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| Dean Phillips |
By the time most of you read this, the New Hampshire primary will be underway. It's really not much of a primary; everybody but Niki Haley has bowed out of the GOP side, Biden is the incumbent Democrat, and Congressman Dean Phillips, (MN-D, 3rd District) is running a campaign to give Democrats an alternative to Biden.
Phillips is an interesting guy. His dad, Artie Pfefer, was killed in Vietnam when he was 6 months old. His mother, DeeDee, married Eddie Phillips (whose mother happened to be Dear Abby) when Dean was about three. Eddie adopted him, hence his surname is Phillips. But that's neither here nor there. What makes him interesting is that he's a three-term Congressclown, having beaten the incumbent GOP clown with 55% of the vote in 2018. No Dem had held that seat since 1961, so that should tell you something about him.
Like Feckless Loser, he inherited his first conglomerate, Phillips Distilling, but he didn't drive that into the ground. Not at all. As per Wikipedia,
Phillips served as the company's president and CEO from 2000 to 2012. He then stepped aside to run one of his other corporate investments, Talenti gelato, until it was sold for an undisclosed amount to Unilever in 2014. In 2016 he founded Penny's Coffee, a coffee shop chain he still owns, which has two locations in the Twin Cities metropolitan area as of 2022.
[Confession: The best Talenti flavors are Sea Salt Caramel and Pacific Coast Pistachio. And they're all OU. Just sayin.']
The guy knows how to run a business. He has a proven track record. Plus, he's 55 years old. He appears to be in good health. Is he perfect? No. Is he squeaky clean? Probably not. Am I supporting him? Not at this time. Have I thought about it? Yes.
I don't think he's undermining Biden; I think he's asking some seriously legitimate questions that need to be asked. There is no small number of voters on both sides looking for an alternative candidate. A third party candidate might be a disaster. But the right candidate might bring a wide enough swath into the voting booth to stop the fall. Can one be found? I have no idea, but it's nice someone is trying.
As long as the American public continues to drink the Kool-Aid that Biden is lousy for the economy, there may not be a viable path to salvage his campaign. So far, the only one talking loud is Feckless, and his minions don't care what he says.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and predict Feckless is gonna get another shot at the presidency. This worries me on two very different planes.
The first is that of late, he makes speeches that make no sense....the WORDS don't make sense. Two nights ago, in one of his speeches about January 6th, he consistently confused Nancy Pelosi with Nikki Haley, claiming she was the one in charge of security during the January 6th insurrection:
Nikki Haley, you know they, do you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it. All of it, because of lots of things like Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guard, whatever they want. They turned it down. They don’t want to talk about that. These are very dishonest people."
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| Twins! |
Haley was never in Congress; she was, however, his representative to the United Nations.
The gaffs are too numerous to list, but if someone doesn't begin to call this orange's mental acuity and fitness into question, then no one is doing their job. That his followers don't seem to mind that he cannot put together a cogent sentence is terrifying. Are they willing to elect a guy with obvious cognitive decline to carry the nuclear codes in his back pocket?
But Mr. Hannity, a longtime Trump ally, was apparently unsatisfied, and five minutes later, he brought up the issue again. “You are promising America tonight, you would never abuse this power as retribution against anybody?” he said.
“Except for Day 1,” Mr. Trump said breezily. There was the smallest silence. “Except for—” Mr. Hannity responded, sounding a bit flustered.
“Look,” Mr. Trump joked to the crowd watching him in Davenport, Iowa. “He’s going crazy.”
And even as Mr. Hannity tried to clarify that Mr. Trump had no intention of abusing his office, Mr. Trump did not state a clear aversion to the idea of authoritarian power.
“This guy, he says, ‘You’re not going to be a dictator, are you?’” Mr. Trump said, referring to Mr. Hannity. “I said, ‘No, no, no — other than Day 1.’ We’re closing the border. And we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.”
As we say in Minnesota, Ja, sure, you betcha you're gonna stop.
During the immunity hearing, the following exchange took place between Judge Florence Pan and Feckless Loser's attorney, D. John Sauer:
Judge Pan: I asked you a yes-or-no question. Could a president who ordered SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival, who was not impeached, would he be subject to criminal prosecution?
Attorney Sauer: Qualified yes – if he is impeached and convicted first.
With SCOTUS firmly in his pocket, his belief that he can order a hit on an opposition leader, do you really think the Constitution as we know it will hold up against his promised power grab? I don't.
I think the Constitution will be repealed and dismantled in parts, supported by a court that doesn't give a flying fart in space for anything but their own pockets. And those members of the court who dissent? They will be impeached, disbarred, and disinappeared*.
Ready for part two? Ever ask yourself What happens if he runs and loses?
The idea that he could run and win is not nearly as terrifying as what happens if he loses again.
This time, it won't be a failed insurrection at the Capitol building. This time, his anti-democracy minions have had more than enough time to not just learn from the January 6th failure, but how to start a civil war. These guys have not stood still. Behind closed doors, deep in the forests, and tucked away in the hills, those guys Feckless Loser told to stand down have done exactly that. They stood down, stepped back, and are planning the demise of the United States as we know it. Feckless, of course, will think he's the dictator, but we all know that's poppycock. He will be the puppet whose strings are jerked by the new versions of Bannon and Miller.
There is no clear dividing line as there was in the first Civil War. A division will not be cleanly cut. A friend in the military pointed out that most of the brass would uphold their oath to defend the constitution and fight to save a democratic republic such as it is. The troops, on the other hand, may not understand the nuance. That is dangerous on a whole bunch of other levels.
What happens in the US matters across the globe. If we fall, other democracies will fall without our support...places like Ukraine and Israel.
And if Israel falls?
The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week
Think long and hard about your political choices.
*Disinappeared: an original word by the Senior Son.
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