"These people are not Democrats.... I’m not in that f*cking political party."

"I am totally comfortable in a political party that spends time questioning the policies of the government of Israel. In fact, I’m enthusiastic about that. I don’t want to be in a political party that denies the right of the state of Israel to exist. That’s just not– I just can’t do that."

Said James Carville, quoted in "'I’m Done, I’m Not in That F*cking Political Party': James Carville Freaks Out After Progressives Win Big in Democratic Primaries" (Mediaite).

I think Carville is copying Carlson. See "'I'm out': Tucker Carlson says he's done with the GOP" (Axios).

I hope James Carville is doing satire.

About 24 hours ago, I said out loud, here at Meadhouse, "I'm waiting for Trump haters to say this was done to distract us from Epstein."

I'd like to think anyone saying that is doing satire, but James Carville really commits:

🚨NEW: James Carville goes on *UNHINGED* rant claiming Trump Admin Venezuela Operation was "ALL ABOUT EPSTEIN"🤦‍♂️

"Come on, people! Wake up! ... Never ever underestimate what Trump will do to try to survive and draw attention away from Jeffrey Epstein."@DailyCaller pic.twitter.com/jRa52gwDwD

— Jason Cohen 🇺🇸 (@JasonJournoDC) January 3, 2026

"Constipated. Leaderless. Confused. A cracked-out clown car. Divided.... The Democratic Party is in shambles."

James Carville weighs in, in the NYT.

The Democratic Party is steamrolling toward a civilized civil war. It’s necessary to have it. It’s even more necessary to delay it. The only thing that can save us now is an actual savior, because a new party can be delivered only by a person — see Barack Obama in 2008 and Bill Clinton in 1992. No matter how many podcasts or influencer streams our bench of candidates go on, our new leader won’t arrive until the day after the midterms in November 2026, which marks the unofficial-yet-official beginning of the 2028 presidential primary. No new party or candidate has a chance for a breakthrough until that day. Until then, we must run unified in opposition to the Republicans to gain as many House seats as possible in the midterms....

So... I guess... end the constipated, cracked-out confusion and feign unity until we get to the other side of the midterms. And then, the Messiah cometh, and when he comes, he will tell us all things.

"With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver..."

"... in the history of our party: roll over and play dead. Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight, and make the American people miss us. Only until the Trump administration has spiraled into the low 40s or high 30s in public approval polling percentages should we make like a pack of hyenas and go for the jugular. Until then, I’m calling for a strategic political retreat. The Army has a term for this: 'tactical pause.' It’s a vision move — get out of the hour-to-hour, day-to-day combat where one side (ours) is largely playing defense and struggling to defend politically charged positions (like explaining D.E.I. or persuading voters to care about foreign aid).... I don’t think a lot of Americans are waiting around for us to use the same old arguments and same old language to pile on Donald Trump — they’re tired of it...."

Writes James Carville, in "The Best Thing Democrats Can Do in This Moment" (NYT).

James Carville watched a few minutes of the Biden/Trump debate, then turned it off, "ate two pot gummies and started listening to some Hank Williams."

"He said he realized at that moment that Mr. Biden would have to drop out. By every account, Mr. Carville’s decision to act against Mr. Biden came after extensive consultation with a network of friends he has been talking to daily for 30 years. 'I went into this with what you would call in the law malice and forethought,' he said.... 'I could have been embarrassed,' Mr. Carville said. 'He could have run and won. But it never occurred to me that I was wrong.' At this stage in Mr. Carville’s life, there was not much to lose and it is hard to imagine him remaining quiet. 'He can’t help it,' said Paul Begala, Mr. Carville’s partner on that 1992 campaign and one of his closest friends. 'It is who he is. His income does not depend on being hired by politicians. Nor has it been for 30 years. He can say whatever he wants.'"

Writes Adam Nagourney, in "James Carville on Aging, Edibles and His Anxieties About Harris/At 79, the Democratic commentator is the subject of a documentary that captures his musings — and his warning to President Biden — about the toils of age" (NYT).

What Hank Williams song did James Carville cue up?

I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry (because JC was sad)

Jambalaya (because JC is Cajun and the song begins "Goodbye, Joe")

Hey Good Lookin' (because no one ever said that to him)

Other (make your argument in the comments)

 

pollcode.com free polls

"Jill Biden, lacking the detachment of a Melania and enjoying the role of first lady more, has been pushing — and shielding — her husband..."

"... beyond a reasonable point. After Thursday’s embarrassing debate performance, she exhorted the crowd and played teacher to a prized student: 'You did a great job! You answered every question! You knew all the facts!' This, to the guy who controls the nuclear codes.... The Democratic strategist Paul Begala... explained on CNN: 'The first Democratic politician to call on Biden to step down, it’s going to end their career... None of them are going to say, 'Hey, let me step forward and knife Julius Caesar.' Biden is a beloved man in the Democratic Party.'... James Carville... told me Biden should call former Presidents Clinton and Obama to the White House and decide on five Democratic stars to address their convention in August.... Carville said the president should give a July 4 speech announcing he will let the next generation of Democratic leaders bloom.... And what if Joe and Jill cling on? In reply, Carville quoted... That which can’t continue, won’t."

Writes Maureen Dowd, in "The Ghastly vs. the Ghostly" (NYT)(boldface added).

I don't get to use my "Julius Caesar" tag too often. I can't believe Dowd planted that in the text and then ended with "That which can’t continue, won’t." 

The adage is attributed to Herb Stein. See "Is Stein’s Law real?" (Robert J. Samuelson, WaPo, May 30, 2013):

"A suspicion of mine is that there are too many preachy females [dominating the culture of the Democratic party]."

"'Don’t drink beer. Don’t watch football. Don’t eat hamburgers. This is not good for you.' The message is too feminine: 'Everything you’re doing is destroying the planet. You’ve got to eat your peas.' If you listen to Democratic elites — NPR is my go-to place for that — the whole talk is about how women, and women of color, are going to decide this election. I’m like: 'Well, 48 percent of the people that vote are males. Do you mind if they have some consideration?'"

Said James Carville, quoted in the Maureen Dowd column, "James Carville, the Cajun Who Can’t Stop Ragin’" (NYT).

ADDED: The quote above followed the observation by Dowd that "Lately, [Carville] has been obsessed with Biden bleeding Black male voters."

Oddly enough, the very next thing I saw was this clip from the new episode of Bill Maher's show, where he's advising Democrats to give up racial politics:

"Exhausted, confused, isolated and depressed Americans are not buying the Democratic line that things are better than they look."

Writes Maureen Dowd, in "Can Dems Dodge Doomsday?" (NYT). Focused on helping the Democratic Party in the next election, she looks to 3 Democratic Party strategists — James Carville, David Axelrod, and Stan Greenberg.

Biden’s advisers are urging him just to sell harder and people will get it. Axelrod disagrees: “You cannot persuade people if their lived experience is telling them something different. We’ve been through hell in America and around the world.”...

Carville [says Democrats] should work not to seem like an “urban, coastal, arrogant party”... “People don’t like you.”...

... Greenberg warned Democrats not to use Obama.... “Obama did not give voice to the hurt and anger that working class voters were feeling,” Greenberg wrote.... Fretting about the threat of Trumpism, given that the Democrats are bleeding working-class voters, including Black and Hispanic ones, he told me, “If they don’t listen this time, we’re going to end up with fascism, dammit.”

To sum up. Axelrod says: empathize with the people. Carville says: stop being so damned dislikeable. Greenberg says: do class politics, not race politics.

ADDED: I'm reading the comments over there and it's overflowing with denial: Stop trashing Biden! I'm tired of attacks on Democrats! 

One comment with over 1400 up votes ends with the poorly thought-out line: "D to go forward; R for reverse....over an endless series of catastrophic cliffs." Don't go forward over even one catastrophic cliff, because that will be the end of it all, and what lies beyond is irrelevant. If the endless cliffs are behind us, so that going in reverse would take us over them, how did we get here in the first place?

Do you visualize history as a landscape? Do you think of the government as a car driving over that landscape? Does that car have an automatic transmission? When I get in my car, I don't see a "D"...

"You ever get the sense that people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people?"

"They come up with a word like 'Latinx' that no one else uses. Or they use a phrase like 'communities of color.' I don’t know anyone who speaks like that.... This is not how voters talk.... Wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it. It’s hard to talk to anybody today — and I talk to lots of people in the Democratic Party — who doesn’t say this. But they don’t want to say it out loud.... I think it’s because large parts of the country view us as an urban, coastal, arrogant party, and a lot gets passed through that filter.... And maybe tweeting that we should abolish the police isn’t the smartest thing to do because almost fucking no one wants to do that. ... People always say to me, 'Why don’t Democrats just lie like Republicans?' Because if they did, our voters wouldn’t stand for it. But I’m not saying we need to lie like they do. I’m saying, why not go after Gaetz and Jordan and link them to Hastert and the Republican Party over and over and over again? We have to take these small opportunities to define ourselves and the other side every damn time. And we don’t do it. We just don’t do it...."

Said James Carville, in "Wokeness is a problem and we all know it/James Carville on the state of Democratic politics" (Vox). 

Despite the headline, most of the interview is a mishmash of political strategy, mostly about how the Democrats need to hit Republicans harder. It's a lot of babble, including raving about child molesting. He'd have the Democrats talking about Dennis Hastert and tying him various Republicans, and not about how Democrats have gone way too far with wokeism. He wants the talk to be about perverted sex, sex, sex. It works for Q Anon! 

I'd say Carville is himself "urban, coastal, [and] arrogant." He looks down on the people. He's not really criticizing Democratic insiders, just saying they're on a higher level than the voters and they need to step down from that to win votes. But don't lie! The would-be Democratic voters won't stand for lying! Just run with that child molesting story and pound Republicans with it over and over and over again.

"There may be a new genre: liberals expressing 'buyers remorse' over the culture they have created."

"Here's a talk between Bill Kristol and James Carville on the 2020 election and what came after. You'd think the two would be ecstatic, exultant. Trump is gone. The Dems are spraying money on citizens like cheap perfume on a whore. White men make up 14% of the class at the many Ivy League colleges. Good times. But these two are somber.. Bill Kristol keeps begging Carville to tell him where the Democrats are going and Carville seems to think the Democrats have a flimsy, rickety coalition that will fall apart if the Dems keep saying 'people of color' and 'Latinix' and keep canceling people of whom the Amherst College English department disapproves. Carville seems to regard Biden as the man standing between the Dems and the deluge. Perhaps 'buyers remorse' isn't quite the term I'm looking for - maybe 'Belshazzar's Feast.'"

Writes Wild Swan in the email. I tried watching the video.... 

 

... but the video and audio on Carville's side is horrible. Unwatchable. Is he filming from a laptop on his lap? What a ridiculous place for a laptop! I don't know why the audio is also herky-jerky, and bad audio with his idiosyncratic manner of speaking is unintelligible. And that's quite aside from whether he's making good points (and good sense).

But — lo and behold — there's a transcript! I can skim, and I can cut and paste: