2020 election – Page 12 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

October 3, 2019

What You Read Ain’t What You Hear

The transcript of the “infamous” call to Ukrainian president Zelensky by Pres. Trump, July 25, 2019.

Regarding Trump’s phone call to Zelensky, president of Ukraine, an oral message put on paper and then read isn’t the same as performance of the conversation in the manner in which it was delivered: person-to-person in conversational tones. Adam Schiff’s bastardized performance is a travesty. I’m talking about taking the original transcript and vocally delivering the actual words as they occur in a natural conversation. Once you do that, the air is taken out of the Democrat’s impeachment balloon. There’s no there there.

Hugh Hewitt and his producer, Duane Patterson, conducted such a reading (Hour 2, Hugh Hewitt Show, 10/2/19). If performed as it was originally delivered, certain conclusions about the call stand out:

(1) Trump is right. There was no quid pro quo. There was no use of presidential power to advance his candidacy. There was no offer, implied or otherwise, to withhold aid for purely partisan advantage.

(2) Zelensky brought up Giuliani, not Trump. Trump was asking Ukraine for their assistance in our probe of Russia-gate. Of course, Giuliani, being the personal attorney of the president, is also gathering evidence to defend his client against the Democrats’ anti-Trump jihad. Remember, Clinton had an entire war room devoted to the defense of our priapic 42nd chief executive. In fact, the conversation mostly skirts the mention of Giuliani.

(3) The aid that the US has given the Ukraine was mentioned to remind Zelensky that allies operate in a reciprocal manner, and Europe provides little help to Ukraine. We need some international help to investigate a matter of international scope, not necessarily to go after “lunch pale” Joe. We have treaties with other nations to cover these eventualities.

(4) Biden is mentioned by Trump in a brief, offhanded manner. It was mentioned to highlight the possibility of Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election. The Crowdstrike reference is brought up in the beginning by Trump to make the point. That’s the context.

I could say more. It is very strange for Congressional firebrands like Schiff to rush to impeachment over this frail thread. Is this an attempt to head off Barr and Durham as they draw close to the origins of Russia-gate? If so, indeed, we have a coup underway.

In this April 25, 2006, file photo, John Durham speaks to reporters on the steps of U.S. District Court in New Haven, Conn. (AP Photo/Bob Child, File) (Washington Examiner)

Something to think about. Eh?

RogerG

October 3, 2019October 3, 2019

Are We a Deliberative Citizen Republic or No?

Our politics has descended into a shout-fest. Trump doesn’t present reasoned arguments (argument as in viewpoint with reasons). He resorts to boilerplate and name-calling. The Dem leadership and its Squad are channeling a mix of over-caffeinated social justice warriors at a Charles Murray lecture and teenage inmates on acid in a juvenile hall cell block. Don’t expect much calm deliberation to come of it.

If you have one hour and 20 minutes – or as much as you can handle – here is an example of what civil discourse is supposed to sound like (go to here or click on the icon below).

The editors of National Review gather to discuss the issue-meltdown du jour. This session concerns the infamous call and impeachment. There’s quite a range of opinion from the hyper Trump skeptic David French to Charles W. Cooke to the constitutionally fastidious Luke Thompson to Michael Brendan Dougherty to Rich Lowry, the moderator. On the call and impeachment, French lies closer to Pelosi and Thompson closer to Trump. All are critical of Trump and the Democrats but vary in their degree and basis of condemnation

The consensus, if there is one, is that Trump behaved badly and the Dems could have possibly stepped on another rake. My take is closer to Thompson – Trump’s actions were within the historical bounds of presidential behavior and certainly not impeachable – and Cooke – what’s the standard for impeachable offenses given Andrew Jackson’s genocide to presidents making war without congressional approval to presidents with a phone and pen so as to slip the bounds of their oath of office? Impeachment, really, over this?

Take a listen.

RogerG

September 6, 2019September 7, 2019

‘Tis the Season for Demagoguery

Do you want an example of pure demagoguery? Well, here it is! Watch Elizabeth Warren appeal to the prejudices and emotions of her crowd.

Her speech is filled with all the lingo in the quiver of any power-hungry firebrand. When democracy becomes a substitute for morality, as it is for Warren, Bernie, and the Squad (AOC and company), such people are free to go out and advocate theft if they can garner a large enough throng. And in this Democratic Party, the rhetoric does. This, the wealth tax, is thievery through the tax code, pure and simple. Her rationale is utterly fantastic and also very frightening. It is frightening not just for its lunacy but for the moral corruption of the masses who buy into it.

Elizabeth Warren addresses a large crowd for an August campaign rally in California.
Frederic J. Brown/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

A rebuttal to Warren can be found here.

The wealth tax ploy is too easy to take apart, as economists even in the Democratic Party stable (Larry Summers, et al) have done. Fact: you’ll get a small fraction of what you expect. It’s too easy to legally dodge. And if that doesn’t work, simply flee and have your assets electronically transferred to Zurich. Wealth is remarkably portable. Of course, you can attempt to stop the flight with more draconian measures, but then you’re mimicking Maduro, or Lenin, or Stalin, or Mao, or Castro …. Elizabeth, do you really want to go there? Some in the base are certainly hot for it.

Venezuela’s illegal traders have proliferated as grocery stores are fast becoming empty. Credit: Eneas De Troya / Flicker

I’m reminded of other crusades to stick it to the rich, real or imagined. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane to 1929. The story actually begins in 1906. The farsighted Russian Prime Minister, Pyotr Solypin, starting in 1906, uplifted the peasants by giving them land and thus they became property owners. Some were successful and became richer than others. By October of 1917, a revolution for forced “equality” – that’s what communism and Bolshevism are all about – seized power and would spend the next decade trying to eliminate the so-called “kulaks”, or rich peasants. Many were not so much rich as they simply owned their own land. Stalin had enough of peasant resistance. Party activists and armed cadres descended on the countryside to rile the many less-well-off. They seized land, food, crops, livestock, equipment, and herded peasants into state farms and the gulag. That’s the beginning of the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33.

A dispossessed kulak and his family in front of their home in Udachne village in Donets’ka oblast’, 1930s. (Image credit: Central State Archives of Photo, Audio, and Video Documents of Ukraine named after G. S. Pshenychnyi)

A family with starving children during Stalin’s de-kulakization campaign. Wikimedia Commons.

What’s interesting about the episode is the requisition squads left no stone unturned. Peasants resisted by hiding all they had, all to no avail. Everything was taken, even the seed grain for next year’s crop. What does this mean? Famine and 50 years of shortages. Warren will have to follow in the footsteps of the lefty activists of 1930’s Russia to realize her anticipated $2.75 trillion windfall. It’ll be a replay of 1930’s Russia. Capital will be hidden or flee with the same devastating effects on our country. Warren has company of the sort nobody should relish.

As in the October Revolution, Warren and company are offering “equality” through a series of massive wealth transfers. The “equality” will come in the form of freebies offered up to the alleged dispossessed. It’s a promise with a sordid past. Beware America, she plans to revisit the horror on us and our progeny.

RogerG

August 23, 2019August 23, 2019

Bernie’s Intergenerational Suicide Pact

Today, Bernie Sanders unveiled his plan for the Green New Deal, a $16.3 trillion monster. You can read about it here in the New York Times. The number – 16.3 trillion – is so huge that we lose sight of its magnitude. To break it down, if the dollars were miles, it would be a little less than three-quarters of the distance to Alpha Centauri, an entirely separate planetary system “far far away”. The size of the number means that the bill can’t be paid by anyone. The projected payback will extend beyond generations “far far away”. It’s essentially an invitation to join the Stone Age for anyone and everyone in generations from now to those “far far away”.

That dingbat congresswoman from the Bronx would like to stampede us into the Stone Age with hysterical cries that we have only 10 years before the Götterdämmerung if we do nothing. For her, better the Stone Age than extinction. Apparently, Bernie also favors the choice of the Stone Age. For me, the difference is marginal. The Stone Age was best captured in Thomas Hobbes’s famous dictum: life is “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short”.

But is the U.S. in the catbird seat to stave off disaster anyway? Remember, our government’s decisions to economically harm us only harms … us! China and the rest of the developing world have a keen interest in indoor plumbing and air conditioning. They’ll burn down their jungles and the fossil fuels in a long list of Saudi Arabias to get out from living in the dirt. So, unless Bernie appoints himself to be the Maoist General Secretary of the World and embarks on a Genghis Khan-style conquest of the planet to enforce the resultant poverty, he’ll just end up destroying us. The rest of the world will continue to pollute, albeit at a faster clip.

BEIJING, CHINA – DECEMBER 20: Citizens walk in smog on December 20, 2016 in Jinan, Shandong Province of China. Air quality index (AQI) readings exceeded 400 and some schools have suspended classes in Jinan. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

Burning coal in China to generate electricity.

A few numbers might help Bernie, his fellow ideological asylum inmates, and the Squad in understanding the extent of the craziness. The U.S. is about a quarter of the world’s economy. China comes in second at 15%. The numbers are nearly reversed in global CO2 emissions: China at 30%, the U.S. at 15%. So – I’ll go slow for the woke crowd – we produce 25% of the world’s product at only 15% of emissions, and China knocks out 15% of the world’s product at 30% of emissions. What’s that mean? I’ll go slow once again for all those with degrees but show no sign of better judgment: It means that China is dirtier, much dirtier at a rate twice ours. The lesson, therefore, is to smash the cleaner nation’s economy only to clear the way for the dirty one. Bernie must have skipped Math class in high school.

The hope is that China will be inspired by our example to voluntarily follow suit. What example? It’s the example of how to level a first world country into the third world. I suspect that they’d like to avoid the experience as if it was a leper colony.

California prides itself in being a ground breaker. They have adopted the greenie snake oil through a variety of measures over the past couple of decades. As of 2017/18, though, the state accounts for only 1.1% of global CO2 discharges. Even if they knock it down to zero – probably by running the rest of the economy out of the state – their slot will be more than replaced by India as it ramps up.

What’s the upshot of all the greenie caterwauling? Say goodbye to the future for your kids, their kids, and their kids’ kids. Maybe they might feel better if they know that they were making a sacrifice for the good of … no one. Not!

RogerG

August 16, 2019August 16, 2019

Solutions Made for … Political Careers

U.S. Senator and Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris (D, Ca.) in a CNN Town Hall, April 22, 2019. She pledged that, if elected president, she would take executive action to enact sweeping gun control measures.

America is awash in solutions in search of a problem. Climate change is happening to some extent. But is the problem such an obvious cataclysm to justify sovietizing our entire economy and way of life in the Green New Deal? Differences exist in aggregate, average wages between men and women. So, is massive federal, state, and local intrusions into every business’s labor practices down to the minutest detail reasonable? These examples highlight a light year’s worth of space between proposed solution and hypothetical problem, with emphasis on hypothetical.

Well, we’ve taken the nonsense to a whole new level in the recent barking over gun control. Would any of the proposed “solutions” prevent the mass shootings, mass stabbings, and a career criminal and drug dealer placing cops in his crosshairs in north Philadelphia? Solution and problem have gone beyond the distance to Alpha Centauri (4.37 light years). The two are in separate and parallel universes.

Going back to Sandy Hook, the killer lived in a home with guns, shot his mother to death, and then took a ride past a closer but protected high school to an unarmed elementary school. What background check, gun ban, magazine size limitation, or gun buy-back program would have stopped the guy? What about the murderous loons in El Paso and Dayton? Without a paper trail, there’s nothing to check. Really, do you think any sort of gun ban would have stopped them from getting armed to shoot revelers and Walmart shoppers? Ditto for the Las Vegas murderer.

In Orange County, the savage didn’t even need a gun. He was content with a knife.

The suspect in a stabbing and robbery spree in Garden Grove and Santa Ana, August 7, 2019.

And then we have the Philly shooter. The miscreant had already run afoul of half of the gun laws on the books in the city and state, in addition to huge swaths of the rest of the penal code. I suppose that a career of assaults, prison stays, and meth/crack/heroine dealings would have made him sensitive to a ban on a banana clip in his gun. Nooot!!! This is farce chasing buffoonery.

The surrender of the shooting suspect in north Philadelphia, August 14, 2019.

So they chant, “Ban assault weapons”. What is an “assault weapon”? Put that one into law. Go ahead. Ban “semi-automatic”. In so doing, you just criminalized a good portion of the American public – many of the guns not handled by Sylvester Stalone in one of his flicks are semi-automatic. Ban what the thing looks like, like make the pistol grip taboo. Really? Is that the best that you can do? That fact is, a workable definition is as slippery as a frog lathered in Crisco. What the Dems are really trying to do is ban anything that might look like something in a “John Wick” movie.

The whole herd in the Dem presidential field line up in support of the quackery. Just today I heard an interview of one of the “moderates” in the stable, Seth Moulton (D, Mass.). He tried to peddle his service in Afghanistan and Iraq to rationalize his efforts to steal my rights. Seth, I salute your service but I’m not in a mood to surrender my rights to your conscience. You give up your guns; leave mine alone. They’re legal and I’m clean.

Today’s political circus mangles solutions and problems, and any relationship between the two. It’s a burlesque show; it’s a mess. It’s the political equivalent of speaking in tongues and snake handling. The truth of the matter is that power-hungry politicos, already inclined to make us subservient to mommy and daddy government, want to build a political career on the corpse of our rights – legal, Constitutional, and natural. It’s all about manufactured solutions at the service of political careers. Now that’s the very definition of disgraceful.

RogerG

July 31, 2019

Socialist Longing

Democratic Party presidential contenders debate, 7/30/19.

The morning after last night’s Democratic Party debate I was reading Jay Nordlinger’s story (National Review, 7/29/19) about the Russian dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now in exile in Britain. It brought to mind an inextinguishable need in the enthusiasts of socialism, whether openly declared or as quiet fellow travelers (much of the Democratic presidential field), to constantly point to a non-existent, never-realized form of it. It’s a phantom only possible in the mind’s eye of the true believer and nowhere else. Bernie exhibits it in great bounty, and so does an increasing portion of the party’s activist base, the party’s stable of presidential candidates, and its giddy zealots in Congress (the dimwit Squad for instance). In addition to Stalin’s Socialist Realism in art, we must add Socialist Longing – the longing for a future and purer socialism that somehow will get it right – to the doctrines of the Church of Socialism.

Bernie sounds like he was mentally put into a cryogenic state during his glory days of the 1970’s and 80’s. Mentally, he’s still honeymooning in the Soviet Union. Khodorkovsky mentioned the everywhere-stated party slogan: “The Party solemnly promises that this generation of the Soviet people will live under Communism.” Bernie is stuck there as well. For Bernie, the promise is always in the future, or in a northern European country that, in reality, shed much of its experiment in socialism. Bernie’s socialism is the Sweden of 1970, for example, not the Sweden of today.

Does he know that Sweden isn’t far behind the US in Heritage’s economic freedom rankings? (The US position was bolstered by the recent tax cut law.) Still, Sweden has no minimum wage law, abolished its inheritance tax in 2004, and let go of much of its state-owned enterprises. It’s vaunted public healthcare system is remarkably decentralized, a far cry from Bernie’s sovietized Medicare for All. Bernie’s idea of socialism is the failed version, and can’t point to a functioning one this side of North Korea and Cuba.

Bernie wants to impose something that Sweden ran from. Does he know it? Don’t know, but the longing continues for a decrepit idea in the hope that it will be magically transformed into a success. Bernie is the chief exponent of a made-in-America cargo cult.

RogerG

June 27, 2019June 28, 2019

A Telethon in Reverse

The Democratic Party first debate, 6/26/2019.

I didn’t watch the Democrat debate last night. It’d be too painful. Anyway, the general script for the primary has already been written. The parade of the ambitious are functioning like the old March of Dimes telethon … in reverse. Instead of calling in to donate money, the candidates act like the volunteers in the phone bank announcing the latest request for more of other people’s money. It’s a marathon about how much to give away, not contribute.

In the first cartoon – “Bernie Panders” – Bernie Sanders proclaims he’ll call and raise the bids of the faux indigenous candidate (Elizabeth Warren) and our giddy sophomore class president (AOC) in their demands to write off the student loan debt of people who voluntarily stoked up their debt in their halcyon days on campus, much of it accumulated in grad school. Now they have to pay it back with a payback schedule bent-over-backwards to make it easy.

Who’ll pay for the giveaway? It won’t be the young scions of the upper income and upper middle income families who mostly ran up the debt. The favorite target of our politically ambitious rabble-rousers is the rich, out of which they won’t get anywhere close to retiring the $1.4 trillion price tag. All the while, the targets hide their money or flee the country, and the millstone around the neck of toddlers and the yet-to-be-born – called the national debt – will only get heftier. Too bad. Toddlers and the yet-to-be-born don’t vote. Not yet anyway.

Cartoon #2 brings up another antic of the spendthrifts. Here, the presidential wannabes magically transform an economic good/service into a “right”, resurrecting FDR’s old ploy. FDR, great guy, but occasionally he spouted nonsense. How do you turn something produced with limited resources into a “right”? Answer: you can’t. It’d be like reducing obesity by legislatively repealing gravity. Economic behavior is as natural to us as our teeth. The behavior can’t be repealed.

You make it a “right”, and therefore “free” to the user, and the demand floodgates are thrown open. The concept of a checking account with limited funds has no relevance. You want it; it’s a “right”; you get it. The only real limit is politics, and that is based on how much the people will tolerate the declining quality, the delays, and the denial of services. It plays out whether in the Soviet Union or the British Health Service.

It’s silly beyond belief to equate a “right” to an economic good/service to the right to free speech. Free speech has guard rails (Schenck v. United States, 1919), like a highway, but there is no set limit to the number cars taking the route in the course of its life. Healthcare is limited to the number of people who are capable of providing it and other resources not committed to other necessities. Healthcare isn’t geared to be a “right”.

Don’t tell that to the politically ambitious panderers. Also don’t tell them that “payer” in single payer means “taxpayer”, not “government”.

I heard that there was much Spanish speaking at the pander-fest in Miami. Spanish is a beautiful language, but I suspect the display was identity pandering. If it’s a “dog whistle” (using woke language), it’s one tuned to the ears of the multicultural barkers. Their agenda includes the practical erasure of the border. Thus cartoon #3.

Clause 4 of Section 8 of Article I is about to be read out of The Constitution. Once you eliminate border enforcement by dismantling ICE and turning the rest into a construction battalion to build bridges across the Rio Grande, any person living in a dirt floor hut is a soon-to-be-an-American. Would you ever again be able to connect the word “manage” to the word “immigration”? Would there be relevance of “rule of law” to the subject of “immigration”? Hardly. Where’s the law since you trampled it into the ground?

Cartoon #4 gives a clue about the state of mind of the Democratic Party. Gargantuan offerings of free government stuff is a certain path to ruin. It’s a race to emulate Argentina, or maybe Venezuela, or maybe the Soviet Union. Ruination can be a democratic choice.

RogerG