Politics

MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes tweeted in July what, at surface level, seems an obvious point: 'If I were the DNC, I would be spending a lot of money learning basically everything I could about 2012 Obama voters who didn’t vote in 2016.' Considering how much Hayes and others on the mainstream left have invested into debunking the current administration, there’s no surprise that, when the rubber meets the road, the Democrats let their collective hatred of Trump cloud their political judgement. Look no further than their treatment of Tulsi Gabbard.

There’s a presidential primary race afoot in the Libertarian party, America’s third largest. In 2016, the Libertarians nominated former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, and as his running mate, former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld. Their ticket received 3.28 percent of the national popular vote, the largest third-party vote share since 1996 and the best ever Libertarian performance. For 2020, party leaders hope to break that record. Dan Fishman, executive director of the Libertarian National Committee, says the goal is to crest 5 percent of the popular vote, the share above which a minor party becomes eligible for federal campaign funding. ‘The numbers could be even higher,’ Fishman said.

Now for some bracing honesty from the Democratic National Committee. In a new, unanimously adopted resolution, Democrats have declared that ‘the religiously unaffiliated demographic represents the largest religious group within the Democratic party, growing from 19 percent in 2007 to one in three today’ (emphasis added). Advocates for truth in political advertising should rejoice. The so-called ‘secular’ left has finally abandoned the canard that its views and policies are purely ‘neutral,’ or the products of inarguable empiricism. According to the resolution, the religiously unaffiliated and the nonreligious (labels used interchangeably) are, instead, members of a new faith community.

When Joe Walsh announced that he’d be running to be the Republicans’ nominee for 46th president of the United States, the phrase 'long shot' came to the minds of more than a few gamblers and political strategists. Regardless of the bookmakers and power brokers, it's more than possible for Walsh to shake up a political landscape dominated by Donald Trump. With the right political strategy, NeverTrumpers, with a Joe Walsh campaign as their representative, could beat Trump in 2020. In the era of Trump, 'long shots' are more than possible. Lest we forget, Trump was once a long shot. The polls said that he could never hit the bullseye. But today, he’s the leader of the free world.

With millions of people unemployed, finding a new job for a well-heeled Washington insider might seem like a low priority for Americans but I still believe it would be sensible and humane to find Bill Kristol another job. The poor fellow has spent years working in politics, and it just isn't working out for him – or anyone else. Mr Kristol is of course the son of neoconservative theorist Irving Kristol. Neoconservative families are unusually rich in political commentators. Irving Kristol's contemporary and ideological comrade Norman Podhoretz produced the columnist and editor John Podhoretz. Right-leaning historian Donald Kagan produced the neoconservative theorists Robert and Frederick. Conservative literary agent Lucianne Goldberg is the mother of conservative columnist Jonah.

Only just turned 18, David E. Oks extends over a lean 6'1 frame, bent slightly forward. His voice, called 'terrifyingly deep' by a fan, is unforgettable once you’ve heard it. Overall, he seems more like a Romanian apparatchik than the architect of the 2020 Democratic primaries’ biggest anti-war disruption. If you weren't aware, Oks, along with high school friend Henry Williams, was the teenage manager of former Alaska senator Mike Gravel’s insurgent bid for the Democratic nomination. In office from 1969 to 1981, Gravel read the Pentagon Papers into the congressional record to make them publicly available and became a leading figure in the end of the draft and the Vietnam War.

Here’s a shocker: people are more complicated than the caricatures disseminated by their enemies suggest. Witness the stupefyingly rich David Koch, who together with his brother Charles, presided over a business empire worth some $115 billion. David, who died on Friday at 79 after a long battle with prostate cancer, was at one with his brother in embracing a staunch libertarian philosophy of government and also in his belief in the power of philanthropic investment. When you control a personal fortune of $50 billion, you are in a position to distribute philos to many anthropoi. This the Koch brothers did, on a breathtaking scale. A lot of their money, and a lot of money they leveraged from other conservative donors, was siphoned to political candidates of whom they approved.

The United States is apparently angling to outpace its European counterparts when it comes to silly, censorious, and sometimes dangerous internet policies. The latest batch of bad proposals in Congress and the White House would, if enacted, kill social media, search engines, and so much other online life as we know it. While conservative politicians here grumble about ‘hate speech’ and ‘data protection’ laws abroad, the alternatives they keep proposing here are just as speech-squelching and business-burdening. And while Republican party leaders have historically hated US plans like the ‘Fairness Doctrine’ and ‘net neutrality’, they keep pushing their own versions of these for social media.

If The Onion didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent it. The self-described 'omnipotent' purveyor of current-events satire may not be (as another motto claims) 'America’s finest news source.' But it does have a good claim to the nation’s nicest anatomist of political folly (using, I hasten to add, that capacious word 'nice' not in the sense of 'kind, pleasant' but 'precise, exact, fine'). Consider this headline: 'Anthony Scaramucci talks to Bill Kristol about trying to force Trump off the GOP ticket in 2020.' Can you guess the source? If you said 'The Onion,' you would have made a perfectly rational judgment.

Like millions of other Americans, I’m exhausted. But I’m not tired from #Resisting or tired from screaming at a MAGA rally. I’m tired of the toxic tribalism infecting the very foundations of our democracy, straining our relationships, and poisoning our view of our fellow humans. I’m tired of everyone being outraged, getting worked up over the latest news cycle only to forget about it two hours later. Tired of being afraid to voice my own opinions, of knowing how saying the wrong thing at a barbecue while someone is filming on their iPhone could result in a nationwide clarion call for my head on a pike. I’m tired of rage mobs and cancelations. 2016 was the breaking point, or at least a watershed moment, when the vilification of diverse opinion exploded.