[guest post by JVW]

I mentioned a while back that one negative consequence of sliding Little Aloha Sweetie and Crazy Cute Hippie Chick a few bucks to get them on the Democrat debate stage last winter is that I have ended up on the DNC’s mailing list. I decided to track the emails that I received between September 22 and October 15, and you can see the results at this Google Sheet. During that 24-day period there arrived in my mailbox 255 email messages from the Dems, not to mention the other 182 email message from the Dems which landed in my spam folder (for what it’s worth, emails from Donald Trump and Mike Pence also go straight to the spam folder).

I’ll have some further posts about the assortment of pleas, promises, lies, threats, and admonishments that I have received, but today I want to highlight my (one-sided) correspondence with the beating heart of the Democrat Party, a seasoned veteran who has been a steady leader in Washington lo these many decades, a voice of reason who has risen through the party ranks to the highest level of leadership by bridging the party’s establishment flank with its progressive idealists. I am referring of course to the one, the only, Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

(Oh, did you guys think I was referring to Slow Joe Biden? Pffffffffft.)

Anyway, Speaker Pelosi, whom I like to refer to as Aunt Nancy, has been my most loyal correspondent. Over those two-dozen days to which I referred above, she has appeared in my inbox no fewer than 36 times, four-and-one-half times as often as the party’s nominee for President, nine times more often than lazy Barack Obama, and thirty-six times more often than sweet but useless Jimmy Carter. Lazy-ass Chuck Schumer hasn’t bothered to email me so much as once; it’s Aunt Nancy, den mother to the party, who is doing all of the hard work, and if that’s not blatant sexism then I’m not a woke feminist.

But I’m really not here to settle scores. The reason, friends, that I want to highlight the efforts of our beloved Speaker is because, quite frankly, I am worried about her. She started off by writing to me through her Team Pelosi account on September 22, warning me that Mitch McConnell had raised a whole Clintonload of money. The next day, however, she was emailing from her personal campaign account, buoyantly reporting that Cocaine Mitch had admitted on television that the GOP could lose the Senate. By the next day, she was optimistic that Democrats could block a Republican nomination to the Supreme Court. It seemed that things were trending well for her party, and Aunt Nancy had every reason to be feeling happy about her position.

But then it all started getting rough. On September 26 Aunt Nancy sent me a message with the subject line “outraged.” She reported that she had just watched President Trump announce the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, and our Speaker was incredulous to see “Republicans fall in line and cheer for the destruction of our health care.” Two days later, she had come down from outrage and now self-reported as “deeply concerned” about the nomination of Judge Barrett, recycling a verbal tic popularized by former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. The next night — the night of the first Presidential Debate — she reported that President Trump had raised $1.33 billion (huh?) and asked me to help counter that massive sum by passing along $5-25, or maybe $500 or more, to the DNC.

On the morning of the last day of September, Aunt Nancy started to spiral downward. I found in my inbox a message from her with the subject line “livid.” Uh-oh, I thought to myself, today would be a really bad day for our Adorable but Clueless Niece to pull some silly left-wing shit like wearing an ACAB shirt or something, and I sincerely hoped that dear AOC would take heed and keep a low profile. Anyway, our Speaker was agitated by Trump’s debate performance the previous evening. Fair enough. But later that day (Aunt Nancy would email me three times on September 30) she sounded determined, reminding me that the last day of the month was her final opportunity to reach her September fundraising goal. Every organization should have a fundraiser or salesperson as dedicated and thorough as Nancy Pelosi, I am telling you. She then took a week off, which I really think she deserved, with the lone exception of an October 3 message about how the GOP has imperiled the post office, because an organization that on average delivers 182 million pieces of first-class mail each and every day apparently somehow needs billions and billions of additional dollars in funding to deliver an extra 200 million ballots to voters, then pick up, process, and deliver maybe three-quarters of them all within the course of roughly 24 mailing days. But never mind that, I was just happy that Aunt Nancy was getting the rest she needed so that she could come back and finish October strong.

But I don’t know that it worked. On October 8 she was back to being agitated that Vice-President Mike Pence had “defile[d] our democracy during his first and ONLY [sic] debate performance.” By the 11th, I was receiving email from her with the subject line “deeply alarming” (Cocaine Mitch had hauled in $55.7 million for Republican Senate candidates), and by the 13th she was back to being “livid,” this time over the lies that President Trump had told at a rally. Since then, I have received three additional email messages from her in which the subject line is simply “livid”: Lindsey Graham pushing through the ACB nomination (October 22), President Trump once again lying at a rally (October 23), and the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett (yesterday).

Guys, that’s just way too much lividity for an 80-year-old woman to bear. She deserves so much better: lockdown evenings scarfing down pints of $13 ice cream from her $24,000 freezer, seeking bailouts for profligate-spending states who have chosen to hamstring their economies with strict lockdowns, or even time spent with her grandkids, if she really must. She doesn’t need nor deserve the aggravation of lying Republicans doing their Constitutionally-proscribed duty so close to an elections in which she is just sure her party will clean up. Maybe if a deadbeat like I had sent her party a few bucks when she had repeatedly requested it of me, she might have been a bit less livid. I guess we’ll never know.

In any case, spare a thought for our embattled Speaker who finds herself veering from (all of these taken from the subject lines in her email messages) dismayed to outraged to livid. It’s a lonely life she leads on behalf of a grateful nation, and she deserves a whole lot better from the likes of us.

– JVW

The whole thing is worth reading but I will excerpt a few choice lines for you:

The case against Trump in 2020 is a lot like the case against Trump in 2016 but bolstered by the accumulation of evidence and experience. . . . . [T]he Trump administration has succeeded most where Trump has the least to do with it.

. . . .

Which brings me to the practical case against Trump: He stinks at his job.

This also brings me to a lie that needs to be addressed — and it is not a misunderstanding but a lie, circulated with malice aforethought: that the conservative objection to Trump is only a matter of style, his boorishness bumptiousness and boobishness on Twitter, his gooftastical manner of speaking, his preening, his vanity, his habitual and often dishonest boasting in matters both small and great, etc. These things matter, of course, because manners and morals matter, and they matter more in a free society than they do in an unfree one, because free men govern themselves.

Trump’s low character is not only an abstract ethical concern but a public menace that has introduced elements of chaos and unpredictability in U.S. government activity ranging from national defense to managing the coronavirus epidemic. Trump’s character problems are practical concerns, not metaphysical ones. Trump is frequently wrong on important policy questions (including trade, foreign policy, entitlements, health care, and many others) and frequently incompetent even when trying to advance a good policy. His vanity and paranoia have made it very difficult for him to keep good people in top positions, and this imposes real costs both politically and as a matter of practical governance. Trump’s problem is not etiquette: It is dishonesty, stupidity, and incompetence, magnified by the self-dealing and cowardice of the cabal of enablers and sycophants who have a stake in pretending that this unsalted s*** sandwich is filet mignon.

Given all this, Kevin explains what he will not do: hold his nose and vote for Trump anyway:

So, now that I am a swing-state conservative, am I going to hold my nose and pull the “R” lever if only to put up a roadblock in front of the Democrats?

Hell, no.

There’s more to citizenship than voting, and partisanship is not patriotism. If casting a vote is all you have in you, then, fine — by all means, do what you believe to be best. But consider the possibility that the duty of the patriot in these times is not to choose one pack of jackals because it looks a little less hungry and vicious than the other pack of jackals but to oppose these jackals — these demagogues, profiteers, and hangers-on, these greasy little salesmen trying to sell you something that is already yours — and to insist that the free and self-governing men and women of this struggling republic deserve better than what is on offer. We can have better than what we have had because we can be better than what we have been.

Kevin doesn’t specifically say what he will be doing instead, but this passage to me suggests he is going to take a pass on the whole thing. I have my own different thoughts about that topic and hopefully you’ll read them sometime this week, somewhere.