Texas Progressives post-election Roundup: Some bemoan, others are more realistic, detached and more

There IS a Texas Progressives Roundup in this corner this week, even if Charles Kuffner, still in a state of shellshock at Off the Kuff over missed predictions at the state level, isn't initiating it. I know I got the national results wrong in my prediction, and have no problem admitting it, even without Brains dropping in — though he got his response back. (Speaking of, him quitting the Roundup rather than editing what Kuff sent and adding his own material, which I had been doing months, if not a full year or more, before Brains left? OK.)

That said, I'll lead. I offer an early post-mortem (with other things being posted this week) while also focusing on non-duopoly issues, including a big win for the Green Party in Texas, and what also appears to be an implosion, not just here in Texas, but elsewhere, for the Libertarian Party. (I will have a follow-up when we have nationwide popular vote totals for third and minor parties as well as the two duopoly parties.)

The Trib looks at why Texas Dems underperformed again.

At the Observer, Gus Bova talks about "a lost decade"when it's actually been two now, and never mentions Hinojosa's name. True, it was a day before his resignation, but he's still the guy at fault.

That underperformance went beyond statewide races and the GOP gaining a couple of state House seats. Republicans won 25 of 26 contested appeals court races. The Observer looks at the PAC money behind this almost-sweep.

And, Trump took a majority of Latino votes. He even took 14 of 18 border counties. Bova looks at that, too, and manages to mention Hinojosa once, but without attaching any blame to him. In other words, the Observer largely continues to suck, and Bova as its still interim (why does he still have that tag?) editor-in-chief offers little hope for its future, IMO.

The Guardian suggests that nationally, the inflation, or inflation perception, issue was in large part due to Delaware Joe cutting off the tap too much and too quickly on COVID relief.

What happened to Colin Allred indeed?

The election, re the Texas House, did NOT eliminate Dade "Dade" Phelan from another shot at Speaker. Stay tuned.

Beside the nationwide post-election text messages to Blacks, especially men, some students at Texas State showed their own lack of enlightenment.

Texas Progressives, non political roundup

Texas A&M's regents have axed an LGBTQ+ studies minor that faculty wanted kept. I'm of multiple minds. First, this is the university that screwed Kathleen McElroy. Second, objectively, if it's low performing, then maybe it needs gone, while noting we have a short sample period. Third, given issues such as puberty blockers and "reassignment" surgery, and when appropriate and when not, wingnuts aside, maybe there was some indoctrination on the "T."

There WAS NO antisemitic pogrom in Amsterdam. There WAS the government of the Netherlands deciding to join that of the US and Israel, of course, and other longstanding liars like those of Canada and Germany. And, all of them aided and abetted by US media lies, starting with the New York Slimes.

Technically related to the election, but looking beyond it, the recently revived Border/Lines looked at what might actually play out on Trump's immigration policy. It actually looked at both Trump and Harris the day before the election, but everything it said about Trump — and about Harris and most national Democrats, for that matter, stands true. The authors note how much Dems have moved their Overton windows in the past few years, and otherwise have no actual, true "immigration policy."

Calling out other stupid Blue Anon hot takes over the election

Sounding like Ryan Grim, even though he's no longer there, per my previous post about Krystal Ball and Kyle Kulinski, The Intercept talked last Thursday about Rep. Rashida Tlaib and how she "bucked her leadership" and stood with her Dearborn constituents. First, on the presidential race in Dearborn, actually, fake dove Trump was first. Harris was third.

Jill Stein was second in Dearborn. Had Tlaib openly announced she was voting Green, THAT would have bucked her leadership. Unfortunately, Stein still finished third, but even the Intercept admits she got 15 percent there.

The reason I said this sounds like Grim even though he's no longer at The Intercept? Ryan himself is sometimes pretty good on investigative journalism, but he's a duopolist on electoral politics and slurps too much on AOC and the Squad Fraud, even in a book. He also slurped on Marianne Williamson a year ago. 

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That stupidity, though, is far short of the stupidity that says Sonia Sotomayor should resign and that Biden should pull an Amy Comey Barrett and ram somebody else in. First, even less likely to be able to pull it off. Nominal Dems Yachtsman Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema would revolt from the start.

That said, there's also stupidity within stupidity. I present this:

Want to blow Republicans’ minds?

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor retires.

President Biden appoints Kamala Harris to Sotomayor’s vacancy with a lame duck Democratic senate majority.

Supreme Court Justice Kamala Harris. pic.twitter.com/ivCRkG7eEJ

— Protect Kamala Harris ✊ (@DisavowTrump20) November 7, 2024

With my quote tweet.

Oh, fucking barf me. This is the most deluded #BlueAnon idea yet of all of 2024 — having Harris replace Sotomayor.
Damn, you people really WILL never learn. https://t.co/cDxkbsMA5C

— TheRealSocraticGadfly-I Voted Commie 🍉☢️🌻🌲🇵🇸 (@real_gadfly) November 7, 2024

First, Yachtsman Joe Manchin and Silly Sinema wouldn't support this, even if the GOP didn't otherwise obstruct it.

Second, "institutionalist" Joe Bidn would never propose it.

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Oh, here's a goodie! The shitheads at NBC, lead by top non-Madcow shithead Alex Seitz-Wald, claim that Trump won so bigly that it's actually proof Kamala and the DNC didn't fuck up but that Trump's win was inevitable.

And, Seitz-Wald IS a shithead of long standing.

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I'm still planning an actual post-mortem, but I'm going to have to wait until the #BlueAnon stupidity dies down on Shitter and elsewhere.

Librul guilt over Palestine

Abdaljawad Omar weighs in first of two pieces, at Mondoweiss. In case the "librul" doesn't tip your hat, maybe the /s that kool kids use will. Actually, it's more than snark, it's sarcasm.

After noting many possible causes for Harris' defeat, he notes that librul Democrats refuse to accept reality on Gaza as a partial cause:

But one slightly uncanny phenomenon was the fact that many liberals flocked to social media, eager to lay blame on the Palestine movement for the Democrats’ historic defeat. There some wrote vile comments accusing minorities and third-party voters of being behind the historic defeat in the presidential elections, and figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have alluded to this growing discourse on social media, where the ongoing genocide has emerged as a dominant factor in the Democratic Party’s recent loss. In her statements, AOC appears to acknowledge the relevance of the genocide to the Democrats’ defeat, yet she insists that a constellation of other factors was equally instrumental.

There you go. I've seen plenty of that on Shitter myself, made Shitter in the last few weeks by BlueAnon as much as MAGAts.

Then there's this (read the full original for more):

For these liberals, Palestine remains something peripheral, positioned at the margins of their consciousness, never a central or pressing issue. It is a reality to be acknowledged just enough to maintain the illusion of awareness. ...

In keeping Palestine “out there,” comfortably distanced, they refuse to see how this ongoing violence reverberates, how it shatters the moral architecture of the world they believe they inhabit, and how fascism returns to the imperial core with vengeance. ...

To declare that Gaza cost the Democrats the White House reveals a buried awareness of culpability. ...

In essence, the Democrats understand that their steadfast support for Israel, amid its genocidal actions in Gaza, is morally indefensible. Yet rather than face this disquieting truth or recalibrate their policies, they shift the blame outward, a gesture designed not to confront but to externalize their own failing.

There you go.

At Counterpunch, Kathleen Wallace piles on with an "I'm Sorry for your Loss" piece. She mentions Martin Niemoller, beloved of libruls, as a piece of feel-good ethics.

As for Democrats who think they own my vote? This:

I fear very much for the looming Christian Nationalism coming, but to place blame on those of us who did not give full-throated support to a genocidal campaign is to miss the point entirely. You own this shit-show, not us.

Is the bottom line, off Mondoweiss.

She adds that the loudest Democratic gnashing of teeth comes from those quietest about the genocide. She has more at her Substack, but there, has not totally done the duopoly exit, only a safe states duopoly exit.

The post-election blame game and cluelessness game, Democrat-style

The long knives started coming out, at least in private, even before polls closed Tuesday night. A lot of Obama operatives like Jim Messina had been off-put by Low-Energy Joe's campaign even before he got pushed aside. Then, when Clueless Kamala / Hollywood Harris took over, and basically, even with the problems of a short campaign, took the skeleton of Biden's campaign staff, sprinkled it with a little DNC fairy dust, went recruiting Republicans, and quite probably had a worse ground game than some #BlueAnon were alleging Trump had pre-election, that heated up.

Last Thursday, Philly DNC head Bob Brady hammered hard, and also reiterated Dementia Joe being pushed out.

Harris spox Brendan McPhillips hammered back harder:

“The Pennsylvania for Harris team knocked more than two million doors in the weekend leading up to Election Day, which is two million more doors than Bob Brady’s organization can claim to have knocked during his entire tenure as party chairman,” McPhillips wrote. “No serious person can say they have an answer to what caused nationwide trends in the electorate less than 24 hours after polls closed. If there’s any immediate takeaway from Philadelphia’s turnout this cycle, it is that Chairman Brady’s decades-long practice of fleecing campaigns for money to make up for his own lack of fundraising ability or leadership is a worthless endeavor that no future campaign should ever be forced to entertain again. The thousands of dedicated staff and volunteers on the Harris campaign should be applauded for their efforts in the face of an unprecedented campaign, and will no doubt be the ones who are going to dust themselves off and get back to work.”

Meanwhile, both Biden and Harris let more Gazans get killed, even if that wasn't a primary reason for Harris' el foldo.

Please, more of this circular firing squad. Please, enough of it that Democrats finally look at the shitty shape they're in and the self-inflicted reasons for that.

Sadly, I'll have to bet 400 quatloos that doesn't happen.

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The two alleged party leaders won't do that, either. Biden and Harris acolytes are too busy shivving each other, and their opponents' bosses by extension. 

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Chief shivver? Someone who knows how to wield it well, Nancy Pelosi. She blames Dementia Joe for not dropping out sooner, so that Harris, or whomever, could be primary-vetted.

“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race. The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary. And as I say, Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in that and been stronger going forward. But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen. We live with what happened. And because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time. If it had been much earlier, it would have been different.”

But? Why does nobody blame Delaware Joe for breaking his one-term plan (technically not a promise) in the first place?

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The Ax, David Axelrod, calling today's Dems a "smarty-pants, suburban, college-educated party"? Gee, weren't they already moving that way when your boss, Dear Leader, was in the White House?

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If I see one more Dem apologist, or national media pundit, say something to the effect of "Maybe American exceptionalism isn't totally true," I'm going to fucking barf. We leftists have always known that. And, your statements are pretendian, anyway; they're premised on "those" Merikkkans being not so noble, not you.

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Ed Buckner on the cluelessness angle, flying his freak flag. You're a secularist/atheist, and supposed to be some sort of skeptic, and you think Kamala ran a good election? AND that she was "ambiguous" on Gaza? I'd already been thinking about unsubbing, and this may have been the final straw.

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As for the future? Beyond "deep depression," Axios gets it right otherwise. A Veep who was, if not a DEI hire, someone who walked, talked and quacked halfway like one, especially after Biden promised on the campaign trail to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court? She can't be the party's leading voice and won't be. Dementia Joe won't be for obvious reasons. Dear Leader? Harris didn't listen to him; Team Biden, rightly, wrongly, or in the middle, found him and his alums to be condescending. The Slickster and Madame Hillbot? Yesterday's news, and an inflamer of the Gaza issue.

Gilberto Hinojosa walks the plank of the Texas Democrats' SS Minnow

At least for public consumption, nobody had to push the long-time executive director of the Texas Democratic Party's SS Minnow overboard; he did it on his own. As the Trib notes, the stupidity of saying Texas would break for Harris, combined with the Democratic ineptitude plus GOP inroads on the Hispanic vote being so bad that Trump won a majority of Texas Hispanics, made his position untenable. And yes, Trump ran ahead of Havana Ted Cruz, took 55 percent of Texas Hispanics (that's the term Hispanics nationally prefer, well ahead of "Latino" and WAY ahead of the laughed-at and despised "Latinx") and took 14 of 18 border counties.

His biggest failure? It's directly tied to that one failure above, and it's that Hinojosa has peddled that old "demographics is destiny" for Texas Democrats for more than a decade, as did Battleground Texas, Markos Moulitsas himself of Daily Kos and various other #BlueAnon idiots. I called bullshit back in 2013, and updated as needed. But, many Texas Dems, the type like Charles Kuffner and many who follow him at Off the Kuff, kept drinking and even peddling that Kool-Aid.

He finally faced a leadership challenge back in 2022. Sadly for the party, not only did he win, but looking ahead, both the challengers were ConservaDems of the type that make Greg Summerlin types salivate. Kim Olson, who finished No. 2, did the typical nice, polite Dem thing and didn't challenge him and fight him publicly, even as she was being anonymously shivved over an old assault allegation. No wonder he won, holding on like a South Texas jefe.

Elsewhere, the Trib looks more at this year's Texas Democrats' failures. Overall, I suspect that Texas Democrats are about as ready to learn the real lessens that are available for the learning as are national Democrats.

At the Observer, Gus Bova talks about "a lost decade"when it's actually been two now, and never mentions Hinojosa's name. True, it was a day before his resignation, but he's still the guy at fault,