Suckers

Never give a sucker an even break.

— W.C. Fields

Broke, Trump is fleecing the dopes who worship him.

Don't be deceived. 

The challenge to President-elect Biden is all about Trump's pockets.

POSTSCRIPT, NOVEMBER 15: Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen has predicted the windbag will soon flee Washington and start the "Trump Network." I predict he will flee not to Mar-a-Lago, but Moscow.

Shot Heard Round the World

Drugmaker Pfizer announced today it has developed an effective vaccine against Covid-19.

Despite the good news, public health officials are insisting that anti-vaxxers, by refusing the new vaccine, are likely to weaken its role as a safeguard.

In only 10 months, Covid-19 has infected 50.5 million people, and killed over 1.25 million. 

The new vaccine could cut the number of infections by 90%, according to Pfizer.

But not if anti-vaxxers—estimated at 7% of the world's population—get in the way.

Anti-vaxxers have tried to sabotage vaccines before.

In 1956, the influential newspaper, television and radio columnist Walter Winchell told audiences—inaccurately—that Dr. Jonas Salk's new polio vaccine was a "killer" because it contained a live strain of the disease.

To rescue the truth, Elvis Presley agreed to be inoculated in public.

On Sunday, October 28, backstage before his second appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show," Elvis posed for the cameras while two New York City health care officials gave him a shot of Salk's new vaccine.

Americans witnessed, close up, that the King was no anti-vaxxer, and agreed, right then and there, they wouldn't be, either. 

Thanks to Elvis' stunt, vaccine adoption rates surged, polio contraction rates plummeted, and polio outbreaks—once the scourge of every American summer—soon faded from memory.

Repudiation

This summer, I volunteered to help a primary-election challenger to one of Delaware's two Democratic senators. 

The experience reminded me why I don't fit into the unworldly organizations run by progressives. The longer I had a view into the candidate's, the faster darkened my view of her chances of winning. 

No sucker for lost causes, four weeks out from the primary, I quit.

The trouble with the campaign, as I saw it, was two-fold:

• The candidate. Cast in the image of AOC, she was a bright, brassy outsider who championed progressive talk. But she had no strategy for getting elected and put most of her efforts into landing endorsements from disgruntled community organizers and sketchy, far-left websites.
  
  
• The staff. All twenty-somethings, the campaign staffers were sincere, but overbearing, and lacked all understanding of Delaware's centrist electorate. 

Neither the candidate's nor her staff's enthusiasm contributed much in the end. 

She captured only 27 percent of Democrats' votes in the primary—a measurably worse showing than that of the progressive candidate for the Senate in the 2018 primary. Her campaign was deemed by the media to be a flop and a death toll for the progressive movement in Delaware.

Democrats everywhere should heed the lesson: lean center.

Despite Biden's victory, last week's election was another consummate flop, failing to capture the US Senate for Democrats and dramatically thinning the party's majority in the US House of Representatives. It also left statehouses around the country in GOP hands.

Prudently, House leaders are warning fellow Democrats to shun leftist messages. “If we are going to run on Medicare for All, defund the police, and socialized medicine, we’re not going to win,” Rep. Jim Clyburn said on a phone call Thursday.

And so are pundits. "This election for the most part was an absolute repudiation of the Democratic Party as a brand," MSNBC's Joe Scarborough told Fox News yesterday.

How Can They Believe This Crap? Episode V

Fifth in a series wondering why Trump still has adherents

In Episode I, I suggested Trump's supporters have been brainwashed by their betters; in Episode II, that they simply find him entertaining; in Episode III, that they sympathize with him; in Episode IV, that they believe he's a useful idiot.

I have one more theory.

The 70 million Americans who voted for Trump this week don't believe in Trump, because they don't believe in anything.

Like Trump, they're narcissistic solipsists. They believe nothing exists outside their own minds.

NOTE: It's tempting to ask. "What's wrong with America?" But realize only 2 in 10 Americans voted for Trump. The rest of the population—80% of Americans—did not. 

You Cannot Download Experience

 

We event dinosaurs—who've witnessed and dealt with the long- and short-term effects on face-to-face marketing of recessions, travel-bans, terrorism, pandemics and the web—are frustrated by the industry's vivid demonstration of inaction and incompetence in reacting to Covid-19.

Experience stems from bad judgments. 

But in a youth-oriented, know-it-all society like ours, the lessons learned from bad judgments made in the past are considered trivial; and the dinosaurs who made them, annoying.

It's too bad you cannot download experience with a click.