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On Democrats freshening up the brand Thank goodness Syria’s autocratic regime collapsed before Bashar al-Assad “suck-up,” Tulsi Gabbard, had a chance to prop him up as Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, quips Michael Tomasky. Our unstable world is about to become more so. Here at home, Democrats still smart at losing the presidency to a criminal imbecile and walking advertisement for the Dunning-Kruger effect. How they pull the country and the world back from the brink of Idiocracy will occupy them until the next general election, if that long. Perhaps Democrats’ biggest obstacle to freshening up their brand, aside from institutional lethargy, is a media ecosystem owned and operated by reactionary billionaires. Democrats’ post-mortem spitballs over how to regain market share with the American electorate are so many trees falling in the forest if no one hears the sound. Perhaps more star power could break through? Vanity Fair‘s Chris Smith suggested last week that perhaps “Democrats need their own demagogue,” to break through the right-wing noise. The good kind, of course.

Time to wake up people. After a month recuperating from the grueling campaign Donald Trump is back in our faces. The presidential election last month was a disappointment to say the least. And ever since then it’s felt as if the air has just been slowly leaking out of the opposition. Much of the mainstream media seems to be attempting to change course and curry favor with the new administration while Democratic officials appear to be in shock. In some ways it’s reminiscent of the days in the lead up to the Iraq war, with a quiet resignation taking the place of the febrile excitement that characterized the push to rally around the flag. People just seem enervated and spiritless. Sometimes it’s hard to remember why we fight when it all seems so futile. Well, I think the opposition is about to get its mojo back. And that’s because for the last month all we saw (to the extent we were even paying attention which many of us couldn’t bring ourselves to do) was the news telling us about what Trump is doing, who he’s nominating and what he’s planning. And that’s all bad! In fact, it’s worse than many of us thought it would be.

Wait, what????

I guess I’m feeling cynical about just about everything right now, so perhaps my point of view isn’t realistic.

This is one of the craziest things I’ve heard him say: What is he talking about? He must have been drunk when he said that. It’s been the right that’s pushed the flag and a pledge for the last 60 years! “These colors don’t run!”, “Love it or leave it!” After 9/11 anyone who wasn’t worshiping the stars and stripes was at risk if they didn’t keep their mouths shut. As for the pledge: Francis Bellamy was a minister who was thrown out of his Baptist post because of sermons describing Jesus as a socialist. He and novelist cousin Edward Bellamy both saw a future for the United States as a country in which the government controlled virtually every aspect of a person’s life. Francis Bellamy (who also wrote for a magazine underwritten by flag sales and therefore stood to gain by having schools require a flag salute each day) and his friends got President Benjamin Harrison to incorporate Bellamy’s pledge into the 400th anniversary celebration of Columbus’ arrival in the New World. It has been recited in public schools ever since… [T]he pledge has remained a recurring political hot button.

I think everyone knows that the HBO masterpiece “Succession” was based upon the Murdoch family. Well, it turns out that the family has actually based some of its actions on “Succession.” The NY Times (link below) reports that a court in Nevada has ruled today that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch can’t change the irrevocable trust to block the rest of the kids from having any influence on Fox News. He came down hard on them apparently but this isn’t the end of the story. I guess there are appeals and also some end runs to get the job done. But this is just fascinating: The legal maneuvering came to a head during several days of sealed, in-person testimony in Reno in September by Mr. Murdoch, Lachlan, James, Elisabeth, Prudence and a number of their representatives on the trust. The proceedings revealed that Mr. Murdoch’s children had started secretly discussing the public-relations strategy for their father’s death in April 2023.

We know that happened on January 6th. We saw it with our own eyes, heard the testimony of his own staff and read the reports. The facts cannot be disputed. Trump lied about the election of 2020, called people to Washington, incited an insurrection in which they stormed the Capitol and hunted for the Vice President chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” And we know that Trump took no action and let it unfold until late in the day he finally told the rioters that he loved them and asked them to go home. According to the once and future president, Donald Trump, none of that is what happened: None of this is the story Trump tells. Instead, he inverts both the culpability and the morality: The rioters are victims, and those seeking justice are guilty of injustices. It’s deeply and transparently self-serving. It’s also the position of the incoming president of the United States, someone empowered to enforce his vision of justice on the rest of the country. Trump sat down for a lengthy interview with NBC News’s Kristen Welker last week during which he outlined his upside-down view of the events of Jan. 6.

The anger of the crowd and the pettiness of plutocrats Princeton economist Paul Krugman just published his final New York Times column in a body of work begun in January 2000. He considers how the world has changed over 25 years. It’s a grimmer place: What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment. And I’m not just talking about members of the working class who feel betrayed by elites; some of the angriest, most resentful people in America right now — people who seem very likely to have a lot of influence with the incoming Trump administration — are billionaires who don’t feel sufficiently admired. Krugman doesn’t mention Trump again, but he’s the most prominent of those resentful billionaires. In early 2000, Krugman writes, “Polls showed a level of satisfaction with the direction of the country that looks surreal by today’s standards.” One could point to many reasons for the public mood, but the collapse of public faith in elites features prominently.

Ben Wikler on “The Daily Show” Ben Wikler, Democratic Party of Wisconsin chair, appeared Monday night on “The Daily Show” and made an impression on host Jon Stewart. That’s not easy to do for a political operative. Wikler, 43, a founding producer for Al Franken’s Air America radio show and former national adviser to MoveOn, is running for Democratic National Committee chair. “The passion that you’re bringing, that feels like what it needs in this moment,” Stewart said, remarking that DNC chairs he’s interviewed before felt much more corporate. “You are approaching [politics] from a much more populist, bottom-up standpoint than I’ve heard in the past. Other than Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy.” At that Dean reference, the audience applauded. I’ve mentioned Wikler in the context of the DNC chair’s race twice already. The two front runners for the position are Wikler and Minnesota’s DFL chair Ken Martin. I met Martin in passing this year at a North Carolina party meeting. He’s known, experienced, impressive, and connected. But indulge me.