The Coop Scoop #2 -- Impeachment Post-Mortem and More!
January 30-31
Issue #2
Reminder: This issue is also being posted to the CLOSED Facebrook group:
The Coop Scoop Newsletter Lounge, Arena, Playground and Archive.
Please join by clicking the link, answering the 3 short questions and I will admit you. That is the space for comments and reactions and past issues. Important that you participate!
Impeachment Post-Game Wrap
OK, the impeachment Kangaroo Court as of this Friday eve is all over but the shouting..and the final vote that we've known for months and that will be consummated early next week. All of it ending with a whimper instead of a bang.
So, come the questions: Was it worth it? Who won?
You bet it was worth it. And, yes, the Democrats won. Or at a minimum the Republicans lost. Big time.
The value of impeachment, for which I argued starting almost a year ago, was never ever to dream that the Republican Lemmings would somehow see the light and vote to remove the most dangerous, the dumbest, the most corrupt, and the most embarrassing and abusive president in American history. There should be NO surprise in how this is ending.
The purpose of impeachment, at least as I saw it, was to expose, showcase, and underline to a national audience the unfathomable depth of Trump's corruption and mendacity and to use that material as a tool to mobilize the electorate. The intended audience was never the mummies in the Senate -- but rather the millions of voters who tuned in or read about the proceedings.
Further, every time I put forward the argument for impeachment and was met with the superficial and wildly predictable response that the Republicans would never acquit, my answer was the same. Great! Let's hang the 50 pound albatross of acquittal around the necks of all the Trumplican Senators who voted to let this bum off the hook.
All of that has come to pass. There is nothing to be disappointed about unless you are one of those scared liberals who believe that Donald Trump possesses supernatural powers, will defy political gravity, leap over a 20 point approval deficit and streak like a bullet to a second term. Please. No president can be exposed to such a sustained pummeling and somehow come out stronger than he was before the process.
Mitch and his gang have also done us as a favor by sticking faithfully to their script as anti-democratic, self-serving, shameless lickspittles who have burrowed so far up Trump's ass you'd need an MRI to find them. Heaven knows and you should as well that I am anything but a Democrat. No partisan spin here. Just the truth as I see it. I am DELIGHTED the Republicans went into full obstruction mode and have left no doubt in any thinking person's mind that they are but handmaidens of Donald Trump and could not give one hot damn about fairness, rule of law, or even basic decency.
The brazen denial of witnesses and documentary evidence, the outright suppression of testimony from key witnesses Bolton and Parnas, among others, has not been lost on 4/5 of American voters. That's a devastating number for Republicans and it's only going to get worse when Bolton shows up on 60 Minutes in the next few weeks and opens up a firehose of excrement aimed right at Trump. That it happens somewhat later in the cycle than this week is probably also a plus. I am convinced that if Bolton and others had been allowed to testify this week, it still would not have pre-empted the coming acquittal.
The needles didn't move? Really? You forecast at some point that 80% of voters and nearly 70% of Republicans would express opposition to banning witnesses and first hand testimony? Please send me the links!
As to the Democrats: Adam Schiff did a remarkable job in pounding home the salient facts day after day. He was excellent. I will say that while Trump lost this round, the Democrats still have some hard work to do. I think they already did a piss poor job in bringing home the 5 weeks of impeachment process. What connections did they make between the Congressional proceedings and on the ground campaigning. What steps did they undertake to engage their sympathizers into concrete action and organization rather than just letting them sit as a passive TV audience?
Apart from Trump, there are 23 GOP senators up for re-election im November. What steps will be taken in the coming days and weeks to target those senators, yank hard on their albatross neckwear and take them down? They have done us the favor of lashing themselves to the radically listing mast of the USS Trump and the time is coming to sink the whole rotten mess.
Honestly, would you not rather have Democrats run against these self-debased Trump clones than against 10 or 15 Republicans Senators who might have jumped ship -- doing the honorable thing-- but making it that much harder to shut them down in an election that, after all is said and done, as a referendum on Trumpism?
So, please, no whining. No crying. We have one simple goal now. Defeat Donald Trump and his Senate allies. And use every scrap of nastiness from these past hearings to help do the job.
THE DEMOCRAT CAMPAIGN TRAIN
There is a problem, nevertheless, going forward. When Trump won in 2016 he not only smashed the Republican Party but he also wrecked the Democrat Party. He derailed the entire duopoly-driven Establishment.
There's a dangerous denialism among still shell-shocked Democrats. They like to tell themselves that Trump was an aberration and soon we will return to "normalcy." Normalcy, of course, is exactly what produced Donald Trump! Sorry, but you are dreaming if you think we are somehow going to return to a nice, peaceful, indifferent and unequal "normalcy?" I hope not.
It became normal for Democrats to splash around in The Swamp every bit as much as the Republicans. It became normal, ever more normal thanks to Clinton, to move the center of gravity of the Democratic Party from the working class to the professional managerial class. It became normal for Democrats to kiss the ass of the twerps in Silicon Valley instead of forming alliances with those who actually worked 8 hrs a day with their hands for a living. It became normal to see more Democratic candidate bumperstickers on lawyers driving 5 Series BMW's than a Amazon worker driving a 10 year old Toyota. It became normal for Democrats to continue the endless and counter-productive multi-trillion dollar overseas wars. Under the Democrats, cities continued to decay, higher education became unaffordable (as did housing), and wages remained paltry as the wealthy sucked up the slop as never before.
And you wonder why Democrats are trusted by so few? And if you think I am wrong about that then maybe you can explain why so many "sure-fire" party loyalists like Harris, Booker, Klobuchar and others expired so early. I think it had little to do with their individual performances and lot more to do with the fact that Democrats just aren't so loved and admired as, say, in the days of JFK.
COULD IT REALLY BE BERNIE?
As I wrote last week, I make no claim on predicting who will win Iowa next Monday night let alone who will win the nomination. NO clue. For the moment, nonetheless, all the momentum is with Bernie Sanders. He happens to be my candidate but I remain steely-eyed about it all. He could crash and burn 72 hrs from now when the caucuses begin. Or he could stage a runaway victory, especially because for the first time Iowa will release the raw popular vote inside the caucuses, not just who what number of caucuses (and delegates). I find it difficult to think this evening that Sanders will not stack up a commanding number in the popular vote.
Do I think that because I like him? Because I support him? Hardly! Bernie's momentum is fueled by that still present Great Distrust of the Democratic Establishment. And he's the guy who is the farthest from that structure (maybe Yang as well, which would explain his relative viability so far).
The energy is with Bernie,. The activists are with Bernie, Young voters who have NO connection to Joe Biden are for Bernie.Look at his crowd above. Even the money, via record number of small donations, is with Bernie. Do you see any gray hair, except for Bernie's?
I am not gonna get into the issue of "electability" here because when it comes to that subject, most who opine are merely projecting their own biases. I've no idea if Bernie can beat Trump. Not sure which Democrat could or who has a better chance. In any case, the consciousness of many voters is anything but ideological and even less on an ideological continuum. The "lanes" referred to by pundits are recognized only by a small percentage of political junkies while millions of other votes consider factors and impressions that are rarely figured into the electability formulas.
The Sanders Army of volunteers, pouring into Iowa over the last two weeks, is hoping to propel its candidate to a smashing victory in the Monday night caucuses. One caveat: Howard Dean did the same thing in 2004 with battalions of young "Deaniacs" in orange beanie, knocking on every door that could be found. Several times. In the opinion of some, too many times. Critics of Dean say they were so enthusiastic, so relentless, that they basically wore out their welcome and turned off voters.
That was then. This is sixteen years later and in a much different environment. Personally, I would take my chances with such a zealous army. My lifetime friend, writer and public health advocate, Tim Frasca made the trek from The Big Apple to the Granite State where he has enlisted in the Sanders ground army and he posted this upbeat and up close and personal report. It's worth reading the whole thing but here's a teaser excerpt:
In their rare idle moments, Bernie’s staffers explained that our door-knocking shifts were building the database not just for his election but precisely for this post-electoral function, the issue-based mobilizations to come, together with the state and local races of 2022 and beyond. Every hint of data about a voter’s concerns is campaign gold to be mined later for spin-off groups like Sunrise, Fight for $15, Justice Democrats, and others yet to be born....
Bernie’s canvassing operation is crushing the field—130,000 doors knocked last weekend alone. If he continues to cruise ahead and scores a solid victory, one of the main arguments against him will be seriously undermined: electability. My interlocutors often commented that Sanders might not have broad appeal for a variety of reasons. But curiously, they never referred in such terms to themselves—people almost universally said they liked or respected Bernie—but rather to the anonymous average voter out there somewhere. If Iowans show that entirely typical Americans from the quintessentially middle ground are ready for a guy who calls himself a socialist, the following dominoes could fall, just as they did a while back for a black dude with an Arabic middle name.
THE LONELINESS OF THE RESISTANCE PROTESTER
I'm going to conclude this issue regurgitating one of my main points from the previous newsletter. Looking forward to the election, and especially beyond, and even with greater emphasis if Trump is re-elected or a dud like Biden takes his place, we are going to need ORGANIZATION. Demonstrations and canvassing and fundraising are essential to building campaigns. But robust social movements (different than a campaign) require people working together in a sustained way. That means holding active membership in a stable and focused organization -- something we truly lack in our body politic. A couple weeks back, my pal Micah Sifry, highlighted what he called the "hollowness" of the anti-Trump resistance. Sure, lots of people have come out to the marches and the protests, but then they go back home as isolated and atomized individuals. Here's the problem according to Micah:
"While millions of Americans have marched in protest in hundreds of cities and small towns in the last three years, forms of digital organizing may have gotten in the way of a real revival of grassroots Democratic activism. Those millions of people are not for the most part joining local groups and reviving the party’s base. More often they are channeled by sophisticated algorithmic sorting tools into performing just-in-time acts of voter engagement with as little friction or social interaction as possible. There is a danger that, just as Facebook turned real friendship into a status update to be monetized, the national liberal-left email groups have turned real membership into a metric to be optimized. "
The antidote, of course, is organizing in place and then linking up with a strategic center. As I have said umpteen times and as Micah says it in this fine piece above, there are no shortcuts to building a movement. It's a long, tedious and sustained labor. And one, regardless of the primaries and even of the general election, we have to start getting serious about.
I'll see you a day or two after the Iowa caucuses. No instant reaction from me (probably) as I will let the dust settle before trying to make any sense of it.
As always...thanks for reading and subscribing. Onward!
Please continue your financial support:
One Time Donation:
