The SS Schumer hits another iceberg

Yesterday, I flew from Toronto to Calgary en route to the majesty of the Canadian Rockies. I was without wifi for a good part of the day, which was no problem because I’m reading Ron Chernow’s masterpiece biography on George Washington, which is hard to put down.

When I turned my phone back on and saw the following headline in “The Daily Beast,” I was mid-sip with a mouthful of coffee in a hotel lobby, surrounded by family and strangers. What happened next was a projectile spewing, thankfully hitting no one worthy of comparison to Mount Etna erupting. It was involuntary and could not be contained.

At some level, I had no idea what was happening as my physical response to the words was faster than my ability to fully comprehend them. I thought I might be having a stroke as I was consumed by laughter and anger, hopelessness and dismay all at once.

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I called my friend Dean Blundell, and asked if he had seen the news about the Maine US Senate race.

He had not.

Then he looked.

What he said next were words I will long remember:

“You’re saying the Democrats replaced the prep school oysterman with a Nazi tattoo on his chest with a cousin f*cker.”

They did,” I said. “They did.”

Then we talked about when Susan Collins might perform her third miracle.

This morning, Greg Sargent, one of the great political journalists of this rotten era, who writes for the outstanding The New Republic wrote this:

Last month, an ICE agent gunned down a 25-year-old immigrant father outside his house in Biddeford, Maine. The shooting was a horror. His three-year-old daughter was seen crying after the killing. The victim has been widely described as a good man. The shooting spawned outpourings of protest in the state.

Yet Senator Susan Collins, who recently voted to give ICE $70 billion in funding with zero reforms, is now trying to mitigate the issue as a liability or even turn it in her favor. And I fear this is something that Democrats — who almost certainly must defeat Collins to win the Senate — have to take seriously.

Then there is this analysis by Sargent:

To be fair, Maine Democrats are pushing back hard on Collins’ ploy.

Collins’s support handed ICE $70 billion with no guardrails,” the campaign of Democratic challenger Troy Jackson told me in a statement. “If she wants credit for a bodycam headline this week, she can start by explaining why she voted to fund ICE with a blank check and zero accountability attached.”

What’s more, Democrats assure me they take seriously the need to prevent Collins from turning the tables on ICE in any way. They say Collins is already in deep trouble on inflation and health care, issues that will drive the race.

What don’t Democrats understand about American politics in 2026?

It is shocking.

The world is on fire.

America is at war.

The economy is cratering.

The AI bubble is reaching its Hindenburg era.

Soon, the American people will sip from a most bitter cup. The indifference and folly of the second gilded age are coming to a ruinous close.

American politics exists downstream from the headwaters of American culture. The greatest threat facing America is the American people are staring down a fascist menace with nothing between them and us because of the weakness, stupidity and incompetence of a few dozen people, who make millions every year losing campaigns, but are close to the feeble Chuck Schumer.

There is no excuse for this.

None, and I’m sick and tired of it.

We are losing the country because we are defended politically from Washington, DC, by an opposition party, the Democratic Party, that has abandoned its greatness for the embrace of a dogma of loserdom, steeped in the traditions of appeasement, anchored in the self-interest of a small group of career politicians and their retainers, who are outmatched in this moment by their MAGA foes in every way.

It is pathetic.

It seems important to recognize that some may object to these points emotionally and even grow angry that they dare be said out loud. It is not a new experience for me. Here is what I first wrote about Joe Biden in 2022:

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I continued to criticize him until he dropped out. My criticisms of Joe Biden were NOT well-received, to say the least.

Here is the greatest achievement of the Democratic Party between 2015 and 2026. The institution figured out how to lose two out of three elections to the most prolific liar since Hitler and Goebbels last breathed because the American people believed he was the more forthright, honest and authentic candidate in two out of three races.

It is simply incredible.

Even now, the Democratic Party is viewed as the more extreme of the two parties in the United States, which beggars belief in an era in which the corruption of Donald Trump is fueling a sprint into a third world war.

James Carville has noted too many Americans think of the Democratic Party as the extreme party. The revelation in Maine won’t help as Troy Jackson is destroyed by the Republican Party political machine as if he was a tuna swimming off of Cape Cod in white shark season.

In an interview yesterday, Carville said:

My hope and my prayers, any Democrat out there thinking run for president, you have something to offer? For God’s sake run, run for office because we’re not getting – we got nothing but problems. Democrats are getting stupid talking points about a war that’s gone on for 5,000 years and not likely to get solved between now and election day.

I think the state of the country is even more perilous than you even let it on to be.

Democratic leaders in Washington, to Greg Sargent’s post, emphatically take none of this seriously because if they did they would not have nominated a man to replace Graham Platner who had come in third place in a Democratic primary, who has two kids with his cousin.

Not for nothing, the American people broadly view the Democratic Party as excessively judgmental about everything.

Trust me on this, Mainers are going to judge Troy Jackson, and that’s too bad because this was a winnable seat, but won’t be.

Susan Collins is either supernaturally lucky, or has supernatural powers.

Either way, Chuck Schumer’s Senate committee is entirely responsible for setting this chain of events in motion with their grasping for an 80-year-old to run against Collins in a year in which people are fed up and begging for change.

My friends, we are in the storm.

Can you see that? Do you understand that?

Please, I beg of you, have expectations.

There is so much better out there than what we currently have.

A few days ago I interviewed Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear.

Watch the interview and judge it for yourself:

What a breath of fresh air, and more importantly, he’s a winner.

A winner.

We cannot save America by losing.

We are shackled to defeat by the crew of a ship of fools that is better known as the ‘SS Schumer.’ It is a ship that even God cannot stop from sinking.

Across the country, including in Montana, the Democratic Party has found its way to freak show candidates who are a threat to American democracy because they represent fuel for MAGA victories that, absent them, would disappear.

It is pathetic, tragic and shameful.

Are you sick of it?

I am.

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