Open Thread – Sunday Nov 11, 2018

On this day in 1918, German leaders sign the armistice ending World War I, a conflict so terrible it was called “The War to End All Wars.” It was a day full of hope. But the allies bungled the ensuing peace, so another world war erupted a measly 20 years later. Now the day is set aside to honor veterans, of which we have a never ending supply thanks to continuous bungling. (…or there is there some devious logic to it? Hmmm…?)

Anyhoo – THANKS FOR YOUR SERVICE, DONVITI! Enjoy your free oil change.

In other open thread goodness…

Here is a piece from Salon by Lucian Truscott IV (don’t thank him for his service).

I whole-heartedly agree with these points:

Over the years that I traveled to Southeast Missouri to go canoeing and fishing, the Democratic Party began its strategy of concentrating on the “battleground states.” You’d watch the political coverage, and it was all Florida and Ohio and Pennsylvania. Democrats went from contesting the whole country in elections to counting on holding the Northeast and West and what did they call it before it fell in 2016? Oh yeah, I remember. The “blue wall” in the “rust belt:” Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

The mistake Democrats have made over the last 40 years is to think that the people in Missouri who worked in that [long gone] baseball cap factory are stupid, that they wouldn’t notice when Democrats stopped courting labor and went looking for contributions from hedge funders and venture capitalists on Wall Street and Silicon Valley … CEO pay went from about 25 times that of an average worker in the 1970s to 361 times as much. Indexed yearly income of the average American worker in 2016 was about eight times what it was in 1970.
… I’m living out here in the Hamptons, and I’m surrounded by rich Democrats who have no shame. They live in gigantic mansions near the ocean, surrounded by tall hedges, and they fly out here on Gulfstreams and helicopters, and they drive around in Porsches and Ferraris, and they don’t care if you see them and their greed. In fact, they want you to. This is where Hillary Clinton came in August of 2016 to raise money. Right here, to the Hamptons. And she wasn’t raising it from Republicans.

We’ve done this to ourselves. Big time rich Republicans went to Davos, so big time rich Democrats went, too. Big time rich Republicans started paying themselves unreasonable sums of money, so big time rich Democrats did too. It starts there, and it dribbles down through the rest of the Democratic Party. Republicans can get away with it, because they don’t give a shit, but they’re good at pretending that they do. Democrats actually do give a shit, so they don’t even have to pretend, but they’re terrible at telling people they really do care, and they really do want to do stuff and have done stuff that matters. (Hello, Social Security and Medicare! Can you hear me?) Part of the problem is, they’re too busy copying the assholes who don’t give a shit.

You can’t copy what the other guys are doing and expect nobody to notice. They notice, all right. They might not actually lay eyes on you standing around in the backyards of liberal Democrats in Sagaponack, sipping Rose and nibbling Scotch salmon appetizers, but they know. All the way from Southeast Missouri, they know. And they vote.