I spent most of my reading time today going over the increasingly long list of excuses as to why the Democrats got themselves had of their own backsides by the voters, being offered by the Democratic leadership and their minions in the press.
Clearly the issue is at least partially Barack Hussein Obama. I posted the comments of Donna Brazile last night…..
efore I rest for the night, let me explain the election results. When you run away from the President of your party, you lose. Period.
— Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) November 4, 2015
…. because it strikes me as passing strange that anyone in the Democrat Party hierarchy would admit that the voters are running headlong away from Obama governance. She’s able to admit that they are turning away from Obama, but can’t quite bring herself to identify why they are doing so.
Without question, Obama has made about as many bad choices as the victims of a slasher movie would… If you consider the right moves to be leaning toward a stronger America, at least. Indeed as I have said several times in the past, Mr Obama and the Democrats in Congress have made the wrong choice for America every time right on down the line without exception. And, as I have again said in the past we should disabuse ourselves of the idea that these failures were not intentional. After all, you don’t get that kind of consistency without two things going for you… talent, and intent.
If we assume, as I do, that even the rank-and-file Democrats recognize the disaster that is the Obama presidency, that what we have here is a split within the Democrat Party that is larger than anything that the tussle between the establishment GOP and the rank and file has ever been.
So imagine the look on my face as the end of my driving day comes and I find a copy of a Washington Post article in my mail. Look if you will at the numerical gyrations that the author has to go through so that he is not required to admit that the Democrats lost and lost big:
But it may not be quite this bad. The suggestion of a loss of 69 House seats and 13 Senate seats in particular is based on this Politifact analysis, which appears to tally up those losses by comparing the number of House and Senate seats Dems held when Barack Obama took office on Inauguration Day 2009 with the number they hold today.
But the always-excellent Ron Brownstein has suggested a somewhat different metric. Brownstein posits that the fairer way to measure this is to look at the number of seats that Democrats held after the election that took place before Obama won the presidency — that is, after the 2006 elections — and compare that total with the number they hold today (and, ultimately, to the number they hold after the election of his successor). Those results look somewhat different:
Uh-oh. Get your boots on….
Using that yardstick, we would measure Obama by comparing the Democratic standing after 2006 (the last election before his first presidential campaign) with the party’s position after 2016 (the race to succeed him). For Bill Clinton, say, the equivalent comparison would be 1990 to 2000.
So far, Democrats under Obama are down five Senate seats (from 51 in 2006 to a likely 46 today, counting independents who caucus with them) and around 45 House seats, depending on final recounts.
And Brownstein adds that by this metric, three other recent presidents fared worse than Obama, one of them being George W. Bush
Oh you just knew they were going to bring in Bush’s name on this didn’t you?
As one reader put it, ..
The article is nothing short of the hockey stick of Apologia for Democratic destitution in the wake of the Obama.
And I tell you now that going forward this is going to be the argument. They really didn’t lose it all, they actually did pretty well.
I think I ought to point out before proceeding further that there were more people up for election in the above referenced November during the Bush presidency. But let’s not facts get in the way of a good excuse. And of course let’s completely ignore the facts posted by Rory Cooper…
Under President Obama, Democrats have lost 900+ state legislature seats, 12 governors, 69 House seats, 13 Senate seats. That’s some legacy.
After all, we would not ourselves to be swayed by inconvenient facts.
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….. skydiving is definitely not for you.
Maybe a look at this map will give you a clearer picture of what’s going on.
As it stands right now the GOP holds 76% of the nation’s statehouses.
Mind you, I’m not blind enough to suggest thats they are in *conservative* hands. That’s a different animal. But, let’s be aware going forward of just how damaged the Democrat Party is.
Before I rest for the night, let me explain the election results. When you run away from the President of your party, you lose. Period.
— Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) November 4, 2015
All of which of course ignoras that the president and his policies are wildly unpopular even with Democrats…
Donna, maybe you’d better start looking at why people are running away from Obama.
Definitely looks like somebody
didn’t contribute enough to Democrat election campaigns
The Snark of the Day, Erick Erickson, Red State:
Perverts and the Mentally Ill Lose in Houston, TX
Houston to the world: We are sane. The name for men who want to use the girl’s room to do their business is not transgender. It is pervert.
Or, so he says. He’s just disqualified himself from the presidency. And frankly, I’m not too keen on his being in the Senate.
Both David and myself have been saying for some time now that there is undue influence on the scientific community over the aspects of the environment is that are so loudly proclaimed these days. Radiation, pollution, global warming etc. You know the deal, any scientists who dares reveal the situation is not worth me enviro what jobs are telling us, is met with what can only be described as a harassment campaign of criminal levels.
You guys might remember that there was a meltdown at a nuclear power plant over in Japan following a earthquake they had there a few years ago. You may also remember the dire gloom and doom coming from the Enviro whack jobs, which kind of all melted away from the news feeds shortly after the incident.
The reason that it melted away from those news feeds and out of the public eye was it turned out to be not nearly the gloom and doom that was predicted. Lettuce scientists track those points, for all to see, and let him publish those findings, and immediately we have death threats.
Ask me again about the politics and the schoolyard antics that show up in support of the global warming myth.
The Snark of the Day, Camille Paglia:
“Hillary is a mess. And we’re going to reward with the presidency a woman who has enabled the depredations and the exploitation of women by that…husband of hers? The way feminists have made themselves blind to Hillary’s record of trashing. They were going to try to destroy Monica Lewinsky! It’s a scandal. Anyone who believes in sexual harassment guidelines should have seen that the disparity of power between Clinton and Monica Lewsinky was one of the most grotesque ever in the history of sex crime! He’s a sex criminal. We’re going to put that guy back in the White House? Hillary has ridden on his coattails. This is not a woman who has made her own career.”
Hat tip: Kimberly Ross, Red State.
If you thinks that all immigrants should be legal and all guns illegal, you one can not read and understand the constitution, two you are a liberal. From the mental midget, James Kirchick, Daily Beast:
Why don’t gun control advocates like Hillary Clinton talk about the one gun control solution that could actually fix the firearms problem in America?
Thirty thousand people are killed by firearms each year in the United States, an astronomically high figure for a developed Western country not in a state of civil war.
President Obama reminds Americans of this sad statistic with depressing regularity, and he did so again earlier this month, after a mass shooting in Oregon took the lives of nine people. “We know there are ways to prevent it,” the president said.
Meanwhile in Mayor Rahm Emanuel gun free utopia, the People’s Republic of Chicage, from Jeremy Gorner et al, Chicago Tribune:
A robbery was thwarted at a Southwest Side corner store Saturday night when a patron with a concealed carry license shot and killed an armed robber, authorities said.
The dead man has been identified as Reginald Gildersleeve, 55, of the 5000 block of South California Avenue, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office. Gildersleeve was pronounced dead on the scene at 7:10 p.m., according to the medical examiner’s office. An autopsy is slated for Sunday.
Citing preliminary information, police said a man walked into a store in the 2700 block of West 51st Street in the Gage Park neighborhood around 7 p.m., announced a robbery to an employee working behind the counter and displayed a handgun.
The wet dream of idiots like Kirchick, Mrs. Clinton and Barack Obama is confiscate the legally own guns, such as the patron who shot and killed the late Reginald Gildersleeve, yet would leave criminals like Gildersleeve with all their illegal guns. In a civil society free citizens are free to carry arms. In a Marxist society, the serfs are not allows weapons. Kirchick, Clinton and Obama want you to be serfs.
Just don’t call the late Mr. Gildersleeve a criminal.
Hate tip, Sarah Hoyt, Instapundit.
More armed citizens and more dead felons like the late Mr. Gilddersleeve make for a more civil society.
Reax, John Hinderaker, Power Line:
I disagree in this respect: the Second Amendment doesn’t cause “tens of thousands of unwanted deaths.” Sixty percent of the deaths by firearms are suicides, and private ownership of guns deters an unknown, but likely substantial, number of homicides and other violent crimes. Moreover, as I have written several times, the U.S. has reduced its homicide rate more successfully than Australia or other anti-gun countries like the U.K. Currently, the violent crime rate is higher in the U.K. than in the U.S. Reducing “gun violence” is not a desirable goal to the extent that one merely forces murderers to use other weapons.
It is impossible to make a rational argument that while abortion, the willful decision to kill a living human being, is merely a choice, but that suicide is somehow a problem.
File under Hoplobobia.
The Snark of the Day, from Kate, Small Dead Animals:
“If you like your boots-free Syria, you can keep your boots-free Syria.”
Maybe Obama will make the special forces fight in sneakers?
Fred Thompson has died, from USA Today:
NASHVILLE — Fred Thompson, a former U.S. senator for Tennessee, GOP presidential candidate, Watergate attorney and longtime Law and Order star, has died.
Thompson, 73, died on Sunday from after a recurrence of lymphoma, according to a statement issued by his family.
The man did the impossible. He got the unanimous support of the Bitsblog editorial board, but did not get elected President.
The Snark of the Day, from Clarice Feldman, American Thinker:
This week CNBC’s wretched conduct of the Republican debate hurt the pocketbook of their parent company, Comcast, and gave the entire media a long-deserved black eye while upping the audience’s regard for the intended victims. If Watergate was the high water mark of the public esteem of journalists, the debate was its Waterloo.
Truth be told, Clarice’s entire column is snark. She does it well.
Susan Estrich was on Fox News just now, telling us about how Jeb Bush would be a much better candidate in the general election that he is in the primary.
Remember first of all, that the woman’s biggest claim to fame was that she was the national campaign director for Michael Dukakis. Let that sink in for a moment.
Now that we’ve done that, we are done laughing, and wiping the tears out of her eyes, let’s consider the ramifications of allowing failed Democrat political consultants to choose our candidates for us. Didn’t we just do that with Romney, John McCain, and Bob Dole?
I have said for years in these spaces that participation trophies, as opposed to passing out awards to those who actually are victors in whatever they do, is a celebration of mediocrity, and underneath that celebration of mendacity.
I regard Barack Obama receiving a Nobel Peace Prize for…. what was it he got that for again, now?… and now Bruce Jenner receiving Woman of the Year… awards to be the next logical step on this particular highway to hell.
It doesn’t take a great stretch for somebody to see that it’s this kind of intellectual dishonesty that brings us to the notion that Islamic terrorism is not a threat. That we can tax our way to prosperity. That the unborn are not human beings. That socialism of any stripe can in any way be considered a success towards the stated goals of it, or that it ever has a hope of being so. That global warming is real. Or is it global cooling. Or is it climate change. I keep losing track. And so on.
I insist that all these things are directly related. The common thread is a level of intellectual dishonesty that is deadly to human advancement, and in the end I believe to humanity itself. The first step down this road was foolishness in accepting the proponents of such nonsense with an equal voice at the table, instead of shouting them down.
There is a backlash coming but I wonder if it’ll be of sufficient force the pushback this nonsense that we allowed to become part of our national and cultural mindset.
Part of the problem here is that the arguments for such nonsense are not rooted in reality, and therefore cannot be defeated on that plain.
