Short and not-so-sweet, since self the loser is too lazy to come up with a really good edition today, especially given how late in the day I’m writing this. That aside, if you belong to a certain ‘elite’ demographic (and even if you don’t’), you may have heard this old quip:
“You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much.”
Case in point: Ted Cruz, whom it would be great to unseat this November, if enough Texans actually do the impossible. (You can guess that I’m not an optimist there.) Here, in MO, while we don’t have a Harvard grad in the US Senate race this year, we have a Yale grad, Josh Hawley, where, in his case:
“You can always tell a Yale man, but you can’t tell him much.”
In both cases, the Repuke candidate is favored, which would certainly be disasters in both cases, although not surprising, given the intellectually bass-ackwards nature of each state’s electorates in recent years. In the case of Hawley and MO, it’s all the more frustrating since Hawley hasn’t actually accomplished anything noteworthy as MO Attorney General, besides getting elected to the job on Traitor Drumpf’s coattails. In fact, per this Politico article from this past May 15 by Alex Isenstadt:
“….many Republicans worry that Hawley - who openly admits he had no intention of running for Senate until he was pressured into it - is squandering his shot.”
In other words, deep down, Hawley doesn’t really want to be the next US Senator from MO, if this interpretation is correct. He’s doing it just because he was asked. This may explain why he blew it on Twitter this week with his “Where is @clairecmc?” attempted sliming, from the MO State Fair. Senator Claire McCaskill responded thus, and Michael Bersin at the Show Me Progress blog cherry-picked some responses to Hawley here. For the record, Claire was at the State Fair on its first day.
Plus, it doesn’t necessarily help that Claire is a Blue Dog conserva-Dem, which makes her anathema to the purity trolls in MO who are out to ruin everything just as they did in November 2016. (Say to yourself “OH-12” again and again if you really think that B-o-b’ers have actually learned their lesson. They haven’t. Purity trolls are in every state, in sufficient amounts.) However, in counterpoint, guest blogger WillyKay at Show Me Progress noted last week:
“…even though McCaskill is ending her second term as a denizen of D.C … she’s been undeniably tireless in her efforts to keep in touch with the temper of the region – her listening tours and kitchen cabinet meetings have taken place regularly, even in off-election years. While she’s struggled to remain true to basic Democratic principles, she’s also listened and learned from those who see the issues differently, sometimes angering those among us who are more progressive in our leanings. But I wager that many of us, such as myself, respect her effort to represent as many of her constituents as she conscientiously can.”
Note WK’s use of the phrase “many of us”. This fall, we need all of us in MO who loathe Traitor Drumpf to vote for Claire, no matter how Blue Dog and conserva-Dem she is, because we have no other option. This week’s Twitter fail by Hawley is nowhere near enough to sink him as a candidate, far from it. A lot of things have to go wrong cumulatively to convince enough MO voters not already committed one way or the other to vote against Hawley and for Claire, given how rigid people are in their thinking. It’s the same in Texas, even with a genuinely more inspiring candidate in Beto O’Rourke compared to Claire. Cruz is a known slimeball, but that’s nothing new. The trick is convincing enough Texas voters to dump the known slimeball for the unknown fresh face. If nothing else, Cruz and Hawley are living proof that top-rank universities can graduate bottom of the barrel people, not necessarily in terms of book smarts, but in terms of basic decency. (Full disclosure: I’m an Ivy League grad, of no particular distinction, from neither of the great universities mentioned here.)
So that leaves the poll below, where, again, you need to vote for what you think will happen, not what you want to happen. (Option # 4 is clearly what everyone on this blog wants to happen, or at least I hope so. ) With that, happy voting in yet another meaningless DK poll, and time for the standard SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories for the week…