Report From Washington: It's not a one-man coup

 

By Spy Washington Correspondent Nellie Bly with Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling

The Sunday New York Times was really bringing the fire last Sunday, marshaling almost all of its gasbags on an assault on the administration of Pol Potbelly.

From the left flank, Michelle Goldberg pounced:

This brutish hostility to foreigners has already changed the character of America, maybe irrevocably. And in this new America, even citizens shouldn’t count themselves safe. Trump is already talking about sending Americans to be locked up in El Salvador, far beyond the reach of our law. He’s laying siege to our universities for tolerating criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza by Americans as well as by foreign students and professors. There’s a reason Martin Niemöller’s poem is such a cliché. First they came for Khalil. They obviously weren’t going to stop there.

On the right, Weird Ross Douthat commented, unexceptionably, that tariffs were bad.

His colleague Bretbug, one of the last Republican neocon survivors of the once-mighty Hot Air Force which crashed and burned in Iraq, weighed in with a lethal strike on Pol Potbelly’s pro-Russian foreign policy:

Someone ought to tell Trump, Vance and other administration lemmings that nasty, dishonest and stupid is no way to conduct foreign policy. Since then, Russia has continued to press its barbaric attack while Ukraine fights on. All the meeting accomplished was to give America’s friends and foes a clearer sense of the dangerously self-infatuated fool in the White House.

Meanwhile in the center the heavy artillery of the anonymous Editorial Board thundered:

The first 100 days of President Trump’s second term have done more damage to American democracy than anything else since the demise of Reconstruction. Mr. Trump is attempting to create a presidency unconstrained by Congress or the courts, in which he and his appointees can override written law when they want to. It is precisely the autocratic approach that this nation’s founders sought to prevent when writing the Constitution.

Of course like good centrists they couldn’t avoid shelling their allies for being too “performative” and not reaching out to the very fine people who like it when Pol Potbelly’s campaign variety show features comics who compare Puerto Rico to a floating pile of garbage.

But let’s go back to that bit about creating a Presidency “unconstrained by Congress...”

We have a powerful Congress under the Constitution

There’s still a Congress sitting, last we looked, with both chambers dominated by slim but adequate Republican majorities. What are they doing to protect America from these outrages so eloquently set forth in the Newspaper of Record?

This week, the Senate is considering legislation to authorize a money-laundering crypto scam known as “stablecoin,” a fake crypto currency that’s supposed to maintain a stable $1 value because it’s backed by money. So why not use real money? Are there any reasons other than letting scam artists launder money without having to use a regulated banking system and bribe the President by investing in his latest, wait for it, stablecoin scheme, that is?

As usual, useless Democrats, their pockets bulging with real money from crypto finaglers, are trying to ram the legislation through while others are urging not fervent opposition, but caution.

Republicans, also smelling the real money from crypto promoters and afraid to get in the way of the Tangerine-Faced Grifter’s latest corrupt money-maker, are as usual backing the forces of greed and dishonesty.

Republican Senators are also trying to ram through the nomination of Ed Martin, an insurrectionist, election denier, and perverter of justice, to the job of US Attorney for Washington DC. Acting in that job, he has already brought the force of his office to threaten law schools, medical journals, and political activists for exercising their legal rights. This is a crime. 

This week Pol Potbelly is leaning on Republican Senators to approve this subversive nomination.

Republican tower of blubber Thom Tillis is supposedly against, but we’re waiting to hear which way performatively-moderate Susan Collins is going to jump, which is usually a function of whether her vote is needed for confirmation.

Meanwhile the Republican House, faced with the parade of horribles marshaled by The New York Times is focused on the supposed menace of anti-Semitism in colleges and universities that employ Democrats. According to The Guardian, the Republican inquisitors include a few whose Jew-loving credentials are, shall we say, open to question:

A number of Republican legislators set to grill university presidents in a congressional hearing on antisemitism this week are associated with calls for Jews to convert to Christianity, have quoted Adolf Hitler, or have reportedly threatened to burn a synagogue to the ground.

To borrow from Bobbie Fleckman, “And you don’t think that’s anti-Semitic?”

Republican funders expect to get the tax cuts they paid for

In fairness, the Republican Congressman who threatened to burn a synagogue to the ground was a Jewish Republican and it was his own synagogue. So that’s OK then and not at all a schondeh fir di Goyim.

Beyond installing corrupt insurrectionists as prosecutors and performing concern about those lovable Jews to destroy colleges they don’t like, Congressional Republicans have but one single overarching legislative goal this year: cutting rich people’s taxes permanently. The revenue loss would be made up by letting poor people starve, sicken, and die from Medicaid and food assistance cuts, and borrowing the rest.

With that vital legislative goal paramount, Republicans in Congress don’t have much time to worry about all of the terrible things so important to Times opinion columnists.

Which leads us to wonder why Republicans in Congress who have failed to thus far do even one tiny thing to protect the Constitution and the rule of law are getting a free pass from the massed gasbags at New York Times Opinion and to be fair pretty much everyplace else in the mainstream media, including the “pro-freedom” Washington Post.

There's no mystery about the motives of these soulless Republican Solons: they are craven and they are bad people.

They know that their political lives can be ended by Pol Potbelly's decision to back any nitwit in a Republican primary contest.  Never before in American history has a President been able to neuter Congressional majorities of his own party by threatening to primary them. But it’s working because they have nothing but their Trump Stamps. 

Many of them also agree with what is happening.  They never liked foreign aid, food stamps, health care for the poor, or anything that takes one dollar out of a rich white man's pocket for any purposes other than protecting the man's ill-gotten gains.  And many of them were elected only because 40 years of Republican pandering to white racists paid off across the American South, Midwest and prairie.

And yet the media, even the supposedly brave bits, can't bring themselves to state the obvious fact that all, all Republicans in Congress are either actively or by omission aiding and abetting the coup.  Here's The New Yorker on supine cowardly Republican Majority Leader John Thune:

Thune, a fourth-term senator from South Dakota, is an awkward leader for Trump’s ruthless Republican Party, in part because even Democrats invariably describe him as amiable and honest....Thune could pass for an actual movie star, with pale-blue eyes, a square jaw, and Mt. Rushmore cheekbones. Now sixty-four, he has salt-and-pepper hair that is still thick enough to part neatly on the side, and the broad shoulders, thick arms, and narrow waist of a basketball player. 

Yes, that's the important point: Unlike Ted Cruz, Thune's face doesn't make babies cry.

Actually, the important point is that our Constitutional system is being dismantled not just by Pol Potbelly and his raving cadres, but by every single elected Republican, including dreamboat John Thune. It’s almost like the entire Republican Party bears the blame for the chaos and carnage of the Pol Potbelly regime.

Despite their blistering fusillades last Sunday, we’d submit that the forces of The New York Times Sunday Opinion, The New Yorker, and anyone else who believes itself to be in the news business, have a long and grueling campaign ahead of them. They should saddle up.  

Yard Time: High Noon on Mass. Ave.

By Yard Correspondent Larry Lowell with intern Marissa Gunner '28

CAMBRIDGE Mass. - As Gary Cooper learned in High Noon, it’s not until the varmints ride into town guns blazing that you learn who’s willing to stand with you.

Harvard University and its President, Alan Garber ‘77 must be feeling pretty lonely on the dusty streets of Cambridge.

The assault of Pol Potbelly on the University reached a new height when PP’s cadres decided to terminate $2,000,000,000 of Federal grants to Harvard, including those awarded and underway, in mid- molecule. The toll on science, medicine and future health is incalculably bad, including cutting off research in matters of life and death like cancer treatment and research, tuberculosis, infectious disease, crippling neurological conditions like ALS, and environmental health threats.

Harvard President Alan Garber '77 is feeling lonely

The alleged basis for this train robbery is Harvard’s suppose failure to grapple with anti-Semitism, because some a**holes yelled anti-Semitic slurs at those crossing the Yard right after the Hamas terror attack on October 7, 2023. What constitutes an anti-Semitic slur remains open to interpretation, with some tender Semites claiming that any expression of solidarity with the plight of the over 2,000,000 Gazan civilians being systematically bombed and immiserated by the endless brutal Israeli onslaught is anti-Semitic. Others, including plenty of Jews, note that the endless war appears to be designed to accomplish two goals: saving Bibi Netanyahu’s ass from well-founded corruption charges and cleansing Gaza of its Palestinian inhabitants, for which many members of the current Israeli government have long advocated. This is a war crime, by the way.

Further, the extortion letter received by Harvard (supposedly in error) demanded that Harvard remake its academic programs, its admissions standards, and its belief in once uncontroversial virtues such as diversity and inclusion to meet the demanding moral standards of a depraved sex offender who had been found liable for sexually assaulting a woman in a department store dressing room.

Harvard pointed out reasonably enough that such demands would in effect destroy the University by imposing a Cotton Mather-like regime of ideological rigidity on what is supposed to be an enterprise devoted to free inquiry (as long as the tenured faculty does not actually have to speak to grubby undergraduates)

Pot Potbelly’s mouthpieces have even said that Harvard owes the creep an apology, although for what is never stated. Some Harvard researchers have even been locked up without being accused of any crime because they did not properly declare 100 grams of dangerous frog embryos at Logan Airport. Thus promising research into the scourge of pancreatic cancer has been interrupted but at least millions of Americans will be saved from the plague of uncontrolled frog embryos that has decimated our inner cities and Appalachian hollers [Is this right, Marissa? – Ed.] [Will get back to you. Big problem set due! – Marissa].

Not content with illegally withholding earned federal research grants, others of PP’s goons have threatened Harvard illegally with loss of its tax-exempt status, a crushing blow to Harvard’s finances mostly because the rich finaglers who have previously coughed up serious money will no longer be able to deduct their contributions from their already exiguous tax obligations. We'll get back to them presently.

This mortal threat is untainted by any pretense of legality, which will not stop PP’s corrupt henchmen at the IRS from trying. Tax-exempt status is not in fact something handed out in the grace and favor of the demented tyrant; it is something to which Harvard is entitled under law. You remember law, don’t you?

Now a University with $53,000,000,000 in the bank is not without resources, and Harvard can afford to pay and has paid fancy lawyers, including former Republican mouthpieces, to state their case and even sue to stop the depredations.

That massive hoard has led some idiots to ask why Harvard can’t just replace the $2 billion in lost grants with its own money. Two rejoinders suggest themselves to even the most limited intelligence: the endowment money is mostly restricted for certain purposes and cannot simply be reallocated at President Garber’s whim (even though he is a notoriously whimsical fellow).

The second more compelling response is: why the f*** should Harvard have to replace federal money to which it is entitled? That’s not how any of this works.

But you know this. Today we want to see who is and who isn’t standing by Marshal Garber and his pitiful band of deputies as they take on the desperadoes of Merde-a-Lardo in their lonely fight for academic freedom and justice.

Some of the most notorious loudmouths amongst the alumni plutocrats so interested in purging the University of Black women and other mortal threats are conspicuous by their silence. What happened to Bill Ackman, last seen preening at the Nerd Ball as a supposed “celebrity,” with his wife, the best-selling author of Megan Markle's autobiography? Did he lose his X password?

And what of nefarious skillionaire Ken Griffin, who let it be known that he was a harsh critic of Harvard last year but now is content to hold forth on matters nearer and dearer to his wallet, like tariffs? Or Lloyd Blankfein '75, who trousered billions at Goldman Sachs and is apparently much too busy unfolding all those bills to support the college that propelled him to the heights of ill-gotten gains?

Will Marshal Alan ride off into the sunset?

Not to mention other Harvard-connected supposed champions of free speech, at least when it was threatened by the menace of wokeosity — where is Demented Alan Dershowitz? Did he forget to plug in his web camera? And great Constitutional scholar Cancun Ted Cruz?

And with the exception of the Pritzker family, we haven’t heard tickety-boo from the legions of billionaire alumni who like to throw their weight around University Hall. Their press agents will tell you that they prefer to work behind-the-scenes. That’s great, but Marshall Garber needs guns in the streets now, not craven finaglers supposed to be quietly influencing bats*** crazy weirdos like penis cosplayer Stephen Miller and Illegally Blonde Pam Bondi or carnival barkers like Linda “A1” McMahon.

Then we have a few Both-Sides middle grounders like former National Review mouthpiece David French, who regurgitates the old whines about Harvard being dominated by the hard left, by which he means people who vote Democratic.  As Harvard does not inquire of one's party affiliation in admission or faculty hiring, for reasons that must be obvious even to Mr. French, it's hard to know what he thinks Harvard can do about the political choices made by its community.  [We aren't linking to his pisspoor column for policy reasons – Ed.] 

Similarly, insufferable Harvard faculty bloviators like Steven Pinker, having whined for the past two years about their supposed plight, have now learned that that there are worse things than hearing snarky remarks at the Faculty Club about the dumb s*** they spout.

The support of these Both Siders comes at a high price. Should Pol Potbelly’s gunmen be run out of Cambridge, not to mention Washington, these same hacks will claim to be owed a seat at the table to propound their reactionary and intolerant drivel. No dice. 

Now some have stood up, most recently a number of other universities who had been content to let Columbia twist in the wind, but have now figured out that if the Trump Regime conquers Harvard, none of them are safe.

There's one big exception: in the backwoods of New Hampshire there lives a small college known at Dartmouth.  We are told it is actually a member of the Ivy League, and considers itself to be a bastion of academic freedom and rigorous scholarship.  So of course it has thrown its support to Harvard, amirite?

According to The Boston Globe, not so much:

A Trump-friendly college?  As they say at Dartmouth on days ending in y, “Beer me!”

It's not just wilderness outposts like Dartmouth or demented loudmouths like Alan Dershowitz who have refused to join Marshall Garber's tiny band of deputies.

Consider the world of immensely rich and powerful law firms, stuffed to the gills with insufferable graduates of the Harvard Law School.  Many of them have shamefully caved to Pol Potbelly, promising hundreds of millions in pro bono time for causes congenial to the Tangerine-Faced Fascist, although whether they will actually swallow what is left of their dignity and commit to defending murderers in uniform like Derek Chauvin remains to be seen.

Those firms have leaked to the press that they did so because they were afraid that they might lose their $20 million a year corporate rainmakers and their finagling clients to other firms.  Which makes notable the courage of a few, like WilmerHale (whose predecessor firm Hale and Dorr had stood up to Joe McCarthy and Pol Potbelly's mentor Roy “I've Got a Secret” Cohn).

Their Boston rival Ropes & Gray, which boasts a lucrative roster of private equity tycoons easily equal to that of Paul Weiss or Skadden, in fact rose to the occasion and signed (but did not draft) Harvard's complaint, at some risk to its fisc.  Perhaps the fact that it has provided legal services to Harvard since the days of President Mather made it awkward for the firm to turn its back on Harvard now.

At least as of today, neither Ropes & Gray nor WilmerHale has dwindled away, which puts the greed and cowardice of their obedient rivals into sharp focus, at least among fancy law students deciding which firm to sacrifice their lives to.

But when you're up against the likes of Pot Potbelly, the entire bent Departments of Justice and Homeland Security and Pete “I'll Text You” Hegseth, Garber's posse seems overmatched, whether measured by number of available gunslingers or Jaeger Bombs.

If Harvard prevails against the heavily-armed thugs lined up against it, we wouldn't blame Alan Garber for throwing his tin badge at the feet of the alumni who abandoned Harvard in its darkest hour and riding off into the sunset.  Just not in the direction of Hanover, New Hampshire. 

UPDATE April 29 – Alan Dershowitz is silent no longer.  He apparently retrieved his phone from between the couch cushions and spoke with his usual incoherence to The Boston Globe.  We won't provide a link for his sad stupid vocalizations, in furtherance of our policy against providing a platform to dumb s***.

On the 250th Anniversary of Patriots' Day, it's the Great Writ vs. the Great S***

By Legal Correspondent Saori Shiroseki and Immigration Editor Emma Goldman
with Spy Intern Olivia Gunner in Concord, Mass.

CONCORD, Mass. (April 19) – This morning in Concord, Mass. a bunch of cosplaying nerds celebrated the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Concord and Lexington by dressing up, tootling on fifes, parading through the streets, and topping it off with glazed crullers and iced regulars at Dunkin' Donuts.

You colonials will never reach Dunkin' Donuts alive!

We've got nothing against remembering the birth of liberty in America but right now we're too busy grieving its death.  

One of the foundations of that liberty is what is referred to as the Great Writ: the write of habeas corpus which allows anyone detained by the Government to challenge that detention in court.  

That means everyone.  Our framers thought that the writ was so important that they wrote in the Constitution that the American President, their powers carefully enumerated in Article II and constrained there and in every other word of that document, said:

The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it. 

Article I, Section 9, Clause 2.

Terror in the apple orchards! (Snapshot via AP)

How's this cornerstone of our liberty and the rule of law doing in Pol Potbelly's reign of terror?

The jury, as they say, is still out.

We start with a brief recapitulation of one of the most notorious outrages:  last month, a law-abiding Turkish woman with legal immigration status as a graduate student at Tufts University in Medford was kidnapped on the streets of Somerville by masked agents claiming to be from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The next day, despite a Federal Court order requiring that she be kept in Massachusetts, she was shanghaied to a jail in darkest Louisiana, where she was tortured by ICE-controlled guards who refused to give her her asthma medication. Fortunately, they did not succeed in killing her.

Her sole offense, according to Pol Potbelly’s jackals, was that she once signed an editorial in the Tufts student newspaper opposing Israel’s unrelenting war in Gaza. 

Once immured in immigration jail in Louisiana her case was assigned to an immigration “judge.”  We use the quotes because despite the name, these people, who have the power to keep noncitizens locked up and eventually deported, aren't judges under Article III. They are in essence hearing officers subject to the tender mercies of their boss, Illegally Blonde Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has already s***canned 20 of them for reasons only known to her.

Feel better?

The Founders thought so little of this system that they listed it as a reason for declaring the independence of the United States:

[King George III] has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the Tenure of their Offices, and the Amount and Payment of their Salaries.

Republicans mistreating detainees?  Unprecedented?...

On Wednesday, that “judge” decided, solely on the basis of an op-ed Ms. Öztürk signed in a student newspaper, that she should be kept locked up.

In the land of the free, these “judges” are supposed to decide whether to keep people detained according to two legal standards: is the person a danger to public safety?  and is she a flight risk who might not show up for future hearings?  

Obviously, this woman, who has never been charged with a crime, is no threat to the safety of the good citizens of Somerville.  Nor is there any reason to think that a law-abiding graduate student, whose continued residence in the country depends on going to class, is going to be a fugitive from justice.

So of course the “judge” sprang her, right:

Um:

“The immigration judge denied bond based on her untenable conclusion that Ms. Öztürk was both a flight risk and a danger to the community,” her lawyers wrote....“The immigration judge’s decision was based solely on the [government] memorandum, which points to no conduct of Ms. Öztürk’s except her co-authorship of an op-ed that the [government] memo asserts had ‘found common cause with an organization that was later temporarily banned from campus.’”

But have no fear: the Great Write will ride to her rescue:  Yesterday, the Federal District Court in Vermont, refused to dismiss her habeas petition and ordered her returned to Vermont from where the government kidnapped her in violation of an earlier court order.

The Court considered a number of statutes added by bent Republicans and clueless Democrats that strip Federal Courts of power to entertain habeas petitions from noncitizens embroiled in immigration enforcement and concluded that none of them barred a constitutional challenge to Öztürk's arrest and removal to Louisiana. 

Cue fife and drum corps.

Not so fast.  First there is no guarantee that the Pol Potbelly regime will comply with the District Court's order.  It will undoubtedly appeal on an “emergency” basis first to the Second Circuit (which will likely not entertain Illegally Blonde Pam's drivel very long) and then to the Supreme Court which will....  Your guess is as good as ours.

Even more disturbing, even if by some miracle the body-snatchers comply with the Court's orders and send her back to detention in Vermont, she will not be released.

Instead, the Government will continue removal proceedings, including as noted above, the denial of bond already decided by the immigration “judge” from the swamps.

...Well, maybe not

This time, the body snatchers will argue that Federal Court in Vermont is powerless to free her, because federal law strips real Federal Courts of authority over the detention of individuals incident to removal proceedings, like her.

Can this be true?

It can. Thanks to the wonderfully bipartisan efforts of the Clinton Administration and Newt Gingrich's bent Republican House, in 1996, the following provision was added:

“The Attorney General’s discretionary judgment regarding the application of this section shall not be subject to review. No court may set aside any action or decision by the Attorney General under this section regarding the detention of any alien or the revocation or denial of bond or parole.” [8 USC] § 1226(e).

So much for habeas review of lawless determinations to keep innocents like Öztürk from being locked up on the basis of college newspaper articles they wrote.  

But statutes purporting to prohibit resort to the Great Writ have to pass constitutional muster.  The Supreme Court, in reviewing a previous Republican administration to disappear persons into night and fog on the grounds that they were “terrorists,” said the statutory remedy must be effective:

At the outset, the Court acknowledges that the Suspension Clause does not establish an absolute right to seek the writ of  habeas corpus. The Supreme Court has held that Congress may modify or eliminate the right to seek the writ if Congress provides “a collateral remedy which is neither inadequate nor ineffective to test the legality of a person’s detention.” ... If such a substitute is crafted by Congress, courts must then determine “whether the statute stripping jurisdiction to issue the writ avoids the Suspension Clause mandate because Congress has provided adequate substitute procedures for habeas corpus.” ... (quoting Boumediene v. Bush, 553 U.S. 723, 771 (2008)).

Ozturk v. Trump, No. 2:25-cv-374 (D. Vt. Apr. 18, 2025) (slip op. at 33-34) .

(Fun fact: over 95% of the people whom Bush and Cheney said were the world's worst terrorists have been released without any apparent harm to anyone.)

When Ms. Öztürk was denied release by that so-called judge in Louisiana on the basis of nothing but a naked assertion by the body-snatchers and her student newspaper submission, do you think she got an effective remedy which protected her constitutional rights, including her First Amendment right to free speech?

Us neither. Which is why the Vermont Court should order not only order her returned to Vermont, but release her because the immigration court was not, at least in her case, an effective alternative to habeas and thus unconstitutional under the Suspension Clause.

What the bent Supreme Court would say is anyone’s guess. All the lower courts can do is try to prop up the rule of law for as long as they can.

In the battle between The Great Writ v. The Great S***, the outcome is very much in doubt. 

If the Supreme Court eventually rubber-stamps lawless and fact-free decisions of DOJ employees in the back bayous of Louisiana, the only wispy remainder of our liberty left will be a bunch of cosplayers at the Rude Bridge advancing through the streets of Concord and Lexington until they reach the Mass. Ave. Dunkin' Donuts.

Happy Patriot's Day!  

A Passover Report from the Middle East: Bombs Away!

 

By Hebraic Affairs Editor A. Cahan with Military Editor Douglass MacArthur

With the economy and democracy itself in the United States on the verge of collapse, it’s sometimes hard to keep up with what’s going on in the rest of the world.

It’s not good.

The world has apparently forgotten that since the Hamas terror attack of October 7, 2023 which killed 1,139 Israelis, most civilians, and took another 250 hostage, Israel and Hamas have been embroiled in a war in Gaza that has so far killed over 50,000 Gazans, again mostly civilian, and left over 2,000,000 people homeless, traumatized, and starving.

While most living hostages have been released in exchange for the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners, at least 24 Israelis are thought to be still living in increasingly dire captivity. Just like the remaining civilian population of Gaza.

Gaza 2025: it's no worse than...

After the wholly-intentional collapse of the interim cease fire, Israeli forces have returned to Gaza, unleashing fresh waves of death and destruction. To give you a taste of the enormity of the violence, here’s one day’s summary of events from The Guardian:

• At least 29 Palestinians, including children, were killed on Wednesday from an Israeli strike in the Shujaiya area of Gaza City, local health authorities said. Medics said dozens of others were injured in the attack that hit a multi-floor residential building in the eastern suburb of Gaza City. They said many were still believed to be missing and trapped under the ruins of the building. The strike damaged several other houses nearby....
• The Israeli military said in a statement it struck a senior Hamas militant responsible for planning and executing attacks from Shujaiya in northern Gaza, whom it did not identify. ....The Gaza health ministry said on Wednesday that at least 1,482 Palestinians have been killed since Israel resumed intense strikes on the Gaza Strip on 18 March, taking the overall death toll since the start of the war to 50,846....
• United Nations (UN) secretary general António Guterres said on Tuesday that Gaza had become “a killing field” because Israel has continued to block aid, an accusation an Israeli official quickly denied, saying there was “no shortage” of aid. “More than an entire month has passed without a drop of aid into Gaza. No food. No fuel. No medicine. ...,” Guterres said in remarks to journalists. Six weeks since Israel completely cut off all supplies to the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip, food stockpiled during a ceasefire at the start of the year has all but run out. “All basic supplies are running out,” said Juliette Touma from ....Unrwa. She said: “Every day without these basic supplies, Gaza inches closer towards very, very deep hunger.” ...
• The mother of an Israeli soldier held hostage in Gaza told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that she fears that Israel’s renewed bombardment of the territory puts his life at even greater risk. “Our children are in danger,” Herut Nimrodi told AFP during an interview. Her son, Tamir, who turned 20 in captivity, is one of 24 hostages believed to be alive, though no proof of life has been sent since his abduction. . . .

And if there’s one certainty in the Middle East, tomorrow will be worse.

Without justifying or excusing the horrific October 7 attack (unlike some of our former friends), we focus today on the continuing carnage and destruction being carried out by Israel Defense Forces at the direction of President for Life Bibi “Melech” Netanyahu and with the connivance of US President Pol Potbelly, whose sadistic love of pain and torment is too well known to require extensive recapitulation. Just ask E. Jean Carroll.

As the Guardian summary notes, Israel has been blocking all humanitarian aid, including stuff like food, from entering Gaza for over a month to put pressure on Hamas. Israel claims that this is no biggie because Gaza has plenty of food and Hamas is stealing it anyway.

The aid organizations on the ground report hunger and scarcity. And if Hamas is stealing the food, then blocking aid won’t put pressure on them, will it? It will just increase suffering and starvation.

If the starvation and bombing weren’t bad and illegal enough, Israel is continuing to order hundreds of thousands of Gazans to leave what's left of their homes again and again supposedly to help them hunt down Hamas, an activity they have not succeeded at over the past 18 months.

The Israelis claim that Hamas embeds itself with the civilian population, which to the Israeli apparently justifies any level of violence in Gaza no matter how many civilians die. How it justifies attacking marked ambulances with lights flashing is another question that has given even Israel pause.

The endless assault on civilians has many Israelis, including veterans of its air force, wondering if the purpose of these attacks is actually to destroy Hamas, a legitimate military target, or something else:

And the hostages themselves:

The go-back-to-Gaza gibe demonstrates that the hostage-based justification for endless war is but a pretext.  Many fear that Israel’s real goal is to force the civilian population of Gaza to leave, although they have no place to go. This goal is shared by the corrupt demented Russian-owned stooge currently serving as President of the United States:

Mr. Netanyahu and his government say they are serious about [Trump’s] idea but emphasize that they are speaking about facilitating the “voluntary” migration of Palestinians, in an apparent attempt to avoid any suggestion of ethnic cleansing. Critics say that it would hardly be voluntary if Gazans left, regardless, given that so many of their homes have been smashed to rubble.

Those critics, always carping about something.

While Israelis robustly debate the value of continued civilian carnage in Gaza, American Jews are supposed to fall into line and parrot only extremist Likud talking points.

The chief rabbi of the large mainstream Conservative synagogue in St. Louis, B’nai Amoona, has said “there do not appear to be any ‘innocent civilians’ in Gaza.”

There also does not appear to be any connection between this monstrous rationalization for indifference to civilian death and suffering and Jewish values. That didn't seem to bother his devout halachic congregants much:

But the incident also reveals the extent to which remarks like Abraham’s have become accepted in the range of Jewish discourse. B’nai Amoona’s president backed the rabbi publicly and in a message to congregants, and while Abraham took down the post at the president’s behest, he did not disavow its contents in subsequent statements to the congregation and to the Forward. 

A slightly more sophisticated apologia for depraved indifference to the lives of Gazans civilians comes from those of the Jewish persuasion arguing that what Israel is doing is no worse than what we did to Germany in World War II:when our bombs (and British ones) killed and injured plenty of German civilians.  A column by the reliably-loathsome Bretbug in The New York Times last year argued that we should not worry about the death toll of Gaza civilians because, as with the bombings of World War II, the underlying conflict was “existential.”

...the bombing of Dresden!  So that's OK then!

That's not how the international law of war works.  But without even comparing and contrasting the bombing campaigns of the U.S. and Britain in World War II and that of Israel in Gaza today, we have to raise one simple question:  What the f*** difference does it make?

We can debate similarities and differences between historical events.  We can even point out that after V-E Day America reconstituted Germany as an independent state, without any American settlers stealing German land.  We can also point out that no one has ever asserted that Roosevelt prolonged World War II to remain in power and avoid punishment for his many crimes.  And as others have said, if the best defense of Israel's campaign in Gaza is that it is no worse than Dresden, that's not too terrific.

But it is no answer to Israel's callous indifference to civilian life as evidenced by its endless and brutal war on Gaza that maybe it resembles the Punic War.  Israel's brutal, if not sadistic, conduct has to be judged on the basis of our current understanding of law and morality, including the postwar Geneva Conventions on the rights of noncombatants.

The reality is that Israel's indifference, and that of American Jewish leaders, to the suffering of Gaza's civilians is both immoral and contrary to Jewish law and values, according to the liberal Zionist group J Street:

We strongly oppose the decision by Prime Minister Netanyahu to reignite this horrific war. This decision flies in the face of pleas from freed Israeli hostages, families of those still held in Gaza and top Israeli security experts. It will put every remaining hostage’s life at risk while thrusting families in Gaza back into the crossfire of a brutal war which has killed far too many.

Endless war and an endless siege will not be effective in freeing the hostages or making Israel safer. Every day, renewed fighting puts more lives in danger, empowers extremists and isolates Israel further from global support – including among Jews worldwide. 

But you don't have to take it from a liberal Jewish lobbying group. There's higher authority, as some of you may have heard last night at Seder:

Our rabbis taught: When the Egyptian armies were drowning in the sea, the Heavenly Hosts broke out in songs of jubilation.  God silenced them and said, “My creatures are perishing and you sing praises?”....Our rabbis taught: God is urgent about justice, for upon justice the world depends....

CCAR Passover Haggadah at 48-49 (quoting Talmud).

And those Egyptians were armed combatants, not mothers and babies crushed under hundreds of tons of rubble. 

The resumed brutal war in Gaza is existential all right: it is a war over the existence of Judaism as a moral force in the world.

The battle is not going well.

A self-destructive war started for no good reason? Who could have seen that coming?

By Finance Editor Samuel Insull with Meta-content Generator A.J. Liebling

By now, we are all aware that the actions of one corrupt depraved demented Russian-owned stooge have destroyed the global economy, sent the United States spiraling downwards into the first period of stagflation since the oil shocks of the 1970’s, and wiped out trillions of dollars of shareholder value.

Gripped by a strange vindictive lust to tank an economy that was on January 20, 2025 the envy of the world, the Tangerine-Faced Fascist decided to impose ridiculously random punitive tariffs on the entire civilized world, and even some places where civilization hasn’t reached, like the Heard Islands, which are inhabited only by penguins who apparently are living huge from ripping off US workers, and catching fish in the chilly waters of the sub-Antarctic ocean.

The penguin enemies will not replace us

It’s hard to find anyone who supports this insane self-immolation other than the usual gang of Republican grifters, plug-uglies and otherwise unemployable shills, hacks and weirdos.

And even supposedly stalwart Republicans are having trouble swallowing the s*** smorgasbord. The insanely reactionary, pro-greed anti-worker Wall Street Journal Editorial Page on Wednesday issued a scathing critique of President Donald Trump’s so-called Liberation Day announcement vowing sweeping new tariffs on countries worldwide:

In a sharply worded editorial headlined “Trump’s New Protectionist Age,” the newspaper’s conservative board warned of multiple ways the tariffs could backfire on Trump that the president “isn’t advertising.”

The board pointed to a range of possible repercussions, including potential retaliation from foreign governments, higher prices for American consumers, economic pain for U.S. exporters, and “the end of U.S. economic leadership.”

The Petersen Institute, founded by reactionary plutocrat Pete Petersen to advocate fearlessly for tax cuts for the rich and starvation for the poor said: 

The always wrong and always screaming stock tout and former Crimson Editor Jim Cramer ‘77 admitted for once he was played for a schmuck:

Source: CNN Business

If you feel like a sucker Jim, imagine how all those people who ever took you seriously feel? All 28 of them.

The Atlantic, run by well known chat room participant Jeffrey Goldberg, has editorialized against tariffs, noting:

Michael Cembalest, the widely read analyst at JP Morgan Wealth Management, wrote that the White House announcement “borders on twilight zone territory.”

Former Republican White House functionary David Frum slammed the tariffs (in Goldberg's esteemed pubulication) and invited his fellow Canadians to take up smuggling.

And our Wonderful Republican Ally Billy Kristol said:

Source: The Bulwark

We'll get back to destruction in the name of liberation shortly.

It turns out that the basis for these inflationary and job-killing tariffs was even stupider than the most severe critic could have imagined. The tariff rates were calculated by an AI bot that divided the US trade deficit with say the Falkland Islands by the total exports to the US from that territory. This of course principally disadvantaged poor countries who export to the US but are too poor to buy our iPhones and remakes of “Snow White,” like Madagascar. That’s not a rip-off; that’s global inequality on parade.

Let Paul Krugman, who won a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on global trade, explain it:

So what do we know about how the Trumpists arrived at their tariff plan? Trump claimed that the tariff rates imposed on different countries reflected their policies, but James Surowiecki soon noted that the tariffs applied to each country appeared to be derived from a crude formula based on the U.S. trade deficit with that country. Trump officials denied this, while at the same time the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released a note confirming Surowiecki’s guess.

The stupidity is one point but the real point is the fecklessness.  The Tangerine-Faced Grifter and his spineless Republican toadies don't care how tariffs are calculated.  They only care about flaunting the power to impose them and their corrupt desire to trade exemptions for personal gain. 

But perhaps the most absurd complaints are from those who claim they never saw this coming:

following Trump's unveiling of what some said were larger-than-anticipated tariffs - and in the midst of the market selloff that followed - many of the same individuals said their main takeaway was a sense of heightened risk and plenty of unanswered questions.

"This is bigger than I expected; bigger than anyone really expected," said Mark Spindel, chief investment officer of Potomac River Capital. "And the market is reacting accordingly." 

These Masters of the Universe sure surprise easily.

Some have pointed out correctly that the Tangerine-Faced Destroyer had repeatedly promised tariffs during the campaign, so his decision to do what he promised should hardly have come as a surprise.

But there's another reason not to be gobsmacked by Republican efforts to blow up the world for vanity and sadism gratification.

We'd remind you that the previously Republican President, an alcohol-demented ne'er-do-well and nepo baby named George W. Bush did the same thing just over twenty years ago.

Idiot Republican going to war for no reason?
Who saw that coming?

Without any credible justification and accompanied by lies and smears of anyone who dared question his idiotic decision, he took his country into a pointless and bloody war of choice against  a country that posed no threat to the United States.  Unlike the Heard Islands, it was full of people, 400,000 of whom subsequently died to appease the vanity of George Bush and his band of bros. 

Like the Tariff War of 2025, the Iraq War alienated our allies, emboldened our enemies, cost our country over $2 trillion and accomplished nothing.  And that's even before getting to the torture and war crimes which the Bush Administration claimed it had the authority to impose under its theory of an all-powerful Executive.

Sound familiar?

Funny how those inveighing against the insanity and futility of the Tariff War supported the equally stupid and futile misadventure in Iraq. 

Frum, Goldberg, Kristol: all Iraq warmongers.

Now they are supposedly our friends, having failed to reckon with or apologize for their previous embrace of imperial Republican sanity (Frum being an exception).

We're beginning to wonder if the Republican playbook – heavy on grandiose and violent conceptions of an all-powerful Executive unchained by petty things like law and morality – hasn't changed much since the invasion of Cambodia (R. Nixon, 1970).

In fact, both the Iraq and Tariff Wars suggest that the long-standing Republican conception of tyrannical unchecked Executive power is fatally flawed.   

Which is why the only ones surprised were the Republican flacks and plutocrats who bought into it until it bit them in the face.

What's the Matter With Boys Today?

 

By Eric Stratton, M.D., Spy Man Correspondent

Below our office today a line of dorks waits for hours in the cold March wind for a store to open. A few are women, but about 80% appear to be men. What are they doing on the mean streets on a weekday morning?

They’re not working. They’re not in class. They’re not studying. They’re not performing acts of tikkun olam.

They are waiting for the release of a new deck of Pokemon cards.

This got us to thinking about all the noise we hear about the plight of young men.

What’s wrong with men? Pretty much everything, apparently. A recent television series about a 13-year-old boy who stabs a young woman has led the worriers at the Guardian to bemoan the misogyny and cruelty of boys:

Dr Stephanie Wescott, like Schulz, has been researching misogyny in schools for some time. ... With the advent of [the television series] Adolescence, she says, “I feel now the conversation has caught up to the scope of the problem. I feel we do need to be a little bit alarmist here, because what is happening is alarming.”

Research released by Wescott last year, based on qualitative interviews with 30 female teachers, found that sexism – long identified in research on schools – endures still, “resurrected in part by the ubiquity and influence of one specific misogynist ‘manfluencer’, Andrew Tate”. An anonymous online survey of more than 130 South Australian teachers conducted by Schulz last year found teachers identifying a “heightened use of misogynistic language and behaviours by male students, some as young as five”.

As any teenager might say: “Ew. Gross.”

The same article notes that disgusting misogyny among boys is nothing new:

Prof Michael Salter...says, it is not young men, it’s older men. “The idea that young men today are more misogynistic than they were 20 or 30 years ago, I don’t see any evidence for this.” Salter recalls his own primary and high school years, where sexual harassment was rife and normalised. The average age of sexual harassment of girls is prepubescent, he says, and “that’s been the case for decades”.

Now every man was once a teenage boy and if they are being honest they will admit that saying and thinking revolting things about their female contemporaries is not new.

So what is new, other than the unfortunate fact that boys today can immortalize their awful views on social media?

This is the specimen Donald Trump rescued from justice

One answer lies in the quote itself. The ubiquity of hateful anti-woman creeps like Andrew Tate may lead boys to think that such vile conduct is what society expects from young men.

For those of you living in innocence, Andrew Tate is an avatar of sexual violence against women. As Moira Donegan explains:

There are so many allegations of sexual abuse and violence by the misogynist mega-influencer Andrew Tate that it can be difficult to keep track of them all. ...[In 2016, ] Tate was kicked off [a reality] show after producers became aware that he was under police investigation for sexual assault and rape following a 2015 arrest. (Tate denies wrongdoing.)

But after being kicked off of TV, Tate had another career to fall back on: that of a pimp. For some years, Tate has been running an online business in which he collects the earnings of women who perform webcam pornography. ...he has amassed a staggering number of followers – almost 11 million on Elon Musk’s X alone – including a large and growing proportion of young boys.

Who would have anything to do with a specimen like this? Hint: he is a tangerine-faced Russian-owned sex offender and traitor:

Andrew Tate is now a free man. The rightwing anti-woman influencer landed in Florida last week after being held detained for over two years in Romania on rape, sex trafficking and money laundering charges. The Romanian courts abruptly reversed their previous refusal to allow Tate to leave the country after several high-level Trump administration officials took an interest in his case – including Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr, who called Tate’s arrest in Romania “absolute insanity”. The Romanian foreign minister, Emil Hurezeanu, was reportedly approached by a Trump envoy about Tate’s case at a security conference in Munich in February; Tate arrived in the US within weeks. When asked if Trump had played a role in Tate and his brother’s release, the Tates’ lawyer Joseph McBride said: “Do the math. These guys are on the plane.”

So if the question is where young men got the idea that scum like Tate are admirable and indeed role models, the answer seems tolerably clear: they got it from the President of the United States and his flacks and shills.

Indeed, when a 13-year-old boy sees a man who has admitted to sexual abuse, who has been found guilty in court of committing sexual assault, who has been accused by 25 women of sexual abuse or harassment, and who boasts of palling around with a trafficker of underage girls, and that man is elected President in spite of this appalling record, why shouldn’t that boy think that treating women with cruelty and contempt is now the American norm? And when a majority of white women vote for a sexual predator, what conclusion does a young man draw about whether such views are acceptable and normal?

I mean what young man isn't influenced by inept Trump mouthpiece Alina Habba:

Of course, the usual gang of Republican hacks and shills can’t admit that they and their fellow Republicans are to blame for the wretched behavior of young men. They blame, wait for it,... Both Sides.  

For many progressives, weary from a pileup of male misconduct, the refusal to engage with men’s feelings has now become almost a point of principle. For every right-wing tough guy urging his crying son to “man up,” there’s a voice from the left telling him that to express his concerns is to take airtime away from a woman or someone more marginalized. The two are not morally equivalent, but to boys, the impact can often feel similar. In many cases, the same people who are urging boys and men to become more emotionally expressive are also taking a moral stand against hearing how they actually feel. For many boys, it can seem as though their emotions get dismissed by both sides. This political isolation has combined with existing masculine norms to push a worrying number of boys into a kind of resentful, semi-politicized reclusion. 

You'll be shocked to learn that this horses*** appeared in the Opinion section of The New York Times.

Here on Planet Earth, have you ever heard of a progressive refusing to engage with men's feelings or telling them not to express their concerns?  Well, maybe if their concerns involve the desirability of raping and pimping out women.  But if their concerns involve a lack of good-paying jobs and health care, we'd submit that progressives have been responding for decades to such concerns.

(By the way, it is a standard trope of right wing disingenuousness to pass off entirely justified shock and outrage at expressions of bigotry and misogyny, however crude, as intolerance of conservative “ideas.”)

We're progressive.  And we're going to respond honestly to the concerns of sad young men living in their mom's basements playing video games and whining about how they can't find a date.

Here's our response.

• Get out of your mom's basement.
• Go to school, whether college or vocational school.
• Get a real job.
• Stop listening to ass**** telling you that the party of plutocracy and racism has your best interests at heart.
• Try not to whack off more than four times a day.
• If you're having trouble meeting women, volunteer at an animal shelter.  

We are reliably informed that there are very many women out there who may be interested in young men who work or study, are able to carry on a conversation without references to the pride of Newton South, Joe Rogan, and exhibit some morsel of kindness and caring for others, including cats and dogs. 

Will it work?

Hell, nothing is sure in this vale of tears. But it sure beats waiting for three hours in the freezing cold outside a GameStop for a deck of Pokemon cards.

Dems in Dis - array? -grace? -function? You make the call!

By Washington Correspondent Nellie Bly with Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling 

It's been a reliable media standby for over half a century.  Sometimes it was true:

 

but most times it wasn't:

Which is it this time?  We'll go with Too Soon To Tell.

For those of you just awakening from your coma, we'll remind you that American Government is being actively subverted and destroyed by the regime of a bent corrupt Russian-owned bigoted demented sex criminal.

You would have thought that in response to this outrage, Democrats would quickly and uniformly coalesce around adamant and total opposition.

And if you put a honeybee on that at +140, you lost!

Very many Democrats have responded to this crisis of democracy as if they had been pithed:

 Source: NBC News

Sure, as the panzers sweep across the Meuse and toward the channel, why not call for unity with the Wehrmacht?  It worked out great for the French.

How did that bipartisanship work out for “Hot Mess” Klobuchar?

Judging by what happened one hour after that beautiful bipartisan moment, we'd say not great.

The struggle between the collaborators and the resisters came to a head last week, when Democrats failed to block a bent Republican resolution to fund the government, with added sprinkles of racism (not letting DC spend its own money) and subversion (letting Apartheid Leon move appropriated dollars around according to his whim and ketamine dosage).

The resisters have demanded the head of Pops Schumer, who orchestrated the armistice by leading enough Senate Democrats to join Republicans in letting the funding bill proceed to a vote.  

Schumer and his apologists attempted to paint the craven surrender as protecting Democrats from being blamed for a government shutdown.  In fact the Fifth Column Democrats had orchestrated those bad options by not uniting around a demand for a clean resolution that didn't screw DC and didn't give Apartheid Leon a roving commission to blow up any government he chose while the demented nominal President busied himself signing orders he didn't read or understand, like Gov. Lepetomaine.

Imagine if Democrats had posed the choice in that manner, which would have placed the blame for any shutdown on Republican whackjobs and Trump taint polishers.  Schumer admitted to being terrified that the Tangerine-Faced Traitor might be content to keep the government closed for many months, even if that meant letting Social Security recipients starve to death.

We doubt it.

We'll submit that the debate over whether it's time for Pops Schumer to join the condo board at Glades of Del Boca Vista West II isn't the right one to have.

The right debate is how to oppose the continuing Republican assault on democratic government and the rule of law.

Let's start with a general principle articulated by our old buddy Lord Randolph Spencer Churchill (Winston's dad): “The duty of an opposition is to oppose.” 

It worked out pretty well for Winston.  Maybe the Democrats should try it.

We submit that it's more important to decide on resolute opposition than to fight about who will do the opposing.  The time wasted on trying to crowbar Pops Schumer out of his position could be better spent on crafting and delivering a unified opposition message.

The Vichy Democrats usually interpose two objections to the strategy of opposition.  Neither persuades.

They argue that public opinion is with the Tangerine-Faced Traitor as evidenced by his 1.5% electoral plurality and various polls purporting to show that majorities of voters approve of some of his evil plans.

California Gov. and former Kimberly Gilfoyle spouse Gavin Newsom has argued that Democrats should bow to public opinion trending against allowing trans kids to play sports, a problem that has thus far had no effect on 99.9% of athletic teams and gotten almost no traction with the cis athletes who are the supposed victims.

Of course this policy just represents licensed cruelty against almost all trans kids, like Rebekah here who wants to play field hockey with her friends without submitting to genital inspection:

You can meet her here.

Besides the transparent gratuitous cruelty, Newsom's pandering to supposed public opinion constitutes a path to failure.  Given the choice between the party that offers unlimited happy hour doubles of transphobia and the one that serves up diluted transphobic spritzers, who are bigots going to choose?  And what will happen to the Democrats who think that tormenting teenage trans girls is horrible? Will they say, “The hell with it; I'll be happy to abandon my principles because someone who used to bang Kimberly Gilfoyle tells me to?”  We doubt it.  

We think they'll be alienated and susceptible to the song of third party sirens.  And we know what happens to those who chase after that song. 

But there's a deeper error here.  Public opinion is not an immovable mountain. It can be molded and changed by what we do and say.  Just ask Ukrainian Prime Minister Zelenskyy.  He used to be popular among Republicans.  Then his favorability dropped 42 points. Gee, what happened?

Chasing public opinion without trying to influence it is the political equivalent of what in football used to be called the prevent offense.  It can't ever work.

A second equally specious argument against total opposition to the Republican attack on America is that Democrats must “pick and choose” battles.

Why?  That advice works when you want to coexist in some sort of harmony, like marriage or work or raising children.  Who give a f*** about harmony with Republicans?

Dems, listen to Churchill!  This one.

Republicans sure didn't follow that policy in opposing every single thing the last three Democratic Presidents did.  They didn't feel they had to compromise or work with Democrats on any issue.  They simply screamed about every Democratic initiative, from universal health care to fostering equal opportunity to preserving the Earth to blocking Democrats from filling judicial vacancies.  Why didn't they have to pick and choose? 

The argument against picking battles is more than tit for tat.  For example, the battle-choosers start by throwing the most vulnerable overboard, like Rebekah, in favor of various unnamed economic issues, which usually turn out to be the pet causes of Vichy Democrats (balanced budget, anyone?).  That's both wrong and counterproductive.

Second, it muddies the waters.  If the public is told by Democrats that lots of stuff the Republicans want to do isn't so bad, who can complain if they believe it?

Why don't Democrats as part of a campaign of total opposition tie every single thing the Republicans want to foist on us to a few simple principles:

1.  Allowing a ketamine-demented plutocrat to rampage through the Government proves you can't trust Republicans to govern or to protect your interests.

 2.  Republicans are too cowardly to oppose their demented criminal President and protect our Constitution.

3. As for immigration and minority rights, we don't need lectures on violent criminals from the felon who pardoned 1,500 violent insurrectionists or lectures on protecting girls from the threat of  trans field hockey players from the guy who was found to have raped a woman and boasted about spying on undressed underaged girls in their beauty-contest dressing room.

4.  Republicans are destroying jobs and economic growth by imposing tariffs, killing jobs, and borrowing $4 trillion to pay for tax cuts for the rich.

5.  Republicans are subverting US national security with insanity like threatening our allies and sucking up to Vladimir Putin.

That's five points.  Even Pops Schumer can hold on to five talking points.

Is this hard?

Will it work?  Why not give it a try?  At worst, Democrats will shore up their progressive base and get them excited about the midterms.

It might even move public opinion in favor of Democrats.

It's worked before:

The state of mind of Democrats after the 2004 election was not good. The party remained divided between those who had supported and opposed Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Beyond that, Democrats were on the defensive after 9/11, fearful of perceptions they were weak on terrorism specifically and national security generally. ...

As we now know, the sense of Republican strength and Democratic weakness that was so pervasive on Election Night 2004 was ephemeral. Within months, Bush gave Democrats a unifying issue with his clumsy, immediately unsuccessful efforts to “reform” Social Security. His Iraq war became an increasingly unpopular quagmire. His administration’s feckless handling of the Katrina catastrophe on the Gulf Coast became a symbol of an administration that seemed inept and heartless both at home and abroad. 

This isn't hard, Democrats.  And as bad as things were under Bush Minimus, they are a hundred times worse now.  

That ought to scare Democrats into array.