CHAOS
The outgoing DNC Chair just said Joe Biden should have been the nominee, and the mess inside his party right now ...
Let’s get this out of the way first: We are in the middle of a national emergency.
As I type this, the convicted felon and America-attacking racist, Donald Trump, is digging in and finishing what he started on January 6th, 2021. It has been less than two weeks since he parked his two-ton ass on his steel-reenforced throne, and his racist boss, Elon Musk, has been pouring gasoline atop our federal workforce and gleefully setting fire to the lives of hundreds of thousands of workers and their families, while airplanes and helicopters crash into the Potomac River as a tragic backdrop.
Our FBI agents are being rounded up, and kicked out, to presumably be replaced with loyal gestapo-type agents who will lay their dirty hands in the vicinity of a Bible and swear to serve the America-attacker, and not our country.
There isn’t a single thing good in America that isn’t under threat right now by a lawless thug who promised to be a dictator on Day 1.
Our mainstream media is on the verge of being absolutely worthless, by proving it is completely incapable of framing this ghastly moment in American history, and sounding the alarms.
So what has the Democratic opposition been doing in response to all this carnage? By the look and sound of it, at best, nothing, and at worst throwing each other under a bus while it careens off some cliff.
In my piece Thursday, I endorsed Wisconsin’s Ben Wikler to become the next DNC Chair, but in just 24 hours, I have come to the conclusion that few things mean less, because it is becoming crystal clear that the Democratic Party is a splintered group of self-interested people who are nowhere near ready to confront the evil that is coming at us with lightning speed.
Though they are our last best hope, I am losing faith Democrats have what it takes to withstand these ferocious straight-line political winds, and spent fully 500 words in my endorsement of Wikler Thursday taking them to task for their abominable defense of our government employees right now, who only three months ago were under their charge.
From that piece:
Where are the members of Joe Biden’s cabinet, for instance? Understand: These civil servants spent the past four years reshaping the government in these cabinet members’ vision. They did nothing but show up to work each day, and Democrat, Republican or Independent, rowed together in service of the American people and at the direction of these officials.
Now their jobs and their lives are on the line. Not to mention the tens of millions of Americans who depend on these people to do those jobs.
Why aren’t these former cabinet members speaking up and defending these people right now while they are under attack by an anti-American lowlife like Elon Musk, who shouldn’t be within three countries of our federal government?
… to all of you former cabinet members out there: Get your shit together. You are failing the most basic test of leadership, by leaving the troops who served you behind. I promise you this won’t be forgotten when some of you invariably resurface to throw in for big jobs on the national stage.
Their tone-deaf response to the dismantling of our government and with it the hell that has arrived is mind-blowing, but sadly not at all shocking. In early-December, I published, “NO! Democrats secretly trot out same old leadership team when we've never needed something new more ...”
From that piece:
Consider what happened very, very quietly during a closed-door meeting in some hallowed office buried deep inside our Capitol Building that was attacked only four years before.
That’s where the now minority Democrats in the United States Senate got together and basically let us know nothing had changed from November 4th to November 5th in their foggy view. Nope, it was going to be business as usual for us Democrats, and if you, dear reader, don’t like it, well, that’s just tough shit.
Yep, good ol’ 74-year-old Chuck Schumer will be back leading the team, assisted by the 79-year-old Dick Durbin. It was a great day for the “get the hell off my lawn” gang, and a bad one for America.
Instead of at least taking the pulse of the electorate following our shocking loss a mere month ago, they went full speed ahead to assemble a leadership team they thought was best to serve us.
Seriously …
Well, this morning while I was poring over the news, and chugging black coffee, I came across this beauty in The Associated Press:
The DNC’s outgoing chair says Democrats should have stuck with Joe Biden in 2024
It was all I could do not to dump Wild Turkey in my coffee, and just go off on some bender for the next four years …
Go ahead and spend eight minutes with that piece if you want, and come on back, or just pour your own Wild Turkey, because this is a rare Monday Morning Quarterbacking story that tells the sad tale of a party that has somehow managed to sack itself.
In this interview with the departing DNC Chair Jaime Harrison, it is clearer than ever that there is something very, very wrong inside the Democratic Party.
For starters, Harrison contends the party should have stayed with Joe Biden as their nominee. From the interview:
“Joe Biden gave the State of the Union, people said it was one of the best State of the Unions that we’ve ever seen. Then we move forward to the debate, and people were like, that was a horrible debate performance. And then my thought was: ‘Joe Biden secured the nomination. The primary was done, and so, I’m a loyal guy. We’re riding with Biden.’”
So the guy who presumably has his hands on millions and millions of our campaign dollars, was thinking one thing, while others inside the party, were thinking something else.
Just months from the most consequential election of our lifetimes, the party many of us were working for, was ripping itself to shreds, before finally landing on Vice President Kamala Harris to lead us.
When asked if the party was prepped for a possible candidate switch, Harrison said this, which I have now re-read nine times to try get some clarity:
“I had a very small group to whom I basically said, just game out for me what happens ... if I have to do something, because people were asking for a big primary and this and that — and again, we have a short time frame, and so basically it was going back to the rules.”
“I didn’t even talk to all of the people in my inner circle. There were two staffers ... just in case anything happened, I wanted to make sure that I knew what we could do. And so we had some structure for what something would look like.”
And here’s what’s really damning and where Harrison has my sympathy. Because when he heard Biden was dropping out this happened:
“I started making phone calls just asking, ‘I’m sure you’ve heard the news about the president,’ and to a person, they’re saying, ‘I just got off the phone with the vice president, and I’m pledging my support.’ I must have been chasing her calls, because literally, I’m calling, and everyone said, ‘Well, I’m supporting her.’”
In other words, he was one of the last to know ...
If it wasn’t before, it’s pretty clear now that the DNC Chair is nothing but a ceremonial position, and the real powerbrokers are only interested in all the money he or she is raising and not any of their advice.
Harrison admits as much:
“The DNC shouldn’t just be a rubber stamp to whatever the campaign wants.”
“You don’t always have a seat at the table, in terms of, you take all of the arrows and the responsibility. People want to give you all the blame, but you don’t have the power to make those decisions, and I really think there needs to be reapportionment of a better, a greater balance.”
“I did not always have a seat at the table, was not always invited in the room. And I just think that is inherently problematic because of the perspectives that you bring.”
<sigh>
Look, it is worth understanding that it’s not uncommon for the party that loses power to do some real soul-searching, but what we’ve witnessed since November 5th, 2024, goes well beyond that.
It seems like the Dems have skipped the soul-searching part and moved right onto trying to find their asses with both hands.
There does not appear to be a cohesive approach on how to battle the greatest threat to our country since the Civil War.
But if Monday Morning Quarterbacking is where we are STILL AT then let me join the cliché parade and chuck this long bomb: Trump should have been thrown in jail around about 2022, or at the very least, been put on trial for his violent attack on this country, and attempted overthrow of our government.
And if you are saying, “Well, that’s not helping right now, Earl,” I am saying, “Fair, but for Christ’s sake, people, I have been hollering about this since late-2021, when Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland was doing nothing, and well on his way to going nowhere for the next three years.”
It was the second-biggest failure by an administration in my lifetime, dwarfed only by Trump’s attack, and the subsequent failure by enough revolting Republican senators to ensure, bare minimum, he could never run again.
I keep thinking I won’t bring this up anymore, and then I read Harrison’s assessment on things, and go from slow burn to raging fire.
Point is: I’M ANGRY.
I am first angry at the people who live among us, some of whom are family and friends, who support this repellent, orange, stomach-churning mess of a man — a complete loser who took no time at all blaming everybody but himself for the horrific plane crash that took the lives of 67 human beings.
Next, I am angry at the tens of millions of United States citizens who couldn’t bother to vote at all, and instead stayed at home picking their noses and dialing up TikTok videos. I truly wish the worst for them. They, more than anybody else, deserve this.
I have spent the past few months communicating with many Democratic Party activists across the country, and I can tell you most are seething about this incoherence from party leadership.
This was from Christopher Webb, a Democratic Strategist in California, in response to my endorsement of Wikler yesterday:
“I support you on that but I’m not endorsing. I agree he’s probably the best suited of the options we have, but I feel like we need a bomb-thrower, not a fundraiser. There’s a lot of absence right now (from leadership). Dude, it’s driving me crazy. What’s keeping me sane is knowing a lot of the rank and file like us see it, too. So I’m not crazy.”
No he’s not. What’s crazy is following the same people over and over, who have proven they have absolutely no idea where they going.
Time for a change.
(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.)
I’m with you on every last word. Dammit, somebody step up and fight back. Read the 2025 playbook and counter it, lawsuit by lawsuit, protest by protest.
I am not only an angry 70 year old, I am feeling pretty damned vengeful. I am apoplectic about the lack of any concept of LEADERSHIP! by the Democrats. WTF?
It has always been thus, but it worsens every year. The cowardice is chilling. I may be old-ish, but we need to get these geriatric now rich-guy placeholders the hell out of the Capitol and deal with the shit show that is now America. Dammit.