Congress, the Hillary Clinton presidency, and the nuclear option

The New Neo Posted on by

This post posits what is of course still a hypothetical: a Hillary Clinton presidency.

We don’t know that she will be elected. It is not impossible that Trump could win the whole thing. It is just highly unlikely, and I really don’t think it will happen. So I’m speculating on what I think will happen, knowing that the future is full of unknowns.

When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, one of the difficult things for conservatives was that he had a compliant Congress to do his bidding. The Republicans had done so very poorly that they didn’t even have the 41 votes necessary to stop liberal legislation in the Senate, although they finally gained exactly that number with the surprise election of Scott Brown of Massachusetts (although it couldn’t stop Obamacare because the Democrats used the technique of reconciliation to pass it).

However, despite what some people say, the Republicans in Congress were able to stop some of the Obama agenda after they gained the ability to muster at least 41 votes in the Senate, and after they gained the House in 2010. That’s why the Democrats in the Senate triggered the nuclear option for judicial appointments in November of 2013, when they still controlled both the presidency and the Senate but the Republicans had gained enough senators to block judicial confirmation under the old (non-nuclear) rules.

When the GOP took control of the Senate in 2014, the nuclear option ceased to make sense, because the GOP could now block Obama’s appointments without it (which they did for Obama’s attempt to put Garland on the Supreme Court). And it was not just Garland they stopped, either; there were others, but you don’t hear much about that from the people on the right whose self-appointed task it is to tear down the so-called GOPe as do-nothings.

A lot of people probably didn’t remember that the nuclear option had already been used that way by the Democrats in 2013 for judicial appointments (I barely remembered it myself, and I’m a blogger), but it had been. That’s why it should have been no surprise at all when Harry Reid mentioned recently that the next Senate will probably activate the nuclear option for judicial appointments, too. Most Americans who don’t follow the details of politics probably don’t pay attention to the ins and outs of this, but the bottom line is that the motivation to activate the nuclear option comes into play when a president and Senate are controlled by the same party, but the opposition party has more than 41 votes in the Senate.

That’s one of the reasons why which party controls Congress is exceedingly important, and why gridlock can be a good thing when a president whose agenda you distrust and/or fear has been elected. And that’s why the possibility of Trump’s negative coattails in 2016 looms large. If Hillary Clinton becomes the next president and the Democrats take control of the Senate with the GOP retaining more than 40 seats, that’s when the nuclear option for judicial appointments (the thing Reid is referring to) would once again come into play.

Recently Reid has only been talking about the using the nuclear option for judicial appointments rather than for votes on more general issues in the Senate, and there’s a reason for that. The reason (IMHO) is not that Reid and/or the Democrats in Congress would be so loathe to exercise their full power because they respect the institution of the Senate and its moderating traditions too much. The reason is that, without control of the House as well as the Senate and presidency, it wouldn’t do the Democrats much good to exercise the nuclear option for other things because normally legislation needs to be approved by both houses of Congress. And the reason the nuclear option for judicial appointments is tempting even when a party controls only the Senate and the presidency but does not control the House is that House approval is not needed for federal judicial appointments, which are confirmed by a vote in the Senate only.

That’s not rocket science, but it’s a bit complicated and requires a certain interest in politics to follow and understand, and it’s easy to forget some of the details. That’s one of the reasons it’s easy for people to get the wrong idea about what’s possible and what’s not possible in the interactions between Congress of one party and a president of another party. It also makes clear why the situation in which Hillary would be president and both houses of Congress would be in Democratic hands (similar to what occurred at the beginning of Obama’s first term in office) is to be very much feared.

My hunch is that if Hillary is elected president and the Democrats were to end up with majorities in both the Senate and the House (something I don’t think will happen, but which is important to prevent), there is a good chance that Democrats would invoke the nuclear option not just for judicial appointments, but more generally, in order to maximize Democratic power to do things without interference from the 40+ GOP senators. Those 40+ GOP senators would really be the only thing potentially standing in their way, except a Supreme Court that is highly unlikely to do oppose them. However, if the GOP retains the House (which is likely to do), the Democrats would probably retain the nuclear option for judicial appointments only, because on other issues the House would retain its ability to thwart the Democratic aims to a certain extent.

Of course, a President Clinton could do as Obama did—which was to go around Congress and use executive power as much as possible, and dare the GOP to stop him/her.

All of this just further drives home the fact that, whoever you choose to vote for at the top of the ticket, it is exceedingly important to go to the polls and vote for Republicans in Congress. And it also explains why Ted Cruz has been busy saying that a Republican Senate could and would continue to block any Hillary SCOTUS appointment, just as they did after 2014 with Obama.

In summary, assuming a President Clinton, it is of the utmost importance that the GOP holds the House, which it seems likely to do. But the Senate outlook is very iffy—so please make sure to vote and not stay home.

Podesta and the “oversampling” on polls

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a meme going around to the effect that Wikileaks has exposed a John Podesta email that proves that polls are rigged to favor Democrats through oversampling of Democrats. Commenter “blert” (among others) described it yesterday this way:

We have Podesta’s emails where he dictates to the pollsters how to spool up Hillary’s numbers…

Podesta’s emails explain just how easy this is to do in our era of total databases and selection algorithms.

The Podesta emails blert is referring to contain statements such as these:

Attached are the state by state polling and research recommendations from the ATLAS product that have been compiled into one document…

Hey, when can we meet? I also want to get your Atlas folks to recommend oversamples for our polling before we start in February. By market, regions, etc. I want to get this all compiled into one set of recommendations so we can maximize what we get out of our media polling.

When I read that I immediately thought it likely that Podesta was referring to internal polls, because of the use of phrases like “our polling.” Pollsters such as Gallup and Rasmussen—the sorts of polls the public relies on to gauge the popularity of various candidates—are nearly always supplemented in campaigns by private or internal polling used by each candidate to assess certain aspects of the race. This latter type of polling is performed differently than public polling (Gallup et al) and results are not made public.

And it turns out that that’s what was going on when that email of Podesta’s was written back in 2008, during the Democratic fight for the nomination:

…[The email discusses] what appears to be internal polling (not public ones published by media organizations). And oversampling in this instance means polling more people in a specific demographic group for analysis — not ignoring Republican voters to suppress their votes…

The email, one of thousands of Podesta emails released by Wikileaks, is a January 2008 exchange between Democratic strategists and employees of the Atlas Project, a political polling and data firm.

Atlas sent over 98 pages of polling and media recommendations that includes several recommendations to oversample minorities, independent voters and Democrats in certain states.

Experts told us the technical term for this is “stratified disproportionate sampling,” but most pollsters use “oversample” as a shorthand. It’s done not to skew the polls, but to gauge the attitudes of specific demographic groups, who would not be a statistically large enough group to analyze if sampled randomly.

For example, in a national sample of 1,000 eligible voters, only 12.5 percent, or 125, would be black. To accurately gauge black attitudes on certain issues, a pollster may oversample 500 black eligible voters (four times more than the random sample). Then, in analyzing the full sample, the sample of blacks would be assigned a weight of 0.25 to represent the overall population.

“If the analysis of the group is done separately, it is simply a large sample of that group. If combined with all respondents the oversample is weighted down proportionately so that the overall sample is representative of the population as a whole,” said Charles Franklin, the director of Marquette Law School Poll. “This is a standard procedure and does not mean the weighted sample gives disproportionate weight to the oversampled group.”

And yes, that quote was from Politifact, which tends to lean to the left. But the information seems to be factually correct and relevant, and to make sense. Until evidence comes up to the contrary (which certainly could happen; these things are not written in stone), I would tend to believe it, and to assume that it correctly describes that particular Podesta email.

I think it is important to realize—as most here do—that the left lies, and the MSM lies, and they shouldn’t be automatically trusted. But it is also important to realize that the right sometimes lies too, and the media on the right lies, and they shouldn’t be automatically trusted. This story about Podesta fit in so very nicely with Trump’s “rigged election” charge that it probably seemed to Trump and several pundits on the right to be too tempting to ignore, and too potentially useful to avoid making use of—even if it had to be twisted and misrepresented to do so.

Do you like being lied to? I don’t. I didn’t like being lied to by the left—in fact, that’s one of the things that sparked my political change. And I don’t like being lied to by the right. Enough bad things about the left were revealed by the Wikileaks email dump that there’s no need to make stuff up or mislead about it. But it seems they just couldn’t help themselves.

Meanwhile, Michael Totten reports on what’s been brewing in the Democratic Party

The New Neo Posted on by

Michael Totten went to the Democratic Convention and talked to a lot of Bernie Sanders delegates and supporters:

I asked them to tell me the biggest problem they had with Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment, to narrow it down to one or two things. I got a variety of answers.

“Our biggest problem,” a young man said, “is her lack of integrity.” Everyone nodded. They had other complaints, though, that set them far apart from Clinton and the party’s establishment and placed them firmly in the camp of the alt-Left.

“The Democratic Party hasn’t gotten rid of patriotism yet.” This was a complaint.

“Chants of USA, USA were disturbing. I felt like I was in Germany in the 1930s.”

“They brought out the flag and sang the national anthem.”

“You have a problem with the national anthem?” I asked.

“It makes me uncomfortable.”

“Every country in the world has a national anthem,” I said. “It’s perfectly normal.”

“Just because something is normal doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.”

Some surprised me again by agreeing with Trump’s lambasting of NATO. “These entangling alliances are going to get us into World War III.” At least two of these Sanders delegates said that the United States should completely disarm and have no military at all, like Costa Rica.

…[A] party espousing these ideas would find it extraordinarily difficult to win a general election. The alt-Left is no more palatable to moderate swing voters than the alt-Right. That, I suspect, is one of the unspoken reasons that the Democratic establishment wanted to muzzle these people, why it wanted to push them so hard that they do not come back, why it wanted Bernie Sanders beaten.

I asked everyone at the table if they intend to quit or to keep fighting inside the party. All said that they would keep fighting. None said that they would vote for Clinton. As far as they’re concerned, she’s a Republican.

…These young millennial delegates are the rising generation. They preferred Sanders over Clinton by a margin so overwhelming that the word “landslide” doesn’t even begin to describe it. Their collective vote was more like a tectonic shift that forced a new mountain range up out of the plains.

There’s nothing inevitable in politics, but these delegates, if they take over the Democratic Party in the future, will control the platform and the messaging, and their extreme views, combined with their generation’s startling disregard and even contempt for democratic and broadly liberal principles, will scare the daylights out of moderates in the party and could easily trigger an existential crisis. Don’t think it can happen? Nobody saw the rupture of the Republican Party coming.

That’s a pretty chilling set of responses. But at the same time, it’s fairly typical leftist stuff that’s become much more mainstream and more common, especially among the young.

Will such a rift take place for the Democrats? I don’t think so. I think the party will continue to move inexorably to the left in a more incremental fashion as a whole, as it has already been doing during the last couple of decades (some would say since FDR) and particularly during the Obama years. And it will do that in part by ejecting those who won’t move leftward with it (Joe Lieberman, anyone?).

However, one little quibble with Michael Totten about this statement of his: “Nobody saw the rupture of the Republican Party coming.” I certainly did four years ago, and I very very much doubt I was the only one:

One thing I believe is that, if Romney loses this election, the right will start tearing itself apart in anger. That’s another thing the left banks on…I already see some evidence of it in articles and comments from the right that accuse Romney of not wanting to win, of not going on the attack enough, of not doing whatever it might be that the brilliant armchair strategists would be doing if they were running for president, an election they of course would win by dint of their brilliant strategy. If Romney loses, the RINO theme will rise again undiminished, and the hatred of the “Republican establishment.”

My opinion of what’s going on is quite different: if the American people re-elect Obama despite his failures, lies, betrayals, immaturity, gaffes, arrogance, destructive foreign policy, demonstrated leftism, small-mindedness, lack of leadership, executive power-grabs, fiscal irresponsibility, and a host of other negatives I may have forgotten to list but which have been operating for the last four years, then it will prove that the American people have fundamentally changed in the direction they want this country to take, and it will require some major upheaval to reverse that trend.

Trump was merely the symptom of a huge rift that had already occurred before he declared himself a candidate. He leapt into that already-existing gulf, and pushed with all his might to widen it.

He has succeeded in that endeavor.

Early voting in Florida: fun with statistics

The New Neo Posted on by

You can have a lot of fun with statistics.

At Gateway Pundit, an extremely pro-Trump blog, there’s a post entitled, “YUGE! Trump Leads Early Voting in Florida By 120,000 ”“ A First For Republicans in The State” [hat tip: Artfldgr].

Sounds good for Trump, doesn’t it?:

…[Trump’s] lead in early voting [in Florida] is a first for Republicans.

The News Alert blog reports:

Florida Shocker: Republicans Winning By 120,000 Votes In Early Voting. #Trump the FIRST Republican EVER to win early votes in FL! #TrumpPence16.

BREAKING: #Trump the FIRST Republican EVER to win early votes in FL! #TrumpPence16 pic.twitter.com/PzefGCEAfE

”” ALWAYS TRUMP! (@Always_Trump) September 23, 2016

If you follow that link to News Alert you can study for yourself what is actually being said as to what dates are being compared, and what kind of voting is being compared. They say that, as of 9/23/16, the total number of Republican early voters (the reference to “early voters” is in the headline of the post) was 880,234 and Democratic early voters was 759,184. They also say that in 2012, when Obama won Florida, the breakdown for the parties in early voting was 43% Democrat vs. 40% Republican.

But note that the 2016 figures were reported as of September 23, 2016 and are represented by numbers. The set of figures for 2012 are reported as percentages, and are as of November 1, 2012. In Florida, what happens between September 23 and November 1? Well, a lot more people vote, and they vote in different ways (more about that later in this post).

Those are also figures for the party affiliation of voters, not for their actual votes in terms of who they voted for or plan to vote for. So that headline at Gateway Pundit was doubly misleading. These aren’t actually votes for Trump, they are about party affiliation of ballots requested. And the comparison of the early voting in 2012 (by November 1) to the early voting in 2016 (in late September) was comparing two very different animals, as well. “Early voting” in Florida is defined this way:

Early Voting is defined as “casting a ballot in person prior to Election Day at a location designated by the Supervisor of Elections and depositing the voted ballot in the tabulation system.” The voter uses the same type of voting equipment that is used at the polls on Election Day. In all elections when there is a state or federal office race, early voting is required to be available. Early voting may be offered in county, municipal and other local elections.

Actual “early voting” just began yesterday in Florida, so those September 23 statistics can’t be referring to early voting, although the November 1 statistics from 2012 include it.

If you want to see what’s really been going on in 2016 up to this point, the site has been updated recently to read that 733,605 absentee ballots have been requested so far by Democrats and not returned and 704,440 absentee ballots have been requested by Republicans and not yet returned. So on that score, the Democrats are now ahead.

It also says at that site that 556,058 Republican absentee ballots that were requested have been returned, and 525,076 Democratic absentee ballots have been returned. So there is a slight lead for Republicans on that statistic alone. Therefore, that last statistic might show some sort of weakly good news for Trump. But digging deeper, you’ll find it’s actually not good news at all [emphasis mine]:

In two must-win states for Trump, North Carolina and Florida, Republicans are clinging to narrow leads in the total number of mail-in ballots requested. Yet in both states, Clinton is ahead of President Barack Obama’s pace four years earlier ”” and the GOP trails Mitt Romney’s clip.

Any diminishment of the GOP’s mail-in ballot lead is a matter of concern for Republicans because Democrats typically dominate early in-person voting in both states, which will begin over the next 10 days.

“Democrats have narrowed already the advantage that the Republicans had in 2012,” said Michael McDonald, whose United States Election Project offers detailed analysis of early and absentee voting patterns.

So, to recap: the optimistic news for Trump reported by Gateway Pundit was achieved by comparing a statistic on which Democrats usually lead—total early votes—from four years ago with a 2016 statistic in which Republicans usually lead by more than they’re leading now. It is a case of cheerleading the troops with a clever use of misleading and mismatched statistics.

Gateway Pundit tells you to pay no attention to that man behind the curtain:

CONFIRMED: Early Voting Data Shows Trump Lead ”“ Ignore Trolls Who Say Otherwise

CONFIRMED: Early Voting Data Shows Trump Lead ”“ Ignore Trolls Who Say Otherwise

DO NOT BE DISCOURAGED WITH EARLY VOTING DATA ”” IGNORE ALL TROLLS WHO SAY OTHERWISE

DO NOT LISTEN TO THE CORRUPT MEDIA”“ We Know Hillary’s Plan. It was revealed by Wikileaks”¦

LEAKED CLINTON INTERNAL DOCUMENT: Discourage Trump Supporters with Bogus Polls and Declaring Election Over

So do not listen to the lying media”“
Trump is leading in early voting data””

All caps; now, that’ll do it!

And here’s a quote that Gateway Pundit offers from someone named Reddit the Donald, about the whole thing:

First, Republicans are turning in their mail-in ballots in higher numbers than the Democrats in Florida. Yes, that site claims that more Democrats received their mail-in ballots, but it shows that more republicans actually give enough of a shit to vote i.e. Trump is inspiring more people to vote than Hillary (this means that more Pro-Trump independents will vote than Pro-Hillary independents).

Of course, people would say that McCain and Romney held a higher lead with mail-in ballots in Florida than Trump (assuming that most republicans will vote for the republican candidate ”” which they most likely will). That is true, but it is highly misleading. If holding a lead in mail-in ballots actually mattered, then both McCain and Romney should have won Florida, yet they did not.

The first sentence of that second paragraph invalidates the first paragraph, because if the Republican mail-in ballots in this Year of the Trump are running behind when Romney ran, than it does not show that Trump is inspiring more people to vote than Hillary is, any more than the even greater lead in Romney’s mail-in ballots in 2012 meant that Romney was inspiring more people to vote than Obama was.

And of course, that second paragraph’s last sentence is illogical. No one is implying that mail-in ballots matter in the absolute sense in terms of leading to victory; no one except the Trump cheerleaders, that is. The Romney forces certainly aren’t arguing it, since they know that Romney won on that metric and lost the state overall in the general election.

And yet I can pretty much guarantee that many people find those pro-Trump arguments very credible indeed. As Trump would say: sad.

[NOTE: By the way, when I saw those glowing pro-Trump headlines from Gateway Pundit, I went there to read about it with an open mind. I certainly believed it very possible that they were reporting on an actual phenomenon, and that perhaps Trump was doing better in Florida than had been expected. When I got there, however, and checked out the information in the links, I found a very different story—one either of blatant deception or ignorance.

Some people will say that I should stop reporting gloomy news. But I’m a realist, and I believe in reporting what’s true. Lies only lead to more deception—including what may be the most destructive thing of all in this case, self-deception.]

Sad news: Steven den Beste has died

The New Neo Posted on by

Unless you were around in the early days of the blogsophere, you may not have heard of Steven den Beste, and the news that he has died may not mean much to you.

But to those of us who remember him, he was a giant. I wrote a post about him in 2005, and I’ll reproduce excerpts from it now:

I miss Steven Den Beste.

No, I never met him; and yes, I know he’s not returning to political blogging…

He’s very ill; and, what’s more, even if he weren’t, I don’t get the sense that he’s the type who would respond to pleadings from his audience…He’s the type who makes up his mind and that’s it. No looking back. At least that’s what I imagine.

But I still miss him, and hope he’s doing well. I think, when I reflect on it, that he was my favorite blogger. There was nothing easy about him; no cheap shots, no funny stuff. He didn’t pander, and he was the hardest worker imaginable, churning out reams of lucid prose on a daily basis. I never understood how there were enough hours in a day for him to write as much as he did, even if he was working round the clock. And of course I didn’t know at the time that it was done at enormous physical cost to him because he was suffering from a progressive degenerative illness. When he quit blogging about a year ago in July, 2004, he cited both the illness and a massive psychological burnout that seems to have come from the fact that almost all the mail he got—and he got a lot of it—was negative.

I felt guilty, having never written him an e-mail myself that let him know how much I admired and appreciated his work. I wrote one afterwards, but he never replied, nor did I expect him to. I like to think it was because he was inundated with similar missives.

Den Beste had never impressed me as being the type to care whether people appreciated him or not, though. In fact, Bill Whittle famously called him the “Krell Mind Machine”–and those of you who read the book The Forbidden Planet in your youth and loved it (as I did), or saw the movie, will understand what Whittle was getting at. But I suppose even the most cerebral of us—and Steven Den Beste was nothing if not cerebral—have feelings, too (something that should be glaringly obvious, but is sometimes clear only in retrospect).

To those of you who got into reading blogs after Den Beste had retired and who don’t know what I’m talking about, I urge you to visit his archived writings. Here’s a guide. Of course, it’s not the same as reading his analyses at the time he wrote them. For example, during the buildup to the Iraq war, when the US was presenting its case (interminably, it seemed) to the balky UN, I recall that it was Den Beste who had the best (yes, puns are irresistible) writings on the situation. He was the one I relied on.

You had to be patient to stick with Den Beste—he wasn’t what you’d call a quick read. Step by laborious step, he’d take the reader through a beautifully and logically reasoned argument or explanation, and he didn’t really care how long it took. He respected his readers and figured they were up to the task—and for him, they were. He sometimes dealt with minutiae and technical things (after all, he’d been an engineer), and some of his posts were arcane. If on a certain day he wanted to write about something obscure and tech-y, or anime—well then, that’s what he wrote about that day (and that’s the day I might take a break from his blog). But most of the time he worked large, weaving together examples from disparate sources in new and unexpected—and, above all, deep—ways, bringing the sharp order of his mind to the chaos of politics and world events.

As Den Beste himself put it (and he put it best) in this essay about the process by which he wrote his articles, he used an “internal mechanism” which was especially “good at…finding non-obvious relationships.” That was indeed his specialty. In the same essay, he says: I write about something because I’m compelled to, because it’s often the case that if I don’t, then I can’t get it out of my head. Putting my thoughts into print relieves an internal pressure which also isn’t easily described.

That came across in his essays. He seemed to be a pressure cooker of some sort: throw in a bunch of data, seal the top, add heat, and the pressure would build until—voila!—out came a tasty feast, in his case an intellectual one, cooked in far less time than conventional pots and normal pressure could ever accomplish. It’s not surprising he burnt out. Even if he hadn’t had an illness, I can’t imagine anyone keeping up that sort of pace.

Den Beste was a master of the long essay form and a blog pioneer, beginning in early 2001, when most of us had never even heard the word “blog.” I’m a practitioner of the medium-to-longish essay myself, and I tip my proverbial hat to Den Beste for setting the bar very very high.

Den Beste had been in ill health for many years. RIP.

[NOTE: Some of the links in the above passage from that 2005 post no longer work.]

Harry Reid says the Senate is set for the nuclear option

The New Neo Posted on by

No surprise whatsoever:

Reid, who has previously floated changing the rules in 2017, added to TPM that if Republicans “mess with the Supreme Court, it’ll be changed just like that in my opinion. So I’ve set that up. I feel very comfortable with that.”

In 2013 Senate Democrats changed the filibuster rules on most of Obama’s nominees, allowing them to get approved by a simple majority, but left the 60-vote hurdle intact for Supreme Court nominations.

However, the 2013 shift ”” the most significant change to Senate floor procedure in decades ”” has sparked years of backlash from Republicans, who warned that it undercuts a minority party’s ability to block a president’s nomination.

The reason the Democrats are poised to do this isn’t just because they are expecting to take the Senate, it’s because they are also fully expecting to continue to control the presidency with the election of Hillary Clinton. The nuclear option only makes sense when a president is of the same party as those exercising it, as I pointed out about a year ago:

As I said, on the day when Republicans are no longer in control of the Senate, Democrats will jettison the rule themselves if they see a need to do so.

That said, I don’t think McConnell’s objection [to activating the nuclear option last year] is a fake or theatrical one. This would be a huge, huge, and risky step (it’s not called “nuclear” for nothing), and to what end? To have Obama veto any bill that is passed?

When there is a president of the opposite party in the Oval Office, the nuclear option just leads to a veto. That’s the reality of presidential power. And that’s why it didn’t make sense for the Republicans to jettison the rule during the Obama years. They calculated that they didn’t want it in place until 2016, when a Republican became president, as they fully expected to happen prior to the revelations of the 2016 campaign season. Then it would mean something. And if they lost both the presidency and the Senate in 2016 (which looks increasingly likely to happen), they certainly didn’t want it to already be in place at their own hands, so they would have no valid objections to its continuing when it would harm them and benefit the Democrats.

But mark my words: I predict that if Hillary Clinton wins the White House in 2016, and the Senate passes into Democratic hands, and the Democrats in the Senate then go about exercising the nuclear option (I believe all those things will occur), a lot of angry people on the right will yell that it once again proves how wimpy and awful the GOP members of Congress are, because they didn’t do it when Obama was president. The fact that it would have been mostly to no avail because of the veto would probably be lost on most of those people or ignored by them, and in their anger they’ll take it out on the remaining GOP members of Congress and thus guarantee even greater Democratic control of our entire government.

If that sounds gloomy—well, sorry, but I guess it is.

The Trump candidacy has been a learning experience, hasn’t it?

The New Neo Posted on by

A while back, commenter “Bill” had this to say:

One of the jarring things for me during this awful year is that I’m beginning to understand what it’s like to be a man without a party. I always was right along with everyone else on the conservative side in past elections ”“ all the same wishful thinking, all the same demonization of the other, all the same reference to polls being wrong, all of that.

…[T]his election has afforded me the ability to better see clearly all the ways we spin when we think we’re not.

Yes, there’s certainly been a lot of jumping on bandwagons and spreading the meme-love around.

Many months ago, I had bookmarked this very similar comment at The Other McCain, with the thought that I might write a post about it:

I am grateful to Donald Trump for running. He cured me of the naive idea I held that “my side” was full of people who were different than the foolish, hero worshipping Obama supporters. That “my side” was about principles and ideas, not a man. They are not…They do not object to the tyranny, but only to the tyrant they do not like. It is a very good thing to know, and now we must all be grownups and deal with the difficult reality before us.

Having come from the other side, I think I always knew that these tendencies were present to a certain extent on both sides. Having been both an insider (of sorts) and an oursider vis a vis both parties, I have no vested interest in idealizing either one.

And yet I think I did, just a bit. Or maybe I idealized Americans as a whole. Or maybe Americans have changed in the years since I formed my opinions about the nature of this country and its people.

The 2012 campaign and election—and then again, even more strongly, this 2016 one—drove home (if it needed any more driving home) the enormous extent of many Americans’ susceptibility to propaganda, their inability (or unwillingness) to think for themselves, their propensity for following not just the lead of others but the thoughts of others on the same side as they. I’m not able to compare numbers between left and right on this. But I observe the same sad vulnerabilities in people on each side, and the numbers involved on each side are not small.

It is a human trait and a human failing, not a party one.

Remember all those sayings about how the left runs on emotion, exploits emotion, uses emotion and channels it? Well, so does the right—or rather, so can the right if a candidate chooses to work that way and appeal to that aspect of people.

The purpose of this post is not to say that Trump’s appeal is solely emotional and all the others appeal to the rational. Far from it. Human beings are ruled by their heads, hearts, and guts, and we all have all three for a reason. People have a different balance among the three, and there are different kinds of people with different systems predominating in each camp. The very best candidates appeal on all three levels (Ronald Reagan,anyone?). But let’s explode once and for all the myth of the solely rational right and the solely emotional left.

What a tangled web we weave…

The New Neo Posted on by

…when first we practice to deceive:

Here we provide empirical evidence for a gradual escalation of self-serving dishonesty and reveal a neural mechanism supporting it. Behaviorally, we show that the extent to which participants engage in self-serving dishonesty increases with repetition. Using functional MRI, we show that signal reduction in the amygdala is sensitive to the history of dishonest behavior, consistent with adaptation. Critically, the extent of reduced amygdala sensitivity to dishonesty on a present decision relative to the previous one predicts the magnitude of escalation of self-serving dishonesty on the next decision. The findings uncover a biological mechanism that supports a ‘slippery slope’: what begins as small acts of dishonesty can escalate into larger transgressions.

Of course, some people are just sociopaths from the start.

[NOTE: The title of this post derives from this.]

Fall: past peak

The New Neo Posted on by

The leaves aren’t quite what they were just a week ago. But although there are fewer of them, some very beautiful ones still remain.

It’s windy, and you can feel a nip in the air.

Here are some photos I took this past weekend:

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BEREFT
– by Robert Frost

Where had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking down hill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and the day was past.
Sombre clouds in the west were massed.
Out on the porch’s sagging floor,
Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly struck at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.