The Self-Destruction Of The Republican Party, Puts The Democrats At A Crossroad

The least racist person anywhere by Nancy Ohanian

Last May Trump performed at one of his hate rallies in one of the most vile neo-fascist areas of America, the Florida Panhandle (AKA, "Little Alabama"). He was stoking hatred and bigotry is a place he had no need to be. Panama City Beach is east of Panama City-- in Bay County-- drawing residents from Florida's first and second congressional districts. Trump beat Hillary in Bay County 71.2% to 24.9%. Trump beat her in the first district 67.5% to 28.2% and bear her in the second district 66.2% to 30.6%. They were his top two performing districts in Florida, not just Republican, thorough fascist. Matt Gaetz represents FL-01. At his hate rally he excited the audience with a question and answer: "How do you stop these people? You can’t." He was referring to immigrants. One of his adoring fans screamed, "Shoot them." Trump smiled benignly as thousands of repulsive fascist supporters cheered wildly.

And then, Saturday, we had El Paso. Remember RedHat = HatRed. Yesterday Yasmeen Abutaleb, reporting for the Washington Post, wrote about what's inside the Trump-inspired manifesto posted by the Trumpist mass murdrerer. "It railed against a 'Hispanic invasion' and laid out a plan to divide the United States into territories based on race... It begins by praising the manifesto of the gunman who killed 51 Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand earlier this year. That document cited a white supremacist theory known as 'The Great Replacement,' which postulates that a secret group of elites is working to destroy the white race by replacing them with immigrants and refugees. 'This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,' the manifesto says." Trumpism were sprinkled throughout the 2,300 word manifesto, which she notes is "a jumble of positions and ideologies."

Under “political reasons,” the manifesto lambastes both Democrats and Republicans, suggesting the United States will soon become a one-party state run by Democrats because of the growing Hispanic population, the death of the baby-boom generation and the “anti-immigrant rhetoric of the right.” The author postulates that the growing Hispanic population in Texas will soon make it a solidly Democratic state, which he argues would all but assure repeated Democratic presidential victories.

“The Democrat party will own America and they know it. They have already begun the transition by pandering heavily to the Hispanic voting bloc in the 1st Democratic Debate,” the manifesto says.

The document repeatedly rails against corporations, which the author says have taken over the government. The author criticizes Republicans for favoring corporations, but argues that “at least with Republicans, the process of mass immigration and citizenship can be greatly reduced.”

The author also expresses fear over the impact automation will have on job opportunities and argues that immigrants should not be allowed to continue coming into the country as long as job opportunities are scarce. He argues that while immigrants often take menial jobs that Americans are unwilling to perform, their children seek better opportunities and often receive college degrees that allow them to obtain high-skill positions. The document again blames corporations for advocating for work visas for skilled workers and says they rely on immigrants to fill low-skilled positions.

In a jumbled rant, the document rails against corporations for destroying the environment by over-harvesting resources. The manifesto chastises the government for being unwilling to confront environmental issues and most Americans for being unwilling to change their lifestyles to be more environmentally friendly. It argues that the United States therefore needs fewer people consuming resources.

The author wrote that he planned to mainly rely on an AK-47 as his weapon for the shooting, noting that it overheats after about 100 rounds and that he would need a heat-resistant glove.

The manifesto notes that many migrants return to their home countries to reunite with family, arguing that “the Hispanic population is willing to return to their home countries if given the right incentive. An incentive that myself and many other patriotic Americans will provide.” The author writes that such terrorist attacks will “remove the threat of the Hispanic voting bloc.”

In the “personal reasons and thoughts” section, the author writes that he has spent his life preparing for a future that does not exist, though does not specify what that future would be. He ends on an anti-immigrant screed, worrying that Hispanics will take over the Texas government and says the Founding Fathers have given him the rights-- presumably referring to the right to bear arms-- to save the country from destruction.

“Our European comrades don’t have the gun rights needed to repel the millions of invaders that plaque [sic] their country. They have no choice but to sit by and watch their countries burn,” the manifesto says.

Finally, the manifesto ends by decrying interracial couples and proposes separating the United States into territories based on race. The author points to white supremacist theories that “stronger and/or more appealing cultures overtake weaker and/or undesirable ones.”

The author expresses fear that he will be captured, rather than die during the shooting, because that would mean he would receive the death penalty and his family would despise him. And he stresses that he has maintained his white supremacist ideology for many years, predating President Trump and his 2016 campaign, which he says did not influence his reasons for carrying out the attack.

“This is just the beginning of the fight for America and Europe,” the author writes.

I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
Asked the Lord above "have mercy, now save poor Bob, if you please"
Ooh, standin' at the crossroad, tried to flag a ride
Ooh-ee, I tried to flag a ride
Didn't nobody seem to know me, babe, everybody pass me by
Standin' at the crossroad, baby, risin' sun goin' down
Standin' at the crossroad, baby, eee-eee, risin' sun goin' down
I believe to my soul, now, poor Bob is sinkin' down
You can run, you can run, tell my friend Willie Brown
You can run, you can run, tell my friend Willie Brown
That I got the crossroad blues this mornin', Lord, babe, I'm sinkin' down
And I went to the crossroad, mama, I looked east and west
I went to the crossroad, baby, I looked East and West
Lord, I didn't have no sweet woman, ooh well, babe, in my distress

About a month ago, Joshua Zeitz, author of Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson's White House, writing for Politico put the dilemma of the NeverTrumpers into some historical perspective. For years, before the Civil War broke out, there was a mass migration among northern Democrats away from "the political organization that had long formed the backbone of their civic identity. Yet they came over the course of a decade to believe that the Jacksonian Democratic Party had degenerated into something thoroughly autocratic and corrupt. It had fallen so deeply in the thrall of the Slave Power that it posed an existential threat to American democracy. Placing the sanctity of the nation above the narrow bonds of party, these Democrats joined in common cause with former Whig antagonists [the newly-formed Republican Party] in the epic struggle to save the United States from its own darker instincts. Today, a small but influential cadre of Republican elected officials, strategists and policy experts faces a similar choice. Heirs of Ronald Reagan, they have grown to believe that their party has also degenerated into something ugly and undemocratic-- hostile to science and fact, rooted in an angry spirit of racial and ethnic nationalism, enamored of foreign strongmen and hostile to American institutions, and so fundamentally estranged from the nation’s founding values that it poses an existential threat to American democracy. During the presidential campaign of 2016, and for the better part of the past two years, these Never Trumpers could plausibly speak of extracting their party from the grip of white nationalism and angry populism. Now, with midterm elections approaching-- with broad majorities of the GOP electorate firmly in the president’s thrall and the Republican Congress all but fully acquiescent to the White House-- such talk is fanciful... [T]oday’s Never Trumpers face a stark choice: passively acquiesce to the further ascent of Trumpism, or switch parties and play a vital part in stopping it."

In the course of defecting to the new Republican Party, many former Democrats came to look back with disgust on the ways by which Southern Democrats had enforced rigid, doctrinaire support for slavery for decades. Starting in the 1830s, when Congress instituted a “gag rule” barring debate or discussion of the peculiar institution, the Democratic majority blithely tramped over the First Amendment rights of white Northern congressmen in the defense of chattel slavery.

A onetime Democrat from Ohio-- and future Republican congressman-- put the matter in sharper relief when he complained that “we have submitted to slavery long enough, and must not stand it any longer… I am done catching negroes for the South.” Hannibal Hamlin, a Democratic senator from Maine, lamented that “the old Dem. party is now the party of slavery. It has no other issue, in fact, and this is the standard on which [it] measures every thing and every man.” Hamlin soon switched parties and served as vice president in Abraham Lincoln’s first term.

It’s unclear whether the politicians were leading their constituents, or vice versa. The congressional district in Pennsylvania that antislavery Democrat David Wilmot and his Democrat-turned-Republican successor, Galusha Grow, represented had delivered a plurality of 2,500 votes to Democratic presidential candidate Franklin Pierce in 1852. Four years later, Republican nominee John C. Fremont won the district with 70 percent of the vote and a plurality of 9,000. (Grow would go on to serve as House speaker.) Throughout most of the North and Midwest, Democrats were reduced to minority status overnight.

...Ex-Democrats in the 1850s and 1860s didn’t have to become Whigs. They were able to join a new political party-- albeit one dominated by former Whigs.

The shrewdest of today’s Never Trump Republicans realize that they face only one clean choice, and it is, of course, more jarring: Become Democrats or, like the prominent GOP strategist Steve Schmidt, become independents and support Democrats... Never Trumpers will find it a bitter pill to swallow.

Zeitz offers them-- in the name of "history"-- some consolation, promising the Never Trumpers control of the more conservative, less progressive Democratic Party that the ex-Republicans are all over MSNBC and on the editorial pages of the New York Times propagandizing for, as they push, push, push for Biden or-- if he proven too implausible-- Mayo Pete or Kamala "Mnuchin" Harris. Never Trumpers and Democrats can find common cause, wrote Zeitz, filled with disdain for the activist progressive roots of the FDR "wing" of the Democratic Party, in love with the Republican wing. Of the Democrats, he wrote, it "is more center than left. It’s the only American political party that has seriously attempted to develop market-based policies to expand health care access (the Affordable Care Act), address climate change (cap and trade) or upgrade the nation’s deficient infrastructure (an infrastructure bank). He celebrates half measures like RomneyCare/ObamaCare and buries his head in cap and trade as Miami and Fort Meyers sink under the waves. "If Never Trumpers are truly alarmed by Democrats’ recent embrace of single-payer health care and universal community college, they should become Democrats and develop market-based solutions to big, systemic problems. That would also require that Democratic voters understand their role in forging a new majority: They must pitch a larger tent and accommodate a broader range of ideas and perspectives. Some of them might be forced to make sacrifices like Lincoln’s and step aside in favor of former Republicans where circumstances demand it." Zeitz may be hopeful, but that doesn't make him correct.

Reed Galen offers another historical analysis. In the first half of the 19th century, the two major parties in the U.S. were the Democrats and the Whigs. The Republicans broken from the Whigs in 1854, basically to stop the spread of slavery. Six years later, they elected a president, Abraham Lincoln. "While slavery served as the lever around which the Whigs would spin into oblivion," write Galen, "it was their moral failure regarding so odious an institution to so many Americans that ultimately killed them off. Like the Whigs of old, Donald Trump’s GOP is staring at a similar fate should it continue on this path. Many evangelical Christians, seeing themselves as arbiters of moral righteousness, tout the president as the tonic to so many of the country’s problems. The reality is, however, that the party’s outward failures are distinctly grounded in a lack of moral compass, ugly politics and nonexistent policy; for which the electoral consequences have only just begun."

Between 1854 and today, the GOP has completed an about face. Founded as the party of equality for all races, its leader and new spiritual guide now intentionally stokes resentment as a matter of politics, policy and habit. Trump’s reasoning? An abiding fear that his overwhelmingly white, male base will desert him. We’re a long way from Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.

In last year’s midterm elections, many suburban congressional districts, long the bastion of Republicanism, saw Democrats elected for the first time in decades. Given these voters’ unwillingness to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016, they took their revenge on Republicans generally, and Trump specifically, in 2018.

Based on their feelings about Trump’s language and behavior, many Republicans and conservative independents are turning away from the party. As Jonathan Martin noted earlier this week, Orange County, Calif., once the heart and soul of Reagan Republicanism, saw its GOP voter registration advantage sink from 124,000 to only 1,000 in the course of three years. The Republican Party in California is now third in line, registration-wise, behind Democrats and voters who claim “No Party Preference.”

The GOP’s decade-long war on Obamacare, and its inability to provide a credible substitute, battered and bruised the party last year. Today, health care, and the economic fallout from health crises, consistently top voters’ concerns in public surveys. Republicans are out of step with the electorate, with nothing to say and no one to say it.

The images and stories coming out of our border with Mexico cause many middle-class and suburban Americans to blanch. Despite our nation’s troubles, these voters still see America as exceptional, as humane and as an exemplar to the rest of the world. Keeping men in cages for weeks on end and taking children from their parents is beyond the pale for moderates, independents and many otherwise conservative voters.

In politics, as in life, demographics are destiny. In the 2016 election, Trump lost voters 18-29 and 30-44 by 19 percentage points and 10 percentage points, respectively. As MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki noted on Jon Ward’s podcast, The Long Game, one look at public polling shows there is a massive chasm between voters under/over 45 years of age.

Regarding how they see the world, their personal priorities, what they believe to be the most pressing issues facing the country, the GOP is out of step with a large and growing cohort. On the other hand, the older voters that Republicans have long relied on-- white, more conservative, more working class-- will represent a plurality of registered voters and their impact will drop accordingly.

This argument and warning to Republicans is not new. In the wake of Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss, the “Growth and Opportunity Project” was commissioned by party leaders to determine a direction forward. Their belief? Without a credible position on issues such as immigration and without the ability to draw in minority and younger voters, the way of the Whigs was their likely destination.

While those GOP leaders misread the Republican electorate of 2016, looking back they understood the arc of American politics. What the country needs now is a new collection of political pioneers, willing to find their Ripon moment. The opportunity for new entrants and new energy is there. Harnessing the energy, attention and passion of millennials and Generation X to chart our course forward is completely possible and absolutely necessary.

The catastrophe for America would be for the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- the Blue Dogs New Dems and corrupt careerists like Pelosi and Hoyer and their leadership team-- to be allowed to let the NeverTrumpers woo the Democratic Party into leaving the progressive instincts of the party on the side of the road in return for temporary, self-serving and expedient political dominance. For progressives, this is the time to continue the fight against conservatism, whether that conservatism is led by Trump, Biden, Romney, Mayo Pete or any random MSNBC talking head who was stupid enough to lose his or her own party to a two bit con man in a fancy suit and a long red tie.

Huckabee Warns GOP Leaders They Are On The Road To Becoming As Irrelevant As The Whigs

Huckabee comes out against outreach to mainstream Americans

Last week we had a Whig history lesson here at DWT, and since then I've been deluged with e-mail from Whigs from every part of America. One Whig was sharp enough to figure out how to post a comment! Another (unposted) came from a Whig who read Ken's discovery that Tom Ridge was a paid lobbyist for Albania and went on and on about the recent Whig Party's relationship with Albania and its troubles in the Balkans.

So, of course, I was fascinated when CNN reported that Republican vice-presidential longshot Mike Huckabee declared that the GOP is at risk of becoming "irrelevant as the Whigs." I doubt either CNN or even Huckabee knows that the GOP was born out of the disintegration of the Whigs and that, in fact, Abe Lincoln, the last great Republican president, started his political career as a Whig!

With many ex-Republicans now fleeing back to the Whig Party, Huckabee may be touching a sensitive nerve that will come to haunt him and the rest of the left behinds.

In an interview with the California newspaper the Visalia Times-Delta, Huckabee said the GOP would only further decline in influence should it alienate social conservatives-- largely considered the most energetic and loyal faction of the party.

"Throw the social conservatives the pro-life, pro-family people overboard and the Republican party will be as irrelevant as the Whigs," he said in reference to the American political party that largely disbanded in the mid 1800s.

"They'll basically be a party of gray-haired old men sitting around the country club puffing cigars, sipping brandy and wondering whatever happened to the country. That will be the end of the party," he said in the interview published Thursday.

Huck was speaking disparagingly-- with Limbaugh's blessing-- about the cosmetic outreach being made by Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush and Eric Cantor to mainstream conservatives and GOP moderates horrified how their party has been taken over by the haters, bigots, Know Nothing extremists, and religious radicals. Huckabee may have been upset that the GOP Establishment didn't include him in the re-branding effort.

Meanwhile NY Times political analyst Carl Hulse reported that Republican members of Congress have finally seen the writing on the wall and that the GOP's lockstep obstructionist strategy has started to crumble. As we've being seeing more and more non-Southern Republican members of the House, back from visiting their districts, have realized that the public is not feeling any sympathy with all this sabotaging of Obama's change agenda.

Scores of House Republicans joined Democrats in recent days in pushing through measures meant to rein in credit card companies, increase federal resources to pursue financial fraud and crack down on predatory housing lenders-- all legislation opposed by top House Republicans. On the credit card and financial fraud bills, only a minority of Republicans ended up opposing them.

“It is hard to say we shouldn’t put in more stringent standards on mortgage lending, given what has happened in the past,” said Representative Mike Simpson, an Idaho Republican who backed all three measures.

And yet Simpson is in one of the safest Republican districts in America. He won re-election last year with 71% of the vote, 205,777 to 83,878. McCain took the district with 61% and only two counties (of two dozen), tiny Teton on the Montana border and Blaine, went for Obama. Simpson is an affable Mormon dentist who rarely strays from the party line. But he was one of the 60 Republicans on Thursday who stampeded across the aisle and told Boehner, Cantor, Hensarling and Ryan, the architects of the obstructionist agenda, to shove it. The day before Simpson had joined 117 Republicans-- a majority-- in skipping across the aisle and voting with the Democrats on the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act, much to the chagrin of Boehner and the Limbaughist extremists, lunatic fringe America-haters like Steve King (IA), Pete Sessions (TX), Patrick McHenry (NC), Mike Pence (IN), John Shadegg (AZ), Jason Chaffetz (UT), Tom Price (GA), Michele Bachmann (MN), David Dreier (CA), Virginia Foxx (NC), etc.

The Republican willingness to join with Democrats on some legislation has come gradually but does suggest that the notion of bipartisanship is not the mirage some have declared it to be. If the trend continues, it could become problematic for the Republican leadership, especially if it is interpreted as a lack of confidence in the party’s opposition stance.

To many in the leadership of the radical right, there are more important fish to fry than protecting their pals, the predatory lenders. They are panic-stricken that the Democrats could pass real health care reform, something that could be another nail in the Republican coffin. “There is a truism in baseball and in Congress,” said Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, the No. 3 House Republican, who opposed the lending, financial fraud and credit card measures. “You can’t swing at every pitch. But where we think the interests of the American people require a strong unified opposition, we let our membership know that and we have a high degree of success.” In other words, thugs like Pence won't beat up on members like Simpson on issues that are overwhelmingly popular with voters-- like reining in the banksters-- as long as they remain solid on killing health care reform. And if they don't, the leadership knows they can always turn Limbaugh and Hannity and Coulter lose on them-- a death sentence for any Republican running for re-election.

Will The Whigs Rise On The Ashes Of The GOP-- Just As The Republicans Were Born As The Whigs Disintegrated?

Last weekend, after my attack on the honor of Millard Fillmore, I got a very long and very... interesting letter from the Whig Party. I was fascinated and asked why I couldn't post it here (which is what the Whig requested). What followed was an even longer explanation of why not and finally, an official guest post from the Whigs. In defense of the Whigs, above and beyond my appreciation for the Afghan Whigs, I should say that in the Revolutionary War "whigs" were considered the people who opposed aristocratic rule, supported the supremacy of the congress over the presidency and opposed all trade policy that smacked of anything like NAFTA or CAFTA. They opposed the secessionist Calhoun doctrines that were sweeping the South then (and now). And Abraham Lincoln got his start as a Whig. Are they making a come-back? Many mainstream Republicans, sickened by their own party's turn towards fascism and mindless obstructionism, have been flocking to the Whigs' banner. This is the letter I had permission to republish (by a secretive Whig Party official):

I’m writing to you as a Whig. I have been registered to vote in the Whig Party for many years. I am writing to complain about your defamatory allegations smearing the last Whig Party President, Millard Fillmore. On Saturday, May 2, 2009 you wrote on your Down with Tyranny blog that Millard Fillmore was “perhaps the worst President before George Bush.”

Millard Fillmore signed the Statehood Act so you could have a State of California to live in. Millard Fillmore dispatched Commodore Perry to Japan, so that you can have Japanese cars to ride around in. The United States ratified a guano treaty with Peru under Millard Fillmore.

There have been dozens of Presidents who each undertook far worse actions or inactions as President than anything Millard Fillmore did or didn’t do as President. Millard Fillmore did not launch any genocidal wars. In Fillmore’s era, both Jackson and Polk encouraged genocidal behavior. After Fillmore left the Presidency, our nation was stuck with President Franklin Pierce (“hero of many a well fought bottle”) and then President James Buchanan. Even court historians consider Pierce and Buchanan to each to have been much worse Presidents than Millard Fillmore.

Millard Fillmore was the last Whig Party President from 1850 to 1853. In 1856 Millard Fillmore was the Presidential candidate of both the Whig Party remnants and the once secret “Know-Nothings.” Millard Fillmore had not been nominated to run for President by the Whigs in 1852 primarily because the Whigs wanted to run a general for President. Generals had previously been the only types of candidates Whigs could successfully elect to the Presidency. The Whig Party fell apart more than the Democratic Party did before the 1852 election because the Whig Party candidate, General Winfield Scott, had proclaimed that he supported the Whig Party platform for the 1852 election when seemingly nobody else supported that Platform.

Millard Fillmore retired from the Presidency, toured Europe, and then accepted the “Know-Nothings” 1856 nomination of the “American Party” after the “Know-Nothings” had surfaced their political party under that name. Millard Fillmore wanted to run for President and the American Party and the Whig Party remnants wanted a well known person to be their 1856 Presidential candidate. Millard Fillmore was about as ardent in trying to be a “Know-Nothing” as Arlen Spector or Joe Lieberman are now as devoted in trying to be progressive Democrats.

Millard Fillmore took over the Presidency after Zachary Taylor died. Zachary Taylor was probably assassinated by arsenic poisoning, which was covered up by the use of a cover story that alleged that Zachary Taylor had died of an overdose of iced milk and cherries.

Zachary Taylor was a general who was famous for hating politics and politicians. Zachary Taylor had never voted in a Presidential election in his life. Zachary Taylor didn’t even know he was running for President for weeks after his nomination by the Whig Party convention, because Zachary Taylor had refused to pay the ten cents postage due on the letter first notifying him of his candidacy.

The Whigs had nominated Zachary Taylor for President because he was regarded as being a military hero. The only previous time the Whig Party had won a Presidential election in 1840 it was believed it was because they had run William Henry Harrison, who was also regarded as being a military hero, as their candidate.

Zachary Taylor was quoted as saying “I am a Whig, but not an ultra-Whig.”

Zachary Taylor was also quoted as saying “The idea that I should become President seems to me too visionary to require a serious answer. It has never entered my head, nor is it likely to enter the head of any sane person.”

Mrs. Zachary Taylor was quoted as saying “His nomination is a plot to deprive me of his society and to shorten his life by unnecessary care and responsibility.”

The term of office of the evil genocidal President James Polk from the Democratic Party officially ended at noon on Sunday, March 4, 1849. Zachary Taylor scheduled his inauguration for Monday, March 5, 1849, since he didn’t want to be inaugurated on the Sabbath day.

President Polk had kept the Senate in a day and a half long session trying to complete additional business from Friday evening until 7 AM on the Sunday morning when Polk’s term in office was ending. The Senate leader, Senator David Rice Atchison, then returned to his rooming house and told his landlady “Don’t wake me up for anything.” At noon on that Sunday, David Rice Atchison became President under terms of the Constitution, since because Zachary Taylor had not been inaugurated. After noon people started to show to tell Atchison he was President, but his landlady wouldn’t wake him up. Atchison was later quoted as stating that he had slept soundly through his entire term as President of the United States.

Zachary Taylor was inaugurated on Monday, March 5, 1849, because Zachary Taylor didn’t want to be inaugurated on the Sabbath day. Zachary Taylor died in the White House on July 9, 1850. Zachary Taylor and William Henry Harrison were the only two Presidents whose actual deaths occurred inside the White House, after being the only two Presidents to be elected by the Whig Party.

In 1991 Zachary Taylor’s body was disinterred so it could be checked for arsenic poisoning. Even though the historical evidence provided indications of acute arsenic poisoning, the 1991 exam only checked Zachary Taylor’s body for chronic arsenic poisoning. There were means of checking for acute arsenic poisoning, but the examination of Zachary Taylor’s body did not include those checks. Was that yet a further continuation of the cover up of the probable conspiracy which led to the assassination of Zachary Taylor?

William Henry Harrison was the first President to be elected by the Whig Party. Whigs believe that William Henry Harrison was America’s greatest President, because William Henry Harrison was the only President not to launch our nation into any sort of disaster through some action of Presidential ineptitude during his term in office.

William Henry Harrison had said nothing during the 1840 campaign, and relied on the Whig Party’s singing campaign to get elected as President. Our copy of the 1840 Log Cabin Song-Book that was published to support William Henry Harrison’s campaign has 50 song lyrics printed in a 68 page booklet. The original Whig Party existed prior to the invention of loudspeakers, radio, television, or internet. The only sort of mass communication Whigs could engage in consisted of political campaign “Sing-A-Longs.”

William Henry Harrison delivered an inaugural speech that reportedly lasted for an hour and three quarters. William Henry Harrison didn’t have loudspeakers, so he had to shout out his speech into a freezing windstorm. William Henry Harrison wasn’t wearing a hat or topcoat. Before William Henry Harrison delivered the inaugural speech he spent three hours sitting on his horse in the inaugural parade. William Henry Harrison caught a cold. That cold eventually turned to pneumonia, and William Henry Harrison died slightly less than one month after taking office. William Henry Harrison was the only President with no recorded fuckups as President.

William Henry Harrison took three actions as President. William Henry Harrison withdrew all pending nominations from consideration by the Senate. William Henry Harrison issued a call for Congress to conduct an extraordinary session to attempt to address the nation’s debt problems, which Congress did about two months after his death. The third action was the greatest attempt to avoid election corruption by any American President, so it’s been covered up for over one hundred years. William Henry Harrison ordered his Secretary of State, Daniel Webster, to send a circular letter to every federal government office so as to inform every federal employee that William Henry Harrison would regard it as “cause of removal” from office for any federal employee to either give or receive any campaign contributions.

Vice President John Tyler was playing marbles with one of his sons when he received news that President William Henry Harrison had died. A few months after John Tyler assumed the Presidency, in September 1841 the Whig Party staged an elaborate ceremony on Capitol Hill replete with drummers to literally drum John Tyler out of the Whig Party. Most of the cabinet members resigned. John Tyler was then known as the President without a Party.

John Tyler took many cabinet members and members of Congress on a river cruise on February 28, 1844 aboard the USS Princeton. The reason for the cruise was to witness the firing of the new “Peacemaker” naval gun. The gun blew up during preparations for firing a third shot, killing eight men. Included in the dead were Secretary of State Abel Upshur, Secretary of the Navy Gilmore, and Senator David Gardiner from New York.

John Tyler’s wife had died in 1842. Three months after the Princeton explosion, John Tyler went to New York and married David Gardiner’s daughter Julia, who was thirty years younger than John Tyler. John Tyler didn’t run for President in 1844 because he was unsuccessful in trying to find a political party that wanted him to run for President. About three weeks before John Tyler’s term in office ended, Julia Tyler threw a “splendid party” in the White House. Julia Tyler was repeatedly quoted as saying “They can’t say John Tyler is a President without a Party any more” during her “splendid party.”

The first documented assertion of the “State’s Secret” privilege occurred when the Democratic President James Polk refused to share with Congress information about secret activities that had occurred in John Tyler’s administration. The only cabinet member who had not resigned in September 1841 was Secretary of State Daniel Webster, who was trying to negotiate the Maine boundary dispute with the British Minister Ashburton. The Webster-Ashburton treaty was ratified in August 1842, after which Daniel Webster also resigned from John Tyler’s cabinet. (Daniel Webster had apparently secretly spent government funds to purchase advertising in “religious newspapers” supporting the Maine boundary negotiations. President Polk asserted the State’s Secrets privilege in denying the documents to Congress several years later.)

It is important to us as Whigs to assert that the “State’s Secrets” assertion was made by a Democrat regarding something done under the authority of a “President without a Party” as Tyler had been ejected from the Whig Party before the period of negotiations between Webster and Ashburton. Whigs should not be smeared with State’s Secrets allegations like the Democrats and Republicans deserve to be smeared.

Our revival of the Whig Party is our bicentennial joke that has been backfiring on us for over thirty years. For many years we Whigs considered ourselves to be a “secret” political party, since that was a way for us to align our joking conceptual art politics with Millard Fillmore. We made up our “top secret” political demands because we were sure that our political demands would never get publicized. That way we could have a secret political party. Whigs are the “Party of Honest Corruption and Willing Incompetence,” offering “A choice, not an echo” to the dishonest corruption and unwilling incompetence offered by both Republicans and Democrats. We frequently promised to try to honestly embezzle campaign contributions.

The short version of our “top secret” political demand is “Let’s have juries award broadcast licenses.” The longer version is “Broadcast licenses should be awarded by randomly selected juries, should be non-salable, non-renewable, and the winning applicant for each broadcast license has to perform “Re-Affirmative Action!” by serving for one month every year in a randomly selected jail or prison.” We were confident that specific Whig Party political message would never be effectively broadcast, so we could be a secret political party.

What kept our Whig Party political activities from being a complete joke was our dual purpose use of the Whigs as political insurance. Back in the 1970s several of our original supporters had friends who lived in a notorious anarchist collective. We feared inadvertently visiting that collective immediately prior to the launch of a police raid, which might result in our having to face with some sort of “conspiracy” criminal charges arising from our very presence.

Having learned from watching the Oakland 7 and Chicago 8 trials that the government could allege anything from a wide variety of behaviors as might be viewed as contributing to a conspiracy, we’d also learned that broader defenses are allowed to defend against conspiracy charges. We figured that if we had to face conspiracy charges, and if we had a political party with pre-existing literature (no matter how flaky the politics espoused by our political party were) we could try to use our political party to help mount a political defense to the conspiracy charges. Our bicentennial Whig Party platform was composed both for comedy and also in part to prepare for such a defense by trying to be really insulting to lawyers and Judges.

Our plans were to keep our mouths shut during an arrest. We would have a lawyer tell the court at arraignment that we had been visiting the anarchists in order to debate politics with the Whig Party’s honorable opposition, the anarchists. We considered the Republicans and Democrats to be the dishonorable opposition to the Whig Party. We planned on demanding that the jury be told about our political outlooks and our beliefs that we were engaging in first amendment protected free speech activities. Our “plan” was to show the Judges and prosecution that we could cause them to blow through too much of their budget in trying to prosecute us. We hoped our plan might cause them to offer us a better deal than they might otherwise offer to us. We never actually had to test that legal survival theory.

We had a series of surreal adventures as Whig Party organizers during the bicentennial that made us resolve to stay as Whigs until somebody actually came up with a reasonable political party that we could believe in for our nation. Since nobody ever came up with anything that we considered to be a reasonable political party, we ended up staying registered to vote as Whigs. It is a distinctive measure of the surrealism afflicting our nation that we’re managing to convince ourselves that our joking comedy bicentennial Whig Party platform seems to be ending up offering our nation a better political platform than anything provided by the Republicans or Democrats.

The Whig Party has been both our "Shelf" Party and our "Stealth" Party for more than thirty years. We're a "Shelf" Party in that we have a political party sitting on the shelf for us to use whenever we feel like it, and a "Stealth" Party because we haven't tried for much publicity before now. We've been mostly content to be a "do nothing" political party that we've been keeping available for our use. We did get over 1000 bicyclists to "follow the Whig Party line" on a Critical Mass bicycle ride route which was aligned to cover portions of every street named after famous Whigs in northeast San Francisco to celebrate President John Tyler's 206th birthday on March 29, 1996.

You can read about some of our Whig Party politics at the February 9, 2009 entry (which was Whig President William Henry Harrison’s 236th birthday) at Radio Bolo, Alex Bennett's website. If you want a Whig Party leaflet, send a self addressed stamped envelope to the Whig Party, P. O. Box 4210, Berkeley, California 94704.

If you've gotten all the way to the bottom of this you have earned an opportunity to listen to 6 new Green Day songs from their upcoming album. Have a nice night!


UPDATE: Will Joe The Plumber Join The Whigs Now?

According to the new issue of Time Magazine, Joe the Plumber-- the target demo-- is also leaving the GOP!

[A]re the Republicans going extinct? And can the death march be stopped? The Washington critiques of the Republican Party as powerless, leaderless and rudderless — the new Donner party — are not very illuminating. Minority parties always look weak and inept in the penalty box. Sure, it can be comical to watch Republican National Committee (RNC) gaffe machine Michael Steele riff on his hip-hop vision for the party or Texas Governor Rick Perry carry on about secession or Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann explain how F.D.R.'s "Hoot-Smalley" Act caused the Depression (the Smoot-Hawley Act, a Republican tariff bill, was enacted before F.D.R.'s presidency), but haplessness does not equal hopelessness. And yes, the Republican brand could benefit from spokesmen less familiar and less reviled than Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich, but the party does have some fresher faces stepping out of the wings. (Read seven clues to understanding Dick Cheney.)... A hard-right agenda of slashing taxes for the investor class, protecting marriage from gays, blocking universal health insurance and extolling the glories of waterboarding produces terrific ratings for Rush Limbaugh, but it's not a majority agenda. The party's new, Hooverish focus on austerity on the brink of another depression does not seem to fit the national mood, and it's shamelessly hypocritical, given the party's recent history of massive deficit spending on pork, war and prescription drugs in good times, not to mention its continuing support for deficit-exploding tax cuts in bad times.

...Samuel Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber, tells TIME he's so outraged by GOP overspending, he's quitting the party — and he's the bull's-eye of its target audience.

I doubt the Whigs would want him-- although I suspect they'll take anyone-- but in any case, this has got to be the best news the GOP has heard in eons.