Since early yesterday, I’ve been wanting to talk about Rob Ford’s admission that he smoked crack cocaine. But before I get to that, I want to clarify something. Ford is a terrible human being. He represents everything that is wrong with conservatism. In addition to everything else—but this is core—he shows no empathy for others. But I have a lot of empathy for him. I’m sure you’ve seen the video of him where he goes back to throw a football and then falls down. Or just look through Gawker’s 39 Breathtaking Photos of North America’s Most Photogenic Mayor. Despite everything, he’s most clearly a loser who doesn’t fit in anywhere.

So the fact that he gets shitfaced every night is hardly surprising. And as we all know, when you are shitfaced, you tend to do things you would not normally do: take illegal drugs, sleep with your sister-in-law, run for mayor of Toronto. So I’m more than willing to believe that Rob Ford only smoked crack once that he can remember. And I don’t doubt that he is not a crack addict, although some people want to define the use of any non-approved drug as addiction. He might want to get some help on the drinking or, you know, just cut back a bit. That’s up to him.

People have claimed that he lied before, but he didn’t. I remember thinking when the scandal first broke, “These guys are asking the wrong questions.” What does it even mean to ask Ford if he was a crack addict? That’s at best a value judgement. It seemed strange that I never heard anyone ask him the very simple question, “Have you ever smoked crack?” (Someone might have yelled it at some point, but I didn’t hear it.) Even yesterday, the question was, “Do you smoke crack cocaine?” Well, Ford had to finesse that question to make the admission he wanted. Because if he has only smoked crack once a year ago, then he does not, in fact, “smoke” cocaine; he “smoked” cocaine. I would think reporters would be smarter about this kind of stuff.

I don’t really see the outrage here. Let’s suppose he is telling the truth and he only did crank that one time. It’s a problem because it is a felony. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s pretty minor. It’s not even up there with Eliot Spitzer going to prostitutes multiple times. And it is hard to see how it hurt his job performance. But the constant drinking? That seems far worse. The man has been making law in at least some state of inebriation. But as long as it never ended in a night of crack smoking, the media didn’t care. That strikes me as very messed up.

Look, I understand why the comedians are all over this. For one thing, can anyone watch Rob Ford for more than a minute and not think, “Hey, he’s a lot like Chris Farley!” But you know, Chris Farley if he had been drunk all the time. And the story is delicious. I think Stephen Colbert did a particularly good job of it:

But for the rest of us, I think a certain amount of understanding is in order. And I say this knowing full well that if the situation were reversed, Rob Ford would show me no such understanding. But that’s the thing about liberals: we’re better people. Conservatives should be restricted to work that doesn’t require empathy. Things like accounting and garbage collection. But the fact of the matter is that Rob Ford is just a very famous person who is being tarred by our ridiculous and hypocritical beliefs about drugs. And in that way, he is no less deserving of our sympathy than anyone else.

Afterword

For the record, I don’t buy that Rob Ford only smoked crack that one time. The video of that one time was available? And what about the people he was with? They didn’t look like his normal drinking buddies. But it doesn’t really matter to me. Toronto needs a new mayor, but not because of his crack smoking.

If I told you that that the police pulled over a guy for a minor traffic violation and then drug him off to a hospital for anal probes, you would probably tell me I told you about that yesterday. But you would be operating under the illusion that this doesn’t happen all the time in America. We have another story!

Okay, it didn’t happen again, it happened before. The same police force used the same untrained drug dog to drag an innocent man to the same hospital outside the court’s jurisdiction for anal probing. There are really only two differences. First, it was innocent citizen Timothy Young this time instead of innocent citizen David Eckert. Second, the traffic violation was a turn without a signal instead of an incomplete stop.

The bad part about this is that in the end, all the blame will probably go to the K-9 named Leo. Of course, I’m not buying it. Let’s suppose that poor old Leo starts barking at a drivers seat. Leave aside the whole question of why Leo was brought out to sniff around. (Was Young also clenching his buttocks?) After he does that, they take the driver to the hospital and thoroughly examine his anal cavity. No drugs are found. Doesn’t this make them think that leveraging minor traffic stops into major anal probes might be a bad idea?

But here’s the thing. I don’t think these are unfortunate accidents or mistakes. My understanding is that bringing out the drug dogs requires its own reasonable suspicion. So these guys are taking what sound like pretexts for stops: not signaling and not coming to a complete stop. Then they coming up with a pretext for the dog: clenched buttocks?! And then they are using the dog as a pretext to go to a hospital and go absolutely search crazy.

It looks like fewer procedures were done on Young than on Eckert. This may indicate that the officers were freaking out at the prospect of yet another negative on their anal probing. But really! What kind of a person jumps from a traffic stop to “You got drugs up your butt!” Because that seems to be what’s going on here. I’ll be watching this situation closely. Just with what we know now, this is beyond the pale.

So a pretty weak Democrat won the Virginia governor’s race by 2.5 percentage points in what is still mostly a red state. Conclusion: the election was a repudiation of the Democrat?! And thus it is with the pundit class the day after the election. They seem to have lost their grip on what they are doing. Perhaps they think elections are like the stock market.

Here’s how this works. If a company’s quarterly profits turn out to be less than expected, the stock price goes down. This is because the going price for the stock was based on the belief that the company was making more money than it actually was. This is completely reasonable. But it is nothing like an election.

In the case of elections, the expectation means nothing. The only previous voting that took place was the last election. So the “correction” is the new election. In Virginia, it no doubt feels good to Cuccinelli supporters that he didn’t lose by as much as the polls suggested two days ago. On the other hand, one year ago, the polls suggested Cuccinelli would win. And the last Virginia government was Republican. Based upon those expectations, Cuccinelli did really poorly.

Still, it’s interesting to look at why Terry McAuliffe did worse in the election than the polls indicated. But it’s not interesting because it indicates that Cuccinelli did well because he didn’t; Cuccinelli was decisively beaten in an election where the fundamentals favored him. But it is interesting because the difference between elections and polls tells us things about voting patterns.

Jonathan Bernstein noticed something really interesting from the Virginia exit polling. The libertarian candidate in the race under-performed even more than McAuliffe. It seems that the supporters of the libertarian candidate were divided between conservatives and liberals. The conservative ones decided to go ahead and vote for Cuccinelli. The ones who stayed with the libertarian candidate would have voted overwhelmingly for McAuliffe if they only had the two major party candidates. So what it likely means is that the McAuliffe libertarians felt they were safe to make a protest vote without getting stuck with Cuccinelli.

If the libertarian candidate had done as well as expected, the Virginia race would have turned out exactly as the more recent polls suggested. Or to look at it differently, if 60% of those who voted for the libertarian had gone for McAuliffe, he would have won by 4 percentage points—just what we expected. What it shows is just how dangerous third parties can be in first-past-the-post voting systems. Had the libertarian contingent been larger, the strong public polling might have caused Virginia to end up with Cuccinelli as governor, even though a majority of voters wanted McAuliffe.

Regardless of all this, the facts in this election are very clear. McAuliffe won the election by 2.5 percentage points. The Republicans should have maintained control of the governorship. As it is, they lost as governor, lieutenant governor, and maybe even attorney general. This is a huge loss for the Republican Party in Virginia and it is madness that anyone is saying otherwise.

I am so glad that the New Jersey governor’s race is over. Now Chris Christie can get onto the serious business of showing his true colors. Are you ready for the start of Christie’s 2016 presidential campaign? I am. I’m looking forward to not hearing people talk about how reasonable and centrist Christie is. Look: I wouldn’t mind hearing that if it were true. But Christie is as extreme as Ted Cruz. And now that he’s looking toward the Republican primary, we’ll see more red meat coming from him.

I am also happy because I won’t have to watch the Democratic Party’s shameless disregard and often outright hostility toward the great Democratic candidate who took on the job of running against a very popular Republican governor. No one expected Barbara Buono to win this election. But with some party support, she would have done a hell of a lot better. Here is a partial list of New Jersey Democrats who endorsed the vile Republican: Mayor Dina Long, state Senator Brian Stack, and Mayor Jennifer Naughton. But it wasn’t just local Democratic leaders. Where was Obama?

Buono referred to this as “the onslaught of betrayal from our own political party.” This is something I have long complained about regarding the Democratic Party. And let’s face it, Obama is the best example of this. The administration is always willing to cut loose anyone over the smallest of political pressure. Whether it is ACORN or Shirley Sherrod or IRS chief Steven T Miller, it is always “abandon first; ask questions later.” So Obama was around for Terry McAuliffe while he was winning but he was conspicuously absent for Buono who could have used the help.

It’s hard to continue to support the Democratic Party. I’m glad that Bill de Blasio will be mayor of New York. But think back to 2009 when Bill Thompson ran for mayor. He almost won that race. But where was Obama then? Sure, he endorsed him. You would think that such an endorsement would be de rigueur for the head of the Democratic Party, but you would be wrong. But Obama’s endorsement was weak, including nice things about Bloomberg.

But Obama doesn’t live in a vacuum. He is the rightful head the Democratic Party—a pro-corporate centrist for a pro-corporate centrist party. But that isn’t the worst part of the party. We all understand why the Republicans are having problems: the demographic apocalypse they face has caused a collective freak out. But what’s going on with the Democrats? Far from having a Democratic version of the eleventh commandment—”Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Democrat.”—we don’t even have a wimpy version, “Thou shalt at least give vague support for those you agree with on policy.”

I’ve been shocked and dismayed at how many liberal pundits have also sided with Chris Christie in this election. That’s not to say that they’ve been for him. But they’ve acted as apologists, putting the best spin on his career. Now that the the election is over and Christie has his landslide and the Democrats have shown they don’t give a fuck about supporting their own people, we can get back to normal. Christie can go back to his Governor Who Shouts at People routine. And the pundits can be reminded what an extremist asshole Christie always was. And if things go very badly, the Democratic Party can learn just how much pain and suffering can be inflicted by President Christie in four years.

Ed Kilgore provides a good rundown of one race we haven’t heard much about: the Republican primary election in Alabama’s first congressional district—the Mobile area, In Alabama GOP, It’s Hard to Be Too Radical. It is an election between Tea Party nutcase Dean Young and the Republican establishment candidate Bradley Byrne. What’s important here is that from a policy standpoint, there is pretty much no light between these two men. So the question is, how exactly is Byrne the “reasonable” Republican?

The answer is that he isn’t. Over the weekend, I discussed this very issue as it applied to Virginia, Business Will Not Give Up on GOP. The business community is not for moderate or reasonable candidates. They want candidates who will do exactly as the big corporations want. The only concern they have about the supposed extremists is that they won’t win. Otherwise, they are fine with them.

The same thing is true of the Republican establishment. In fact, we might as well say that corporate America and the Republican establishment are the same thing. They want the same policies and their only real concern is winning elections. If there is a difference, it would simply be that the Republican establishment are slightly more willing to compromise in the pursuit of their goals.

Kilgore sums up the situation in Alabama, but the same thing could be said about any Republican primary anywhere. You may remember Roy Moore, the Alabama judge who put a two-and-a-half ton Ten Commandments monument in the Alabama Judicial Building. He’s supporting Young. Here’s how Kilgore puts it:

Exactly! And I’m glad to read more and more people saying this. Now if we can just get the mainstream press to stop saying that Chris Christie is “reasonable” we’ll be onto something!

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. To many people in the United States, nothing (And I do mean that: nothing.) is more important than stopping people from using drugs. You know, Jaycee Lee Dugard could be held as a sex slave in a backyard shed for 18 years. How could the police have known? And really, they have priorities. Like the cops in Deming, New Mexico. They thought a guy they pulled over, David Eckert, was “clenching his buttocks.” The cops burst into action: there might be drugs in that thare anus! So off to the court they ran to get a judge to okay a cavity search. And why not? After all, the cops thought the man was clenching his buttocks. It’s a good thing we have courts to look after the our rights!

Off the police went: a doctor shopping they did go! They finally found one who didn’t have an ethical problem with ripping into the guy’s ass. It didn’t take long. It is normally a lot harder to find a doctor with ethics, not without. So they prodded him, then x-rayed him, then penetrated him, then enema-ed him, then colonoscopied him. Along the line they made him defecate for them. No drugs were found. Of course, you would think that after him defecating, they would have been satisfied. But maybe at that point, it wasn’t about the drugs. I think it was to send a message: stop clenching your buttocks!

In addition to everything else, the search—even so far as the ridiculous court warrant is concerned—was illegal. The doctor shopping took the police outside the county where the warrant was legal. So hopefully there will be some small amount of justice. After all, the guy was proven as not guilty as anyone ever could be. And the search was illegal. But even if the guy gets a nice settlement, all the police department will have learned is, “When you are giving a suspect an anal probing, make sure you are in the right county.”

Oh, and the topper of the topper: the medical clinic that did the prodding, x-raying, penetration, enema-ing, and colonoscopying? They are charging the man for the procedures and claiming that they will take him to collections if he doesn’t pay up. Quick!

And the la-hand of the Freeeeee!
And the hoooome, of thhhhhe, braaaave!

Here’s a great report from KOB 4 in New Mexico:

Afterword

I know my tone on this article was glib, but regular readers will know that I am livid. This is the kind of shit that conservatives brush aside as an exception—no kind of indictment of the whole system. Well, that’s not even true. But they say such things at the same time that they claim that it is tyranny to increase the taxes of the rich by a couple of percent. Of course the New Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama (both admitted felons) are also to blame for this kind of thing.

I’ve been reading Joe Muto’s excellent (And funny!) An Atheist in the Foxhole, which is subtitled, “A liberal’s eight-year odyssey inside the heart of the right-wing media.” One of the things I learned is that Fox News was not always the way it is now. Of course, they were always going after the right wing hate radio listeners. But at first, their focus was on “news you can use!” By this he means that they had more segments on consumer issues and religion which have since gone away. Why would they need them? They can use the commercials for consumer information. And Christ is the one true way and anyone who doesn’t believe that (along with being anti-choice and anti-fag) is an agent of Satan.

I was thinking about this last night. The Fox News coverage of Obamacare has explicitly been: news you can’t use. The biggest story out this last week has been that insurance companies are using their ended policies to mislead customers into buying much more expensive policies. This is the kind of stuff that conservatives normally get outraged about. They have this childish notion that capitalism would work fine if it weren’t for those occasional bad apples. That’s right: most conservatives do not understand how capitalism is supposed to work, much less how it actually does work.

Now Fox News wouldn’t say anything about these practices regardless. It’s only the conservative voter who believes such fairy tales. The elites know what conservatism is all about: keeping the weak down and funneling as much money to the powerful as possible. But in this case, Fox News has an even higher calling: destroying Obamacare. So it is with great relish that they are reporting insurance company malfeasance as a problem with Obamacare.

So Fox News is purposefully keeping their viewers in the dark about news that actually affects them in order to push their ideological agenda. For most Fox News viewers it won’t matter because they are already on Medicare. But the behavior is still disgusting. For a small partisan advantage, the network is more than willing to cost each of its “young” viewers thousands of dollars per year.

I remember a poster in my high school library that read, “Ignorance is NOT bliss!” Maybe yes, maybe no. But one thing is for sure: ignorance is expensive. And anyone who chooses to feed his angry id rather than filling his empty cortex is getting a very bad deal. And so are we. Remember: such people vote!

Afterword

It is election day in many parts of the nation. If it is election day where you are, please vote! And remember the next general election is 4 November 2014. It’s important!

Ed Kilgore provided a good rundown of, The 2012 Campaign Books. I am knee deep in this stuff. I’m trying to get my hands on all of the campaign books from 1976 onward for a book that I am working on. But I was around for the 2012 campaign and I think I have a very good take on what happened.

Now, I understand that there are lots of other people who paid just as much attention as I did. And they’ve come to different conclusions. Fine. But most of them are totally wrong and this is well on display in the books. Three of the books are the usual insider nonsense: The Center Holds, Double Down, and Collision 2012. But The Gamble is right in line with what I think—not just about 2012 but about pretty much all elections.

This is due to the fact that The Gamble is written by two political scientists: John Sides and Lynn Vavreck. I’ve written about both of them various times here because I am what people call as “fundamentals guy”: I believe that broad demographic trends determine elections, not clever campaign tricks. In fact, I probably take it too far because I don’t much care about anything else.

Apparently, they argue that the Republicans don’t need to make any fundamental changes for 2016. This goes along with what I’ve been saying. If the Republicans nominate a reasonable candidate and the economy tanks, the Republicans will win in 2016. In fact, even an unreasonable candidate would probably win. People don’t like to think this kind of thing. Neither do I! But what are you going to do? We didn’t elect Reagan because the country was suddenly conservative; we got him because the economy was bad. We could get Ted Cruz for the same reason.

Looking back, people want to think that there was lots of back and forth between Romney and Obama. It’s a myth. Obama led throughout the general election. What’s more, things like Romney’s surge after the first debate don’t mean what people think they mean. All that happened (and I wrote about this at the time) is that people who were going to vote for Romney but who had claimed to be undecided simply decided. People in the same position about Obama simply waited until later. As a result, it looked like had surged, but it had no actually effect on the election.

What Republicans need to worry about in 2016 is that the demographics will be so bad for them that even a bad economy and a good candidate won’t save them. And I wonder more and more if the Republicans aren’t smart to not change. Are blacks and Latinos and the young really going to get behind the Republican Party just because they start talking nice? A change is going to have to come from the base of the party. They are going to have to see California Republicans start to make sense. As it is, regardless what anyone says, Darrell Issa is still an extremist asshole who seems interested only in trumping up scandals. Who is going to look at that and say, “The Republican Party has changed!” So they might as well focus on the base.

Another thing: is someone like Chris Christie the savior of the Republican Party? I don’t think so. In a general election, his extremism would come front and center. He could certainly become president, but I don’t see his chances as any better than those of Ted Cruz. So there are two questions for 2016: How is the economy? And what is the demographic advantage of the Democrats? It may simply be hopeless for the Republicans in 2016. And no amount of Willie Horton ads are going to change that.

I am going to be out pretty much all day, so there won’t be anything up until tonight. However, I wanted to mention a really good article by Dean Baker, You Can Keep Your Insurance: Washington Post Fact Checker Assessment. It follows after Glenn Kessler’s assessment of Obama’s statement that if you liked your insurance you could keep it. Kessler gave the statement “four Pinocchios.” It’s all pretty pathetic, because he has to go pretty far out of his way to find the statement that misleading.

It does remind me that Politifact will undoubtedly use this as their “Lie of the Year.” It is so rare that these supposed fact checkers get an actual lie from the left side of the political spectrum, they are going to use it for all it’s worth. And more, as we see with Kessler.

Baker put the whole thing in perspective. The truth of the matter is that insurance policies that were in effect when the law took effect can, in fact, keep being sold. They were fairly restrictive about how they could change them going forward, but they were most definitely not required to end them. How it looks to me is that the companies preferred to end those policies. Given that everyone is now required to get insurance, why allow someone to buy a cheap policy when they could force them into a higher cost policy.

This gets down to the evil essence of the Affordable Care Act. Requiring everyone to buy overpriced and inefficient health insurance from a private company is the height of crony capitalism. From a constitutional or libertarian standpoint, straight government run single payer is actually a more justifiable system. Not that I expect any flavor of conservative to admit that. But we are, at least for now, stuck with this system and it is what it is.

The main thing is that although Obama was largely wrong when he said people could keep their existing insurance, it wasn’t especially a lie. It was more along the lines of what we’ve all come to expect from Obama: naivete. What’s more, it is the wrong way to think about this. We should be thinking in terms of people getting decent insurance. But the media system just can’t resist this story. For once the Republican Party has a talking point that has a real kernel of truth. It’s very much a kind of false equivalence, however. Since the Republicans are usually on about nothing, the media make a big deal when they are a quarter right. Hopefully we can get past all this and onto some real news this week. But it is unlikely.