After Action Report

In the aftermath of any event in the industries I have worked, there has always been some form of “After Action Report.” It goes by various names, “Hotwash,” “Critique”, “AAR”, and many others, but it’s always useful as a means of cementing in place the lessons we have learned of what did, and what did not work, and how to move forward with those lessons.

So today, we’re going to go through that exercise.  Oh, and as always, please notice the cup at the tip jar Where we restock the bar. While you can do a paid subscription here at Sub stack, and it’s a welcome donation, Stripe (the folks that handle the money for sub stack) get a BIG cut.  The Tip jar money all goes straight to me.

 Dinner tonight is Turkey and noodles, I did a pair of turkeys for my Masonic brothers last night, and the carcasses are currently being boiled down for broth.  The booze is on the counter, soda in the mudroom, and ice tea/ lemonade in the fridge. So, let’s begin!

As I mentioned last week Bad Cat (https://boriquagato.substack.com/)  predicted last week that the press model we grew up with is dead. Tuesday night showed how right he was.  The polls showed Harris ahead right up until the day of the election.  Oh a few of them were hedging their bets, but even then, there was “Oh this new poll in Iowa shows Kamilla is going to win!” and other such stories…  Right up until reality tipped over the apple cart.

The press continues to whistle past the graveyard. The Washington Post this morning said, “Ahead of Election Day, polling hinted that Democrats could take back control (of the house) from Republicans.” 

Uh, dudes, the last three elections in a row have shown that polls are worthless in the modern twenty first century American environment.  The only thing consistently true about polls is that they’ve been WRONG. 

With the exception of Bezos and one or two others, no one is asking the right question though.

“What’s the right question?” You ask?

Glad you asked.  The right question is WHY are the polls wrong?

The answer is complicated, but it comes down to a four things. 

1) Trust.  The MSM doesn’t have any.  They’re operating on a significant trust deficit, to the point that if CNN says the sky’s blue, most people will go outside and check for themselves, being pretty sure that some sort of anomaly has made the sky now green. Since most polls are conducted by the media, that leads to:

2) Intentional lying.  If you are a cop, and you ask a guy who’s swerving all over the road how many drinks he’s had, odds are, he’s going to say “two.”  With the exception of the rare diabetic who’s in ketosis, or addict on something else, the dude is lying. 

Why is he lying?

Because he doesn’t trust the cop. Well, he’s right, the cop is looking for admission of guilt.

Likewise, the general consensus is that the press is going to twist your statement to meet their agenda.  So, for example, most gun owners, when asked by a poll: “how many guns do you own?” is going to lie, because they don’t want to provide the press with ammunition to shoot at them. 

When it comes to things like “who are you going to vote for?” The right has started to lie on the assumption that “if they don’t know how many votes to fake, they won’t be able to beat the margin when cheating.” Which brings us to:

3) Self-selection. A vast number of people just don’t talk to pollsters. Further, that number is more right wing than left wing.  (That’s because the press is overwhelmingly, in your face, somewhere to the left of Bernie Sanders.) If your sample is contaminated, Garbage in, garbage out.  And finally:

4) Badly worded questions. The polls written looking for a specific answer will get that answer.  My wife was hit by a pollster the other day, one of the questions was “How likely are you to vote in this election?”

 She answered, “I will vote.”

“So, you’re more likely than not to vote?”

“No, I WILL vote.”

“Your choices are; ‘I probably will not vote, I may vote, or I am more likely than not to vote.’ You must pick one.”

At which point my wife hung up.  This by the way, adds to the whole lack of trust thing. It’s compounded when the writer of the poll is hoping for a certain result and loads the question to get the answer they want.  Conformation bias gives you shitty results.

Unless they fix those items, polls are worthless, and going to get more so.

Trump, against most predictions not only won the Electoral college vote, but he also won the popular vote. (Oh there’s still some press types claiming “well the votes aren’t all counted yet, there could be a miracle on the way.” But we’re back to whistling past the graveyard.)  And even now, when most places are admitting Trump’s victory, they’re loading the semantics to try and discredit him.  “Impeached for his role in a violent attack on Congress, five months after being convicted of a felony in New York” is a phrase used in every single article the MSM has written about last night. 

The ridiculousness of it all is the sheer cognitive dissonance of the MSM.. For example Rebecca Solnit, one of the MSM’s darling heroines https://www.facebook.com/rebecca.solnit Wrote this huge screed simultaneously quoting and idolizing the Wobblies (the IWW or International Workers of the World, a Soviet Communist front organization from the 1920s and 30s) while talking about the horrors of living under the USSR. Leaving me with ‘Forest Whitaker eye’.

Accordingly, the first lesson learned from all of this: MSM, you need to fix yourself, and get rid of your implicit bias, or you’re done.  The majority of the nation is tired of your bullshit, as evidenced by the election, and if you want to be anything other than a museum piece and a footnote in the history books, you need to change your ways.

The second lesson is for the Democratic Party.  Look, I don’t WANT a single party system.  No, really!  That’s a bad thing.  However, the DNC needs to do some sincere soul searching, or that’s what we’re going to get.  Oh, I’m sure that the recriminations and the long knives are already coming out, and behind closed doors there’s more backstabbing going on right now than there was in the Roman Senate one March.  The trouble is, there’s no assurance that what will come out of it will be of any value, unless they’re honest and accurate about their failings.

They lost the unions. They lost the Hispanic vote (by a 23% margin), they lost the black male vote, they lost the working-class vote.  And yet, they’re still doubling down on the same mistakes.  (among which is “well America is too sexist, that’s why we lost.)

When the Republicans have a convention, the delegates are selected based on caucuses and primaries.  Those folks choose who is running, and what the platform will be.

When the Democrats have a convention, they have delegates from the caucuses and primaries too, but they also have “SUPER delegates.”  These are the people chosen by the leaders of the party, to be the leaders of the party.  If that sounds very autocratic, and Soviet, that’s because it IS.  What’s worse is that the “super delegates” (SD) outnumber the regular delegates.  If the SDs decide that so and so is going to be the standard bearer, well that’s who the party goes with.  This is exactly what happened this time.  Harris wasn’t elected, she was appointed. The powers behind the throne spoke, and the party had no choice.

Now it was already obvious that Biden was not running the show, the only thing he was running was into his Depends. Still the cabal running the party were happy with that, because they had a front man, and could do as they liked, so the official line was “Joe has never been more on the ball!”  Right up until they couldn’t hide it anymore, because he basically shit his pants and played with it on national TV.  Then they had to find a plan B fast.  Which is how we wound up with Harris, someone who never won a primary in her life, never got a caucus approval vote in her life, as the standard bearer. 

The DNC can do one of two things now.

1)They can completely re-engineer their party, to make it responsive to the desires of the people, and steer a course that takes them back toward the folks who’s support they lost (the unions, the black men, the Hispanics, and the blue-collar workers) which will involve telling the perfumed princes like Obama, the Clintons, Pelosi, Schiff etal and the bomb throwing radicals like OAC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and the rest of ‘the squad’ to SHUT THE FUCK UP, SIT DOWN, and LISTEN, instead of telling everyone: “This is what you want, if you don’t understand that, well, you’re stupid.”

Or

2) They can continue to do what they’re doing now, but maybe with some of the old guard put out to pasture and blamed for this particular disaster, while doubling down that “really, what we told them they wanted, is what’s best for them, we just sucked at selling it.”

One of those choices is harder, and it involves some really bitter medicine.  The trouble is, right now the DNC has cancer. Chemo is brutal, but sugar pills won’t help.  One of these choices means the complete irrelevance of your party, and probably the breakup of it, in the long run, as some other party becomes the opposition to the Republicans, while you go the way of the Whigs and the Democratic-Republican party.  Your call, but before you make it, you might examine what has happened in the stock market, the Bitcoin market, the International currency market, and virtually the entire global market structure today, and ask yourself WHY.

There’s a suggestion that I don’t have the time to run down today, that the only states Harris won are states that do not have a voter ID requirement.

Which plays well with the observation that somehow, magically, in 2020, and only in 2020 we had nearly twice as many voters as we ever have before or since.

It's a problem of perception even if it’s completely innocent. And from the party that brought us folks like Mayor Daily, and the 1960 election in IL, well trying to sell that it was completely innocent is a big sell.  If the excuse is “well, it was Trump, and we had that many people that hated him…” OK then where were they yesterday?

Democrats, you MUST fix your party or form a new one.  Y’all got problems.

The Third lesson is for President Elect Trump.  David Strom wrote an impassioned piece on ‘Hot Air’ all-gas-pedal-no-brakes-this-time- Suggesting that Trump go full General Sherman on the government in general.  Fire the bureaucrats, get the FBI out of Washington DC, (along with several other agencies… and the idea of moving the Department of Agriculture out is especially worth while to me.) Fauci imprisoned, the World Economic Forum nuked, NATO told to put up or shut the fuck up, etc.  Many of his ideas have merit.  The FBI is so tainted that a complete reorganization would be about the only way to restore trust.

I’ve called for the decommissioning of the Department of EDU for years.

The WEF? Yeah, if you want to go to Davos you’re going on your own dime, and taking a leave of absence to go. Fuck them and the whores they rode in on. 

Court Martialing Milley for his stunts with the PRC while serving as CJCS?  OH HELL YES. He should spend the rest of his natural life in USDB Ft. Leavenworth.

All of that said, this needs to NOT become an exercise in revenge.  First off, remember that in four years, there will be another election, and there’s no promise that the people you piss on won’t wind up in office.  This is not the time to see how many of them we can lock up.  This is the time to reestablish a little civility.  Oh, make it sting! Elections DO have consequences, and you took it fair and square in spite of anything your opponents could do.  But there’s better ways than to pull the shit that they pulled.

let this sink in

Harris is politically dead.  Leave that rotting corpse to shamble off to whatever crypt it wants to crawl into, as a politician she’s deader than last week’s salmon (and smells as bad.) 

Biden? Yes, he’s a crook.  His whole family is crooked as hell.  But politically he’s just as dead as she is.  Piss him off even more, grant him a pardon.  No trial, no dredging up nastiness that we can’t do anything about anyway, no putting an 80-year-old with advanced senility on the witness stand, just a presidential pardon, and leave him a laughing stock.

Hillary is a dead letter as well. Obama? Eh, if you have something felonious on him, fine, but make DAMN sure it’s bullet proof, or just leave him alone.  I expect he’s going to be one of the casualties of the failure of this election, and will never be a power in politics again.  That should be galling enough for him.

On the other hand, Schedule F? Oh yes. 

I’ve been in discussions with the executive director and head lobbyist for the organization that represents federal managers that I used to be a senior VP at.  I left that position when I retired from Government service, but I have maintained a life membership in the outfit.  They are extremely against Schedule F, for obvious reasons. (hey if you’re a lawyer, you represent your client, even if he’s guilty as hell) The claim is:

“We will advocate in the strongest terms possible against politicizing the civil service.” To which my response was:

“With respect sir, that ship sailed years ago. 

“The Civil Service, especially at the GS 13 and up, and the ESE are already as politicized as possible.  The thing is, they're un-fireable, even when they violate the directions of their bosses both elected and composed of ‘we the people.’

“I disagree with the stance we are taking on this issue.”

Well, while it would be inappropriate to share the discussion in full, there is acknowledgement that such a problem exists, they just think it can be fixed short of the nuclear option that Schedule F represents.  Further they think that creating Schedule F will cause a lot of voids in offices due to the requirement that someone be appointed by each new president, and confirmed by each new congress, and that this would add on the order of 50,000 new appointments to be reapproved each election.  I seriously doubt that number, and I also doubt that each of those would have to be reapproved.  Just because a president CAN fire everyone he's authorized to appoint, doesn’t mean he’s going to.  A president can fire every sitting general and admiral.  Does it happen? No.

Although this time, it might be needed.  Our military is broken right now.  You’ve heard me on this hobby horse before.  If we don’t fix it, FAST, we’re staring at a bloody and possibly lost war with the PRC.  If we can hold them at bay for another decade, they’re probably going to collapse without any help from us.  Seem impossible?  So did the fall of the Soviet Union, until it happened. They’ve got internal problems, just like the USSR did.  They’re hoping to fix it via a “short victorious war.”

Sound familiar?  It’s been a game played by tyrants since the world began.  The thing is, tyrants don’t start wars that look like they will be neither short nor victorious.  That’s why we need a military, and specifically a navy that causes the PRC to say, “Well, maybe this isn’t such a good idea after all Xi, we the party, looked at it, and we find that you’re going to need to take a vacation, in sunny Xinjiang.”  (that’s where most of their “re-education” camps are.)  

CDR Sal has a nice piece on this as well as the latest on Fat Lenard that you should go see: fat-leonard-and-phat-victories in which he talks about what Trump needs to do in the DOD arena, and his disgust at how lightly Leonard Francis got off… along with the timing, burying of that news in the grass below the news of the election. As always, Sal is over the target and dropping smart bombs.

Oh, and speaking of Smart bombs, Musk pointed out a brilliant piece by Bill D’Agostino this morning  replace 'democracy' with 'bureaucracy' and it makes sense you should go see it, it’s only 40 seconds, and it explains everything.

Well, one last and completely unrelated thing before I go.  It seems that some unidentified Funeral home in Seattle ‘found’ 28 sets of remains from CIVIL WAR VETS no, I’m not shitting you. /remains-of-nearly-30-civil-war-veterans-found-funeral-homes-storage- Apparently they were only discovered through the good services of the Missing In America Project.  Go take a read, it will do you good.

QOTD " "Kamala thought she could campaign exclusively on the ability to kill children and win. It didn't work." —Allie Beth Stuckey

"Kamala Harris got fewer women voters than Joe Biden. The gender gap narrative also went up in smoke." —Katie Pavlich

Yours in Service,

William Lehman