The center cannot hold

 For a while now, I’ve been predicting that undecided voters would start to break against Republicans. It looks like it’s happening in earnest. 

There are many who are skeptical of the polling world, and we should all be a bit skeptical here, but there is not much good news for Republicans. Donald Trump’s approval rating is collapsing, and independent voters are swinging towards the Democrats. The president hit an all-time low in his approval rating at a net -22 points in Nate Silver’s polling average. This is lower than his approval just after January 6. 

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Meanwhile, Republicans are trailing Democrats by about nine points on the generic ballot. Among independents, it is far worse. Republicans trail with these unaffiliated voters by a whopping 25 points. This is a shift of 37 points since 2022, when Republicans led by 12. 

Both Larry Sabato and Cook Political are moving races in the direction of the Democrats. I couldn’t tell you how long it has been since I saw a race shift to favor a Republican.

If you doubt the polling, consider that Republicans seem to believe it. Republican insider Steve Deace reported that Iowa State House Republicans were told, “If you are in a +15 district you’re within the margin for error, if you’re in a +10 district, you’re underwater, and that this might end being an even worse midterm environment than 2006,” when Democrats gained 5 Senate seats and 31 House seats with an eight-point popular vote advantage. There are rumors that Republicans will cut funding from their Senate candidates in Georgia and North Carolina, writing off those seats. 

There are a multitude of reasons why the sky is falling for the GOP, but a big one is the alienation of Hispanic voters with aggressive and oppressive (and racist) immigration enforcement policies. Polling shows Hispanics abandoning the Republicans by double-digit margins, even in the red firewall states of Florida and Texas. 

Byron Donalds evidently believes the polling. The Republican candidate for Florida governor just saw his race shifted to tossup status. Donalds’ response was to scrub all mentions of the other Donald from his campaign websites. Donalds isn’t the only Republican running away from Trump, but it will be hard to undo years of MAGA cheerleading in the less-than-six-weeks before the election, even less in states with early voting. 

The midterm is shaping up to be a perfect storm of the Republicans own making. Call it Hurricane Donald. The current polling is a culmination of a long list of abuses of authority, incompetence, corruption, and downright insanity. 

The only thing that’s surprising about the massive shifts in polling is that it took this long to register. Then again, maybe it didn’t.

There were signs of growing discontent all along. The cracks started showing with the economic chaos of the “Liberation Day” tariffs just a few months into Trump’s second term and grew into the massive No Kings demonstrations in which almost three percent of the US population took part. 

So, it wasn’t really just high gas prices that sunk Trump Part II. It was the chaos, the shameless grifting, the unnecessary wars, and not least of all, the total unwillingness of Republicans to tell Donald Trump no.

There’s a lesson here about hubris that Democrats would do well to learn. Even personality cults won’t follow blindly forever, and even if 73 percent of Republicans still favor Trump, precious few other Americans do. Not nearly enough swing voters to stave off disaster.

Rhetoric and attacking the other side will only get you so far. Sooner or later, you have to perform. This was a problem for Trump in his first term, but he got a break when COVID-19 overshadowed his economic mistakes. This time around, not only have Trump’s mistakes been larger and more impactful, but they’ve taken center stage.

The idiocracy is on full display, and if the partisan base isn’t happy, the rest of the country is livid. And they’re about to show it. 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

-Yeats

From The Racket News ™

The Spanish civil war election

 There are 42 days to the midterm elections. Six weeks. Get your voting shoes ready. 

Both sides have described the election as a Flight 93 election at times, but I think there’s a better analogy. To find it, we have to look back a bit further than September 11. 

At this point, it seems as though the big Republican closing argument is going to be that, sure, gas prices are high, but the Democrats are communists. 

Admittedly, there is some truth to this. Graham Platner was a self-described communist, and in one of the rarest of all things, he was a communist with a Nazi tattoo. (Nick Fuentes might be another.) On the other hand, Graham Platner was shown the door a few months ago in one of the smartest moves the Democratic Party has made in recent years. 

There are a few Democratic candidates who claim to be socialist, as well as some others, like Abdul El-Sayed, who don’t adopt the label but share many of the policies. It’s true that socialists are not communists, but it’s also true that the dividing line is pretty gray and blurred. “Socialism” can represent anything from the democratic socialism of the wealthy Nordic countries to the hardcore leninism of the Soviet Union (the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) and the Cubanand North Korean regimes. 

There’s a lot of ground in between those two extremes, and Democrats who take the socialist label tend to skew toward the Scandinavian end. As I pointed out with Platner, however, there are exceptions. 

On the other side of the political aisle, Democrats have accused Republicans of being fascists. That’s not a totally new thing, but as I pointed out a while back, Trumpism fits the generally-accepted definition of fascism that includes characteristics such as extreme nationalism, a (would-be) dictator with a cult-like following, and no firm principles other than whatever is best for the tribe. Fascism, of course, was also called national socialism. 

An interesting quirk of politics and history is that national socialism isn’t really socialism. The word “socialism” in Hitler’s National Socialist party was a bait and switch, intended to capitalize on socialism’s popularity in 1920’s Germany in an attempt to appeal to the working class as well as middle-class Germans. The two ideologies overlapped in many ways, such as being anti-capitalist and authoritarian, but the Nazis were anti-socialist and anti-liberal. 

In the wake of last week’s hullabaloo about Bo French’s racist tweet about college football crowds, Erick Erickson posted an expose’ about the white supremacist infiltration of Republican and Christian Nationalist groups, which traced the ideology of some prominent right-wing activists to Carl Schmitt, a veritable WWII German Nazi. The replies to Erick’s posts on the subject are revealing. 

In a way, this year’s election is a matchup of Democratic Socialism versus National Socialism. You know what else had that sort of ideological faceoff? The Spanish Civil War. 

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The Spanish Civil War gets short shrift in the American version of world history, but if you’re a World War II buff, you’ve probably at least heard of it. The conflict began in 1936 with a military revolt against Spain’s Republican government. The causes of the war aren’t as relevant to the story here as its conduct. The Nationalists, led by Francisco Franco (if you’re a Saturday Night Live buff, you may remember the old Weekend Update joke, “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead”), fought the Republicans, and each side had its surrogates. (If you want an more backstory on the conflict, I recommend episodes 109 and 110 of the “WWII: Both Sides of the Wire” podcast.)

Once the war started, Nazi Germany used the conflict as a field test for the weapons and tactics that it would use in Europe a few years later. German soldiers and pilots, the Condor Legion, served tours in Spain to get combat experience and “advise” Nationalist troops. On the Republican side, the Soviet Union counterbalanced the fascist aid to the Nationalists. 

In many ways, the Spanish Civil War was a cause celebre of the 1930s in much the same way that the Russo-Ukraine War has rallied the world’s support in our own time. Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece, “Guernica,” memorialized the loss of life on the Spanish town of Guernica by a German air raid, and Ernest Hemingway, a war correspondent who covered the conflict, detailed his experiences in “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” The United States was officially neutral, but American volunteers formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight against the Nationalists. Some of these volunteers were communists or socialists, while others just hated fascism.

As Hemingway wrote:

"Are you a communist?"
"No I am an anti-fascist"
"For a long time?"
"Since I have understood fascism."

It may be hard for those who know me know to believe it, but I was once an avid reader of “Soldier of Fortune” magazine (“the journal of professional adventurers”). In addition to covering the conficts of the 1980s, SOF also ran articles about military history and I distinctly remember one letter to the editor about about an article on Spanish Civil War. I can quote the closing lines from memory that succinctly described the war: “The Spanish Civil war was communism versus fascism. Both suck.”

Indeed. 

The point here is that when faced with two unpleasant choices, sometimes you still have to choose. The lesser evil is also the greater good to an optimist. (Thanks to Micheal Medved for that insight.) Let’s not bother talking about third parties that have no chance. Sometimes being an adult means making difficult choices.

In 2026, we have a Spanish Civil War sort of choice. I’m not very excited about some of the people on the Democratic side, and I’m not excited about a lot of the Democratic platform. 

However, I do understand that the greater danger is the wanna-be dictator and the personality cult who are actually in power and already doing tremendous damage. MAGA fascism is also a greater threat than Democratic socialism because the Republican Party is far more infected with radicalism than the Democrats are. Polling shows that Republicans are still79 percent MAGA while 55 percent of Democrats viewed socialism favorably in recent polling. Neither stat is anything to brag about. 

Like Ernest Hemingway, being an anti-fascist in 2026 may put us temporarily on the same side as some socialists and even some communists. That doesn’t make us communists or socialists; it just means that we see fascism as a more imminent and dangerous threat. 

Sinclair Lewis did not say, “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross,” but the sentiment has proven correct and here we are. It’s up to the American people to correct the course of the country. Like the Spanish Civil War, it can be difficult and unpleasant choice, but there is definitely a right choice. 

I’ll close with another Hemingway quote that seems eerily on target these days: “There are many who do not know they are fascists, but will find it out when the time comes.”

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From the Racket News

The GOP’s white supremacy problem

 There are 48 days until the midterm elections, and not a lot is going well for Republicans. Aside from rising oil and gas prices, the worst news over the weekend was from a Texas statewide candidate who made the mistake of saying the quiet part out loud. 

Bo French, candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner (despite the name, the office is a powerful one that regulates the oil industry), posted an angry rant on the platform formerly known as Twitter about University of Texas students who had the temerity to not look enough like Heritage Texans. (You can see the picture on the original tweet here.) Most people saw ecstatic football fans celebrating UT’s win over Ohio State. Bo French saw an outrage. 

This picture is a Rorschach test. What do you see? Screenshot from Bo French.

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In his words, French lamented, “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”

The apparent problem was that the students in the picture were too brown, because there was no other obvious issue. The happy Longhorn fans in the photo look to be mostly of Indian or South Asian descent. To French, that’s a problem.

Lest you give French the benefit of the doubt, he explained further in a subsequent tweet, “Like body-cams exposed criminals, social media is exposing how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners. It’s everywhere and far worse than any of us could imagine.” 

So here’s the problem with French’s take in case you haven’t figured it out yet. We live in a multicultural nation, the proverbial melting pot of cultures. It’s impossible to tell if someone is an American or a foreigner by looking at them. A great many native-born Americans have skin colors of varying shades of brown. They don’t look like Bo French, but they are still Americans. 

There are no degrees of citizenship. A new citizen who was naturalized yesterday is just as American as a native-born American whose parents came over on the Mayflower. That’s the American way.

Further, under Texas law, Texas students in the top five percent of their classes are guaranteed admission to UT. The odds are good that, not only are the students in the picture Americans and Texans, but they were probably among the top students from Texas schools. That is called a meritocracy, and it’s something Republicans used to favor.

French is rightfully getting dragged online for his comments, and it seems that these tweets were only the tip of the iceberg. Other problematic- let’s just say the word: “racist” - tweets have also emerged, including one from last monththat says, “Muslims shouldn’t be allowed....in the United States Period.”

Tweets like these show the fallacy in the claim that Republicans only oppose illegal immigration. There is no evidence that any of the UT students were here illegally. French attacked them fore merely looking “foreign.” He would disallow all Muslim immigration based on religion, First Amendment be damned. 

The interesting thing is the silence from Republicans. Quite a few online accounts are defending and agreeing with French, but most Republicans are staying silent. Ken Paxton denounced generic racism in a tweet that attacked James Talarico rather than addressing the elephant in the room.

Credit where credit is due, Erick Erickson is one of the few voices on the right that I’ve heard denouncing French and his defenders, calling out the talk of “Heritage Texans,” i.e. white Texans,as racist, and even calling French a “racist dumbass” in a memorable tweet. I’d be surprised if French and his ilk aren’t just as unhappy about Hispanic Texans as they are Indian ones, even though Texas’ Hispanic heritage is older than its Anglo one.

And that brings me to my next point. Ironically, Erickson was calling out the propensity of Republican staffers to be Nazi sympathizers just before Frenchgate broke. 

The most recent such story involves the political director for Ohio Republican Senator John Husted, who used a picture of Waffen SS soldiers as his Facebook profile picture. This was not the only recent case of Republicans with a thing for Nazis. Just a few days ago, a staffer for Rep. Eric Pratt (R-Minn.) was fired after posting pro-Hitler and antisemitic content on social media. In Georgia, Rep. Mike Collins had an intern and PAC staffer who posted Nazi and KKK images and content, as well as a son-in-law who made white nationalist posts. 

Going back further, there is even more. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security and other agencies have posted Nazi slogans and references. American flags with swastikas were found in several Republican congressional offices. A leaked group chat of Young Republican leaders was filled with racist and antisemitic comments. Going back to Trump’s first term, the Unite The Right rally that led to rioting in Charlottesville was filled with alt right and neo-Nazi figures like Nick Fuentes and Steve Bannon, yet the broader Republican movement accepted these people as conservatives.

And speaking of Charlottesville, as I was finishing this piece, I saw that Marshall Rawson, a Republican candidate for the Florida House, had been identified as having marched with a pro-secession, neo-confederate group at Unite the Right. 

Partisans will dismiss these red flags as isolated occurrences, but there’s a lot of smoke here. I recall an aphorism from military history that, “Once is a coincidence, twice is happenstance, and three times is enemy action.” 

The Republican Party has a serious problem with racism.

Honestly, I’m surprised at how blatantly racist the party has become. A few years ago, when I was a Republican, the talk was about equality without favoritism. There seems to be none of that talk anymore.

I grew up in the South, and have lived most of my life here. I’ve seen a lot of change, most of it for the better. There are fewer racial differences than when I was young. Friend groups cross the color barrier. Multiethnic children are common and accepted. I can remember when all this wasn’t the case.

But there was latent racism hiding beneath the surface. Hatred and suspicion of people who are different is still common, although I doubt most people who hold these views consider themselves racist. I think that the Republican stoking of fears about immigrants has played a major role in bringing such attitudes back to the surface.

Republicans had a chance with their inroads into minority groups in 2024, but they are blowing it. If the mass deportations, restrictions on legal immigration to near zero, and the suspicion of anyone who looks “foreign” weren’t enough to sour minority voters on Republican candidates, overt hostility and racism likely will be. 

The damage being done now to the Republican brand is going to be a longterm problem for the party. The GOP is an increasingly white party in a country that is increasingly nonwhite. That demographic change is not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing. It’s just change. 

Republicans should be aware that the white electorate is not getting any bigger. They can’t successfully run on racist subtexts forever. At some point, the scales will tip and the GOP will become a permanent minority party representing a demographic minority. Even in Texas, non-Hispanic whites are already only 39 percent of the population. 

The growth of America’s nonwhite population is not something that Republicans can deport their way out of. 

From the Racket News

Are Republicans surging?

 If you’ve been online much lately, you may have seen some optimism about the midterms from Republican quarters. Some accounts are suggesting that Republican chances are rebounding after a summer slump, Even our old pal, Erick Erickson, is questioning polling and pontificating that it won’t be as bad as all that, even though he does expect the GOP to lose the House. 

Personally, I think all this is whistling past the graveyard. I’ve said for a long time that I do think it will be that bad, as long as the Democrats don’t go uber crazy. Even that may only matter at the margins. 

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A lot of the calls for encouragement are based on isolated polls. For example, Benny Johnson cites a Harvard Harris poll showing Trump at 44 percent approval. That’s not a great number, but it’s a better number than most polling gives Trump these days. The Real Clear Polling average puts his job approval at 39.6 percent, with Johnson’s poll being highest on the list. Most recent polls are lower.

If you’ve been reading me very long, this raises some red flags. Partisans like to rally the troops with cherry-picked outlier polls, but as I’ve written in the past, two big rules of thumb for looking at polls are to a) look at polling averages to avoid being fooled by outliers, and b) look at trends rather than focusing on numbers. 

With respect to Erickson’s theory, he looks at 2020 and cites a column by Patrick Ruffini, who wrote that polling errors favor Democrats by up to 5.9 points over the summer and diminish to 2.6 points in favor of Democrats on Election Day. I think the answer to this theory is that 2026 is not a typical year. 

We do have some hard data from this year in the form of special elections. An analysis of this year’s special elections by Multistate Elections found that Democrats overperformed in 36 of 43 contested races. That doesn’t mean Democrats won all those races, but they closed the gap, even in deep red districts with a median swing of more than 10 points toward the Democrats. That includes some high-profile wins in red states, including the Florida district covering Mar-a-Lago. I can’t find any Democrat seats that have flipped to Republicans in contested elections. 

That isn’t polling or predictions. Those are votes that have been cast and counted. 

“A swing at the current level, sustained through November, would point to a substantial Democratic wave,” the Multistate Elections analysis says, adding, “whether 2026 holds through the summer or fades the same way [as 2018] is the open question these specials are answering in real time.”

As you look at the hopeful Republican posts, ask yourself what would entice voters to vote Republican. The GOP is leaning heavily into communism and socialism in its campaign messaging, and while these culture war issues will sway some voters, “It’s the economy, stupid,” remains as true now as it was in 1992. 

The economy isn’t great, and Trump’s fingerprints are all over it. From the recent unnecessary trade war with Canada to the already-endless unnecessary war with Iran, most of Trump’s policy moves have been akin to throwing wrenches into the economy. Elected to lower prices, consumer costs such as groceries and gas have surged under Trump.

It’s going to get worse. 

As I write this, 55 days before Election Day and at a time when gas prices are usually falling, the national average price for diesel is about to hit $6 for the first time ever. Gasoline isn’t far behind at $4 per gallon. 

The core cause of the sky-high gas prices is the war with Iran, and there is no end to that in sight. Seven months into the two-week war, ship counts in the Strait of Hormuz are still far below pre-war levels. To make matters worse, Iran’s Houthi allies recently launched a series of attacks on Saudi oil facilities outside the Persian Gulf.

Up to this point, Trump has blunted the effects of the energy crisis by releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but with the stockpile at its lowest point since 1982, about 40 percent capacity, our ability to smooth out price spikes is disappearing, especially if we want to maintain a supply for true emergencies. All this means that, after tamping down price increases through the spring and summer, the gas spike is primed to hit voters like a punch from George Foreman just as they go to the polls.

And it won’t be just gas. In our just-in-time economy, inventories are constantly being replenished by trucks and trains that are powered by - wait for it - diesel. If the diesel price spike continues, look for the cost of other consumer items to rise as well. Everything from food to clothes to toilet paper rides in diesel-powered transports.

What is the Republican answer to all this? Like a political Bruce Dickinson pressing for “more cowbell,” the Republican Party’s only coherent response is “more Trump!” This week the party is staging a rare midterm convention, aka the “Trumpapalooza,” in Dallas. They might also find other bodies of water to rename.

Wishful thinking aside, the situation is looking dire for Republicans. Poll after poll shows Democrats with strong generic ballot margins, and movement of swing voters away from Trump and MAGA. That’s especially true of the Hispanic voters who helped put Trump over the top in 2024. Who would have guessed that they’d dislike seeing their relatives and neighbors deported, along with being harassed themselves based on their appearance?

There is a caveat, however. Gerrymandering does favor Republicans. Democrats now need to win the national popular vote by an estimated four points to win the House. 

That’s attainable. Democrats need to focus their messaging on the economy and affordability with a corruption and Epstein files as the icing on the cake. Those messages resonate.

Already, every time I see an update from the Cook Political Report, they are shifting race ratings towards the Democrats. I haven’t seen any race move towards Republicans. 

The trend of the race is evident by where the battlegrounds are. Unlike 2024, where blue states were starting to turn purple, this time it’s red states that are starting to swing. Among the Senate tossups, five (Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Ohio, and Texas) are Republican, while Michigan is the only Democratic Senate battleground. What’s more, Republicans are trailing in all of those states except Iowa. It shift is akin to trumpeting a poll showing 44-percent approval.

This isn’t a typical year. Trump is atypically bad and destructive. The world is teetering on the brink of a financial calamity and expanded wars while Trump lines his pockets and builds his ballroom. If American voters can’t deliver a full-throated rejection of this Administration’s incompetence and corruption, we don’t deserve our Republic.

Get to the polls ASAP, and don’t trust your ballot to the Post Office this year.

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MIAMI CRASH I didn’t write an analysis of the Miami Prime crash, but it appears to have been caused by a too-fast, unstable approach that led to a touchdown too far down the runway. To make matters worse, the crew apparently tried to start a late go-around and then reversed that decision. Here’s a good rundown:

From the Racket. news

The ballroom blitz

The Supreme Court declined to halt Donald Trump’s ballroom construction in a ruling this week that hinged on the plaintiff’s lack of standing. In a dissent, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the Administration’s actions were “likely unlawful.”

When cases reach the Supreme Court level, I tend to view standing as something that the majority can often game. In a great many cases, it seems that if the majority doesn’t want to rule on the merits of a case, they can simply find that there was no standing, and - poof - the case goes away. On the other hand, the same majority can look at different angles to find standing if it’s a case that they want to rule on.

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I have a couple of big questions for the Supreme Court about this case. First, who does have standing to stop the destruction of the White House and the lawless construction of the new ballroom? The follow-up is: what good are laws if no one has the power to sue and force them to be upheld?

The second question is the more important one. John Adams famously said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

We are seeing the truth of that statement being played out in front of us right now. The Trump Administration is running wild and ignoring laws while the institutions that were designed to put the brakes on such abuses of power are systematically skirted or dismantled. I lay a lot of the blame for this on congressional Republicans who are too cowardly to stand up to the president and the Republican base.

The real problem is the voters, however. Not only Republican primary voters, but the voters who returned Trump to power after January 6 and after he explicitly campaigned on abusing his office if he was re-elected. The bottom line is that Trump is running amok and destroying the Republic because voters refused to hold him and his party accountable.

The greatest generation we aren’t.

A case can be made about why a ballroom should be built for state functions, but Trump’s actions are a case study in how not to handle government projects. The saga includes no-bid contracts for cronies, ignoring laws, cost overruns, subterfuge, outright lies, and frequently moving goalposts.

The ballroom may be a small piece of Trump’s corruption in the grand scheme of things, but it is magnificently symbolic of all that is wrong with his Administration. Trump was elected to fight inflation and high prices, but he is focused on the completion of a luxury vanity project that few Americans will ever see the inside of. Rather than following the constitutional process to appropriate and authorize the ballroom through Congress, Trump decreed the job with kingly authority and lied about his intentions from Day One, including falsely saying that the ballroom “won't interfere with the current building. It'll be near it but not touching it.” Days after making that statement, the president unilaterally demolished the East Wing.

The ballroom isn’t the end, either. Trump is already planning to start work on an arch monument, satirically dubbed the “Arc de Trump,” in a matter of weeks. Congress has not approved this construction either. If the president can rule by decree and appropriate his own funds, why do we need Congress?

Precedent is being set with the destruction of the White House and the construction of the ballroom. If Donald Trump can raze the East Wing and raise a ballroom in its place without congressional authorization, the next president can take equal and opposite action. Maybe the next Democratic president can demolish the ballroom and build a combination drag queen theme park and abortion clinic or something.

I’m not saying I support this, but turnabout is fair play. Frankly, I don’t want to get into a tit-for-tat in which federal buildings and historical landmarks are demolished and replaced every time we change presidents. It’s much better to use the constitutional process and involve Congress.

There is a reason that the founders and preceding generations of legislators set up processes for how to spend federal money and replace government buildings with other ones. A big reason is that the whims of one president can be easily replaced by another, and things get whipsawed back and forth.

If Donald Trump wanted a ballroom, he should have gone to Congress and asked for money, just as every president before him has done. That’s how our system is supposed to work. After all, the Constitution explicitly gives the House power over the federal purse in Article I, Section 7.

But Donald Trump wants to have his ballroom without going through Congress, and frankly, that needs to be an issue in the midterms. Let Trump and the Republicans defend the president’s gilded dance hall to voters who are worried about the rising costs of food and energy.

Trump’s ballroom fetish is about as populist as Marie Antoinette, and the Republican defense of the structure while Americans contemplate how to pay for their next tank of gas is akin to saying, “Let them eat cake.”

From the Racket News

Imperialism if you can keep it

 The United States had an important moment this week. The Trump Administration announced a deal with Venezuela that would purportedly give the US access to an estimated 300 billion barrels of oil reserves, more than triple the US reserves.

There are a lot of questions about the deal. These range from whether Venezuela actually has that much oil to whether the Venezuelan oil is worth very much in terms of converting the dark goo into gasoline. In any case, Venezuela has a lot of oil, but its infrastructure is in dire need of repair and upgrade, and its oil is of the heavy, sour variety that yields less gasoline but is well-suited to Gulf Coast refineries.

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The most important question, however, is what the heck are we doing?

This all started with a daring, special operations raid last winter that captured Venezuela’s dictator-in-chief, Nicholas Maduro. Since then, we have left the regime in place, albeit with a different figurehead at the top. Delcy Rodriguez, vice president under Chavez, stepped into the top spot with American blessing and has proven to be more compliant, if no less authoritarian, than the previous dictator.

Contrary to the hopes of Venezuelans and human rights activists, our focus over the past nine months has been on assuming control of the Venezuelan oil industry rather than regime change or spreading democracy. The raid seems to have been all about the oil, rather than truth, justice, and the American way.

There’s a word for what Trump is doing in Venezuela, and that word is “imperialism,” which Merriam-Webster defines as “the policy, practice, or advocacy of extending the power and dominion of a nation especially by direct territorial acquisitions or by gaining indirect control over the political or economic life of other areas.” Military action to replace a dictator and gain control over Venezuelan oil is an almost verbatim real-life restatement of the definition.

The word “imperialism” has been overused a lot in recent decades, but at times it does apply. There were charges of imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq, although Afghanistan had little of value and we didn’t keep Iraqi oil. But when a country is attacked and its resources taken under duress, it is one of those times when the word applies without stretching the concept.

For most countries, the allure of imperialism went out with World War II, if not the 19th century. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is one of the exceptions, and Americans should be disturbed at the fact that Trump’s foreign policy is becoming more explicitly Putinesque.

This was not without warning, however. The concept is perfectly in keeping with the theories about Trump’s geopolitical doctrine of dividing the world into spheres of influence controlled by us, Russia, and China. If these theories are correct, Taiwan should brace for the next shoe to drop.

Marco Rubio, the anti-communist son of Cuban immigrants, should be particularly ashamed. For the Secretary of State, the metamorphosis from advocate of Latin American freedom to defender of Trump’s exploitation of the Venezuelan people marks a decade-long decline from a top presidential candidate in 2016 to a MAGA yes-man.

And then there’s the fact that the deal also gives the federal government, specifically the Defense Department’s Office of Strategic Capital, a 35 percent stake in North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), the joint US-Venezuelan venture. So, in addition to being imperialist, the deal is also socialist, granting the government yet another ownership interest in a growing list of nationalized American companies.

Chevron has announced an investment into Venezuela, but as Republicans used to believe, government intrusion into the market may turn out to be detrimental. Aside from the legal questions, oil companies may question the wisdom and prospects of competing with a government-back entity.

It goes without saying that this is all without either congressional approval or oversight. The Senate has the constitutional duty to ratify treaties, but it’s unlikely that any treaty is forthcoming. Trump is almost always long on announcements and short on implementation.

The deal is already unpopular with the people of Venezuela. Trump avoided a prolonged war in Venezuela by replacing the head of the regime, but if it the plan doesn’t collapse under its own weight, it’s entirely possible that American soldiers will have to be deployed to protect US oil interests in the country, because ultimately imperialism is about using force to take what belongs to someone else, and often the victims don’t like that status quo.

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Election Follies

 There are a couple of oddities in the current election season. Strangely enough, the Alaska Senate race, where two Dan Sullivans are competing against Democrat Mary Peltola is not the oddest of the odd. 

Alaska’s incumbent senator, Republican Dan S. Sullivan, is locked in a reelection battle with Peltola, the Democratic challenger, as well as another Republican Dan Sullivan. 

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Dan J. Sullivan, a retired teacher, emerged as a strong enough candidate to earn a spot on the November ballot after placing third in the state’s nonpartisan, jungle primary. Dan S. Sullivan, the incumbent, finished second behind Peltola.

Republicans are crying foul and blaming Democrats for playing shady tricks, but both the Peltola campaign and Dan J. Sullivan deny coordinating with each other. The state Division of Elections removed the non-senator Sullivan from the ballot, saying that his campaign was designed to cause confusion, but he was restored by a judge. Sullivan says that he is running in good faith, despite the fact that he voted for Peltola in her congressional bids.

What makes this even funnier is that this is not the first time that Dan Sullivan has been on the same ballot as another Dan Sullivan. When Senator Sullivan was first elected in 2014, yet another Republican Dan Sullivan was running for lieutenant governor. That third Dan Sullivan has endorsed Senator Dan Sullivan in the current race. 

As a footnote, Senator Sullivan trailed Peltola by more than 10,000 votes in the primary. Even assuming that all Dan J. Sullivan voters would have voted for Senator Sullivan if Dan J. wasn’t on the ballot, his 3,847 votes would not have changed the outcome. I do wonder how many of the Senator’s voters intended to vote for Dan J. 

You might wonder what could be more weird than the saga of the Alaskan Dan Sullivans, and the answer would be found in Nebraska, where Democrats are fighting to not have a candidate. No, that is not a typo. 

In the Cornhusker State, Democrats are fighting a legal battle to keep their primary winner off the ballot and not have a candidate in the general election. The backstory is that when Nebraska Democrats held their Senate primary, they overwhelmingly chose Cindy Burbank over William Forbes, a Trump-supporting, pro-life candidate who, in a parallel to Alaska, some Democrats consider to be a plant. For his part, Forbes says he is a registered Democrat even though he voted for Trump multiple times and attended a training session for Republican candidates. 

Burbank promised during the campaign to withdraw from the race if nominated in order to support independent candidate Dan Sullivan. No, I’m just kidding. The Nebraska candidate is a Dan, but his last name is Osborn. Osborn is not a Democrat and has rejected both parties, but he has strong support among Nebraska Democrats. As an aside, I’ll also note that promising to withdraw or resign is a strategy that I’d love to see more candidates use. 

To make a long story short (too late!), when Burbank filed to withdraw from the race, Republicans sued to place Forbes, the alleged ringer, on the ballot, while Democrats fought to keep him off. The case hinged on the wording of the Nebraska statute, which stated that ballot vacancies “may be filled,” but also says, “the vacancy shall be filled by the majority vote of the proper committee of the same political party.”

The case was decided this week when a state judge threw out Forbes’ lawsuit. Per Courthouse News Service, the judge held that the word “may” gave the party discretion on whether to replace its nominee, but the “shall” dictated the procedure to follow if the decision to replace was in the affirmative. 

Barring any further developments, Osborn will face incumbent Republican Pete Ricketts in November. The only recent poll is one sponsored by the Osborn campaign, and that one shows a 47-47 tie. 

It remains to be seen whether Osborn can upset Ricketts, but it is a certainty that he has a much better chance of doing so without a Democratic nominee in the race. That is true even if the Democrat is a DINO (Democrat in name only), who only entered the race to sow confusion. Every vote will matter in this race. 

This is an important election year. The outcome of these and other races matters a great deal, but despite that - or perhaps because of it - there seems to be ample weirdness in the electorate. File these stories away for use in trivia contests a decade or so from now. 

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DEPT OF ED COMPARES TRUMP TO HITLER A deleted post by the Department of Education featured a movie clip of Winston Churchill talking about Hitler, followed by a montage of Trump pictures. This creates the opportunity for a multitude of jokes that can easily write themselves. I’m starting to agree with abolishing the DOE.