Democrats: Politics Is War. And We’re Getting Killed.
Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.
— Mao Zedong, 1938
The Democratic Party leadership’s performance over the past 365 days is clearly bullshit. This is not an Obama-bashing. This is an entire Democratic party-bashing.
I’ve never been a soldier. But I damn well know a few things about war.
First of all, you protect your most important positions. At all costs. ALL COSTS. So, for instance, when a Democratic Senate seat – a seat that’s been held by a Democrat since John F. Kennedy – fifty-six years ago, is up for grabs, during a special election – you damn well put everything you have into protecting it. And yet, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair, Robert Menendez learned just a week and a half ago that the race was tightening? And where the hell has Tim Kaine been? You remember Kaine, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee? What the heck has he done for the DNC lately? (Howard Dean, any chance you’d consider coming back?)
This is just like Maine, when we lost marriage equality in November. We had won gay marriage in the legislature just months before. And yet, we lost. Why? Complacency. The same reason Coakley lost. Complacency. Not treating a prized possession like a prized possession. Not ensuring we protected our assets. (Note to all Democratic pols: NO vacation six months before an election. Did no one learn anything from Prop 8?)
And when the hell are Democrats going to learn to communicate? When are they going to learn to explain things, like healthcare, like the stimulus, and learn to get in front of the message? You can’t be a politician and be a back-seat driver. Not at the same time.
You know, there is one good thing about being a Republican. They’re fear-based. Republicans are afraid of everything, so they act like they are at war – all the time.
Sadly, life sucks when you live in fear. But at least, from a national, political standpoint, things get taken care of. Or taken-out.
Michael Steele may be a raving lunatic, but he is out there attacking anything that’s coming toward him, and anything that might be. Even things that are just in his head.
And that’s the problem with Dems. Lack of vision.
Maybe we should just have someone sitting in a chair, with the proverbial “gun pointed at their head,” forced to come up with every possible scenario of what could happen. Think of it like the Cheney Doctrine. (After all, for Cheney, 1% was all it took to go to war.)
Make no mistake. We are at war. The stakes are that high. (Don’t believe me? How many people die a year because they have no health insurance? How many people died because there was no hate crimes bill?)
Democrats, you need to learn to fight. That’s one thing the Republicans have over us. Not that we want to be like Republicans – just use some of their strengths.
The last thing this country needs is a return to Republican leadership. If you can call it “leadership.” Because they are the ones who got us to where we were exactly one year ago today, January 19, 2009: Bush’s last full day in office, and America on the verge of collapse. Hell, Obama & Co. had to drag George W. Bush over the finish line. Have we EVER seen anything like that before? Bush practically abdicated two months before he was done. At least Sarah Palin had the good sense to resign, knowing she wasn’t going to do anything for Alaska as governor.
Anyway, I’m sick to death of the Democrats pussyfooting around. They’re like high school kids scared someone isn’t going to ask them to the prom. Well, politics is Sadie Hawkins – YOU ask someone to the dance. YOU take control. YOU throw the first punch. YOU set the agenda. YOU make the rules. (Harry Reid, are YOU listening? President Obama, are YOU listening?)
And yet, all we’re doing is countering the Rush-Beck-O’Reilly-DeMint nutjob whack-a-mole machine. How much time and money has every politician, strategist, and blogger on the left spent licking a finger and putting it up in the air to see which way the Republican wind machine is blowing?
I say it’s time to blow back.
Full force.
Take the offensive.
I am sick to death of Dems doing things half-assed. Ask yourself, what is the last thing Democrats did 100%? What is the last thing we did that we put everything we had into it? And don’t say Obama’s campaign: remember the Hillary contingent.
I’d say, in the 1960s, when Kennedy staked a claim in a national goal of “landing a man on the Moon” by the end of the decade. And before that? When Truman dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those were no-going-back, full-in, do-or-die moments.
Yes. Politics is war. And the Republicans are kicking our asses.
America cannot afford to move any further right. Too much is at stake. Healthcare, for one. Civil rights. Our relationship with the rest of the world. Infrastructure. Job creation. Financial regulation. The Supreme Court.
Yes, the Supreme Court.
As we’ll soon find out, win or lose, the Prop 8 trial that is currently on in San Francisco will force the Supreme Court to take up marriage equality in the next few years. And a conservative Supreme Court – which is what we have right now – will not hand over marriage equality to us, regardless of the merit of our case. It’s just not going to happen.
So we need to move the court to the left. Which means, we need a Democratic president to be in place to appoint more progressive judges to the bench.
George W. Bush put three conservative judges on the Supreme Court bench. We need more progressives. True progressives.
But, back to business. Democrats: get your asses in gear. Politics is war; take no prisoners. The enemy, trust me, has been given the exact same command.
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Maine Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Graham Platner is under fire after releasing a video declaring that new allegations against him are false, yet he is “taking time to reflect” on a path forward.
Politico on Monday afternoon reported that a woman who dated Platner, Jenny Racicot, “says he forced her to have sex with him nearly five years ago despite her repeated objections, an allegation Platner denies.”
“Racicot said she had an on-and-off relationship with Platner,” Politico reported, “for more than two years before he entered her rural Maine home uninvited one night in late 2021, deeply intoxicated, and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop. She said she cut off contact with him after telling him the encounter was not consensual.”
In a video posted to social media eleven minutes after the Politico story dropped, Platner says, “I wanted to directly address the troubling, serious, and false allegations against me. Any accusation of nonconsensual behavior is categorically false.”
He said he and his supporters “were united in a love of Maine, a belief that our politics must change, in a focus on defeating Susan Collins.”
“So, regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting, but mindful the political reality will inflict, we are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward for the state that I love, the people that I love, the movement I belong to, and the goal of defeating Susan Collins.”
“Those were the goals when we launched this campaign. And they remain my goals today.”
“Throughout it all, you never turned your back on me. And I will not turn my back on you now. Every one of you deserves to see that vision come to fruition and see Susan Collins defeated. And we will use every tool at our disposal to do so.”
The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, a political commentator who served as the communications director for the Jeb Bush 2016 presidential campaign, blasted Platner.
“I’m sorry but ‘we are taking time to reflect on the best path forward’ is not an option on the table,” Miller wrote. “Either it’s false and you campaign with vigor or it’s true and you get out / apologize to everyone you let down.”
Journalist Ryan Grim, commenting on Platner’s video, noted that Platner “strongly suggests he is considering dropping out. Already Troy Jackson and Chellie Pingree, both gubernatorial candidates, are being kicked around in Maine circles as potential replacements.”
Several others, including Puck News’ Peter Hamby, predicted Platner will be dropping out.
Platner had postponed several campaign events before the Politico story was published.
— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) July 6, 2026
President Donald Trump is facing backlash after posting a video of children — including showing their unblurred faces — graduating from kindergarten, with some of the girls purportedly wearing hijabs.
“President Trump posted a captionless video of graduating kindergarteners on Truth Social on Monday, goading his supporters into verbally attacking little children simply for being Muslim,” The New Republic reported. “The clip is from Gateway STEM Academy, a majority-Black K-8 public charter school in St. Paul, Minnesota. It shows about 21 children in caps and gowns on stage singing a song together. Most of the girls are wearing hijabs.”
The original post of the video which Trump reposted reads: “Public school in St. Paul, Minnesota. Every girl is in a hijab … in kindergarten.”
Trump did not add any comments. TNR called the post “Islamophobic, weird, and creepy,” while noting that the comments section of Trump’s post was filled with calls “by racist, xenophobic MAGA supporters” to “deport the children and ban hijabs.”
TNR also noted that it “should come as no surprise that Trump isn’t above attacking children who just learned how to read, but this post is still particularly discomforting—and will certainly contribute to the already potent level of anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. and in Minnesota.”
Critics blasted Trump.
“There is something deeply unsettling about the president of the United States—the most powerful person in the world—going after kindergarten schoolchildren in Minnesota because they wore hijabs, as Trump has done this morning on his website,” The Bulwark’s Sam Stein wrote.
One social media commentator wrote, “Trump posted an unblurred video of more than a dozen Muslim kindergartners to Truth Social, exposing the children’s faces while targeting them for their religion.”
Another added, “Trump is a bigot. The president took to Truth Social to attack kindergarteners in hijabs. These are little kids. The president isn’t just a bigot, he’s also a coward.”
The original video was posted to the X social media platform in June.
U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) at the time commented, “If you are in a public school in America, you should be speaking english.”
Image via Reuters
President Donald Trump’s apparent efforts to delay releasing the $5.8 million civil judgment to E. Jean Carroll are being met with a warning by the journalist’s legal team, who suggest there could be a legal maneuver for Trump to employ to forgo paying the judgment in either of the two cases he lost.
According to The Guardian, on July 4, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered Trump to release the $5.8 million judgment, which is in escrow, to Carroll by this coming Tuesday — or explain why he would not do so.
Carroll’s attorneys think Trump may be trying to buy time to mount another legal strategy, telling the judge that Trump’s request for an extension “appears to be little more than yet another play for time.”
“The case is separate from Trump’s appeal of a Manhattan civil jury’s 2024 award of $83.3m to Carroll for defamation,” The Guardian explains. “But her lawyers have suggested a legal scenario in which the president might seek to conjoin the cases and further delay payment of both.”
Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan (no relation to the judge) wrote, “We can only assume that defendant is seeking … to buy time so he can try to concoct some new basis to put off paying plaintiff presumably in connection with his forthcoming petition and motion for a rehearing.”
Trump’s former attorney, Justin Smith, in one of his final acts, wrote to the Supreme Court suggesting that his client would be appealing the $83.3 million civil judgment.
Smith argued that the Supreme Court “may wish to consider the petitions together,” given they involve the same parties.
The larger judgment case involves possible questions of presidential immunity, and that has Carroll’s attorneys concerned.
“A conjoined case, Carroll’s lawyers fear, could result in both judgments being wiped out,” The Guardian reports.
The president has also made clear he is no fan of Judge Kaplan, after the jurist made several rulings that “angered” Trump.
“What else can you expect from a Trump Hating, Clinton appointed judge, who went out of his way to make sure that the result was as negative as it could possible be,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in 2023, “speaking to, and in control of, a jury from an anti-Trump area which is probably the worst place in the US for me to get a fair ‘trial’.”
Image via Reuters
Platner Scorched Over ‘Taking Time’ Video After New Accusation
Trump Sparks Fury Online After Posting Unblurred Video of Muslim Kindergartners in Hijabs
One Legal Maneuver Threatens to Undo Everything E. Jean Carroll Won
Inside the Group Helping MAGA Voters Walk Away — And What Finally Pushed Them
