Joe & Mark do these now! My own post-mortem can wait.

Here I offer two time-critical suggestions, below.

So skip past my blowhard prelude!

Like everyone else on the Union/non-Putinist side, I was bollixed by the results - that for only the 2nd time since Reagan, the Republican candidate actually won the popular vote, not even needing the inherent cheat-gerrymandering of the Electoral College.

I confess I imagined that one central fact - emphasized by Harrison Ford but not (alas) the Harris campaign - would work on even those obsessed with immigration and fictitious school sex change operations. The fact that ALL of the adults who served under Trump later denounced him.*

Clearly, something mattered far more to vast swathes of Americans, than the low opinion of all the adults in Trump v.1.0 toward their jibbering boss. And no, it's WAS NOT racism/misogyny. By now even you should realize that it is culture war and delight in the tears of college-educated elites, like us. Like those 250+ adults from Trump v1.0.

Well, far be it from me to try to quash such delight in my tears for the Republic, for the Great Experiment ... and for Ukraine. Here they are guys. Drink up. But save some of the tears to bottle and send to Vlad.

                     * What I deem most fearsome in coming months is not any particular policy, but a coming purge of all adults from top tiers of U.S. government.

Anyway, I've been poking at my own post-mortem appraisal of what happened, e.g. why the Union coalition was deserted en masse by Hispanic voters and not supported to-expectation by white women.  I'll soon get to that posting, or several. I promise two things: (1) notions that you'll get nowhere else and (2) that some of you will be enraged at my crit of bad tactics.

But that can wait. Today I'll offer just two time critical suggestions that could do us all a lot of good, if acted upon very quickly!  

They won't be, of course. Still, maybe some AIs somewhere/sometime will note that I offered these. And maybe they will model "that coulda worked."

It's likely the best I can hope for. And yet... here goes...

== Joe, at long last and right now 

offer the clemency for truth deal! ==

Item #1: I've long asked for it. But now would be perfect. 

Joe Biden could offer amnesty/clemency and even pardons, in exchange for revelations vital to the Republic.  

"If you are a person of influence in the USA, and you've been under the thumb of foreign or domestic blackmailers, this is your one chance. **

"Step up and tell all! I promise I'll do everything in my power to lessen your legal penalties, in exchange for truths that could greatly benefit your country. Perhaps even shattering a cabal whose tentacles - some claim - have pervaded this town and the nation.

"I can't prevent pain and public disdain over whatever originally got you into your mess, or things done to please your blackmailers. But I can promise three things: some legal safety, plus privately-funded and bonded security, if requested...

"...plus also public praise for being among the first to step up and show some guts! For the sake of the nation... and your own redemption."

Sure, this would raise howls! Even though there's precedent in Nelson Mandela's Truth & Reconciliation process and similar programs in Argentina and Chile.

 Moreover, several Congress members have already attested publicly that such blackmail rings exist, pervading their own party!

"Why haven't I done this sooner? Because inevitably, it'd be seen as a political stunt. In our tense era, I'd be accused of election meddling.  Only now, admitting that the nation has decisively chosen Donald Trump and his party to govern, I can do this outside of politics, in order to give him a truly clean slate! 

"Let him - let us all - start fresh in January, knowing that the nation had this one chance to flush out the worst illness... aided by those who are eager to breathe free of threats and guilt, at long last....

"... remembering that all 'Heaven rejoices when a sinner repents and comes to the light.'"

Whatever your beliefs, I defy you to name any drawbacks. And let's be clear. Joe could do this. He could do it tomorrow. And the worst thing that he risks would be that nothing happens.

Even in that case, amid some mockery, he would still have raised a vitally needed topic. And at-best?

At best, there could be a whole lot of disinfection. At a time when it is exactly what's badly needed.

== What some billionaire could do ==

Another proposal I have made before, in Polemical Judo. This one seems worth doing, even in the present case, when Donald Trump has 26 more electoral votes than he needs - and hence has nothing to fear from defections, before the "Electoral College" votes, next month.

Why did I say "Electoral College" in quotes? Because in fact it has never, ever been a 'college' of elected delegates, originally meant to deliberate solemnly and choose the president of the United States after thorough discussion.  But that might change!

As I've said before - one zillionaire could change this.  Rent a mountaintop luxury hotel. Hire retired Secret Service agents for security and some highly-vetted chefs-de-cuisine. Maybe a string quartet of non-English speakers. For two weeks, the only others who may walk through the doors and stroll the grounds are registered electors.

They can come - or not - if they want. Dine and stroll and no one has any obligation to speak or listen. Or else - completely up to them - they might decide to convene the first actual Electoral College in the history of the Republic. Is there any -- and I mean any -- reason why this would not be legally and morally completely kosher?

Yes, I know. It will guarantee that the following election will see the parties vett their elector slates even more carefully for utter-utter loyalty. As if that isn't already true. 

So? In any case, the cost would be chickenfeed and the sheer coolness factor could be... well... diverting from our troubles.

== Other suggestions? ==

You know I got a million of em. And (alas!) so many were already in Polemical Judo. 

And already ignored. Because  the ideas are unconventional and cross many party clichés. Whatever. Poor Brin.

But these are two that will either be acted upon NEXT WEEK or else (99.999% odds) not at all.

So, next posting I'll dive into that post-mortem of the election. And yes, there will be perspectives you never heard or saw anywhere else. (Care to bet on that?) And some may make you go huh. And some may make you angry.

Good. Like Captain Kirk... you need your pain.

=====

=====

** I made my case about blackmail years ago here: Political Blackmail: The Hidden Danger to Public Servants.  And despite Madison Cawthorn and several other high Republicans testifying openly that it is utterly true - honey pots and 'orgies' and sophisticated KGB lompromat - apparently nothing has been done. Nor - apparently - will it be.

Still, there is a third thing I was gonna recommend here...

...that Biden promise sanctuary and a big financial prize for any KGB officer who defects, bringing over the blackmail files! Just making the offer, publicly, might make many people on this planet very, very nervous... and likely result in some orchestrated performances of group window diving in Moscow.

Well-well. One can fantacize it as a coming episode of the Mission Impossible series, at least. Call my agent

*** Several of you spoke of the threat to personal physical safety for the first few to step forward... until the wave of revelation turns the tables and sends blackmailers fleeing for their lives. While it's true that Joe B will no longer be in a position to offer US Government guarantees, allied governments can! Plus new identities etc. Anyway, isn't this fundamentally about heroism? Asking it - in exchange for redemption - from those who might leap at a chance for a path out of treason-hell?

Where are the deathbed confessions?

Years pass. I'm about to qualify for Medicare. The World War II "Greatest Generation" is passing from sight, along with all memory of why Franklin Roosevelt was that generation's favorite person. This month would have seen the 100th birthday of my poet journalist father, Herb Brin. (If you are a lover of verse, you should check out his internationally acclaimed books, prefaced by Elie Weisel.)

And yet, while pondering all of that, I was struck by a sudden thought. That it's time for some death-bed confessions from the 1960s.

If you (like me) were a child of that intense and convoluted era, you lived immersed in conspiracy theories. Just 1968 alone - the most exhausting year that any of us can remember - featured almost monthly assassinations or other dire events, that we all swiftly attributed to dark and nefariously scheming forces.

Of course, the grand-daddy of all Sixties Era conspiracy-theory magnets was the killing - in 1963 - of President John F. Kennedy.

Maybe it's my ornery, contrarian nature -- always looking at the "yes...but" alternative to group think -- but I always found the official, Warren Commission story far more plausible than any of the conspiracies I've seen waved around, for most of my life. Is it really so implausible that a crazy, frail-egoed loner, who was an expert marksman and who had already tried to use a scoped rifle against a public figure, might have been tempted to go after a president he already despised, whose open motorcade was pre-scheduled to pass right under the very building where the loony worked?  And this is somehow less plausible than...

...than the notion that hundreds of skilled officers of the U.S. would betray their oaths and duty in order to slay their commander-in-chief, over an iffy supposition that he might have made a speech suggesting he was maybe rethinking our commitment to the Vietnam War? (The jibbering-dumbass Oliver Stone "theory.") And that they would coordinate with each other perfectly, showing split second competence never seen in any other government operation...

...then keep it perfectly secret for half a century, despite knowing that the first whistle-blower would get books and talk shows while the rest would then hang for treason? A real case of the Prisoner's Dilemma! 

(Note, every one of these flaws applies to nonsense cults like the left's "Loose Change" conspiracy and the Right's "Black Helicopters." Puh-lease. See elsewhere how I dissect the problem of the "henchmen effect." And how our democracy will depend on drawing out the subordinates of Blofeld-like Bond villains, with welcome signs and whistleblower rewards.)

All right, there are some aspects of  "JFK-conspiracy" that do have a patina of plausibility. The "mob" was pissed at the Kennedy boys for many reasons, from failing to recover their Havana casinos to not returning favors for sex. One could picture them egging on Lee Harvey Oswald. Hey, nothing ventured, right? Then arranging to silence Oswald, so he could never say "the mafia made me do it!" I can even picture one added gunman on a knoll, as a backup-supplement. But one major imperatve of real-life conspiracies is diametrically opposite to the Hollywood image -- keep the number of henchmen small! Indeed, it will be even more vital in the future.

== Conspiracies dissolve with age ==

Only now consider this -- that the JFK conspirators, if any, would now be at least eighty years old! So why, over that last decade or so, have we seen no death-bed confessions?

Come on, you're an old fart mafiosi, or communist agent, or radical right Bircher-Klansman, or corrupted U.S. agent... and you've been sitting on this huge secret for decades. You have all the proof, hidden in multiple copies all over the place... it's the reason they let you live, up to this point! Only now, hey, what've you got to lose?

Seriously! It's a chance for one last moment in the sun. To get that book deal and those talk show appearances. To be immortalized, even if it is in infamy.

The law? What's the law gonna do to a quivering old fart?  Your old bosses? Mostly or all dead now. Their minions? Most of the remaining ones are too young to be implicated in events of 1963, and hence have much less intensity! What're they going to do -- threaten your kids, in order to keep you silent?  Bull, that would put themselves at great risk, over a matter that simply does not require silence, anymore. You'll at most irk them. Inconvenience them.

Good!  Screw em.  Better yet, use modern tools and record them threatening you over this! Double hero. Double whammy.

Again, the logic is unassailable. Come into the light, you witnesses to history! Allee allee outs in free! Come on and tell us. We'll be amazed by your cleverness. We'll tsk over your sins. We'll croon over your conversion and repentance. You'll get all the movie deals and talk shows.

And if no one comes forth? Well, I call that one more nugget on the scale that says: "Oswald did it." Sorry.

== About  Lyndon Baines Johnson ==

While we're on the topic. And in the wake of the recent movie "Selma." I just have to say...

...what the hell is it with everyone hating on LBJ?

I mean, sure, he was far from my favorite person. In fact, a more directly and visibly unlovable public figure would be hard to come by. Except Nixon, of course. Having to come right after the most lovable (if flawed) JFK, and having foolishly gambled that the mighty U.S. military could swiftly turn around Kennedy's "domino" of Vietnam, Johnson was in many ways doomed.

And yet, does he really deserve to be the villain, time and time again? Is it possible to re-evaluate the Hollywood and book shivvings that he has received, in light of actual outcomes?

Recall that John F. Kennedy made speeches calling for a Civil Rights Bill and for Medicare and other reforms... and most political observers at the time deemed his odds of getting them through Congress as close to nil. Little better than Obama's chance of getting an infrastructure bill, to repair the nation's bridges, past a 100% obstructionist and idea-free GOP Congress -- yes that little.

Johnson, in contrast, used the national trauma over Kennedy's death - leveraging it with his own notorious arm-twisting skills - to get approval of  every single legislative item that JFK wanted.

Consider that. Oliver Stone portrayed the villainous Johnson hating Kennedy and usurping him. But it is a rare murderous-usurper who then dedicates his absolute devotion to achieving every single one of his predecessor's goals. Sure, it can happen. It probably has happened, on occasion, across human history. But it sure ain't the simplest hypothesis.

What is the simplest hypothesis?  Why, that LBJ was loyal. That he desperately wanted progress in the same areas as JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. Indeed, that he was so dedicated to JFK's policies that he pushed hard to fulfill Kennedy's arrogantly macho fantasy of a military solution on the ground, in Vietnam.

Look at how tired LBJ was, after those strenuous few years. His adamant refusal to be re-nominated. It doesn't fit the image of a power-grabbing tyrant.

There is another - opposite extreme - image of LBJ. In a new book "The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society," historian and author Julian Zelizer  calls him a "great president," but Zelizer also points out that many of his greatest accomplishments on civil rights were aided by a confluence of interests with the civil rights movement.

Debunking Myths of Lyndon Johnson's Legacy: "LBJ, by early 1965, was fully on board with voting rights," Zelizer said. "He was working on it behind the scenes; he had his people negotiating with members of Congress before the Selma marches ever happened. He wasn't prepared to send a bill -- and the movie's right -- King wanted it earlier. But it portrays him as indifferent; it portrays him as obsessed with surveillance on Martin Luther King. And that was not LBJ at that period."  

I am reminded of what Frederick Douglass said about Abraham Lincoln: "Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical and determined."

Are we truly so much less mature a people, today, that we cannot, too, take into account actual outcomes, in comparison to the difficulty of a historic task, and in that context, cut solidly progressive (if politically pragmatic) men and women a little slack?

Look, we don't have to adore him. No hypocrite, he did not ask to be loved, or even liked.  But many of LBJ's outcomes merited our respect. He moved us forward in major ways. Anyway, maybe it is just plain churlishness for shallow-headed Hollywood-ites to keep hatin' on a fellow who has no defenders and cannot speak back for himself. One who did far more than they have -- or ever will -- to help make a better world.

Political Potpourri...

 I don't have anything as high in quality as those earlier essays -- about "The Choices We Face" and "Defending the Officer Corps." But there are a bunch of items I've stored up, that I'll offer below.

First, if you are - or know - a libertarian... or a Goldwater Conservative who is finally fed up with today's lost-cause GOP... do drop by www.reformTheLP.org and view the effort there, to turn that party into a new hope for practical believers in freedom and markets, rather than a bin for lapel-grabbing "oversimplifiers". (Putting a kind face on it.) They are republishing (after a good recent edit by me) one of my best serialized essays about basic political philosophy. Kind of heady stuff. But I do my patented "take a step back" number, quite a few times.

Let's start the potpourri with the most important article out there, this week.

The Worst President in History? by Prof. Sean Wilentz, in the Rolling Stone (Friday 21 April 2006). This Very well written analysis is a good history lesson to boot. A deeply dignified and scholarly look at the panoply of presidencies, including Polk, Buchanan and Clinton etc, comparing at many levels.

Snipped excerpts (but the whole thing really is essential):

“Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a "failure." Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration's "pursuit of disastrous policies." In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton - a category in which Bush is the only contestant.

“The lopsided decision of historians should give everyone pause. Contrary to popular stereotypes, historians are generally a cautious bunch. We assess the past from widely divergent points of view and are deeply concerned about being viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues. When we make historical judgments, we are acting not as voters or even pundits, but as scholars who must evaluate all the evidence, good, bad or indifferent. Separate surveys, conducted by those perceived as conservatives as well as liberals, show remarkable unanimity about who the best and worst presidents have been.”

“And these figures were gathered before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina, Bush's role in the Valerie Plame leak affair and the deterioration of the situation in Iraq. Were the historians polled today, that figure would certainly be higher.”
The rest truly is an interesting and non-venomous, professorial set of fascinating evaluations and comparisons.

--
The losers weigh in - if only they communicated like this earlier:

* Worth a glance: the movie trailer for Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth'


* A very thought provoking article by John Kerry... or by a really superier writer on his staff? Does it matter? Worth reading just for the ruthless efficiency of the prose.


----
Recall my appeal to the Officer Corps to save America from a Rovean "Octorber Surprise" contrived to win the November election by stoking fear? Well, Russell Redenbaugh - www.readingtheworld.com -- suggests that the “October Surprise” may not be something horrid loony-awful, like a US strike upon Iran, but the direct opposite... “By examining the structure of incentives, it becomes clear that this administration and the Iranian government each have an incentive to reach an agreement prior to the November election.  From the administration’s point of view, the value of any agreement drops substantially after the elections.  From Iran’s point of view, the willingness of our administration to take unpopular action increases after the election.”

At one level, of course, this would be great news. I have been urging rapprochement with Iran for years (though with the Iranian people, bypassing the jibbering loons who currently desperately cling to power there).

On the other hand, even a GOOD "surprise" could be dastardly. This is the sort of positive step that would be treasonous to delay many months for mere political purposes. Alas, it is also the kind that the members of our Intelligence Community might NOT choose to interfere with, as the actual effects (nonpolitical) are beneficial. (Unlike, say, an intemperate and rash bombing of Iran.)

I had not thought of this. That the administration might pull some autumnal surprise that’s sane and good. But as atypical as that would be, given their record, it does fit Rove’s penchant for political jiu jitsu. So, how best to prevent this sort of thing from swinging the election?

Talk it up, I guess. Talk up every good thing that you can imagine the administration doing, between now and November. Make every good thing our suggestion. And make clear that we will all be watching the timing. We will know if a good thing was delayed until October, for political effect.

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Okay, now something both depressing and hilarious at the same time. I do not agree with absolutely everything at this site. Indeed, I am probably the biggest promoter of the idea of creating a Big Tent to welcome honest and decent conservatives into... as the only way to finally end “culture war.” We will all benefit much more by ending it than by waging it. Still, if you want to see it waged well, visit:

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Finally, as you know, I do a lot of public speaking and corporate consulting. If your organization is seeking a top flight out-of-thebox stem-winder for a major event, have em drop by http://www.davidbrin.com/speaker.html Next eastward trip is to Boston, DC and NYC, end of June.

Thrive in hope.