revision99

The Democratic candidates for President have been forced out of the race roughly in the inverse to how good they would have been at the job and how different from the mainstream were their messages.

Richardson, Dodd, Biden and Kucinich represented a combination of experience, competence and new ideas. Any of them would have been a good president, maybe a great one, and certainly in that mix one could find ideas and programs that diverged far from the business-as-usual that Americans have had to accept in recent decades. So the corporate media ignored them or made fun of them, and we failed to support them, and they are gone.

Now John Edwards is leaving the race. His underfunded, under-publicized campaign truly forced the leaders at least to give lip service to his progressive ideas. There was a moment when poverty mattered to the big campaigns, when universal health care had to be talked about, when withdrawal of troops from Iraq was a viable notion. John Edwards sustained that moment until this morning, but it’s over now.

I hope Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama remember the moment. I hope Edwards’ campaign continues to affect the direction of the nation. But I don’t hope much. Mostly, I now resign myself to another presidential election in which I pick the Democrat over the Republican, because those are my only choices and because I know the Right is not my direction. I’m a little disappointed.

Smarter people than I will analyze the Edwards’ campaign for the next 12 hours or so, before it passes into political insignificance. You can get the pundit scoop from MSNBC or wherever. As for me, I’m left wondering who on the national stage speaks now for the poor, the hungry, the sick, the oppressed and the homeless.

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PS: The latest Rasmussen Poll (today, January 30) shows that in a national election, John McCain would beat Hillary Clinton by eight percentage points, 48% to 40%. McCain comes out ahead of Barack Obama by six points, 47% to 41%. Meanwhile, throughout the past year Edwards led all Republican candidates by greater margins than either of the two “top tier” Democrats. So, one less problem for the Republicans to worry about, eh?

UPDATE, 5:00 pm: Ralph Nader is thinking of running for president. That should seal the coffin.

I just can’t win.

[Photo borrowed from eatourbrains.com]

I got hold of an early copy of President Bush’s second inaugural address back in 2004, and I published it on this blog. Unfortunately, his handlers changed the whole speech at the last minute, and the draft I had wasn’t used at all. These damned neocons are just too smart for me, so I’ve stopped trying to scoop them.

Instead, here’s what I think is going to happen in tonight’s State of the Union address.

The last year in office is the time when most presidents try to firm up their legacy. No matter what they’ve done in office, no matter what has happened in the nation and the world on their watch, they use their last months in office to make it look as if they were Great Statesmen, so history will remember them fondly, and their portraits can be on the White House walls proudly displayed next to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

Of course George W. Bush is too arrogant and clueless to realize that his image needs some polishing. He thinks he’s done a great job. Heck, he’s even named a Doctrine after himself: the Bush Doctrine, which states that the United States has the right to do anything it wants anywhere in the world — including invading countries who do not threaten us — no matter what anyone thinks, as long as the president says it’s OK. Way to go, Mr. President!

But he does have one last task to accomplish in order to ensure that the right wing spin machine installs him as The Greatest President of the 21st Century alongside Ronald Reagan, The Greatest President of the 20 Century, and that’s what he will be doing tonight during the SOTU address: He must now try to create an environment in which the Republican Party can win some elections in 2008, especially the Presidential Election this November.

It doesn’t look good. There’s the illegal war he’s losing in Iraq; the failure of his government to respond to the horror of Hurricane Katrina; the collapse of the unregulated subprime mortgage industry, which will take the homes of several million people before it’s finished; the near-tripling of oil prices; the mass exodus of decent American jobs to the third world; the parade of corrupt and criminal Republican officials; the looting of the Treasury; the degradation of the U.S. and world environment; the unilateral abrogation of international treaties and the systematic theft of American civil liberties. A lot of folks are pretty pissed off about some or all of these, and even a lot of Republican voters are thinking that a change is necessary.

So get your air sickness bags ready. Here’s what he’ll say tonight.

• The war in Iraq is going great! In fact, thanks to The Surge, it’s almost over! And by the way it was a Good War, fought by heroes for only the highest purposes. America needs to keep it going, and not set a surrender date, like those Democrats want to do.
• The tax cuts for the rich are working, and must be made permanent for the economy to rebound. Soon, prosperity for all!!
• And speaking of prosperity, here comes my economic stimulus package, that I thought up myself and pushed through a reluctant Congress. I urge the Senate to act quickly and not try to extend any benefits to those lazy unemployed people. Everybody else, watch your mailboxes for some free money that I’ll be sending you soon. It’s not a bribe, but think about it next November, ‘kay? And I think everybody ought to get on board with making those tax cuts for the rich permanent. That’s really important.
• We need to get this new FISA bill going right away. For those who haven’t been following this, the government needs to spy on a lot of people, and in secret, too, and our intelligence professionals need the tools to do this, and the bad Democratic Congress must act quickly to give them these tools. If they don’t, terrorists will for sure be attacking us again, maybe next week! That’s how important this is. But if the new bill doesn’t include amnesty for the big phone companies who illegally helped us spy on Americans, I’ll veto the motherfucker, and you can take that to the bank!
• I also want to introduce a widow, a soldier, an American entrepreneur and a little kid. I don’t know exactly why, but this baloney always goes over well, and it usually makes it look like I’m in touch with the common folks, which I’m not really.

Those will be the highlights, and if we buy that, maybe the neocons and Republican candidates will not be utterly and completely discredited and humiliated in the coming months. He’ll just have to hope, I guess, but I don’t think it will work, do you? There will be more, naturally, but it will be right-wing parallel-universe patriotic fantasy filler, just to pad things out so it doesn’t look as if he wants to get the hell off the dais before the tomatoes start to fly.

Tune in with me to this Very Special TV Event tonight at nine eastern, won’t you?

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PS: And just in case a Democrat somehow manages to fool the public and get into the White House this year, won’t that Democrat be surprised to learn that the Bush Defense Department has reduced it’s funding request for the war in Iraq so that it will run out in January, 2009! So if the new President wants to fund the troops for even one more day, (s)he’ll have to ask for more money, proving that the war really is the Right Thing to do. As I said. these neocons are just too smart for me.

Here’s a scary thought: President McCain and Vice President Huckabee.

Don’t laugh, my liberal brothers and sisters. It could happen.

Sure, everybody is fed up with the war in Iraq and seven years of Republican cronyism and corruption. But as we learned in 2000, the majority doesn’t matter. It’s the electoral college that matters, and all you need there is 270 votes. The Republicans have demonstrated that they are good at gaming that system. Put their skill at that together with a dash of fear-mongering, a little precinct-level fraud, some careful vote suppression, a bit of racial pandering and add it on to their natural Baby Jesus constituency and you might wake up on November 5th with a nasty surprise on the teevee.

Writing in The Huffington Post, Earl Ofari Hutchinson says

In the South and the stretch of states from the heartland to the West there are 150 to 200 electoral votes. The recent endorsement by two Red State moderate Democratic senators of Obama means little. These states and their electoral votes are not in play for the Democrats. In fact, they haven’t been for decades. Though Bill Clinton managed to pry four Southern states from the GOP orbit, he did it because the independent insurgent candidate Ross Perot took thousands of votes from the GOP in 1992, and in his election and reelection bids he sold himself as a Republican lite candidate…

Obama, Clinton and Edwards will never be mistaken for Bill in the Red States.

(Read more of Hutchinson’s post here.)

No matter how bad the current administration is, there are many voters who will continue to go Republican on single issues, i.e., “I hate abortion, so I’ll vote for Thompson, even if he does appear to be sound asleep, and his whole presidency will probably be bad for me and my family.” Or “I’m scared to death, and Rudy says he’ll protect me, so I’ll vote for him even if he picks my pocket for four years.” In this way 270 electoral votes are gathered.

Don’t let up. Don’t attack each other or tear each other down. Stay united. Remember the goal for November. Stay focused on winning. Make the strongest case you can for your candidate, but get ready to support the Democrat who wins the nomination.

It is not in the bag.

I’ll vote for John Edwards when my state has it’s primary, and you should, too.

As I said in my previous post, the winner of the Democratic presidential nomination will be our next president. So a lot of liberals/progressives/Democrats might have already stopped worrying about the future, secure in the knowledge that next January a grown-up will take office and things will get back to normal. But it really shouldn’t be good enough for any American that the new occupant of the White House will simply not be George Bush.

The Rove/Cheney/Bush years have done more damage to our standing in the world, to our educational system and our health care system, and to the economic viability of our working class than any administration during my long lifetime (that’s six decades). We don’t need to manage the mess. We need to clean it up, and we need to get started on that right away.

Of the three top Democratic candidates, John Edwards seems to be the only one who understands that the concentration of our nation’s wealth into the hands of a tiny minority is not only unfair, but in the end warps the political system itself: Money grants power, and as the money is distributed more and more up the class ladder, so goes the power, until the working people who create the wealth in the first place find themselves disenfranchised, their health care (if they’re lucky) served to them by insurance conglomerates who provide no medicine, but take their profits anyway, their votes directed to one or two preselected “safe” candidates, their judges appointed by an ever more insular ruling class, their laws written by lobbyists, their jobs reduced to low-paid, insecure drudgery as the corporatocracy engages in a global “race to the bottom” in wages and working conditions. John Edwards understands that America’s middle class is being systematically shredded, and without a healthy, educated middle class we will lose our democracy.

Edwards also knows that the wealthy elite in government and business will not relinquish their power and their unprecedented wealth simply because we ask them nicely, or present compelling logic as to why this is important to our republic.

And he is ready to fight them to take back the power. He has made a career as an attorney defending the rights of people who got run over by powerful corporations in their thoughtless scramble to accumulate more and more money. He fought for the little guy and won. He made the powerful pay, and this is what he says he will do as President. That’s the kind of President I want.

The national press and television news, which are owned by the nation’s largest and richest corporations, would like John Edwards to go away. They want him to drop out and leave the race to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. They take Edwards at his word that he will be a friend of the people, and so they have tried to defeat him early in this presidential campaign, by making him invisible. He won’t be one of their preselected safe candidates, and it scares them that, despite a virtual blackout on coverage of him, his campaign continues.

I am inspired by the rhetoric of Barack Obama, but I can’t figure out what his plans are to make any of his campaign dreams come true. I look back longingly at the years of Bill Clinton’s presidency, but those days are over and I don’t believe Hillary Clinton can bring them back. Both Obama and Clinton have been in the Senate since the Democratic takeover in 2006, and they have been unable to stop the current president from getting everything he wants legislatively, even though he is less popular than Richard Nixon. In fact, it doesn’t look to me as if they have even tried. And in national polls taken prior to the early state primaries, neither Obama nor Clinton were as strong against probable Republican presidential opponents as John Edwards.

John Edwards has specific proposals to end the war in Iraq, bring about universal health coverage, reform the tax code, rescue the middle class, and more. He’s known as a smart and tireless fighter in the courtroom, always prepared, always focused. He’s been honest enough to admit that it was a mistake to give George Bush the power to attack Iraq in 2003, and hasn’t tried to hide behind an “if I knew then what I know now” excuse.

I believe he’d be a great president. He says he’ll stay in the race until the nominating convention. That means we all have a chance to vote for him, to poke a sharp stick in the eyes of the corporate media and demand a candidate with a real program. Only two states have held primaries so far. There’s a long way to go. Check out his web site. If he makes as much sense to you as he does to me, and if you’re tired of Chris Matthews telling you what to think, give him your vote in your state’s primary.

John Edwards08.com

The next President of the United States will be a Democrat.

That much you can take to the bank. And because of the way things seem to be shaking out (before I learn the outcome of the New Hampshire primary), that Democrat will be either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. I wish it could be John Edwards, but the corporate media has circled their wagons around the other two, making Edwards the Invisible Man in this race. Obama and Clinton will certainly bring out the Democratic voters and win in November, but Edwards would get lower middle class Republican/populist voters and trounce whoever the unfortunate Republican candidate turns out to be. But John Edwards has been too outspoken about his intention to go after the greedy and overprivileged corporations who, among other things, own all the news media. So they are simply freezing him out, so he won’t be able to “get” them. Did anyone notice the lead story on the AP wire the day after the Iowa caucus? The headline was “Clinton and Obama - Study in Contrasts.” Even after Edwards beat Clinton, the story was about Clinton, not Edwards.

American journalism has a tradition of poking it’s nose where it is not wanted, finding out things that powerful entrenched interests are trying to keep hidden, dragging the stinking garbage out into the light of day and exposing the often creepy facts to the public. In the middle of the last century, when television became the primary source for news, the tradition continued, with guys like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. But little by little the news divisions were overtaken by parent corporations and the entertainment departments, and in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (signed by Bill Clinton, I’m sorry to say), the corporate power structure was given more or less free reign to take a stranglehold on all the most trusted sources of information in the country — the newspapers, the radio stations, the TV stations and the networks, and gradually these sources have been replaced by look-alike and sound-alike replicants whose purpose is not to give you the news, but to advance the corporate interest. Trouble is, most of us still think we’re getting the news. So if a candidate gets no coverage (Kucinich, Paul, Edwards…) it’s natural to think that candidate is of no consequence, so we ignore the candidate. It’s not a perfect self-fulfilling circle, but it’s close, and the result is that some worthy candidates are not even considered by the voters.

There’s no easy solution to this problem, because money (almost) always prevails, and bullies (almost) always win. As long as we fool ourselves into thinking that our traditional sources of news are, in fact, delivering the news and not some made-up, parallel universe, Matrix-like facsimile, we will remain mostly in the dark with little chance of catching a glimpse of what’s really happening. For those who care, there is real information out there, in independent weekly newspapers and on the internet. It’s not always pretty, and sometimes it challenges beloved and dearly held beliefs, but you can find it if you look.

If you don’t look now, you may never find it.

Really, it’s time for Diane Feinstein to step down and let a Democrat be Senator for a while.

UPDATE, November 8, 2007: The New York Times, with their fancy New York writers, has said this better.  Read their editorial here.

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She’s one of two “Democrats” on the Senate Judiciary Committee who voted to send Michael Mukasey’s nomination as Attorney General to the full Senate for a vote. What good is it to give the Democrats a majority in both houses of Congress if they can’t grow enough spine to wield their power?

But I don’t mean this in a nasty, partisan, we-won-shut-up kind of way. I’m talking about morality here. Under questioning by the Committee, Mukasey could not bring himself to say that waterboarding (a brutal interrogation technique in which the victim believes he is drowning) is torture.

It’s against the law in this country. It’s against international law — we’ve signed a treaty stipulating that. What’s the problem with calling it what it is? The problem is we’ve been waterboarding our prisoners, and if Mukasey called it torture, he’d be bound to prosecute the war criminals — our people — who have been doing it. Crazy. Why would the Attorney General, the nation’s highest-ranking cop, NOT want to prosecute criminals?

Look, after Alberto Gonzalez, we don’t need another guy who wants to enable the Bush Administration in its race to completely destroy our government and our nation’s international standing. Waterboarding was invented during the Spanish Inquisition and has been widely used by the most unsavory regimes ever since. If Mukasey doesn’t think it’s torture… I say “Next candidate!”

To Feinstein, I’d say if you made a deal with somebody, sold your vote on this in order to get support for something else you’re working on, let’s hear about it. Maybe I’ll approve of your deal, maybe I won’t. But don’t hand me that horseshit about you don’t think a “leaderless department is in the best interests of the American people.” Jeez, are you affected by the writer’s strike, too?

I was late for work today, so I had a chance to listen to Rush Limbaugh in the car.

Since Al Gore was given the Nobel Peace Prize this morning, I figured Rush would be particularly entertaining today. In the few minutes I listened, he said:

• The Nobel Prize committee is a joke
• The Nobel Prize committee is a bunch of socialist Swedes
• “the Clintons” hate Gore because he’s rich
• Gore hates “the Clintons” because after 2000 they stole the Democratic Party leadership from him
• The Nobel Peace Prize is meaningless because of the inadequacy of past recipients, namely Yassar Arafat and Jimmy Carter
• “the Clintons” are “hell-bent” on getting rich, and might be getting money from Norman Hsu

These are just the things I can remember that he said in a three-minute period. I don’t know how Bill and Hillary Clinton became part of the story, but I’m sure the ditto-heads were delighted to hear their names again. There were, of course, a few more remarks that I can’t remember, but there was also his tone of voice, which was dripping with sarcasm and a kind of giddy, manic, pseudo-gotcha glee. Pseudo because he ain’t got shit.

The Nobel Peace Prize is prestigious. The right wingnuts know this, even as they try to deny it. It’s often controversial, but if it’s such a joke, why spend any time making fun of it? Rush ain’t got shit, and the Republicans ain’t got shit. Limbaugh is a clown, an entertainer who has figured out where the money is and who will say whatever it takes to keep it flowing. He’s good at his job, unfortunately, but he seems to be talking crazier and crazier shit as the fortunes of the Right decline.

Note to the righ wing slime and disinformation machine. Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize, and you didn’t. Get over it.

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I was somewhat disgusted by the spectacle of Ann Curry, upon whom I have a slight crush, sucking up to Jenna Bush on the Today Show this morning.

Ann is a pro, though, a description that also applies to prostitutes, so I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear her say more than once during the “EXCLUSIVE!” interview that she would be so proud of Jenna if she (Ann) were her mother. Ostensibly, Ann said this because Jenna has written a book in which she professes concern for disadvantaged people in Latin America,* but actually it was probably corporate penance required of NBC for allowing Bruce Springsteen to say bad things about Jenna’s dad last Friday.

This, in part, is what he said:

. . . over the past six years we’ve had to add to the American picture: rendition, illegal wiretapping, voter suppression, no habeus corpus, the neglect of that great city New Orleans and its people, an attack on the Constitution. And the loss of our best men and women in a tragic war.

This is a song about things that shouldn’t happen here happening here. So right now we plan to do something about it, we plan to sing about it. I know it’s early (in the morning), but it’s late. So come and join us.

What a dilemma for NBC! The Boss has a new record out and he’ll play in the street for you to promote it (Yay! Big ratings!), but you have to let him talk, and then he goes and shoots off his mouth like that (Boo! Controversy!). There goes your access to the White House. David Gregory never gets called on in a news conference again!

But then two days later Jenna wants to promote her book, and presto! Problem solved! Just have Ann get a lip lock on Jenna’s butt, and fawn over her for not one but two interviews on the same episode of The Today show. I think my link at the top contains video of these extremely sappy interviews, but I’m at work, where there is no such thing as streaming video, so somebody please let me know what you find.
OK, seriously, I understand that these morning talk shows exist primarily for authors and movie stars and political figures to promote their books, movies and selves to us, but really, aren’t you supposed to just toss them softball questions? I mean, come on, Annie — let Jenna promote her own book! You don’t have to do it for her.

Whatever. But congratulations to Springsteen for speaking up the way he did. I’m dismayed that more of us aren’t doing it.

In other aging rock star news, apparently Genesis has gotten back together and staged an elaborate paid rehearsal in Cleveland in preparation for their real shows here in L.A. Check Blue Girl’s blog for many obscure insider observations on this.

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*Please note that I do not doubt Jenna’s sincerity. But if she says she’s not running for President, get your “Jenna in 2016″ posters ready.

The Republicans don’t want to discuss black issues.

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UPDATE, September 25, 2007: The New York Times has now gone populist and offers most of its content for free. So I can link to this Bob Herbert editorial on this subject.

So now that Tavis Smiley has organized an “All-American Presidential Forum” at traditionally black Morgan State College in Baltimore, it seems that all of the Republican candidates for President have scheduling conflicts that will prevent them from attending. This after all but one of them (McCain) declined to appear for a debate on the Hispanic Univision TV network last month. McCain didn’t debate with himself — they postponed the event, but it looks like the Republicans don’t want to talk about issues of interest to Hispanic voters, either.

I was going to try to demonstrate that this makes them racist bigots. I mean, it sure does look like they are choosing to ignore segments of the population and that their choice is based on race. And of course they may actually be racist bigots. They are, after all, moral descendants of the Dixiecrats of the 1940’s — segregationist Southern Democrats who have been switching to the Republican party ever since they couldn’t get Strom Thurmond elected President in 1948. And you know what they say — if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, there’s a good chance it’s a duck. But I have to admit that this news doesn’t prove anything.

Instead, it speaks to the sorry state of national politics in this country, wherein rabid extremists are the ones who nominate the candidates. The Republicans who would be President have to contend with gun-totin’ good ol’ boys from the National Rifle Association, hyper-pious anti-abortionists, seal-the-border anti-immigrationists, evolution-is-just-a-theory Christian fundamentalists and stay-the-course war supporters, to name a few wacky groups. These people are the grass roots of their party, and in the months before the national convention they are the ones who always frame the debate, by virtue of their zealotry and the fact that every single one of them will vote in the primaries. They simply cannot be ignored, even though their positions are so far out of the mainstream that their “ideal” candidate, if one even exists, could never win a majority of the popular vote.

So Rudy and Mitt and John and Fred are pandering to these groups by abandoning their previous moderate positions on gun control, gay marriage, the war in Iraq, national health care, etc., and trying to out-crazy each other with far-right positions on these issues. If common sense is the first casualty of primary season, the second one must be ethnic groups who aren’t going to vote for you anyway so why bother to let them ask questions or witness your debates on subjects that will directly affect them in the event you get elected?

Nobody’s going to vote for the Republican presidential candidate in 2008 anyway, and that landslide will be led by America’s blacks and Hispanics. Still, if you’re the candidate, you know that after the primaries and the convention you’re going to need those votes. So why are you dissing them now, when all they want is to see you in person, find out what you have to say and get some sense of you as a person?

Anyway, they’re probably not racists, even if they are quacking a little.

I gave up trying to do political commentary on this blog some time ago.

I don’t have the resources that real reporters and pundits have. I don’t have the time. I don’t have fact checkers.

I’m a partisan and I can’t help showing it, but who really cares what I think? There are a lot of people who think like me — maybe not enough of them vote in national elections, but certainly my views are well-represented in the press and on the internet. No one is ever really convinced by argument, and my viewpoint isn’t needed to help you clarify your thoughts.

But keeping my mouth shut hasn’t reversed America’s decline into fascism, and now I’m scared, ashamed and depressed. Take a look at this video on Blue Girl’s blog, and read Vikki’s recent diatribe on her blog. These are among the reasons for my current malaise.

Beginning with the theft of the 2000 presidential election and continuing with the relentless right-wing political chicanery that has been going on ever since, the fear-mongering, and the corporatization of our government, and the bigotry and racism, and the spying and torturing and invading and occupying and the ransacking of the Treasury and the outsourcing and the union-busting and the profiteering and the subversion of Justice (both the department and the concept), my spirit has been beaten down.

I just want to play my music, hang with my friends, visit a little bit of this beautiful planet and be left alone. I grew up in what now seems like a more sane time. The political pendulum was swinging left. We the People ended the war in Vietnam, established civil rights as law, threw out a corrupt Republican president, created environmentalism. (We did some stupid stuff, too, but it was harmless, I hope.)

I don’t want to take to the streets and protest. It doesn’t do any good, since this administration doesn’t care what The People think. The opposition, whom we elected to make some changes, is not acting fast enough. They’re protecting their interests when they were sent to clean up the mess. I’m not the boss, and I no longer believe that enough of us can band together to force the authorities to change their immoral and self-serving ways. Too many of us are hypnotized in front of too many HD Plasma screens to even get a quorum on the streets.

But it’s not just about me and my shame and my discontent. A lot of astute observers are now certain that the U.S. will attack Iran, and soon. You couldn’t believe it when the Republicans stole that election in 2000? You withheld judgment for four years because you thought it just couldn’t happen here, right? Along the way you were shocked over and over again with the wiretapping, the torturing, the imprisonment without charges, the failure to respond to Katrina, the use of the Justice Department to further rig the electoral process, blah, blah, blah. Then the ‘04 election was stolen, too, and it was too late.
Is it possible that this administration, which has so far exceeded the bounds of morality, which has destroyed America’s reputation and its economy, stretched our military to the breaking point and killed over a million Iraqis in its pursuit of ever more oil (and booty) — is it possible that they haven’t yet finished fucking things up? An attack on Iran might be the only thing this administration could do that would be stupider and more devastating to the security of the world than the crimes they have already committed.

A few years ago I’d have said you were crazy to suggest something like that. Now I think you’re crazy if you are not afraid that it could happen.