Month: December 2019

I used to think Australia was the safest place to be because it would be relatively safe if there was a limited nuclear strike in the Northern hemisphere. But I’ve rethought my emergency plans. It appears that Australia is the first continent to be rendered inhabitable by climate change.

Thousands of people in Australia’s southeastern seaside town of Mallacoota were forced to seek refuge on the beach and even boats in the water early Tuesday as deadly blazes closed in around the popular holiday destination to create an apocalyptic-looking scene of huddled evacuees under dark red skies.

As wildfires grip Australia in one of its worst fire seasons in memory, the threat is especially intense this week in southeastern states such as Victoria and New South Wales, where most of the country’s population lives…

…Fires this week have forced road closures, caused cellphone and power outages, and destroyed homes — and show few signs of relenting. The language in the flurry of alerts from local fire services is dire: “It is too late to leave. Seek shelter in a solid structure to protect yourself. Be aware of the danger of falling trees and branches,” read the bullet points of a Wednesday morning alert…

…In the capital, Canberra, the typical high temperature during December is 81.5 degrees (27.5 Celsius); over the weekend, temperatures hit 100 degrees (37.7 Celsius). The heat this spring and summer has shattered all-time records in Australia. The country had its hottest day on record on Dec. 18, when the national average maximum temperature hit 107.4 degrees (41.9 Celsius), beating the record, which was set the day before.

And, of course, Australians just rejected a party dedicated to tackling climate change in favor of the “Drill, baby, drill” coalition.

Happy New Year!

President Trump found a fine way to end the decade by doing his best Jimmy Carter impression. While generally reticent to use military force, when he does use it it usually doesn’t end well. In this case, it was an example of thoughtless over-exuberance.

The airstrikes targeted an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia, Kataib Hezbollah, which the United States accused of carrying out a missile attack on an Iraqi military base that killed an American contractor and wounded American and Iraqi service members. A spokesman for the militia denied involvement in the attack.

But the size of the American response — five strikes in Iraq and Syria that killed two dozen fighters and wounded dozens of others — prompted condemnation from across the political spectrum and accusations that the United States had violated Iraqi sovereignty.

I guess the theory was that the best deterrence is a disproportionate response. But there were some flaws with the theory.

Thousands of protesters marched into Baghdad’s heavily guarded Green Zone on Tuesday after prayer services for the militia fighters killed in the American strikes. While few of them were armed, many were members of Kataib Hezbollah and other fighting groups that are technically overseen by the Iraqi military. The militia is separate from the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon, although both groups are backed by Iran and oppose the United States.

At the United States Embassy, protesters used long poles to shatter security cameras, covered the compound walls with anti-American graffiti and lit a guardhouse on fire. After breaking open a compound entrance, dozens of men entered and lit more fires while embassy security guards watched them from the embassy roof and fired tear gas.

It could have been worse.

The men did not enter the main embassy buildings and later withdrew from the compound, joining thousands of protesters and militia fighters outside who chanted “Death to America,” threw rocks, covered the walls with graffiti and demanded that the United States withdraw its forces from Iraq.

The government did little to protect the embassy, although they did eventually persuade the protestors to disperse. Then they joined them in condemning the United States.

Condemnation of the recent airstrikes continued on Tuesday. The Iraqi prime minister, Adel Abdul Mahdi, announced an official three-day mourning period for the men killed in the strikes, which he called an “outrageous attack.”

My understanding is that the Iraqi people are highly displeased with their government and with the influence of Iran over their internal affairs, but they don’t feel very positive about America’s presence in their country either, as  these developments illustrate.

These retaliatory airstrikes have weakened the United States’ standing in Iraq while strengthening Iran’s hand, which makes them a rather obvious mistake. The embassy in Baghdad is quite obviously insecure and a new hostage situation has to be considered a distinct possibility. In any case, it’s resonant of the Iran Hostage Crisis and it makes the president look impotent, which is probably not what he was going for when he authorized the strikes.

In looking over the five developments in the Democratic primary race that surprised Ed Kilgore in 2019, I was interested to see the differences in our perspectives. I already covered the first two items on Ed’s list in the piece I wrote last week on the predictable strength of Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. I’m also not the least bit surprised that black voters are wary of nominating a minority candidate after seeing how much of the country seemingly went crazy during the presidency of Barack Obama. The only areas of partial agreement I have with Kilgore involve Pete Buttigieg and Andrew Yang.

He doesn’t really explain why Biden’s steadiness surprises him, but his explanation appears just a bit shy of adequate:

Biden’s resilience is often attributed to Democratic primary voters’ obsession with electability, reinforced by his durable support from nonwhite and elderly white voters who fear a Trump victory more than they hope for some hypothetical progressive administration.

That’s all accurate but I’d add a few things. First, it’s an inescapable fact that most Democrats simply like Joe Biden whether they agree with his politics or not. Second, minority voters are well-disposed to Biden not only because they see him as “electable” but because they value the job he did as Barack Obama’s loyal and capable lieutenant. He earned their gratitude and their trust, which is why Kamala Harris didn’t help herself by attacking his record on busing. Third, elderly Democrats are more comfortable with Biden’s style of leadership and more forgiving of the flaws in his record than younger voters because they suffered through the worst of the conservative backlash against the progress made in the 1960’s. Fourth, Biden does have some strengths in areas where the Democratic Party is increasingly weak, including among white working class Catholics (especially if they’re unionized) and the socially liberal/economically conservative “New” Democrats that proliferate in the suburbs. When you add all of this up, it’s hard to see how Biden’s support could fall below about a quarter of the Democratic vote. It’s really his uneven debate performances and signs of aging that have prevented him from running away with the nomination.

I confess that I thought Sanders’ heart attack might be a game changer that blew up my previous analysis and so I do share a bit of surprise with Kilgore when he talks about Bernie’s ability to weather that storm. But since I predicted that Sanders would stick above fifteen percent no matter what (and thereby get delegates in nearly every congressional district in the country), I can hardly say it defies my expectations to see him polling in second place at 19 percent. He has enough of a loyal remnant from 2016 that I never could envision him falling below a fairly high floor.

The third item on Kilgore’s list is the strength of Pete Buttigieg, and here I agree.

In March, he was well below one percent in candidate preferences. Now he is at 8.3 percent and, more importantly, leads the polling averages in Iowa and is a close second in New Hampshire.

Buttigieg is not doing so well in states that vote later in the process, where nonwhite voters — among whom he has very low support — are predominant.

I did not see Buttigieg getting any traction and am genuinely surprised that he’s been able to build so much support in Iowa. He’s one of the strangest political characters I’ve ever encountered because his support comes from such disparate places. His LBGTQ support is self-explanatory, and he positioned himself as an economic centrist so I see how he’s getting a chunk of Biden’s natural constituency. But it’s really his support from Silicon Valley libertarians that seems to have driven him above the long list of also-rans. If you support platform monopolies like Facebook and Amazon, Buttigieg is your guy. He’s the anti-Elizabeth Warren wrapped up in an “aw shucks” Midwestern package. It’s a giant fraud, but it seems to be effective. As Harris and Booker failed to get traction, Buttigieg became even more important to the venture capitalists and tech monopolists, but I can’t say I saw this coming.

The fourth item on Kilgore’s list is his surprise that nonwhite voters do not show a preference for nonwhite candidates. Latinos prefer Biden to Castro and blacks prefer Biden to Harris or Booker, so we’re not seeing any significant racial solidarity in terms of candidate choice. In addition to indirectly benefiting Buttigieg, this is probably the easiest thing to explain on the list. Trump has ridden a wave of racist backlash against the presidency of Barack Obama. This is terrifying to liberals of all types, but nonwhites are obviously the most threatened by the rise of a white nationalist movement. It’s natural to want to drain the blood out of this fever rather than risk feeding it with another minority candidate. This can be called an “electability” argument, but it’s based in more than mere political fear. It’s a fear of personal safety and loss of rights. Black and Latino voters are looking for protection and a return to normalcy, and that’s a different kind of pragmatism than just who can win.

The last item on Kilgore’s list involves Andrew Yang:

There have been a number of conventionally strong candidates who have dropped out or seem to be heading in that direction. Among them are Montana governor Steve Bullock, Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, and early Texas sensation Beto O’Rourke. And there are other barely surviving presidential prospects with pretty good résumés, such as Senators Cory Booker and Michael Bennet and Representatives Tulsi Gabbard and John Delaney.

Andrew Yang has consistently outperformed them all. He has qualified for all seven presidential candidate debates (including the upcoming event in Iowa) and is currently tied with Amy Klobuchar in the RealClearPolitics’ national polling averages.

Yes, Yang has some interesting signature policy proposals, and yes, he’s done well intermittently in debates, and yes, his fundraising totals have been impressive, and yes, he’s got a social-media Gang spreading his word. But still, his campaign is overperforming any reasonable expectations.

Yang was already doing surprisingly well when I decided to take a good look at him. So, I basically came at analyzing his appeal after that appeal had already been demonstrated. It’s hard to be surprised after the fact, but Yang’s ability to hang on even as he comes under greater scrutiny is a testimony to his talents as a politician and, especially, as an organizer. He’s funny and charismatic, which goes a long way in politics and probably explains most of his success. But, to be honest, we shouldn’t exaggerate the significance of his candidacy. He’s polling nationally at 3.6 percent and in eighth place behind Tom Steyer and Cory Booker in Iowa. Most of the surprise pertaining to Yang is not about how well he is doing but that he’s done better than well-established politicians like the governors of Colorado, Washington and Montana.

So, Yang and Buttigieg have surprised me a bit, but I’ve been put off-balance more by Elizabeth Warren’s missteps and the amount of money Steyer and Michael Bloomberg are throwing around than anything else. These are the wildcards I struggle with as I try to game out the Democratic nomination. And, of course, I have no idea how the eventual trial of Donald Trump will impact things. It could boost Biden but there’s a good chance that it will hurt him at just the wrong time.

I guess I’ll never understand how Warren became convinced that she needed to get off the themes that made her formidable and take the left-most position on health care. She didn’t need to fight on Bernie Sanders’ turf. She needed to prove she could make a class-based pitch to Trump Democrats and compete among labor Democrats in Rust Belt states. She needed to show she understood the concerns of minorities and could be depended upon to support and protect them. The last thing she needed to do is fight over the white progressive vote with Bernie Sanders.  But she planted her flag in the wrong place and all it did was put her back behind Bernie and in Nowheresville in the campaign.  Before she made that error, I thought she had the best chance to beat Biden. I no longer think she has any chance of doing so.

Astead Herndon reports for the New York Times on the latest festival honoring Donald Trump:

GOLDEN VALLEY, Ariz. — Great American Pizza & Subs, on a highway about 100 miles southeast of Las Vegas, was busier and Trumpier than usual. On any given day it serves “M.A.G.A. Subs” and “Liberty Bell Lasagna.” The “Second Amendment” pizza comes “loaded” with pepperoni and sausage. The dining room is covered in regalia praising President Trump.

But this October morning was “Trumpstock,” a small festival celebrating the president. The speakers included the local Republican congressman, Paul Gosar, and lesser-known conservative personalities. There was a fringe 2020 Senate candidate in Arizona who ran a website that published sexually explicit photos of women without their consent; a pro-Trump rapper whose lyrics include a racist slur aimed at Barack Obama; and a North Carolina activist who once said of Muslims, “I will kill every one of them before they get to me.”

All were welcome, except liberals.

“They label us white nationalists, or white supremacists,” volunteered Guy Taiho Decker, who drove from California to attend the event. A right-wing protester, he has previously been arrested on charges of making terrorist threats.

“There’s no such thing as a white supremacist, just like there’s no such thing as a unicorn,” Mr. Decker said. “We’re patriots.”

I’m not inclined to let these people own the word “patriots.” I think “Nazis” is a more accurate descriptor, and they’re not as rare as unicorns, unfortunately.

I don’t know whether Trump can win the Electoral College again, but I am certain that most Americans don’t want to be part of any political movement involving Guy Taiho Decker or the rest of these deplorables. It’s not a bad thing to publicize their activities and political beliefs.

Bandy X. Lee is a professor of psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine. She is also the president of the World Mental Health Coalition. If you’ve heard of her, it’s possibly because of a book she edited called “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.” She has been warning about the state of President Trump’s health since the 2016 campaign. Now she is taking things a step further and suggesting that Nancy Pelosi has the right and the duty to essentially have Trump forcibly evaluated and possibly committed.

“As a coworker, she has the right to have him submit to an involuntary evaluation, but she has not,” Lee told Salon. “Anyone can call 911 to report someone who seems dangerous, and family members are the most typical ones to do so. But so can coworkers, and even passersby on the street. The law dictates who can determine right to treatment, or civil commitment, and in all 50 U.S. states this includes a psychiatrist.

“The advantage of a coworker starting this process is that a court can mandate a mental capacity evaluation before the dangerous person returns to work,” Lee continued. “The committing physician is preferably the patient’s treater, but does not have to be.”

Personally, I think this is gibberish. Nancy Pelosi simply does not have this power and it’s stupid and discrediting of everything else Professor Lee has to say to suggest that she does. But there’s something else Lee says in this interview with Salon that is worth considering because it has independent merit.

SALON: You mention “shared psychosis” while “translating” the portion of Trump’s letter about law professor Jonathan Turley, who argued against impeachment. Are you implying that he suffers from shared psychosis? And can you elaborate on your “shared psychosis” description in general?

LEE: “Shared psychosis” is a phenomenon which happens in households or in nations when a sick person goes untreated and healthy members are in close contact. Rather than the sick person getting better, the otherwise healthy people take on symptoms of the sick person, as if they had the sickness themselves. It is a very dramatic phenomenon that equally dramatically disappears when you remove the sick person from contact or media exposure.

Anyone who has lived with a family member or loved one who suffers from addiction will be familiar with this phenomenon. What’s important here is that it is often quite true that people will get very sick when forced to live in close contact with someone who is sick. And it’s also true that they frequently will recover quickly if that person is removed from the scene, even for a brief period.

This can also work in the opposite direction. When exposed to an especially effective leader, people can perform at the very limits of their capabilities and achieve almost unimaginable things. Think of the best sports coaches, for example, people like Vince Lombardi or John Wooden. And if that leader is suddenly removed, the same people can revert to a normal level of competency or worse.

Leadership is under-appreciated in its influence on the character of the nation. There are certainly structural and societal changes that have driven the Republican Party to embrace white nationalism. Demographic changes coupled with rising regional inequality and hollowed out local economies have caused enormous anxiety in communities all over America. You will see people try to explain the rise of Trumpism almost exclusively in these deterministic terms. But the same people elected Barack Obama as elected Donald Trump. Some things come down to chance, like a butterfly ballot design in Palm Beach County, Florida, or the strange distortions introduced by the Electoral College. It’s hard to agree that anything made the election of our recent presidents in any way inevitable. What’s clearer is that George W. Bush exercised a dramatically different kind of leadership than Al Gore world have, and that the same is certainly true of Obama and John McCain and Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Trump’s form of leadership makes us sick. Removing him from office is likely to make us well. His influence will be semi-permanent in many ways, but we shouldn’t discount the possibility that we can make a quick recovery. Even the Republican Party should be expected to get healthier once he is no longer in a position of power.

It’s true that Trump is partially a symptom of larger forces in our society, but he’s also a unique force in his own right who is causing us all to perform at a very low level. We cannot be at our best when exposed to his sickness. If we remove him from office and limit our exposure to him, we will see dramatic improvements across the board as a nation.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of Wilderstein. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit just a few weeks ago.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas.

When last seen the painting appears as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

The building is now further along, with light and shadow now clearly delineated. The windows have been revised as well. Note the porch posts on both sides of the building.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

 

If the Germans are right that President Trump is more dangerous than Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping or Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, then my job is more dangerous than I had dared imagine. I suppose few peoples are better positioned to assess the potential threat level of a white nationalist demagogue, but I hope they’re just being paranoid.

What I am willing to say, however, is that just as it took real courage for career federal employees to defy Trump and testify before Congress about his impeachable offenses, it isn’t that easy to make a career out of calling out his lies and abuses of power as a member of the press. As Nancy LeTourneau points out, some like Chuck Todd just aren’t that good at it. Standing up to powerful people who lie to your face isn’t easy, nor is it comfortable to question people who have the power to surveil you, audit you, attack you personally in official statements or tweets, or even arrest you. For reporters who rely on access to do their jobs, their access can be curtailed or denied, which renders them useless to their employers.

Around the world, journalism is dangerous work. A 2018 study by the Committee to Protect Journalists found that 300 journalists in more than 40 countries had been killed in the prior decade, and that 326 journalists had been imprisoned in 2017 alone. In the United States, politicians are more likely to bodyslam reporters or threaten to throw them off balconies than to actually have them arrested or killed.

Yet, President Trump applauded the body-slamming incident and when, on June 29, 2018, a lone gunman walked into the newsroom of the Annapolis Capital Gazette and shot and killed five people with a shotgun, Trump initially refused to lower the flag out of respect for the victims. That might seem inexplicable, put it is part of a pattern. When the New York Times was concerned for the safety of one of their reporters in Egypt, the Trump administration told them that the reporter was making the government in Cairo “look bad” and did nothing. The Times ultimately got assistance from the Irish government. When Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi was murdered by Saudi intelligence officers in Istanbul and cut up with a bone saw, Trump praised Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as “a friend of mine,” defended the American-Saudi relationship, and emphasized their willingness to buy military equipment.

“We don’t like it even a little bit. But whether or not we should stop $110 billion from being spent in this country… That would not be acceptable to me,” Trump said last October 11, when asked whether he would cancel billions of dollars in weapons sales to Saudi Arabia if its leaders were implicated in the assassination. “I don’t like stopping massive amounts of money that’s being poured into our country.”

President Trump’s threats against the media as “the enemy of the American people” are well-documented. To punish CNN, Trump tried to prevent the merger of Time Warner and AT&T. He directed the US Postal Service to attack Amazon as a way of punishing the Washington Post for critical coverage.

In this environment, no one should take the freedom of the press for granted. President Trump may not be the biggest threat on the planet, but he’s a significant threat to American journalists and media organizations.

This is why you should support organizations like the Washington Monthly that have the courage to tell truth to power. At Political Animal we have been documenting the atrocities of the Trump administration without fear. We rely heavily on the support of ordinary readers like you. And if we’re going to survive to tell the true history of what is happening in this country, we need people like you to help us out.

Thanks to a grant from NewsMatch, this is the best time of year to get a subscription to the magazine or to make a simple donation , or both. In fact, if you make a donation right now, —$10, $20, $50, $100, $1,000— your contribution will be matched, dollar for dollar, thanks to a grant from NewsMatch. And if you give $50 or more, we’ll give you a a complimentary one-year subscription to the print edition of the Washington Monthly.

Your contributions to the Washington Monthly are vital, tax-deductible, and much appreciated. You’ll also be doing your own small part to push back against an unprecedented assault on the press.

Nancy Pelosi’s strategy of letting Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell twist in the wind appears to be working.

Public support for Donald Trump‘s removal from office is the highest it has ever been, according to a new poll.

Fifty-five per cent of those asked said they were in favour of the US president’s conviction by the Senate, a figure which has shot up from 48 per cent the week before.

Meanwhile, the number of people against Mr Trump’s removal has dropped to an all-time low, according to the MSN poll.

On Christmas Day, 40 per cent were opposed to the Senate voting to convict the president, who has been impeached over his dealings with Ukraine and an alleged subsequent attempt to obstruct congress.

The gap between the two views has become much wider since last week, when there was little to divide them (48 per cent in favour of Mr Trump’s removal, 47 per cent against).

The percentage of respondents who neither supported nor opposed conviction also grew.

David Rothschild, an economist at Microsoft Research, said the numbers of people shifting from opposition to removal to “don’t know” was significant. “When you follow polling daily, you learn people rarely make big jumps from Opposition to Support,” he said.

“This polling is a clear sign that [the] Republican policy of complete obstruction is not selling well to [the] voting public.”

The number that really matters is 67. That’s the percentage of senators who need to vote to convict Donald Trump in order for him to be removed from office. But 55 percent is not too shabby for the moment, and the trend is heading in the right direction.

If things continue moving this way, eventually we’ll see some Republicans senators start to object to McConnell’s no-witness strategy. And if that wall crumbles, anything is possible.

Back in April 2019, before Joe Biden had even announced his candidacy, I wrote that he and Bernie Sanders were in “the driver’s seat” to win the nomination. I was inspired to write that piece by a spate of articles that were critical of Sanders for not polling better. My counterargument was that he was actually in a quite enviable position relative to the other candidates. To begin with, Sanders was then leading in Iowa and New Hampshire among candidates who had actually declared they were running.

Biden and Sanders are leading the polls in large part because they are the best-known politicians in the bunch, but also because Democrats genuinely like them. While there may be a wide ideological gulf between them, especially if we go back decades in time, most voters aren’t making those kinds of distinctions. They’re both leading because they are popular with Democrats all along the ideological spectrum, and this seems to confound and perplex political analysts and activists alike. Progressives are supposed to be repelled by Biden and white working-class voters are presumed to dislike socialism. Neither assumption bears out in the polling numbers.

As the other candidates begin to execute their campaign strategies and get their chances to perform on bigger stages, we will see these polling numbers begin to fluctuate, and there will be horses that show a burst for a time. It’s interesting to speculate about which candidates might have the talent or good fortune to move closer to the front. The Democratic primary voters may want a reliable hand like Biden or an economic populist like Sanders or Warren or a fresh and charismatic face like O’Rourke, Harris, or Booker. They might want someone completely new and from outside of Washington like Pete Buttigieg or Washington governor Jay Inslee.

All we know right now is that Biden and Sanders are in the best position to win the nomination. We’re not suffering because there aren’t enough takes being published about why they’re not doing better.

I don’t think that was welcome analysis for a lot of Democrats. Progressives wanted to believe that Biden was weak, and mainstream Democrats didn’t like the sound of Bernie Sanders being in a commanding position. But time has borne out the validity of my assessment.

At the time, I also included an examination of how delegates are awarded in the primaries to buttress my case because most analysis was ignoring this key element. The articles I was reading took…

…no account [of] how delegates are actually awarded in the Democratic primaries, where you need to break 15 percent to get anything, and if you are one of only two candidates to clear that hurdle, you can count on getting more than 40 percent of that states’ haul. If these elections were held today, Biden and Sanders would be splitting all the delegates between them, and even if Sanders were losing every state it would take him a long time to be eliminated.

My take back in April was that Biden and Sanders might be polling in the low-twenties or high teens, but this support was rock-solid because of their built-in bases of support. This was different than a mere early name recognition advantage, and would guarantee them a share of delegates in almost every congressional district in the country. It’s probably time to remind people of the importance of this fact, because it has remained true even as ethical questions about Hunter Biden have become a key aspect of the impeachment inquiry and Sanders suffered a heart attack. Despite these considerable challenges to their candidacies, they remain solid frontrunners, and it seems to be a great surprise to a lot of folks.

Suddenly, Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign is being taken seriously.

For months the Vermont senator was written off by Democratic Party insiders as a candidate with a committed but ultimately narrow base who was too far left to win the primary. Elizabeth Warren had skyrocketed in the polls and seemed to be leaving him behind in the race to be progressive voters’ standard-bearer in 2020.

But in the past few weeks, something has changed. In private conversations and on social media, Democratic officials, political operatives and pundits are reconsidering Sanders’ chances.

“It may have been inevitable that eventually you would have two candidates representing each side of the ideological divide in the party. A lot of smart people I’ve talked to lately think there’s a very good chance those two end up being Biden and Sanders,” said David Brock, a longtime Hillary Clinton ally who founded a pro-Clinton super PAC in the 2016 campaign. “They’ve both proven to be very resilient.”

It should not be lost on you that this resilience was identified by me as structural and had little to do with the merits of their policy positions and even less to do with their campaign strategies. It was based in a solid floor of support that other candidates did not have and would have trouble producing. For Biden, much of this was explained by transferred loyalty to Barack Obama, and for Sanders it was from strong supporters of his 2016 campaign. Both of them could reasonably expect to clear 15 percent in nearly every contest based on this advantage alone.

Please remember this when you hear other explanations for their current position.

Democratic insiders said that they are rethinking Sanders’ bid for a few reasons: First, Warren has recently fallen in national and early-state surveys. Another factor, they said, is that he has withstood the ups and downs of the primary, including his own heart attack. At the same time, other candidates with once-high expectations, such as Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Beto O’Rourke, have dropped out or languished in single digits in the polls.

“I believe people should take him very seriously. He has a very good shot of winning Iowa, a very good shot of winning New Hampshire, and other than Joe Biden, the best shot of winning Nevada,” said Dan Pfeiffer, who served as a adviser to former President Barack Obama. “He could build a real head of steam heading into South Carolina and Super Tuesday.”

My point in April was that both Biden and Sanders would use their bases of unshakeable support to weather the unknown and unpredictable twist and turns. They were the real forces in the campaign, and almost nothing would change that. As a result, I don’t see their current positions as indications that they’re doing a great job relative to other candidates. They were always going to be in this position, and it has always been up to their challengers to rise up, match, and eventually surpass them.

They are still in a great position because they will almost definitely be winning delegates even in the states that they lose. But neither of them is assured of winning a majority of the delegates and securing the nomination. They haven’t really grown their advantages as much as maintained them even as some of their more potent opponents have faltered or dropped out.

It will be extremely hard for anyone else to win a majority of the delegates so long as both Biden and Sanders remain in the race and gathering delegates in every contest. If someone can repeatedly come in first place, they might be able to pull it off, but a plurality might be the best an inconsistent winner can do, and that would send the decision to the floor of the convention.

A lot will change over the next month as we gear up for the first contest in Iowa, but it’s unlikely that anything will change this basic dynamic of the campaign. The impeachment trial of Donald Trump will present risks for Biden, and a new health setback for Sanders could be devastating, but these things have not done enough damage to date to make me change my initial assessment of the race.

Merry Christmas, everybody. It’s a good day to try to forget that the Deep State somehow became the good guys and then failed at doing the one thing they’re supposed to do, which is to get rid of anyone who gets in their fucking way. I still can’t believe how easily Robert Mueller rolled over for William Barr. What a goddamned joke the Deep State turned out to be. They’ve never been great at protecting our interests, but now we learn that they can’t even protect their own.

Rather than roll Trump up like the halfwit habitual crook that he is, these buffoons have sat back and watched him take over the “National Security” party in Congress and gut every decent thing “the best and brightest” accomplished since Nagasaki.

The most we get is some quiet mewling about how it’s all very disturbing to have a fucking moron get away with turning the GOP into an old-fashioned fascist cult of white nationalists.

Trump isn’t getting weaker. Every time he demonstrates his grip on the Republican Party, he gets stronger. Every time that another expert is forced out of an embassy, kicked off the National Security Council, or hounded out of their job at the State Department, Pentagon, or CIA, the president grows more dangerous and more difficult to stop.

Every day, the integrity of the Justice Department and the FBI is further diminished and the courts become more a part of Trump’s cult. So, yeah, Merry Christmas. Next year at this time, we’ll know whether Trump could ultimately be stopped. If he was, it won’t have been because of anything the Deep State did. They already lost.