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After Impeachment, Clinton Paved the Way for Trump

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Ted Rall
            The laws of political physics, it seemed, had been reversed.             The president had been exposed as a pathological liar and a serial cheater. The butt of relentless jokes on television comedy shows and online, his reputation and legacy in tatters, he endured the ultimate opprobrium a federal official can face under the American constitutional system, impeachment, as well as the worst indignity possible for a lawyer, disbarment.             The president, of course, was Bill Clinton. The year was 1998. But just when it seemed that he was doomed to slink off into the humiliation of single-digit approval ratings and Richard Nixon-esque oblivion, the opposite happened. Despite Monica Lewinsky and “it depends on the meaning of is” and impeachment, Democrats didn’t abandon him. To the contrary, they came to his defense. Senate Democrats refused to ratify impeachment with a formal conviction. Liberal voters, including many whose support for Clinton had been tepid at best, rallied around a president they…
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We Came, We Dithered, We Died

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Ted Rall
“We believe that the damage done to the ocean in the last 20 years is somewhere between 30 per cent and 50 per cent, which is a frightening figure. And this damage carries on at very high speed—to the Indian Ocean, to the Red Sea, to the Mediterranean, to the Atlantic…Everywhere around the world the coral reefs are disappearing at a very great rate, to such an extent we are not sure we will see anything like what we know now.” Jacques Cousteau wrote these words in 1971, for an New York Times op-ed titled “Our Oceans Are Dying.” No one listened. No one cared. No one did anything. So now, as Cousteau warned us would happen, our oceans are finished. More than 90% of coral reefs on Earth will be dead in the next 25 years. What if we did…something? No. Reef extinction is irreversible, even if we were to stop emitting greenhouse gases right this second. 96% of…
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Can You Vote for a Third Party? Take the Test.

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Ted Rall
            The idea that third parties are spoilers is a baseless conspiracy theory on par with the Loch Ness monster, the man on the grassy knoll, and Pizzagate. But what if you’re worried, like many Democrats, that voting for a third party like the Greens’ Cornel West or, if they ever get their act together, someone from the No Labels Party, might improve Donald Trump’s chances of returning to the White House next year?             Given just how bizarre, manic and exhausting Trump’s four years were, I don’t blame you for being paranoid. It was a rough time for Democrats, more so than under previous Republican administrations. You’re traumatized. You’ll do just about anything to stop that from happening again! (Those of us on the Actual Left, not Democrats, found Trump’s time in the White House more amusing than dispiriting. Sure, he mostly did stuff that we didn’t like. But so did Biden. Anyway, it’s not about us…not this week.)…
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Hail to the Jailbird President

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Ted Rall
            Each time Donald Trump has been indicted, his poll numbers went up—among Republican voters who closed ranks around him in response to what they decried as politically motivated “lawfare.” Now he enjoys a commanding lead for the GOP nomination.             Of course, it’s one thing to win the nomination of your party, an exercise that requires motivating the hardcore partisans who form the ideological base. To prevail in a general election, conventional wisdom says, you’ll need to appeal to moderates and swing voters. Democrats pivot right after their summer convention; Republicans don’t pivot left as much as they pull back their red meat appeals to the right.             That said, corporate media seems determined not to plumb the depths of  cluelessness-driven embarrassment they displayed in 2016, when the New York Times told readers on election morn that Hillary had an 85% chance of winning. “Trump is not only in a historically strong position for a nonincumbent to win the…
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Democrats and Republicans “Stole” Over 35,000,000 Votes From the Greens and Libertarians in 2020

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Ted Rall
Many things that everyone knows, are not true. Sometimes, quite rarely, one of those widely-believed falsehoods not only turns out not to be true, but obscures the fact that the exact opposite is true. Most people believe that small political parties siphon off votes from one of the two major parties. Mainstream media repeatedly declares, without bothering to cite evidence because their statement’s obviousness rises to the level of self-evident, that Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the 2000 election (not true) and Jill Stein sucked away enough Democratic votes from Hillary Clinton to put Donald Trump in the White House (also not true). Let us, for the purpose of this essay, set aside the usual counterarguments to the claim that you shouldn’t vote Green because they’re just spoilers: no presidential election is decided by a single vote so you can’t possibly individually change the outcome, people who don’t live in swing states have no reason to worry about tipping an…
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Biden Ghosts His Granddaughter. He’s Always Been Mean.

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Ted Rall
Joe Biden recently told a group of children that he has “six grandchildren. And I’m crazy about them. And I speak to them every single day. Not a joke.” Sounds sweet. It’s not. People who read and watch Republican-leaning news outlets have long known that the president has a seventh grandchild, the product of Hunter Biden and his former girlfriend, Lunden Roberts. Hunter, who lives at the White House with his dad, has abandoned his four-year-old daughter Navy Roberts. He has refused to have anything to do with her. Joe, her grandfather, also pretends his granddaughter doesn’t exist, as though he were Grover Cleveland in the 19th century. (Even old Grover didn’t get away with unpersoning his illegitimate baby.) Last week, the New York Times broke the liberal media’s silence on the story, shocking Democrats. Among the yucky details: Hunter went to court to block the little girl from using her father’s surname, Biden. This is serious stuff: parental abandonment…
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Democrats in Denial

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Ted Rall
            Denial is neither a river in Egypt nor just a psychological defense mechanism identified by Anna Freud, Sigmund’s daughter. It’s the guiding principle of President Biden’s reelection campaign.             Polls consistently show that the vast majority of Americans, including most Democrats, don’t want Biden to run again because they think he’s too old. This is not new information—Biden and the Democrats knew voters were concerned about his age four years ago, when they signaled his intention to be a one-term, transitional president.             Nevertheless, he decided to run again.             Two weeks after he announced his 2024 campaign, Biden’s approval rating fell to his all-time low, 36 percent in the ABC News/Washington Post poll. No president in the history of modern polling has won reelection with numbers this low at this stage in the cycle.             Yet he remained in the race.             Biden faces two challengers, neither of whom has been taken seriously by the media, run TV…
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The Funeral Dirge of Trump’s Opponents

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Ted Rall
           “Trump always gets all the coverage,” an adviser to one of Trump’s opponents tells Politico. “This is what it’s like to run against Trump.”             Poor babies! If only Trump’s rivals could do something to get attention.             Trump gets more media attention because he’s unpredictable and therefore interesting. “Listen, because you never knew what he would say, there was an attraction to put those [Trump rallies] on the air,” CNN President Jeff Zucker explained in an effort to defend the fact that his network covered more of Trump’s live appearances than Hillary Clinton’s. Ratings drive revenue. Why air Clinton’s cut-and-paste stump speeches—a campaign staple that should have remained in the 19th century—when you know bored viewers will tune away?             Memo to Hillary: you could have played the same game. If you had, you might have won.             Trump’s secret sauce is out there in plain sight. If one of his viewers wants to mount a serious challenge…
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For God’s Sake, Give Trump a Plea Deal

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Ted Rall
No one is above the law. But indicting the frontrunner for a major political party’s presidential nomination, a former president to boot, on charges with a maximum sentence of 400 years in federal prison sets the stage for a full-blown constitutional crisis. Is there some way to hold Donald Trump accountable for playing fast and loose with state and federal law, without forcing him to campaign while on trial or asking voters to head to the polls while the de facto leader of the Republican Party rots behind bars? Consider how crazy this could get. Would Club Fed pipe in wifi for the debates? Can an inaugural ceremony be held in the visiting room? Who takes that 3 a.m. crisis phone call when the felon-in-chief is sitting in stir? Biden and the Democrats fantasize about putting Trump in prison. If they calm down and think about it even for a moment, however, they should be able to see how badly…
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Still Trumped by Trump

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Ted Rall
            The problem is not that the electorate is polarized, siloed into self-reinforcing media echo chambers and mutually contemptuous — that’s the cause. The problem is that neither the partisans of the left nor those of the right can imagine themselves, for even a second, on the other side of the ideological divide.             This phenomenon is perfectly illustrated by the spectacular rise of Donald Trump’s Republican primary poll numbers, first following his indictment for business fraud by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, and then after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced his run. According to conventional (liberal) wisdom, both these events should have hurt Trump politically. What the heck, Democrats wondered, is going on with those wacky GOP voters?             Donald Trump thinks, at least he claims he does, that the deep state and the media are out to get him. Judging the long list of congressional investigations, Justice Department inquiries (which were subsequently determined to have been unjustified), multiple…
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