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Campaigns matter.

That’s a long-time conceit of political consultants, of course.  We say it all the time.  I even worked at a successful political consulting firm which trademarked the phrase. Campaigns Matter™.

Campaigns matter – along with its corollary, “the only poll that matters is the one on Election Day” – are central to the political consultant’s belief system.  It is the foundation upon which our entire catechism is built.

If nobody believed that campaigns matter so much, we’d all be out of business and pumping gas somewhere.  The campaign managers, the ad guys, the pollsters, the advance people, the digital elflords, the speechwriters, the debate prep team: all of us need potential clients to believe that “campaigns matter” if we are to survive.  It is critical.

Except for, you know: Donald Trump.  Agent Orange’s successes, inter alia, forcefully make the case that the political class should all find a new line of work.

Trump was a political seismic event in many ways, of course.  Trump shattered the Western liberal democratic consensus in respect of trade, immigrants, refugees, security and race.  He upended every convention.

He also showed everyone, in a yuge way, that campaigns now don’t matter much at all.  Consider the evidence.

• He had never before held elected office.   Anywhere.
• He beat 16 others seeking the Republican presidential nomination, professional politicians who collectively had several hundred years of campaign experience between them. He beat nine state Governors and five U.S. Senators.  He beat the CEO of Hewlett-Packard.  He beat an actual brain surgeon.
• He beat one of the scions of the Bush family. A Bush. He beat one of the Bushes – who had, you know, previously produced two presidents.
• He beat an army of the best political consultants in the world. He beat legendary conservative political geniuses like Mike Murphy, Steve Schmidt and Mary Matalin.  He humiliated them.
• He ran the stupidest GOP primary campaign anyone had ever seen, and won. He ran the most insane presidential campaign anyone had ever seen – almost no ads, little polling, no structure or coherence – and he still triumphed.

Think about it.  A tape came out, mid-campaign, in which Donald Trump boasted about sexually assaulting women.  He insulted military veterans and war heroes and Gold Star families – people considered deities in the U.S. political firmament.  He repeatedly made racist statements.  He attacked the Pope and the disabled. He invited a hostile foreign power to invade the privacy of American citizens – and the hostile foreign power did.  He refused to release his taxes, unlike every other presidential candidate in modern times.  He said, and did, things that were crazy.

And he still won.

Donald Trump – the combed-over, sphincter-mouthed, racist, sexist, fascistic Human Cheeto – showed all of us that Campaigns Don’t Matter.  You can run a really shitty one, like he did, and still win.

But.  But one thing, and it is deliciously ironic.  It is schadenfreude on a scale heretofore unseen in politics.  It is frigging beautiful.

You can see it in the decisions of federal judges in Maryland and Hawaii, issued late last week – but particularly in the must-read decision of Judge Derrick K. Watson, of Federal District Court in Honolulu.  In it, Judge Watson threw out Trump’s second (allegedly kinder and gentler) executive order seeking a Muslim ban.  And he did so by relying upon the words of Donald Trump himself.

Judge Watson dismissed the Trump regime’s claim that a court would need to probe the Unpresident’s “veiled psyche” to locate religious animus. Jusdge Watson would have none of it.  Repeatedly, he cited Trump statements that were helpfully found in the pages of the lawsuit brought by Hawaii’s attorney general.

“There is nothing ‘veiled’ about this press release,” Judge Watson wrote, quoting a Trump campaign document titled “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

Said he: “A reasonable, objective observer would conclude that the executive order was issued with a purpose to disfavour a particular religion.”

The general consensus, now, is that the short-fingered vulgarian – per Canadian Graydon Carter’s now-immortal phrase – will continue to be hoisted on his own petard.  As he labours to render the United States of America an Aryan Nation, Donald Trump will continue to lose in court.  That is now very clear, to every legal scholar and constitutional expert.

Why?  Because of Donald Trump’s own words.  Because of the racist, bigoted things he said in his presidential campaign.  Because what he said, over and over, is now being used against him.

Campaigns may not matter any more.  Donald Trump has proven that.

But words?  Words matter.

He’s proven that, too.

 

 

 

 

 

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Here we go. It will be hard for the trained seals in the GOP caucus to ignore this. 

And, wow. Never thought Comey would go this far.

WOW: FBI CONFIRMS IT IS INVESTIGATING TRUMP-RUSSIA LINKS #USPOLI #POTUS pic.twitter.com/qVHdOd3x4E

— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) March 20, 2017

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Spotted by my eagle-eyed friend, Andy Gregg:

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…wherein Chuck, RIP, slices and dices my fave bands of all time (save and except Da Brudders), here:

The Sex Pistols — “God Save the Queen” What’s this guy so angry about anyway? Guitar work and progression is like mine. Good backbeat. Can’t understand most of the vocals. If you’re going to be mad at least let the people know what you’re mad about.

The Clash — “Complete Control” Sounds like the first one. The rhythm and chording work well together. Did this guy have a sore throat when he sang the vocals?

The Ramones — “Sheena is a Punk Rocker” A good little jump number. These guys remind me of myself when I first started, I only knew three chords too.

Wire — “I Am the Fly” and Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures So this is the so-called new stuff. It’s nothing I ain’t heard before. It sounds like an old blues jam that BB and Muddy would carry on backstage at the old amphitheatre in Chicago. The instruments may be different but the experiment’s the same.

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If anyone else in agreement with her? Is so, comment below!

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…in today’s Hill Times:

Politics is at its worst in political parties. Internal decisions are usually made in secret with little recourse to the rules of due process that apply to normal business decisions.

…Decisions were made which served to tilt the nomination process in the races to replace outgoing ministers, John McCallum and Stéphane Dion. Notwithstanding public protestations to the contrary, non-transparent internal steps were taken that served to benefit party-preferred candidates, facing tough nomination battles.

In one case, the meddling backfired. The popular mayor of St. Laurent, Alan DeSousa, was deemed ineligible to run by the party’s vetting committee. That move ostensibly paving the way for party favourite and former provincial minister Yolande James. Instead, DeSousa’s 26-year-old assistant, Emmanuella Lambropoulos, whose candidacy was green lighted, surprised everyone by winning the nomination.

By any standards, former PMO staffer Mary Ng, and former Quebec provincial ministeryolande James would both have been excellent candidates.They are young, articulate and reflect the diversity of Canada’s population.

But party meddling handed them a poisoned chalice.

The moves provoked a hot debate among Liberals. Jack Siegel, former co-chair of the Liberal constitutional and legal affairs committee, defended the party on his Facebook page. He claimed “the Liberal Party has had retroactive blind cut-offs for close to 25 years,” using it as a means to prevent “dumping thousands of forms at the deadline, keeping their signups secret and overloading the party’s membership systems with the flood of forms, all in urgent need of inputting.”

Siegel was deeply involved in the nomination which prompted my departure from politics. He oversaw a decision to count 500 unsigned ballots that had not been initialed by the returning officer. The membership system in the party of ces was so ‘overloaded’ that, just before midnight, an official deleted 378 eligible Liberals from the voting list. Party officials wanted to ensure the nomination of my opponent, who was the leader’s choice.

I know whereof Sheila speaks. I was at that meeting in her Hamilton riding in March 2004, and I was there to vote for her. I’d left my Dad’s deathbed to come and support her. Jack, I am sad to say, wouldn’t let me vote. “I expected that,” I told him.

I turned on my heels and went into the hallway, where I told the media about how Paul Martin’s thugs had rigged democracy against Sheila Copps. She, of course, ended up losing her own riding to Tony Valeri – and Paul Martin, of course, would go on to lose (deservedly, blessedly) to Stephen Harper. Partly because he had utterly destroyed the unity of the Liberal Party.

Are things any better under Justin Trudeau? Well, let’s put it this way: ten years later, when Dennis Mills was urging me to seek the Liberal nomination in Toronto-Danforth in 2014, I got a few calls from senior Grits. I was told the same thing, over and over: “Forget it. Don’t bother. They’ve already decided to reject you in the green light process.”

Why, I asked.

“You’re too independent-minded.”

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#POTUS arrives in Florida. A crowd of enthusiastic Americans greet him! pic.twitter.com/qMFNsDBFYR

— Warren Kinsella (@kinsellawarren) March 19, 2017

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Snipe and I are going on the road as a punk rock duo, with Dr. Rhythm keeping the beat. Here is our newest ditty, ‘Vomit.’ It is testament to our maturity, and our ability to still write hummable top-tappers. Dr. Rhythm, we are pleased to note, doesn’t drink any beer and keeps his opinions to himself.

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By Dowd, naturally:

…we’ve never watched a president so hungrily devour his own presidency.

Soon, there won’t be anything left except the sound of people snickering.

Consumed by his paranoia about the deep state, Donald Trump has disappeared into the fog of his own conspiracy theories. As he rages in the storm, Lear-like, howling about poisonous fake news, he is spewing poisonous fake news.

The Hirshhorn has a sold-out exhibit of Yayoi Kusama’s stunning infinity mirror rooms. But they are nothing compared to the infinity mirror room of Trump’s mind, now on display a mile and a half away at the White House.

Many voters who took a chance on the real estate mogul and reality TV star hoped he would grow more mature and centered when confronted with the august surroundings of the White House and immensity of the job. 

But instead of improving in office, Trump is regressing. The office has not changed Trump. Trump has changed the office.

He trusts his beliefs more than facts. So many secrets, so many plots, so many shards of gossip swirl in his head, there seems to be no room for reality.

His grandiosity, insularity and scamming have persuaded Trump to believe he can mold his own world. His distrust of the deep state, elites and eggheads — an insecurity inflamed by Steve Bannon — makes it hard for him to trust his own government, or his own government’s facts.

Yesterday at Comedy Trumps Hate, I was brought onstage to be sort-of of interviewed and provide fodder for The Monkey Toast Players – featuring no less than Colin Mochrie and Pat McKenna! – and suggested that Trump really was the enemy of all that is good and decent, and that it really wasn’t all that funny anymore. So, fight back, I urged.  Here’s a few ways to do so.

Anyway. Dodd’s column. Read it. She’s got a ringside seat to the end of America, but she still has a sense of humour. 

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