. That did nothing to quell the fury of the vindictive Judge Emmet Sullivan, who decided to soldier on as both prosecutor and judge in his effort to nail Gen. Flynn. All that comes to an end today. 'It is my Great Honor,' the Twitterer-in-Chief wrote this afternoon, 'to announce that General Michael T. Flynn has been granted a Full Pardon.

It started a few weeks before Election Day. With the polling data almost universally showing that Joe Biden would win the White House and a ‘blue wave’ would sweep Mitch McConnell into the Senate minority, creatures of the Washington swamp started becoming emboldened enough to publicly buck Donald Trump and his team. I don’t mean, of course, the NeverTrumpers who opposed Trump during the primary and general elections in 2016. Those ‘brave’ souls assumed Trump wasn’t going to beat Hillary Clinton so spoke out against him with incredibly judgmental letters and tweets by the dozens, telling voters Trump was unworthy of the presidency, as if Bill Clinton never happened.

President Trump said Monday in a tweet that his administration is willing to start the formal transition of power to Joe Biden, even while asserting that he still intends to 'fight' and 'prevail' in his legal challenges against the results of the presidential election. 'I want to thank Emily Murphy at GSA for her steadfast dedication and loyalty to our Country. She has been harassed, threatened, and abused — and I do not want to see this happen to her, her family, or employees of GSA. Our case STRONGLY continues, we will keep up the good fight, and I believe we will prevail! Nevertheless, in the best interest of our Country, I am recommending that Emily and her team do what needs to be done with regard to initial protocols, and have told my team to do the same.

So much for the Powell doctrine. Only a few days ago President Trump deemed Sidney Powell a vital part of his ‘elite strike force’. No longer. Now Rudy Giuliani’s cold statement dismissing Sidney Powell, who has been the attorney for Michael Flynn, from the Trump legal team is arousing much merriment but I don’t share it. If you can’t peddle a good conspiracy theory from within the confines of the Trump camp, then things have come to a pretty pass indeed. All that will be left for Powell is to fold her termination into a larger conspiracy. Dominion, she will likely claim, has dominion over the Trump campaign itself.

The 2020 election has provided fertile ground upon which Republicans can spend the next four years doing to Joe Biden what the Democrats did to Donald Trump and George W. Bush. For four years, Democrats and their media allies trumpeted every claim, no matter how baseless or crazy, that Trump’s 2016 election win was illegitimate and fraudulent. Despite zero evidence that so much as a single vote was interfered with, Democrats peddled the hoax that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to elect Trump. Even after the Mueller investigation exonerated Trump and his campaign from the collusion canard, Democrats, led by the shameless Adam Schiff, continued to allege collusion. Their simple goal was to undermine and delegitimize the Trump presidency.

It’s of course premature to even speculate as to how the new administration will fashion a foreign policy. But enough declarations have been made to give an outline, so let us imagine the policies that might emerge.The Founders never really envisioned foreign relations being a major preoccupation of America when they drew up the US Constitution. ‘Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none,’ Thomas Jefferson famously admonished. In a document that brilliantly balances the government’s power and reach between executive, legislative and judicial branches, the executive is left with virtual control over making foreign policy, for little of that was expected.

Gavin Newsom is not a very good liar. The California governor, who recently issued a coronavirus ruling prohibiting Christmas and Thanksgiving gatherings of more than 10, or members of more than three different households, has broken his own rules. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Newsom attended a birthday party for a lobbyist at the ultra-lux Wine Country restaurant French Laundry. Six couples were present at the maskless, non-socially distant soirée, including functionaries from the California Medical Association, which advises the governor on the pandemic measures.After putting the state on yet another lockdown, a shifty-looking Newsom recorded a video explaining what happened at that $400-a-plate affair.