Blankenship out
Thank goodness the voters in the GOP primary in West Virginia saw fit to eliminate Blankenship from the running in the Senate race to challenge Joe Manchin. Blankenship was virtually certain to lose if by some chance he was nominated. His defeat—he came in third of three, with approximately 20% of the GOP vote—averts another one of those terrible situations in which a split contest winds up nominating a terrible, terrible candidate and forfeits an opportunity to hold onto (or in this case, gain) an important seat.
In fact, in all the primaries yesterday involving the US Senate, the results look pretty good for the GOP:
A night Republicans feared would end in disaster in at least one state instead produced Senate nominees that party leaders are pleased to run against three vulnerable Democratic senators in November’s midterm elections.
President Donald Trump welcomed the results in a Wednesday morning tweet, calling it a “great night” for the Republican Party.
But don’t discount the stupid party’s ability to be stupid yet. It’s a pretty long way to November.
Blankenship of the hangdog look and the wacky statements was going to be a disaster, so I’m glad he’s gone.
I don’t know if any of you have watched the TV series “Justified”, but in the event there’s going to be a Season 7 of that show (which is set in rural Eastern Kentucky) Mr. Blankenship should appear as the guest star, playing a semi-comedic villain– he’s right out of Central Casting.
Was there really chance he would win the nomination? Finishing 3rd, and that far behind, tells me that a lot of the media attention wasn’t really driven by his chances to win but rather by the fact that he was never really in the running. In other words, he was covered by the media in an attempt to give him a boost.
Mr. Ward: yes, to boost him and besmirch all Republicans for having him, or allowing him, in the party.
“Several prominent conservative Republicans, including Sens. Paul, Ted Cruz (R-TX), Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Sebastian Gorka, and Tea Party Patriots president Jenny Beth Martin have endorsed Morrisey for U.S. Senate.”
Yancey Ward Says:
May 9th, 2018 at 2:11 pm
Was there really chance he would win the nomination? Finishing 3rd, and that far behind, tells me that a lot of the media attention wasn’t really driven by his chances to win but rather by the fact that he was never really in the running. In other words, he was covered by the media in an attempt to give him a boost.
* * *
This is what they did with Mr. Trump’s candidacy, back when they thought he was the only Republican that Hillary was sure to defeat.
Despite the failure of that operation, I think Yancey is right that they are learning from the times a boosted buffoon actually did lose.
The misjudgment with Trump vs. Clinton is still something they haven’t dealt with — neither has the GOP — so the model plan definitely depends on the quality of the Republican candidate.
One of these days, they may be another contrary event, but most of the time to date it’s been a good gamble for them, and they really have nothing to lose backing lousy GOP pols who are facing “decent” Dem candidates.
What concerns me is that 20% of the primary voters supported Blankenship anyway — what did they think they were getting if he won?
I saw on Fox that Joe Manchin is going to vote for Gina Haspel. Who knows were he will go on other votes if he has a competent opponent. I’m glad Trump and McConnell came out against Blankenship.
I would estimate that the 20% do not follow the news and only heard that he was a maverick swamp-clearer, and voted on that basis.
OTOH, I did not think his loss was surprising: in West Virginia, he’s even prohibited from owning a firearm! Dems would’ve made much hay with that one–another reason why they were pushing his candidacy.
I denounce myself. I just want everyone to know that up front. I denounce myself.
But I kida liked that Blankenship guy. I hate unions, but I did generally like your rank-and-file UAW members that you’d meet at at the Fremont drag strip.
Blankenship reminded me of the kind of union member you’d meet in the infield at Talladega (back before NASCAR went to spec cars and it was worth watching).
https://www.sbnation.com/nascar/2015/5/6/8561679/nascar-talladega-infield
Of course they thought Hillary would win. They had the election rigged. The rigging just didn’t work probably because of the Alt Right, Deep State internal fighting, and some kind of divine intervention perhaps.
When the Democrats rig elections against Nixon and others, nobody caught them and stopped their win.
The 2016 election was in the bag for the Demoncrats and they knew it. The only ones that didn’t know it were the Republicans that thought the elections were fair and that votes actually counted.
Not that I’m a conspiracy theorist or anything, but the idea that in West Virginia, a man who went to jail for coal mine safety violations and manslaughter of coal miners could possibly win an election strikes me as something only the Democrats could dream up.
Women are used to being criticited for our looks so let’s hang one on Mr Blank. Seriously this dude is as bad looking as the crimes he comitted. Does he have coal dust smeared under those eyes or what?
Just so creepy like Richard says, probably a ringer convinced to run by the Dummies.
Richard Saunders Says:
May 10th, 2018 at 3:39 pm
Not that I’m a conspiracy theorist or anything, but the idea that in West Virginia, a man who went to jail for coal mine safety violations and manslaughter of coal miners could possibly win an election strikes me as something only the Democrats could dream up.
* * *
I have heard it said of the GOP that it exemplifies Conquest’s Third Law of Bureaucracies:
The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
* * *
FWIW, I usually search for some “definitive source” for aphorisms or facts that I vaguely remember, and generally get more than I was looking for; the rest of the post where I did my “research” is quite fascinating.
http://www.isegoria.net/2008/07/robert-conquests-three-laws-of-politics/
Friday, July 11th, 2008
Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics:
1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
John Derbyshire adds this:
Of the Second Law, Conquest gave the Church of England and Amnesty International as examples. Of the Third, he noted that a bureaucracy sometimes actually is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies – e.g. the postwar British secret service.
John Moore thinks the third law is almost right; it should read “assume that it is controlled by a cabal of the enemies of the stated purpose of that bureaucracy.”
Francis W. Porretto notes that Cyril Northcote Parkinson studied the same phenomenon of bureaucratic behavior:
Parkinson promulgated a number of laws of bureaucracy that serve to explain a huge percentage of its characteristics. They’ve exhibited remarkable predictive power within their domain. The first of these is the best known:
Parkinson’s First Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
Parkinson inferred this effect from two central principles governing the behavior of bureaucrats:
1. Officials want to multiply subordinates, not rivals.
2. Officials make work for one another.
Like most generalizations, these are not always true…but the incentives that apply specifically to tax-funded government bureaucracies make them true much more often than not. They make a striking contrast with the almost exactly opposite behavior observable in private enterprise.
[…]
That young bureaucrat will profit from deliberate ineffectiveness to the extent that he can get himself viewed as an asset by his superiors and a non-threat by his peers. His superiors want him to produce justifications for the enlargement of their domains. His peers simply ask that he not tread on their provinces.
Miltion Friedman noted that bureaucratic resource allocation involves spending other people’s money on other people, so there are no compelling reasons to control either cost or quality – but a bureaucrat will learn, given time, how to “spend on others” in such a fashion that the primary benefit flows to himself.
To do this, bureaucrats must manage perceptions, so that their work seems both necessary and successful:
Von Clausewitz and others have termed war “a continuation of politics by other means,” but when viewed from the perspective of the State Department official, war is the declaration that his organization has failed of its purpose. He sees it as bad public relations for his entire function. Thus, even when the nation’s interests would be overwhelmingly better served by war than by the continuation of diplomacy, the State Department man will prefer diplomacy. It’s in his demesne, and enhances his prestige by enhancing the prestige of his trade.
It’s not too much to say that averting war regardless of its desirability or justifiability is near the top of every State Department functionary’s list of priorities. In this pursuit, the State Department will often find itself opposing even peacetime operations of the military designed to improve its effectiveness, such as the acquisition of new weapons or the enlargement of its ranks.
* * *
I’m sure everyone can cite a favorite exemplar for all of these laws.
Conquest’s Rule Number Two should, I believe, be modified so that even explicitly right-wing organizations are not exempt.
(continued)
The validity of Parkinson’s observations is supported by the structure of educational entities today: top-heavy with administrators to the point of capsizing the ship, as amply demonstrated in an article I saw earlier this week. (lightly edited with paragraphing and notes)
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Are-You-in-a-BS-Job-In/243318?key=17K21y7n_SjUZ04t4-9d7tInUaJwcLDdV_QpNsCZfqsG3f961B4gZ2-LQanQQNUSTHpDSl9ZMUdlWmNRZTZzX0g4eTAydXgwRTRPc0R2WG1RZDdqcWx0SnlZZw
Are You in a BS Job? In Academe, You’re Hardly Alone
In American universities from 1985 to 2005, the number of both students and faculty members went up by about half, the number of full-fledged administrative positions by 85 percent – and the number of administrative staff by 240 percent.
In theory, these are support-staff. They exist to make other peoples’ jobs easier. In the classic conception of the university, at least, they are there to save scholars the trouble of having to think about how to organize room assignments or authorize travel payments, allowing them to instead think great thoughts or grade papers. No doubt most support-staff still do perform such work. But if that were their primary role, then logically, when they double or triple in number, lecturers and researchers should have to do much less admin as a result. Instead they appear to be doing far more.
This is a conundrum. Let me suggest a solution. Support staff no longer mainly exist to support the faculty. In fact, not only are many of these newly created jobs in academic administration classic bullshit jobs, but it is the proliferation of these pointless jobs that is responsible for the bullshitization of real work – real work, here, defined not only as teaching and scholarship but also as actually useful administrative work in support of either.
…
But it’s possible to connect the dots. Let me begin by introducing a concept: managerial feudalism. Rich and powerful people have always surrounded themselves with flashy entourages; you can’t be really magnificent without one. Even at the height of industrial capitalism, CEOs and high-ranking executives would surround themselves with a certain number of secretaries (who often did most of their actual work), along with a variety of flunkies and yes men (who often did very little). In the contemporary corporation, the accumulation of the equivalent of feudal retainers often becomes the main principle of organization. The power and prestige of managers tend to be measured by the number of people they have working under them – in fact, in my research, I found that efficiency experts complained that it’s well-nigh impossible to get most executives, for all their “lean and mean” rhetoric, to trim the fat in their own corporations (apart from blue-collar workers, who are ruthlessly exploited).
Office workers are typically kept on even if they are doing literally nothing, lest somebody’s prestige suffer.
This is the real reason for the explosion of administrative staff in higher education. If a university hires a new dean or deanlet (to use Ginsberg’s charming formulation), then, in order to ensure that he or she feels appropriately impressive and powerful, the new hire must be provided with a tiny army of flunkies. Three or four positions are created – and only then do negotiations begin over what they are actually going to do.
…
[the next musing is somewhat tangential, but interesting]
Something about the experience of grad school, the job market, and pre-tenure trials ends up rendering 99 percent of even the most secure academics utterly incapable of meaningful rebellion. It’s a matter that surely deserves sociological analysis. The tenure system is ostensibly there to give professors the security to experiment with potentially dangerous ideas. Yet somehow the process of obtaining it reduces a good proportion of the most perceptive and sophisticated human beings our society produces to a state in which they can’t imagine what a dangerous idea would even look like.
Again, to return to my own experience: During the British student movement of 2010, which saw [student] occupations in virtually every college [for the purpose of] protesting government plans to triple tuition fees, I struggled to figure out some way for my colleagues – every one of whom claimed passionate support for the movement – to chip in. Expecting them to do anything militant, even spending a day in one of the occupations, was out of the question. So I suggested a boycott of self-assessment exercises. Many of those were mandated by the government, but since direct government funding was being cut off anyway, why not simply refuse to carry them out? So I proposed that we scan each document that passed our desk for tell-tale vocabulary, keeping a tally of the words “quality,” “excellence,” “leadership,” “stakeholder,” and “strategic.” The moment the total passed five, we would tear up the document and throw it away.
The more polite of my colleagues pretended I was joking. Most stared at me as if I were a lunatic.
Experiences like that revealed to me a special vision of hell: Eternal damnation is a group of people performing unnecessary, unpleasant tasks that they are bad at and can’t stand doing – but spend all their time on anyway because they are so indignant about the prospect that anyone else might be doing less.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SgByE0pX1M
I found Copeland’s spiritual power rituals.
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/kenneth-copeland-christians-who-dont-vote-for-trump-are-going-to-be-guilty-of-murder/
That’s some “serious christianity” there that is backing Trum… hah.