MSNBC is in a World of Hurt

After lying to its viewers about inflation, the border and the mental acuity of President Biden and going gaga for Kamala Harris it now faces a collapse in viewership, and more importantly a significant change in its corporate structure.  Today MSNBC's parent Comcast announced that it will spin off most of its cable networks into a new entity. Significantly that new entity will exclude NBC and its news division which means that MSNBC will no longer have access to NBC's worldwide network of reporters.

Thus the new MSNBC will consist of commentators and news readers that won't have the imprimatur of NBC news. Thus it won't be able to cover breaking news about weather events, wars, campaign events and domestic disturbances. Simply put the network does not have the reportorial  staff, unlike its sister company CNBC which has reporters covering business verticals and an international presence.

Indeed, without NBC News, MSNBC, won't hold a candle to Fox News, CNN and Bloomberg News, all of whom are global news organizations. Thus in order to be competitive it will have to staff up at huge cost. Some of that cost will be borne by the overpaid on-the-air talent, something that is long overdue. 

For my previous commentary on MSNBC see: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2012/11/my-letter-to-comcast-ceo-brian-roberts.html and https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-comcast-whores-of-msnbc.html

My Review of Bob Woodward's "War"

Biden’s Wars

Washington Post writer Bob Woodward has chronicled every president since Bill Clinton. In this book he focuses on Biden’s three wars, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Gaza. Unfortunately, he fails to discuss the most electorally significant war that was a result of Biden’s open border policy. Although not characterized as a war, the invasion/arrival of 10 million illegal/undocumented immigrants at our southern border seemed like a war to those Americans living in the Southwest and later to those living in the cities where they were bussed to. 

Woodward glances over the debacle in Afghanistan where Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from that country permanently reduced his poll standing. I have yet to see who was fired for allowing this to happen.

Biden initially does much better with Ukraine. Here we witness the actions of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin seamlessly performing as a team. Of course, it is my guess that those three were Woodward’s sources for what happened. Benefitting from excellent intelligence the team warns Putin and notifies Ukrainian President Zelensky that Russia was about to invade. The public release of the intelligence was unprecedented, and it helped prepare Ukraine and the American people for what was to lie ahead.

Contrary to expectations in the West, Ukraine survived the initial Russian assault and then began a counter offensive aided by U.S. weaponry. It is here where the Biden team fails. Instead of going all-in with all kinds of offensive weapons, the team dilly-dallies preventing Ukraine from pressing its advantage. As a result, the stalemate we have now ensues. The Biden rationale for going slowly was the fear that Russia might introduce nuclear weapons into the conflict. Although plausible, we don’t have any Russian sources to back this conjecture up.

After the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas, Biden goes all-in in support of Israel, and he visits the country a few weeks after. However, after the casualties start rising in Gaza the administration starts going soft. This is highlighted in the July 1924 meeting between Vice President Kamala Harris, now a presidential candidate, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. While being supportive and diplomatic with Netanyahu in private, she stuns the Israelis with a very strong public statement critical about how Israel is fighting the war and the casualties in Gaza it is causing. That along with a slowdown in certain arms deliveries to Israel, highlighted the growing breach between the Biden White House and Netanyahu.

In all three cases it seems to me that Biden’s strategy was to “end wars” not to win them. (See:  https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2024/05/joe-no-win-biden.html) This strategy ended in disaster in Afghanistan, and it is certainly not helping in Ukraine and Gaza.

There were two widely reported scoops coming out of Woodward’s book. The first being that Trump supplied Putin with Covid testing kits when they were scarce in the U.S. and second Army Chief of Staff Milley calling Trump a fascist. There was third one, not so widely reported where Biden demonstrated significant mental decline at a Silicon Valley fundraiser in June 2023, a year before his disastrous debate performance. The country would have been saved a lot of anguish if this were reported earlier.

Woodward’s book is a helpful guide to understanding the Biden years, but it is far from definitive. We learn more as his staffers write their own memoirs in the years to come.

My Review of David McCloskey's "The Seventh Floor"

 Mole Hunters

Retired CIA officer David McCloskey has written another pager turner. In this novel he captures the bureaucratic back-stabbing culture of the CIA as only an insider can do. His protagonist is the gutsy curly headed five foot tall, Artemis Aphrodite Proctor.  She is a veteran of tours in Afghanistan and Syria and was the architect of a botched operation in Singapore where CIA officer John Joseph is kidnapped by the Russians and his Russian asset is killed. This failure forces her out of the CIA.

Simultaneously two other operations go awry with a key CIA asset in Russia assassinated.  She rightly believes that there is a mole in the house and when Joseph is released in a spy swap, they join forces to hunt down the mole. Joseph is also exiled from the CIA, so they are acting as private citizens, albeit highly skilled citizens in the dark arts of the CIA. I learned that the official mole hunters in the CIA are known as the dermatology department. 

On the other side we see an aging SVR officer, Rem Zomov, working as hard as he can to protect is asset operating at the highest levels of the CIA. The title refers to the executive floor at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

Zomov orders a hit on Proctor and Joseph using an illegal couple on Dallas to do the dirty work. In shades of the hit TV series “The Americans” we find them to be a mild-mannered suburban couple blending into the north Dallas milieu.

McCloskey takes his adventure from northern Virginia, to Orlando, where Proctor is now improbably working at her cousin’s alligator park, to Las Vegas and ultimately on to France. There is much more to the story, but I ended up troubled by the bureaucratic infighting and petty jealousies that plague an organization dedicated to protecting us.

After Action Report on the 2024 Election

Shulmaven did not cover itself with glory this year. We thought Harris would win because she would be successful in casting Trump as the incumbent. (See: Shulmaven: The Turning Point in the Election and Shulmaven: A Realigning Anti-Incumbent Election)       She obviously failed in that task. We also thought that the Democrats would retake the House, which is still possible, but unlikely. Our Senate call had the Republicans ending up with 52 seats: they ended up with 53.   

What we did get right was that the election would signal a major realignment in American politics. We wrote “Simply put, the Republican Party, by eating into the Democrats hold on Black and Latino voters, has put together a broad multi-racial working-class party with a strong populist bent. This is a far cry from the business and country club-oriented party of two decades ago. Lurking behind all of this is an ever-widening gender gap.” 

 

We also wrote: “At least to me, if Harris loses Pennsylvania, her biggest mistake would be not picking Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate (See: Shulmaven: Kamala Harris Fails Her First Test with VP Pick)  and her failure to counter Trump’s attack on her position supporting federally paid for gender reassignment surgeries.” Both of these points were spot on. Finally, we noted: “I also have a hunch that the election might not be as close as the polls suggest. It is equally likely that either candidate will receive more than 300 electoral votes.”

Harris lost because her one-billion-dollar campaign and the near full support of the propaganda arms of the state, were insufficient to overcome the underlying fundamentals of the race which were:

1. Inflation is the graveyard of administrations.

2. 70% of voters thought we were on the wrong track.

3. The Biden-Harris Administration had a 40% approval ranting.

4. She failed to counter Trumps ads attacking her support for federal funding for gender assignment surgery for prisoners and immigrants held in custody.

5. Her much-vaunted ground game was over-rated.

Further she made two unforced errors. She failed to appear at the Al Smith Dinner and didn’t accept Joe Rogan’s invitation to appear on his podcast.

Perhaps most interesting the election, contrary to earlier thinking, where women fearful of losing their reproductive rights would drive turnout, instead turnout was driven by a wave of noncollege educated men of all races. It is this group that is driving the realignment towards the Republican Party. Also, of note in the deep blue states of New York, New Jersey and Virginia, Trump’s share of the vote surged. The blue governing philosophy is failing. Net Net. The Democratic Party is in a world of hurt relegating itself to be the voice of a cloistered college educated elite led around by its nose by the mainstream media and the boorish snobs of the faculty lounge.

 

The Turning Point in the Election

History will likely record that October 27th, the date of Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, was the turning point in the 2024 presidential election. The vitriol he spilled that night sent the message, “enough is enough.”

Something similar happened on September 11, 1941 when America First leader Charles Lindbergh made a viscous antisemitic speech in Des Moines, Iowa. It was widely criticized and signaled the end of his organization.

Put very bluntly, Trump lost the election with his Madison Square Garden ego trip.

A Realigning Anti-Incumbent Election

I normally write my election outlook on the weekend before the election. (See my earlier commentary: Shulmaven: The State of the Presidential Race) However, this year, because of my travel schedule I am hesitantly putting it out now. When historians 20 years from now look back at the 2024 election they would note that a major political realignment between the two parties took place. (See: Shulmaven: Political Realignment is Here) Simply put, the Republican Party, by eating into the Democrats hold on Black and Latino voters, has put together a broad multi-racial working class party with a strong populist bent. This is a far cry from the business and country-oriented party of two decades ago. Lurking behind all of this is an ever-widening gender gap.

On the other hand, the Democrats have picked up voters from hitherto high-income business oriented suburban Republican voters, especially women. The Democrats are now firmly the party of the elites buttressed by Black and single women voters. The union-oriented lunch pail Democrat is a relic of the past. The Democrats are the party of women, and the Republicans are the party of men.

Part and parcel with the realignment is that the county is moving towards Trump on many issues, specifically on trade, immigration, and crime. Witness Democratic Senator Bob Casey praising Trump on trade. In contrast the country is moving towards Harris on the potent issue of abortion. It remains to be seen which dominates. What is really surprising is that the race is so close given that nearly all of the propaganda arms of the state are firmly in the Harris camp.

Further the global electorate including ours is in anti-incumbent rage. (See: Shulmaven: Incumbents Beware) This is crucial for both Trump and Harris. Whomever the electorate perceives to be the incumbent will lose. That is why Biden had to drop out. To be sure Harris is the incumbent vice president, but we have been living in the age of Trump for nine years. My guess is that the electorate will not want to witness another four years. The problem for Harris is that she is too tied to Biden, and she has yet to articulate a clear vision of the future. Her closing argument is that Trump’s narcissistic criminality has to be stopped.

The electoral college arithmetic for both candidates is challenging. For example, if Harris holds the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and picks up the one electoral vote coming out of Omaha, Nebraska she will hit the 270 electoral vote magic number. However, if she loses one of those states, she going to have to make it up in North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. Given today’s polls, which is doable, but difficult. At the end of the day the key to a Harris victory is her ground game. She has paid staff and volunteers everywhere, while Trump’s campaign is sorely lacking in this regard. At least to me, if Harris loses Pennsylvania, her biggest mistake would be not picking Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate (See: Shulmaven: Kamala Harris Fails Her First Test with VP Pick)  and her failure to counter Trump’s attack on her position supporting federally paid for gender reassignment surgeries.

I also have a hunch that the election might not be as close as the polls suggest. It is equally likely that either candidate will receive more than 300 electoral votes. Stranger things have happened in the last two weeks of the election and if there is going to be a wave, I would give the edge to Harris. Recall that the polls were wrong in 2016, 2020 and 2022.

In keeping with my anti-incumbent thesis, I think the Democrats will retake the very dysfunctional House and end up with a majority of around 10-12 seats. On the other hand, the Democrats will lose the Senate with the Republicans ending up with 52 seats. Although most Senate Democrats are leading in the polls there are too many targets of opportunity for the Republicans.

Most disappointing about the election is that two particularly critical issues, the elephants in the room, are not being discussed. The first is the out-of-control deficit spending of both parties that putting the U.S. on the path of have highest debt/GDP ratio in history and the underspending on defense that will put our country at grave risk in the years ahead.

 

My Review of David Brown's "A Hell of a Storm: The Battle for Kansas......."

 1854: The Hinge Year on the Road to Civil War

 

Historian David Brown has given us an important and very readable book on how the events of 1854 set America on course to our civil war. The critical event was the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act which broke the Missouri Compromise of 1820 by allowing the territories north of 36 degrees 30 minutes latitude to decide for themselves whether or not they wanted to allow slavery under the doctrine of popular sovereignty. Prior to that enactment slavery was prohibited in most of the Louisiana Purchase. The notion of popular sovereignty was first introduced by Senator Stephen Douglas in the 1850 compromise that brought California into the Union, but, allowed for the New Mexico and Arizona Territories to vote on whether or not they wanted slavery. Stephen Douglas would then build on the 1850 compromise to champion the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

 

The notion of popular sovereignty seems quaint today, but I would note we are yet again living with this on the issue of abortion. The overturning of Rowe v. Wade returned the question of abortion to the states where each state would determine how it deals with this question.

 

Leading the charge against the Kansas-Nebraska Act was Free Soil Party Senator Salmon P. Chase. Chase would go on to help found the new Republican Party in 1854, become Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury, and then become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. His leadership on this issue established him as a national figure and the issue brought Abraham Lincoln out of his successful law practice into the national limelight. The growing chasm between north and south was occurring against the backdrop of rising industrialization and a growing abolition movement. It would become a battle between free labor and slavery.

 

So great was the controversy over the act, that the Whig Party would collapse as the northern Whigs could no longer countenance being in the same party as the southern Whigs. Most of the northern Whigs became Republicans and the Democrats solidified their position in the South and picked up those northern Whigs who didn’t become Republicans. The reason why the act passed was because the slavery-oriented Democratic Party was at the height of its power controlling the presidency and both houses of Congress. Indeed the New Hampshire native Franklin Pierce was the last Democratic president to receive a majority vote for president until Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.

 

Brown brings into the mix Harriet Beecher Stowe of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” fame published in 1852, Henry David Thoreau and his “Walden Pond” (1854), and Harriet Tubman’s underground railroad. All of this was going on in and around 1854. Further, in 1854 the full ramifications of the Fugitive Slave Law, part of the 1850 compromise, was being felt in the North, especially Massachusetts.

 

David Brown gives us a very real sense of our country heading towards civil war. Unfortunately, the parallels for today are more than disquieting.