Anger, denial, bargaining, depression, acceptance ... eye-clawing? Has Elisabeth Kübler-Ross amended her 1969 work on the five stages of grief? 

Or are Democrats just stuck in the first stage?

It didn't take 24 hours from the call of Pennsylvania for Donald Trump before Democrats began running to their favorite media outlets to vent their rage at the result. Axios' Andrew Solender offered up an overview headlined, "Democrats start clawing each others' eyes out," figuratively speaking.

Or at least we hope it's figuratively speaking:

The dust has not yet settled from the 2024 election, but the Democratic Party's blame game over their bleak showing has already begun in earnest.

Why it matters: Democrats across the ideological spectrum are quickly seizing on this raw moment to try to redefine the party in their image.

Read it all, but at least as presented, we don't get any real eye-clawing. What we do see are the ideological factions of the Left trying to frame the loss as vindication for their own positions. That's a natural process after a shocking loss; the RNC actually launched a formalized process for it after Mitt Romney's loss to Barack Obama in the latter's re-election effort in 2012, after being shocked by the results. (I eventually wrote a book about the lessons of 2012 called Going Red.) 

If you want eye-clawing, go to Twitter, where the talons have come out -- but then just as mysteriously disappeared:

Plouffe has now deleted his account https://t.co/a7Fi44tLgD

— Jacqui Heinrich (@JacquiHeinrich) November 7, 2024

To the extent "eye clawing" is happening at all -- either figuratively or literally -- it's targeting the eyes of Joe Biden. David mentioned this Politico article earlier this morning, but the effort to construct a reality in which Democrats pose themselves as Captain Louis Renault in the Biden era really requires a complete demolition. Suddenly, the decision to cook the primaries in 2024 to protect a cognitively impaired incumbent from campaign scrutiny is solely on Biden's shoulders:

Democrats are directing their rage over losing the presidential race at Joe Biden, who they blame for setting up Kamala Harris for failure by not dropping out sooner.

They say his advancing age, questions over his mental acuity and deep unpopularity put Democrats at a sharp disadvantage. They are livid that they were forced to embrace a candidate who voters had made clear they did not want — and then stayed in the race long after it was clear he couldn’t win.

“He shouldn’t have run,” said Jim Manley, a top aide to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “This is no time to pull punches or be concerned about anyone’s feelings. He and his staff have done an enormous amount of damage to this country.”

This is absolute horses***. The question wasn't whether Biden should run in 2024, but why Democrats then chose to discourage primary challengers by changing the rules to protect Biden. Ask Dean Phillips, the Minnesota Congressman who warned in 2023 that Biden was both too unpopular and too old for a second term. Robert F. Kennedy Jr issued the same warning; both launched primary challenges, with Phillips openly hoping to draw a bigger and more effective candidate into the race. 

Instead, the same Democrats now "livid" at Biden for sticking around shunned Phllips and RFK while they circled the wagons around a clearly declining incumbent. They all claimed that Biden was "sharp as a tack" and running rings around aides while Biden stumbled and muttered his way through public appearances. State parties changed rules for primaries and caucuses to encumber challengers; Florida's Democrat Party canceled their primary altogether to protect Biden. None of these Democrats ever spoke up at all before June 27 to suggest that Biden step down; in fact, they doubled down on their support for a second term.

Biden's decision to do a debate with Donald Trump in June ended the "sharp as a tack" pretenses. Americans got a good look at an old man struggling to keep up with the conversation and unable to organize his thoughts -- or even look like he followed the conversation. The same Democrats who insisted that Biden was totes capable then turned on a dime to reverse the results of the primaries they rigged, and conducted a soft coup against the incumbent president and elected nominee. Democrats then put an even less competent Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket without any selection process at all. 

How many of these "livid" Democrats objected to that in late July? Or at the party convention three weeks or so later, when they had plenty of opportunity to address the crisis?

The next paragraph has an even higher horses*** quotient:

According to interviews with nearly a dozen officials and party operatives, Biden squandered valuable months only to end in disaster on the debate stage. And by the time he decided to pass the torch, he had saddled Harris with too many challenges and far too little time to build a winning case for herself.

That provoked a Twitter rant from me last night that I'll encapsulate and reorganize here. Harris had three months to "build a winning case for herself," and refused to try. She would only talk about Trump. Harris barely did media at all for the first month. It took weeks for Harris to even post her positions on the campaign website, and that was literally copied and pasted from Biden's campaign website. 

Harris started off with a massive advantage from a besotted media that promoted her "joy" and "brat" themes. There has never been a more coddled presidential candidate, and she still stunk on ice. She started off talking about "price gauging," and never differentiated herself from Biden and his policies and priorities. Whenever asked to explain what she'd do different or to explain the failures of the incumbent administration, Harris would reply that she was raised in a middle-class household and then filibuster with non-sequiturs.

For the last month, Harris did nothing but talk about what a danger Trump was to democracy. Even as her polling began declining, that's all she ever offered. Her "closing argument" was 33 minutes of calling Trump a fascist and fuzzy clichés. And by the way, how many of those "livid" Dems stepped up during the campaign to publicly advise Harris to start "defining herself" and talk about the issues instead of Trump? I'll spot you the 'z' for the answer.

Here's some exclusive video of "livid" Dems discovering that Biden wasn't fit for a second term in June. pic.twitter.com/7fH3zmXYPh

— Ed Morrissey (@EdMorrissey) November 7, 2024

None of them stood up to ask Harris to start "building a winning case for herself" until yesterday, either. They all pretended that vibes were enough, as well as the Importance of Electing A Woman of Color rather than address the concerns of the people voting in the election.

If Democrats are "livid" at the result, they should be livid at themselves for the fraud they perpetrated over Biden's cognitive incapacity. That fraud set everything else in motion that led to their defeat on Tuesday. All of this "eye clawing" is a performative exercise to distract from their fraud and corruption. 

For those who don't recall it, Cliff Gorman had a great riff on the Küber-Ross scale in the 1977 film All That Jazz, which should have won an Oscar for Best Film. I'm still in the anger stage over that election, frankly.