The Drone Crisis Will End With A Whimper

I'm not sure if the New Jersey drone frenzy is starting to die down or not. It looks as though sightings aren't oing viral, they're still focused mostly on New Jersey and neighboring states, even though airliners in landing patterns and helicopters are common all over the US. A quick web search brings up just a few sightings in exurbs well east of Los Angeles, but none in LA City or County. I think there may be a good reason for this.

Our house is located on a low hillside overlooking Hollywood and Downtown, and in particular, if we look out the windows at night, we see helicopters, lots of them, all over the city. There are police, medical, traffic, news, and private helicopters, all the time. They are mostly far enough away that we don't hear them. Everyone in LA knows about helicopters and is used to them. Nobody is going to take them for drones, and it looks as though nobody is calling them in as drone sightings.

The video I've linked at the top of this post is the best explanation I've seen so far of the phenomenon. The vast majority of drone sightings are airliners and helicopters, others of the planet Venus, and a certain small number of actual, registered drones on various prosaic missions, plus another group of prankster kids and hobbyists. The main problem is that the administration has destroyed its credibility, doesn't understand its audience when it tries to reassure the public, and insults people when it seems to be calling them stupid or unsophisticated.

Here's Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas, best known for claiming illegal immigration isn't a problem:

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas downplayed the recent wave of drone sightings in the tri-state area and emphatically argued the feds can’t just “shoot” them down amid calls by some lawmakers to do just that.

Mayorkas, appearing on CNN Friday night, insisted many people are simply seeing drones that can be purchased at “convenience stores” and most instances are “cases of mistaken identity.”

The Homeland honcho told CNN host Wolf Blizter that his agency has seen no evidence of anomalous activity.

“We haven’t seen anything unusual,” Mayorkas said. “We know of no threat. We believe that there are cases of mistaken identity where “drones” are actually small aircraft — that people are misidentifying them,” he said.

He's saying this with his usual self-satisfied smirk, which does nothing but reinforce the view his audience already has that they're being gaslighted.

Between them, the Biden and incoming Trump administrations have a dilemma. Biden simply has no figure he can name at this point as a potential James Kallstrom surrogate -- nobody, for instance, from the FBI, which had at least some residual credibility at the time of TWA 800. Nobody from DHS, the CIA, or any other agency, they're all compromised in the public mind. Beyond that, all those guys are going to be out of work in another month, they're scrambling for new gigs, why put themselves out now for a lost cause?

A potential Trump move could be to designate one of his nominees -- maybe Kash Patel, maybe Tulsi Gabbard, maybe Pete Hegseth -- to serve as an interim drone ombudsman, maybe getting an asurance from Biden that he's told his agencies to give the Trump ombudsman full access and cooperation, to get to the bottom of the drone mystery and calm things down.

But we have the Napoleonic principle, "Never interfere with an enemy while he's in the process of destroying himself”. Trump can simply wait until Joe finishes driving a stake into his own heart, then come in on January 20 and make it clear he's fixing the problem, even if the problem is nonexistent. He also risks losing his own credibility if his own ombudsman isn't persuasive.

I think the likeliest outcome is that the drone frenzy will simply die out as no new revelations emerge to contradict the clumsy official narrative of nothing-to-see-here. On Thursday and Friday, there were initial reports of crashed drones that either resulted in fruitless searches or simply finding the remains of a hobby drone. An actual crashed drone the size of an SUV or a school bus would be the sort of thing that reinforces the story, but so far, it isn't happening.

There are also saner voices beginning to emerge on YouTube and social media that will reinforce a growing public perception that no new evidence is emerging. But it's probably not in Trump's interest to do anything that might have the effect of boosting the Biden administration's faded credibility in any way at this late stage.

Crisis Management 101

NEW: NewsNation reporter says his entire view of the New Jersey drones has changed after he witnessed 50 of them flying from the ocean.

The drones are reportedly the x 8-10 feet wide and can’t be detected because they don’t give off heat.

“I gotta be honest here. You know when this… pic.twitter.com/2tVGasw2bc

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) December 14, 2024

The X post above embeds footage from NewsNation reporter Rich McHugh. showing various drone sightings he and his cameraman captured in his neighborhood in Monmouth County, NJ. This is some of the most explicit video we've seen so far of this phenomenon. From his narration, he locates his position a few miles west of the naval ammunition depot at Earle, NJ, which is at Sandy Hook, and he says there's a body of water behind him, which would be Raritan Bay, which is also adjacent to Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Queens in New York City.

This suggests to me that he's standing near the west end of Raritan Bay, around maybe South Amboy in Monmouth County, and if the bay is behind him, he's looking south. He says he and his cameraman observed multiple drones coming into sight and disappearing over the course of many minutes watching, but all of them looked like the images on the video. A couple of posts down on the X thread, a visitor posts, embedding this image which seems to have gone missing from the post itself:

The first video clip of a “drone” is literally a commercial airplane. You can even see the outline of its shape. The wing tip lights are red and green as required. The area of northern New Jersey has so many airports, there’s a lot of air traffic there. pic.twitter.com/U762wOGRw5

— Ojisan Kaichou (@OjisanKaichou) December 14, 2024

In fact, here is the approach pattern for Newark Liberty Airport (click on the image for a larger view):

Based on McHugh's narration, he's probably standing almost exactly under, or maybe a little to the east of, the approach flight path of commercial airliners landing at Newark Liberty, and that's simply what he's seeing. They're a couple thousand feet above him, but because it's dark, he thinks they're much closer.

I don't want to claim every drone sighting is a commercial airliner or a helicopter, but if this is the best anyone can come up with so far, then I'm more inclined to think this is another version of the flying saucer fad of the 1950s. Sadly, as a New Jersey boy myself, it doesn't help at all that this got started in the Garden State.

Beyond that, I quoted John Kirby yesterday saying, "upon review of available imagery, it appears that many of the reported sightings are actually manned aircraft that are being operated lawfully." This is, in fact, probably correct. Why won't anyone listen?

In the first place, Kirby already has a poor track record for credibility. He came out in July, just before Joe dropped out of the race, and claimed that Joe was lucid, clear, direct, and in command, when it was plain that he wasn't.

Second, Kirby isn't terribly bright, and in that job, he's a short-timer. I get the feeling he took a poorly-worded explanation from someone at DHS or DOD and didn't do anything to clarify it. Why should he? Sounds like one or more of his bosses is already on holiday break and counting the days to January 20, and Kirby is mad he had to work that day himself. His lazy bumbling led to a confrontation yesterday with Fox's Martha MacCallum:

Martha MacCallum:
A lot of people were unhappy with that comment you made yesterday and felt like you were telling people they were nuts or that they didn’t know what they were seeing with their own eyes.

John Kirby:
No, not at all, Martha. That’s the farthest thing that I would ever do.

Wait a moment. Kirby is a professional press spokesperson, and he's just been accused of insulting his audience, which is what he in fact did, and he's in effect acknowledging it. He was just in government auto-zombie mode, and he's a little surprised that anyone would call him on it. Let's keep in mind that this is a guy who nevertheless comes off as sharper than Karine Jean-Pierre, but when KJP made it clear that Kirby was definitely still number two, he meekly agreed, in front of a national audience. Beta male all the way.

What Kirby needed to do, and what he either didn't want to do or wasn't able to do, was rewrite the insulting part of what he said and insert a paragraph or two of clear explanation, with maybe some audio-visual aid, of what a commercial airliner in landing approach looks like in the dark, with additional explanation of how many airport approach patterns are all over New Jersey, which is that kind of place. This would also be a good opportunity to explain why we shouldn't shoot those things down.

The problem is that Kirby isn't able to function at that level. Just because he seems smarter than KJP doesn't mean he's actually competent. What's almost comical here is that this is metastasizing into one last crisis for the Biden administration, which has never been able to follow the paradigmatic crisis management lessons James Kallstrom taught over the TWA 800 catastrophe: you need a single, credible point of contact who'll answer questions fully with a clear air of integrity.

This could turn into just a punchline of a New Jersey joke, but I'm a little worried there may be too much pressure on the wrong people actually to shoot one of those things down.

The New Jersey Drones

I keep thinking there's got to be a great New Jersey joke out there with a punchline involving drones, but I just haven't found it yet. Maybe Gutfeld will tell it when he comes back from wherever he is. (Full disclosure: I grew up in New Jersey until I was 15, when my family moved to Bethesda, of all places. I guarantee you, there are no Bethesda jokes. Nobody would dare.)

The fact that the only people seeing these drones are in New Jersey, though, keeps me from taking these reports as seriously as I otherwise might, but on the other hand, there's John Kirby pooh-poohing the whole thing from the White House:

"Using very sophisticated electronic detection technologies provided by federal authorities, we have not been able to, and neither have state or local law enforcement authorities, corroborate any of the reported visual sightings," he said. "To the contrary, upon review of available imagery, it appears that many of the reported sightings are actually manned aircraft that are being operated lawfully. The United States Coast Guard is providing support to the state of New Jersey, and has confirmed that there is no evidence of any foreign-based involvement from coastal vessels. And importantly, there are no reported or confirmed drone sightings in any restricted airspace."

This is the same John Kirby who told us on July 9, following Joe Biden's well-publicized gaffes in Europe and Hollywood the previous month and his disastrous June 27 debate,

“The president that I see every day, including yesterday a couple of times in the Oval Office, is robust. He’s lucid, he’s clear, he’s direct, and he’s in command of the context and information,” Kirby said on CNN’s News Central. “I mean, he was asking me questions yesterday about events in Europe that I simply didn‘t have the answers for, and I had to go back and come back to him with some answers. That‘s the president that I see every day. That‘s the commander in chief that I‘ve been serving the last two-and-a-half years.”

Two weeks later, Nancy Pelosi rendered that whole story inoperative. This man has no credibility. Anything he tells us with certainty is probably a lie. David Freiheit, who posts on the Viva Frei YouTube channel, has a theory that probably best explains this.

At 3:24, he says,

They know damn well what it is, amd it's not that they're not telling us because they're scared [of looking stupid], they don't give a flying F if they look stupid. They lie, and they're proud to lie, it's part of the game, it's part of the deceit, and they have no problem "looking stupid" if the purpose of that "looking stupid" is ultimately to conceal what they are up to.

This is the puzzle I have over John Kirby. Right now, he's 61 years old. He'll be leaving the White House next month. His public profile as someone with no credibility probably isn't quite high enough to make him a punchline in a Gutfeld monologue, but consider as well that he allowed himself to be held back in the press office so he wouldn't outshine Karine Jean-Pierre, which brands him a beta male. He's got some sort of pension from the Navy, but I don't think he's going to have a post-White House career even equivalent to Jen Psaki.

Maybe he can get some sort of job as a low-ranking PR flack with a defense contractor that owes him a favor, but the whole point of hiring someone like that is to have a high-profile guy with credibility, so maybe someone will hire him, but not for a whole lot of money.

Compare that to James Kallstrom, who retired from the FBI at age 54 not long after he served as the crisis management spokesperson for the TWA Fligfht 800 investigation, as well as managing it internally. He was probably the one figure who restored the FBI's reputation following the Waco and Ruby Ridge scandals in the early 1990s, but after he left, the agency continueed its decline. According to Wikipedia,

Kallstrom left government work for private sector employment in the financial industry beginning in 1998. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, he returned to the public sector to lead New York state's public safety office at the request of George Pataki.

Of course -- who better for a task like that? And it made Pataki look good, too.

Kallstrom was the host of the Discovery Channel show The FBI Files until it was cancelled in 2006. . . . He was also critical of the Special Counsel investigation by Robert Mueller, saying in 2018 that it was orchestrated by a cabal beyond the scope of the FBI and the intelligence community. He added that he "did not recognize the agency I gave 28 years of my life to".

He waas able to capitalize on a reputation for integrity for the rest of his career, and he had to go as far as separating himself from the FBI's reputation to keep his own. This won't be John Kirby.

Actually, I'm going to be grateful that along with Kamala, Dougie, Joe, Dr Jill, and Karine Jean-Pierre, Kirby will be among those we won't have to hear from after another month or so. But will the drone sightings go on that long?

For now, this is actually a crisis, at least sort of one. As David Freiheit points out, while they look stupid, they don't care if they look stupid, because they can shove the gaslight narrative down your throat. It reminds me of what the IBM rep told me and others at a meeting of users from different companies who used an IBM product and were dissatisfied with it:

Remember this. We don't sell to you, we sell to your bosses. You may not like our product, but your bosses don't care, and they will shove it down your throats.

I was already rooting for IBM's competitors, who actually weren't any better, they just sold to a different group of bosses, and they're out of the picture now, too. But that attitude doesn't last. I'm just waiting for a good new New Jersey joke with drones in it.

AI Update

Let's take a quick tour of this week's AI news. Despite all the potential AI-enhanced tools at law enforcement's disposal, such as DNA, facial recognition, phone and GPS location, and even genetic genealogy, Luigi Mangione, the accused assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was caught by low-tech ordinary citizens at a McDonald's in Altoona, PA:

“Don’t that look like the shooter from New York?” one of the regulars, who only gave his first name, Larry, recalled his friend joking.

“He probably heard us,” Larry said of the man seated maybe 10 feet away in the back, near the restrooms of the fast-food restaurant in Altoona.

All joking aside, Larry’s friend was correct: That man turned out to be the wanted fugitive suspected of calmly pulling out a pistol with a silencer on a Midtown Manhattan street last week and gunning down the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare in a brazen assassination that gripped the nation.

A worker behind the counter used a low-tech phone to call the low-tech Altoona cops:

About 9:15 a.m., a pair of officers found the man “wearing a medical mask and a beanie” sitting “in the rear of the building at a table,” looking at a laptop, according to a criminal complaint. There was a backpack on the floor near the table. They asked him to pull down his mask.

Altoona Police Officer Tyler Frye and his partner “immediately recognized him,” the complaint said.

“We didn’t even think twice about it,” Frye, who has about six months on the job, told reporters after the arrest. “We knew that was our guy.”

High tech?

New York Police Department Commissioner Jessica Tisch said, a “combination of old-school detective work and new-age technology” led to the capture of a suspect.

This is the purest moonshine. The highest tech involved was security camera footage, which police have known how to use for decades.

“There’s numerous linchpins in this case, and the fact that we’ve recovered an enormous amount of forensic evidence, an enormous amount of video,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny told reporters. “I really couldn’t put it on one thing, but if I had to, it would be the release of that photograph” of the suspect’s exposed face.

Which was finally seen by the regulars at an Altoona McDonald's. Alan Dershowitz has asked why Mangione's family, who must certainly have recognized him in that same photo, apparently kept quiet.

This is actually quite similar to how Ryan Routh, the man arrested for poking his gun at Trump through a West Palm Beach golf course fence, was identified and caught:

In a news conference Sunday afternoon, Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said a man, widely identified as Ryan Routh, was hiding in the bushes on the perimeter of Trump International Golf Club when a Secret Service member, who was about a hole ahead of Trump on the course, noticed a barrel of a gun sticking out of the bushes and "engaged" with the man.

“He was able to spot this rifle barrel sticking out of the fence and immediately engaged that individual,” Bradshaw said.

The man then fled. Bradshaw said a witness came forward saying he saw someone flee from the bushes and get into a black Nissan vehicle. The witness apparently took a photo of the car and license plate.

The story claims "A license-plate reader and AI technology, in part, helped track him." But license plate readers simply aren't AI; optical character reading technology has been around for decades, it's on your home scanner. It's generally acknowledged that if a low-tech alert citizen hadn't been there to snap a photo, finding and catching Routh would have been much more difficult, maybe impossible.

It's also worth pointing out that law enforcement "experts" who spoke to media before Mangione was caught thought he was so good, he must have been a professional:

Former FBI special agent Terry Rankhorn said that some aspects of the gunman's behavior "paint a picture of a professional killer like Jason Bourne," who may have used an accomplice to give him a warning when his target was near.

"We see a textbook professional assassination unfold on the video footage," Rankhorn told Newsweek.

No, it wasn't. Mangione was a deeply troubled lone wolf whose activities before and after the assassination were disorganized and counterproductive -- he continued to wear the same clothes and kept the same gun, and although, with a passport and currency in his backpack, his best move would have been to head for the border, he wandered at random in western Pennsylvania until he was caught at random by old-fashioned alert citizens and a rookie cop.

We've had three high-profile assassinations or attempts in the last six months that have actually been major black eyes for high-level law enforcement, and for that matter, private executive security and the Secret Service. UnitedHealthcare by definition had security protecting its CEO, but a random nut job was able to wait for him on the street, get behind him, and fire multiple shots. There are now a lot of namby-pamby articles about how "insurance companies and hospital organizations are considering new security measures in light of Thompson’s killing".

Baloney. Oddly, no story I've seen so far has identified UnitedHealthcare's security head, who should be fired, as well as any private security the company had engaged for executive protection. The real story in all these is that conventional security assumptions haven't been working, and especially as applied to security and law enforcement, the multibillions spent on AI are a massive waste. I can't imagine this is lost on Trump, Musk, or Ramaswamy.

Someone Else Notices There Was Never A Plan B

Much of the second-guessing so far over the Harris cmpaign has come from the left, arguing that it should have brought racial identity and Marxism more to the fore, which were what the working class really wanted, or something like that. Via Real Clear Politics, one such piece from The Nation unintentionally stumbles on a worthwhile insight. No, Kamala Harris Staffers Did Not Run a “Flawless” Campaign:

Quentin Fulks told Pod Save America, “We were honestly in, in crisis management mode of keeping President Biden in the race.… Trump’s favorability numbers were creeping up as Plouffe said, and we had to do something about that as well. And so it was a lot of walking and chewing gum at the same time, but there really was no sort of contingency planning to turn the race over to her right after that debate or at any point until President Biden definitively said he wasn’t going to continue on.”

The fact that there was no contingency planning even after Joe Biden’s horrendous debate performance against Donald Trump in June is shocking. Yet it is confirmed by Time magazine, which reports: “Biden let his top hands know on July 21 that he’d be dropping out of the race. O’Malley Dillon said she and campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez both cried that day, and insisted there had been zero planning for that moment. ‘Not one ounce,’ O’Malley Dillon said.”

What this tells me is that the top people in the campaign, O’Malley Dillon and Chavez Rodriguez, were never in the loop. In fact, contingency planning was above their pay grade. They were both Biden loyalists and would never have seen the need for it in the first place, but if either of them had said, at any point, "Gee, just playing devil's advocate here, but shouldn't we put together some kind of contingency plan?" they'd have been fired. Not by Joe or Dr Jill, neither of them was in the loop, either, although Dr Jill was starti8ng to catch on.

They would have been fired by Pelosi, who wasn't just in the loop, she owned the loop.

The author of the piece, Jeet Heer, gets one big thing wrong:

The original sin of the 2024 election was Joe Biden’s selfish decision to run again, which meant that when he finally gave up the ghost over the summer, Democrats had to scramble to replace him with Kamala Harris.

Many Harris strategists also worked for Joe Biden—and they remain singularly reluctant to hold their former boss to account or to explain their own complicity in Biden’s disastrous egoism.

Let's game this out. Assume Joe decided in mid-2023 that he should in fact decline to run, for the good of the country and the party. Wouldn't the Democrats have had exactly the dilemma they had a year later? Newsom, the front runner, had all his California baggage over taxes, homelessness, crime, immigration, and EV mandates, plus his record on the Covid lockdowns. Josh Shapiro and J B Pritzker were Jewish, so Pelosi, aligned with the far left of the party, would veto them. Whitmer had her own Covid lockdown baggage and her bossgirl image. None would have stood a chance against a resurgent Trump.

The Democrats and the media would have had to merchandise any of them the same way they did with Kamala, present them as pretty faces in an otherwise issueless campaign. There were no good alternatives to Joe in 2023, for the same reason that there were no good alternatives in 2020. Pelosi, who was pretty clearly the de facto head of the party, knew this. Let's also be a little bit realistic here and acceopt that Kamala would not have been Joe's running mate in 2020 if Pelosi hadn't approved it. In fact, I've been arguing that Pelosi had a plan from 2020 onward, and it always involved Kamala. Kamala had come up through the California machine via Willie Brown and Pelosi herself; she owed her career to them, and Pelosi in particular trusted her in Washington.

Pelosi was probably more aware than anyone, except maybe Dr Jill, of Joe's weaknessess even as early as 2020. She seems to have accepted that in spite of that, Joe was good for one more basement campaign against a Trump -- or any other Republican -- who could be vilified as Hitler and branded a convicted felon. The plan was always going to be to humor Joe and go along with his decision to run for re-election with another basement campaign in the fall.

At that point, having won reelection, whether Joe liked it or not, Pelosi would tell him it was time to go, and he would either resign in favor of Kamala, or he'd be removed via the 25th Amendment and replaced by Kamala. Kamala was a cipher, just like Joe, and business would continue at the White House as usual.

In support of my position, I would point out that what we've indirectly learned so far is that the two figures who are most deeply resented by Joe and Dr Jill are Pelosi and Kamala. I suspect that the Bidens belatedly came to realize the plan all along was going to be to edge Joe out, before or after the election, but in the end, Joe was going to go, courtesy of Pelosi and Kamala. In comparison to those two, they've decided Trump is even an OK guy.

Pelosi's plan had three flaws. The lawfare was poorly executed from the start, and as some lawyers have noted, it should have begun execution a year earlier than it did, since it didn't account for Trump's attorneys being able to delay the cases as successfully as they did. Second, it didn't recognize that the plan itself would backfire by turning Trump into a victim, a role he knew how to play and exploited with great success. Third, it didn't anticipate the speed and extent of Joe's cognitive decline by early summer 2024, forcing Pelosi into taking early the action she had always anticipated she would take only after the election, which exposed her hand prematurely.

The overall problem was that this plan had been in effect at least since 2020, it was too complicated, and it assumed nothing would go wrong at any point over four or more years. The odd thing is that there doesn't seem ever to have been any intermediate Plan B for any of the key things that went wrong along the way -- the lack of a contingency when Pelosi had to force Joe out early was only one of the gaps.

The Atlantic Is Worried About What''s Starting To Look Normal

The Atantic, which let's recall is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, #8 on Forbes's 2023 list of the world's richest women, is worried that Trump is starting to look normal:

[W]hat is actually happening in the capital is, by any rational standard, disturbing. Donald Trump is filling his administration with “loyalists,” a prerogative that his opponents have grudgingly accepted as his due. Yet he is defining loyalist in maximal terms, including the belief that Trump legitimately won the 2020 election and was justified in his attempt to seize power. The winners are rewriting the history of the insurrection, and their version of history is about to acquire the force of law.

But isn't the election just past a vindication of the view that the 2020 election was "stolen"? Look at the efforts that began almost immediaately after 2020 to drive a stake through Trump's heart, the second impeachment of a lame duck, the January 6 prosecutions, the lawfare, including a specific federal indictment for fomenting the J6 "insurrection" -- all any of those did was keep public attention focused on Trump and eventually boost him in the polls.

Why did there need to be such an effort to establish and re-establish the legitimacy of that election, and why did it never quite accomplish that purpose? For instance, at this point, it isn't controversial to ask what insiders knew of Joe Biden 's cognitive decline and when they knew it. Nancy Pelosi, a leader of the J6 insurrection school of thought, neverthelesss herself blames Biden for waiting too long to drop out of the race.

So when would have been the opportune time for Biden to do this? In June 2024 instead of July? The primaries were already over, and the idea of suddenly holding new ones was never anythng but a chimera. In June 2023, which would have given candidates time to raise money and support for a full primary season? To raise any such question that Joe wasn't fit to serve would have been unthinkable at the time, and Pelosi would have been a chief enforcer.

Would it maybe have been better if someone other than Joe had run in 2020? Maybe, but the consensus was that Joe, "the last politician" able to keep the fraying Mew Deal coalition together one more time, was the only figure who could beat Trump -- but even in 2020, the insiders appear to have been aware that the only way to run Joe was with a basement campaign that kept him out of unscripted events. In other words, the seeds were already planted that something needed to be covered up.

In fact, one of the motly unmentioned subtexts of Trump's 2024 campaign was his ability to thrive in unscripted environments, from the failed Butler assassinaion attempt that produced paradigmatic visuals to hours-long, no-holds-barred podcast interviews. These were, whatever else they may have been, subliminal cues that something wasn't right in 2020. But this all seems to feed The Atlantic's distress:

On Saturday, The New York Times reported that the Trump transition team is asking applicants for high-level positions in the Defense Department and intelligence agencies three questions: which candidate they supported in the past three elections, what they thought about January 6, and whether they believed the 2020 election was stolen. Among the “wrong” answers, applicants say, are conceding that Trump lost the election or that his supporters should not have tried to overturn the result.

Well, at this point, it's more or less accepted that some of Trump's high-level appointments, including William Barr and Mike Pence, didn't serve him well. A remarkable feature of Trump's inner circle is that they learned things during the 2020 election that they put into practice in 2024, like having flying squads of lawyers in place to challenge election-day finagling. It looks like another lesson involved recognizing the need to establish loyalty at the policy level. The Atlantic thinks this is a bug, not a feature:

The purpose of these issue screens is not merely to ensure that Trump benefits from advisers who are committed to his success and wished for it all along. After all, plenty of Republicans voted for Trump multiple times without endorsing his attempted autogolpe. The purpose, rather, is to weed out anybody who dissents from Trump’s conviction that he is entitled to rule regardless of what the Constitution says. Trump believes, not without reason, that his first term was undermined by the insufficient devotion of his underlings, most famously Mike Pence (of “Hang Mike Pence!” fame).

Ezxcept that the US Supreme Court, in Trump v United States,

found that some specific alleged acts [in the January 6 indictmnt] were cleaarly immune from prosecution and others required an analysis of the facts. The majority ruled that Trump's alleged efforts to leverage the Department of Justice in producing alternate slates of electors could not be prosecuted, while remanding decisions on immunity related to Trump's alleged pressuring of the Vice President, state officials, and private individuals to the district court. The court also directed the district court to examine the scope of evidence that could be utilized in the charges against Trump, such as his public comments.

In other words, it was at worst an open legal question whether anything Trump did on January 6 was unconstitutional, but some things were definitely within the scope of his duties, while others required much more analysis. The special prosecutor eventually threw up his hands and requested the case be dismissed. There's nothing that says Trukmp feels he's "entitled to rule regardless of what the Constitution says". Instead, he asked the US Supreme Court to clarify just what the Constitution does say, and it generally supported his position.

The Atlantic is simply unhappy that the Overton Window has shifted.

Was Obama The Architect Of The Democrats' 2024 Defeat?

A John Kass essay linked at Real Clear Politics yestesrday, To Move Forward, Democrats Must Oust Obama, tries to argue one point, but it actually proves another:

[H]ow did America get to the point where Republicans, once the country club white shoe party of the Bush family, could begin to wrestle with Democrats for the votes of the working class, minorities and women? How did the Republicans win so decisively?

It was Trump. What he did in remaking the Republican Party is simply astounding. But first he had to politically eviscerate the Bush family political dynasty that controlled the GOP. And so he relentlessly attacked Jeb!, then the standard bearer of the Bush clan for the disastrous war in Iraq, which slaughtered thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis while wasting trillions of American dollars on this and other endless neo-con forever wars.

With that, the Bush GOP panicked and whined, but the Bush era was mercifully over. Eventually, working class whites, blacks, Latinos and young people turned their backs on the Democrat Party that had betrayed them.

On this, I agree completely, but he says it all before he even begins to talk about Obama, which he finally does about halfway down:

To win in the future, the Democrats must tear down Obama just as Trump tore down the Bushes. A new Democrat faith must emerge to launch a frontal assault on Obama’s keep in Martha’s Vineyard, sacking it and salting the earth. It must reject the cynical use of race to generate ugly tribalism.

Remember that Obama–who just the other day in a speech in Chicago talked about compromise and turning away from identity politics in order to save democracy–orchestrated two separate coup attempts against sitting American presidents. The first against Donald Trump damaged Trump from the outset and left his administration open to the depredations of the Obama Deep State including corrupt FBI and Intelligence officials, and later there was the Obama coup against Biden, which humiliated the senile old man and ended Biden’s presidency in all but name last summer.

Kass neglects the other figure I've been looking at here, Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi as Speaker was the one who controlled the impeachment valve, and before Obama was on the scene, she was the one who decided not to use it against Dubya:

In May 2006, with an eye on the upcoming midterm elections—which offered the possibility of Democrats taking back control of the House for the first time since 1994—Pelosi told colleagues that, while the Democrats would conduct vigorous oversight of Bush administration policy, an impeachment investigation was "off the table". A week earlier, she had told The Washington Post that although Democrats would not set out to impeach Bush, "you never know where" investigations might lead.

After becoming speaker in 2007, Pelosi held firm against impeachment, notwithstanding strong support for it among her constituents. In the 2008 election, she withstood a challenge for her seat by antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan, who ran as an independent primarily because of Pelosi's refusal to pursue impeachment.

Whatever Obama may or may not have wanted to do, Pelosi, as Speaker, was the one who could bring it about. In 2007, she said no, but in 2019, with Obama retired, she said yes:

On September 29, 2019, Pelosi announced the launch of an impeachment inquiry against Trump. On December 5, 2019, after the inquiry had taken place, Pelosi authorized the Judiciary Committee to begin drafting articles of impeachment. After hearings were held, two articles of impeachment were announced on December 10. The House of Representatives approved both articles on December 18, thereby formally impeaching Trump.

This simply wouldn't have happened if Obama were simply urging it from the sidelines. If Pelosi had said no, as she did in 2007, it would have died. Or take Obama's effort to rally the sexist young African-American men of Pennsylvania to vote for Kamala. Kass says,

Remember just weeks ago when Obama was lecturing young black men who weren’t enthralled with the presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris. Bitter and angry, he harangued them on what he could only understand as the sexism of the great unwashed.

. . . Yet those young men who he tried to shame didn’t live among the elites of Martha’s Vineyard or the Gold Coast of Chicago. And they weren’t insulated from the poor economy and pressure from the illegals. Instead, Obama was revealed by his own mouth to be be a complete and utter phony. You could almost hear regular people, those who had been Democrats, shouting “F You Barack” from every corner in every swing state.

So by Kass's own argument, Obama is past his sell-by date. Pelosi, while semi-retired as Speaker, seems still to be one of those in control of the Democrat party. Last July, whatever Obama may have wanted, Pelosi was the one who spoke to Biden:

Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race and endorse his vice president, Kamala Harris, to replace him is, from one angle, the final political act of an octogenarian who realizes that his power is coming to an end and who is sagely passing the torch to a younger politician in a last-ditch effort to save his party and his country from authoritarian defeat. But from another vantage point, the real story is one of a different octogenarian—one who has wielded power more effectively than just about any politician in the past half-century—who used her decades of accrued experience and authority to do what no one else apparently could: get a dug-in presidential candidate to drop out and give his party a fighting chance.

. . . “Nancy made clear that they could do this the easy way or the hard way,” one Democrat anonymously told Politico. “She gave them three weeks of the easy way. It was about to be the hard way.”

Pelosi is still in the House and has filed papers to run for re-election in 2026. And it's worth pointing out that, although retired as Speaker, she was the one figure who could prevail on Biden to drop out of the race, for whatever that was worth -- it's beginning to look like Harris never had any realistic chance of turning things around.

Both Pelosi and Obama are out of touch -- Pelosi was doing little more than flailing in a last-ditch effort to turn the election around -- but Pelosi is the one who's still in some sort of position to do damage.

SomeDemocrats are standing up to Pelosi,but she's the one that still needs to be taken down:

Several Democratic lawmakers complained anonymously to Axios about the former speaker.

'She needs to take a seat,' said one senior Democrat.

. . . Some lawmakers think the 84-year-old is having trouble letting go of her previous power. She elected to stay in Congress as a regular lawmaker instead of fully retiring.

'I understand that this is a difficult transition for her, not being the leader, but she is not,' the member of the Congressional Black Caucus told Axios.

'She needs to understand what her new role is.'

But it's basically Trump who's going to do this, not any Democrat.