“In my eyes, every election is a trainwreck. Two proudly irrational tribes rally behind two self-congratulatory demagogic mediocrities as if they were the Second Coming. Listening to any ‘serious’ candidate speak is torture. It’s like sitting in on the class presentations of C students, knowing that one of these C students will, on the basis of their half-baked words, become the most powerful person on Earth. What a disgraceful system. You can tell me ‘One of these candidates must be the lesser evil’ from dawn to dusk. But I just can’t stop thinking, ‘They all make my flesh crawl — and if you don’t feel the same way, there is something very wrong with you.’ Yet there is a simple and obvious reply to my extreme negativity: ‘Bryan, your standards are too high.’” (11/11/24)
“Of course we shouldn’t trust the people. That’s one of the basic American ideas. As John Adams saw the political world, there were essentially three main forms of government — monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy — each with its own particular deficiencies. … Adams, like many of the other founders, was a student of the classics (imagine a contemporary American politician beginning a disquisition with ‘Let me proceed then to make a few observations upon the Discourses of Plato and Polybius’), and what he learned from his studies of the wise men and the great civilizations of the past was that the project of organizing life was a story of — at best — temporary success followed by inevitable failure.” (11/11/24)
“President-elect Donald Trump has a fundamental choice to make. He can make good on a number of the agenda items on which he ran and/or which his supporters advanced. He could, for example, enact draconian, across-the-board tariffs; begin massive roundups and deportations of law-abiding ‘dreamers;’ repeal the Affordable Act and major bipartisan legislation passed under President Joe Biden; and enact a new round of massive tax cuts for big corporations and wealthy individuals. These steps no doubt would satisfy big donors, right-wing ideologues and his radical vice president. However, in doing so, he would likely make himself extremely unpopular, induce economic and social chaos and create political problems for his party in the 2026 midterms.” (11/11/24)
“Questions abound as to whether or how a second Trump administration will carry out a mass deportation. After all, President Trump promised large deportations before; but data show he failed to match Obama’s numbers, largely due to resistance of state and local authorities. It’s also clear ICE, the federal agency responsible for deportations, does not have the capacity to handle a mass deportation on a scale Trump is promoting. Perhaps in response to such concerns, Trump has floated using the military or local police to conduct deportations, the legality of which would likely need to be resolved by the Supreme Court. … An economic analysis would involve not only direct costs and benefits to the government, but also impact on the labor market and the US economy more broadly.” (11/11/24)
“The Democratic election postmortem immediately descended into public blame-gaming, as expected. When Joe Biden was forced off the ticket in late July, the conspirators issued a party line that he was to be praised as a veritable George Washington, in the spirit of Washington’s farewell address of 1796 about why it was a good thing for the first president not to run for a third term. … But now? After the Democratic train wreck, half the party is suddenly damning George Washington Joe for sticking around too long, even though party grandees cooked up the scheme in the first place of nominating the cognitively challenged Biden in 2020 to shut out his radical (and supposedly unelectable) primary rivals.” (11/11/24)
“Last week a brigadier general in the Israeli Defense Forces told Israeli journalists that in expelling residents from this area, which includes the city of Beit Lahiya and the Jabaliya refugee camp, the IDF had no intention of ever letting them return. The general added that Israel would allow no humanitarian aid into this portion of the Strip because ‘there are no more civilians left.’ An IDF spokesperson later tried to walk back the general’s comments, and the Israeli government has repeatedly denied conducting forced expulsions. But reports of what is happening on the ground, despite Israeli measures to impede press reporting from the conflict zone, are consistent with an ethnic cleansing campaign.” (11/11/24)
“As shocking as it was, there was also something about last week’s election that felt sickeningly obvious and familiar, like a violent flare-up of a chronic malaise that has plagued our reality for more than a year now. On a certain level, that is to say, watching Kamala Harris lose felt like watching the latest installment in a great Oligarch Purge that started last October and swallowed everyone from Hollywood actresses to an NFL coach to a volunteer Santa Claus who pushed back too aggressively on a Likudnik rabbi’s talking points in a Hamptons community forum on the history of Israel and Palestine. Many of the purge’s casualties were honorable Americans whose revulsion toward the genocide of the Palestinian people had professional costs.” [editor’s note: I guess this pundit thinks “cabal” is defined as “self-destructive idiocy” – SAT] (11/11/24)
“Donald Trump sent a mob to overturn the 2020 election. He called for the termination of all constitutional provisions that prevented his immediate reinstatement. He made it clear that if he regained the presidency, he would extend his abuse of the office. Kamala Harris warned voters repeatedly that Trump would try to rule (as he half-jokingly affirmed) like a dictator. But they re-elected him anyway. This raises serious questions about our country. Did Trump’s voters back him because of his authoritarian inclinations or in spite of them?” (11/11/24)
“The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said, ‘I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.’ Those words came to mind as leading scientific and media figures lost any semblance of restraint or neutrality in bemoaning the results of the presidential election. After regaining their composure, the public was told to ignore what they had just seen. It was not surprising that the sweeping Trump victory last week produced near hysteria among some Harris supporters from women pledging to break up with men to others cutting off their hair to those pledging to flee the country (including one curiously announcing that he was ‘leaving the United States’ for Hawaii).” (11/10/24)
