2022 elections – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

November 2, 2023November 2, 2023

The Trump Personality in Politics

Ilhan Omar calls on House leadership to take action against Lauren ... — Part of the House Republican clown caucus (l-r): Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Majorie Taylor Greene

As a public-school teacher for 30 years, I know the critical rule of classroom management. If one kid’s bad behavior is left unattended, it won’t take long for the classroom to become a zoo. A parallel is Trump’s entry into the Republican presidential sweepstakes in 2015. More than Trump entered the race, also came his personality. It has left an impression on certain adolescent-minded clusters of grownups in the Republican Party – both registered voters and some in elected office. Think of the clown caucus who engineered the ouster of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker.

“Trumpian” boils down to braggadocio, bombast, simplistic and blunt issues in a blunt style with a lot of bullying of friends and foes alike. It’s the over-the-top behavior of a person who craves the tabloid limelight. The Obama birth certificate dustup is a classic example of a simplistic and blunt issue to be exploited for personal gain, which would be Trump’s signature approach to modern politics. The only thing is, the bombast that drew so much attention ended in Trump scaping egg off his face when Obama produced the document.

Few, however, would predict that a windbag’s curtly rudeness would have an appeal among the rank and file. And the whole style seemed to be electorally validated when Trump won in a 2016 black swan event. Success can bring out the worst in people, and “Trumpian” came to be as fashionable as the John Wayne swagger in the 1950s.

While the personality type is appealing to certain party voters, it’s a big turnoff to getable swaths of the general electorate. After 2016, Trump’s appeal down ballot was a disaster. Let’s not forget 2022, at a time when the Democrats have made a shambles of the country, the Republicans could only squeak out a bare majority in the House leaving the clown caucus in a position to put their Trumpian hijinks on public display. The Republicans are proving that neo-Marxism is survivable if Trump, his political personality, and the clown caucus are the face of party.

In Orwell’s “1984”, Big Brother had a face. In today’s rendition of the Republican Party, its face is that of Donald Trump with the likes of Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Majorie Taylor Greene, Matt Rosendale, and Nancy Mace in a chorus line behind. Big Brother wouldn’t be laughed at; the picture of Trump and the Trumpkins elicits guffaws at first, followed by beads of sweat from the realization that they have actual power. To be sure, these are not the kind of people that I would trust with my kids.

IBM software patch upgrades power grid to version 2.0 - ExtremeTech — Big brother from 1984

95,000 words, many of them ominous, from Trump's tongue ...

The despicability of the Democratic Party and a sizeable faction in the Republican Party is registered in polls, something that you’ll recognize if you rely on more than Laura Ingraham for your news. She doesn’t hesitate to bellow a poll with Trump ahead of Biden. Yet, the reality in the most recent Suffolk University/USA TODAY poll presents a more complicated picture (see below). Yes, among Republican primary voters, Trump is far and away the favorite with 58%. Metrics of enthusiasm for Trump are high among these voters. But – here’s the key number – among the general electorate, Biden squeaks out a tiny lead, essentially a tie.

Trump is favored on a host of issues – the border, economy, foreign affairs – but when offered a choice between Biden and Trump, it’s essentially a dead heat. What’s holding Trump and the Republicans back from a sweeping lead? Look at Trump’s negatives. He’s even more reviled than Biden in a recent NBC News poll (see below). Biden’s negative rating stands at 49%; Trump registers a 54% downside. Megaphones like Laura Ingraham of Fox News would mention a Trump lead in a poll’s head-to-head matchup, but nary a word about Trump’s unlikability. Does “putting lipstick on a pig” remind you of anything?

The Trump personality is only appealing to a sizeable portion of the Republican Party base. It’s reviled nearly everywhere else. Trumpian bluster might carry a candidate through the primary, but in places other than a crimson district, it’s the kiss of death. If you want to stop the Democrats’ neo-Marxism, first win elections. What’s a turn-on for primary voters can be poison in the general election.

Democrats know this. That’s why they’re interfering in Republican primaries to elect Trumpians. In my home state of Montana, mysterious ads are appearing that throw mud on Tim Sheehy, who’s challenged in the primary by the Trumpian Matt Rosendale. Not a word in these hit pieces about Rosendale.

The group – Last Best Place PAC – is an undercover Democrat operation (see below) to help get Rosendale the nomination and, thus, an easier challenger for incumbent Democrat John Tester. It’s the same Democrat tried-and-true tactic from 2022. It’s not out of distaste for Sheehy that drives Schumer and company to stick it to Sheehy. He knows, like everyone else who are not fans of the Trump schtick, that a Trumpian is a weaker candidate. What worked in Arizona, Pennsylvania, et al, in 2022 has a good chance of succeeding in 2024. Watch Republicans rush headlong into the trap.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Further, watch an example of a boisterous Trumpian on full display, Lauren Boebert from September of this year. After this, is she like Trump – “I could stand in the middle of 5th Ave. and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters” – and therefore immune from the voters’ wrath? Are some Republican voters that morally stunted? Is the Trumpian personality that hypnotizing?

The Trumpian personality came through the door in 2016 and has entrenched itself. At this point, the party will have to face a disaster before the malignancy can be removed. Like a classroom under the control of hellions, we have a party that has allowed this element to run roughshod. And we will pay the piper.

RogerG

Read more here:

* For deep dive into the Suffolk University/USA TODAY poll, see the full text of the poll at https://www.suffolk.edu/-/media/suffolk/documents/academics/research-at-suffolk/suprc/polls/national/2023/10_24_2023_marginals_embargoed_2.pdf?la=en&hash=ABF93DCEAAFCA91DBE9BD17A2A10E4E4A2C6189E

* The NBC News poll can be read at https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/first-read/poll-overwhelming-majorities-express-concerns-biden-trump-ahead-2024-r-rcna111347

* “Nine months before the Montana GOP primary, a mysterious super PAC is on the airwaves attacking Tim Sheehy”, Ally Mutnick, Politico, September 12, 2023, at https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2023/09/12/congress/montana-senate-sheehy-pac-ads-00115276

* More on the Democrat-affiliated PAC: “Dems Look To Meddle in Montana’s GOP Senate Primary”, Meghan Blonder, The Washington Free Beacon, September 13, 2023, at https://freebeacon.com/elections/dems-look-to-meddle-in-montanas-gop-senate-primary/

March 6, 2023March 7, 2023

The GOP’s TPAC Suicide Squadron for 2024

Steve Bannon blasts Murdochs, Fox News in fiery CPAC speech | The Hill — Steve Bannon at CPAC 2023

CPAC may be turning into a pure Trump personality cult. The first “C” in the anacronym stands for conservative, but truth in advertising demands that it be replaced by a “T” for Trump Political Action Committee – TPAC. If Steve Bannon’s recent speech before the group is any indication, and the thunderous reception that it received, the Trump hero-worship brigades are fully prepared to torpedo the GOP’s chances in 2024 and saddle us with more of the looney left in the seats of power.

Watch a portion of the Bannon speech in the link below.

Bannon is nuts, and so is the TPAC audience. If the numbers in a recent poll are reasonably accurate, 43% of registered Republicans support Trump as the party’s nominee. 43% of Republicans equates to 12% of all registered voters because 40% of all party registrations nationwide are Democrats versus 29% Republicans. Do the math. 43% of 29% equals roughly 12%.

A good portion of that 12% are diehards for an intensely polarizing figure. Let’s say half of the 12% are zealous true-believers (only-Trumpers) which reduces the kamikaze recruits to 6% of all registered voters. Trump only gets more polarizing as he pushes a “stop the steal” story that he can’t prove in court and mires others who were sympathetic into more legal trouble for lending some credence to it.

Trial Lawyer Richard on Twitter: "I think they'll follow him until his downfall. Richard Nixon ...

Dominion v. Fox News is only one case in point. The network and its primetime lineup should be applauded for their honesty rather than castigated by a fanatic like Bannon. The depositions and disclosures of Fox News internal communications in court forces me to partly reevaluate some of my earlier criticisms of Fox’s celebrity pundits. Those disclosures further confirm the out-of-their-mind emotional state of that 6%. The Bannon audience at TPAC, if it’s typical of the cranks attracted to Trump, can only lead the party to more dismal electoral performance – 2018, 2020, and the red wave of 2022 turning into a ripple.

The attacks on Paul Ryan are particularly galling. Somehow, the low-tax/small-government/free-market philosophy of every Republican from Coolidge to Reagan as represented by Ryan is besmirched by ad hominem attacks by the cult’s agitators. It’s just that Ryan won’t pledge fealty to Trump, and that list of dissenters from Trump megalomania has only grown as more people cross paths with the alleged demi-god. Now, we must add Fox News to the ever-lengthening enemy’s list. How many more dissenters from Trump worship must there be before the TPAC crowd begins to question their slavish devotion to a self-absorbed and octogenarian adolescent.

Facebook Shuts Down Pro-Trump 'Stop the Steal' Group | Time

Ryan promises not to attend the Republican convention if Trump is the nominee. I’ll leave the presidential line on the ballot blank if he once again bamboozles the party into the nomination. The argument that it’s a binary choice has worn its welcome.

Trump is a loser. He turns off more than he turns on. His electoral performance over three elections is proof. The only way for him to deny the numbers is to label them as fraud without the proof to convince a judge and jury, let alone a majority of the electorate in a presidential contest. At a certain point, Trump is just embarrassing. Embarrassment doth not make a winner.

RogerG

* “CPAC Crowd Stands and Cheers as Raging Steve Bannon Vows to Bring Down Fox News: ‘We’re Going To Fight You Every Step Of The Way!’”, Mediaite, 3/3/2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/cpac-crowd-stands-and-cheers-as-raging-steve-bannon-vows-to-bring-down-fox-news-we-re-going-to-fight-you-every-step-of-the-way/ar-AA18cqic?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=e82b976dd18142c187e4f85ded29053a&ei=32

February 28, 2023February 28, 2023

The GOP Needs to Get Its House in Order

May be an image of one or more people, people standing and text that says 'Thank You, Lord JESUS, PRES PRESIDENT TRUMP TRUMG © Getty Images North America'

The ancients had much to say about hypocrisy and willful blindness in respect to problems. The prophet Isaiah admonished King Hezekiah on his deathbed (2Kings 20:1, NIV), “Put your house in order, because you are going to die; you will not recover.” And then there is this famous line against pretense from Luke’s gospel (6:42, NIV):

“How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

The Left – meaning today’s progressives and liberals – is nearly beyond redemption, philosophically and in many cases behaviorally. Its neo-Marxist collectivism is a national suicide pact. But a sizeable element of the Right is similarly proving itself unworthy. It is immersed in a performative style of politics, a politics as therapy – “Stick it to the libs, I feel better” – that lacks direction other than the desire to humiliate the other side in staged mini-dramas. They may get an emotional rush from the rhetoric and theatrical antics but it is repulsive to large swaths of the nation’s electorate. Principally for this reason, the last three election cycles have proven to be disappointments for those of a more conservative disposition.

Call it the Trump contagion. It entered the GOP’s bloodstream in 2015 and is proving resistant to cure. Trump still conjures a 43% plurality, 15 points better than second-place DeSantis, among Republican voters in the latest Fox News poll (see below). 43% are hungry for a four-peat of disappointment – to add to 2018, 2020, and 2022. Einstein’s famous insanity formulation keeps coming to mind. This large faction of Republicans remains oblivious to the fact that a candidate that survives them may not, and increasingly will not, survive the general electorate if the party’s base continues to choose candidates based on theatrics and their longings for an emotional release in their politics. The hardheaded on the Right need to understand one inescapable fact: first, as a party, to accomplish anything, you’ve got to win . . . the general! The stalwarts might celebrate victory in the intraparty feud in spring but after the dust settles in November, the donkey-party Left will still be making policy in the seats of power.

The contagion has overtaken the official GOP apparatus in some red/purple states. The effect of the takeover is turning some purple states blue. In places where it is deeply embedded, the infected exhibit the tendencies of those immersed in the blue bubbles, only this time, in a red one. Secure in the cloister of others like them, they are awkward when forced to confront people who disagree and promptly jump to condemnation. It’s true for both silos. Remember Obama’s “bitter clingers”, Hillary’s “deplorables”, and ritual abuse of the word “establishment” and “elites” by Fox News’s primetime “populists”, and Trump’s litany of juvenile insults?

Professor Alberto Coll of DePaul University School of Law, and an astute critic of today’s defunct civic education, is concerned about the decline of the republican civic virtues of prudence, deliberation, and moderation (see below). They are most fundamentally missing from K-12 and have been drummed out of higher ed, increasingly replaced by habitual Marxist oppressor-shaming. It’s an ideology more at home as a bankrupt theology with its unexaminable assumptions and heaven-on-earth end state. Not surprisingly, they behave much like jihadis with their statue-toppling, silencings on campuses, itinerant mobs, and the forcible injection of their ideology into all facets of the culture.

The Left’s inhumanity has elicited an analogous reaction on the Right. Gone is any semblance of prudence. Prudence dictates the recognition of complexities, consequences, and trade-offs. Instead, everything seems so simple in a constant branding of everyone as either evil (them) or good (us).

The Left’s infantilism shows as an attempt to facetiously adduce cause from correlation: socio-economic stats are unequal among identity groups therefore bigotry is at fault, or so they assume. If they can’t find sufficient numbers of bigots, they’ll make it airily “systemic”, which leads them right into the strawman fallacy. It’s ludicrous.

The Right sometimes stumbles into the “systemic” quicksand. They have a vocabulary of vague pejoratives to feed their obsessions such as the aforementioned “establishment” and “elites”. Anyone who has been around too long in the public arena is automatically suspect by that logic, especially if previously identified as one by the movement’s carnival barkers (Hello, primetime Fox News.). The terms encourage an instant distrust of credentials so academics, scholars, people in the professions, political figures, and leaders in business and civil society that disagree with them are summarily rejected. It’s another form of bigotry, something familiar to Antifa and Biden, Schumer, Pelosi, and The Squad in their usual hivemind.

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Deliberation goes the way of prudence. Adults don’t display it. It begins with listening which is clearly absent from the halls of Congress. Have you seen the expansive number of empty seats on C-SPAN during speeches on the House and Senate floors? People talk past each other in party-approved talking points. The kids don’t see it modeled by adults in their media, or in their schools’ curriculums that refuse to establish a good grounding in language, the best of Western literature (Bible, Shakespeare), history, philosophy, and logic. They’ve been turned into vehicles for the voguish neo-Marxist orthodoxy.

I must admit that it’s hard on deliberation when one party – the Democrats – is committed to a revolution as complete as anything begun in 1917 Petrograd (see below about Antonio Gramsci).

As for moderation, what do you think after prudence and deliberation have been kicked to the wayside? The socialism of AOC becomes mainstream Democrat, and the kookery of the Marjorie Taylor Greene/Gaetz/Boebert/Trump clique seizes the reins of a Republican House caucus with the narrowest of majorities. 43% of the Republican base and the nearly entire elected Democratic Party, and maybe three-quarters of the Dem base, stand athwart each other separated with firehoses spewing rhetorical slime.

Since 57% of the Republican base retains some attachment to reality, the country’s hopes for a functioning republic reside with them. A pushback may have begun with Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp. He courageously stood against the Georgia state GOP that backed his opponent in the primary and went on to thump the Trump-backed shill in the primary and the odious Stacey Abrams in the general by 7.5 points. The victory means that the guy has street cred.

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp makes remarks during a visit to Adventure Outdoors gun shop in Smyrna, Ga., January 5, 2022. (photo: Alyssa Pointer/Reuters)

He warned big donors in the Georgians First Leadership Committee at a recent luncheon, “. . . we can no longer rely on the traditional party infrastructure to win in the future.” “Infrastructure” is a $10 word for a Trump-crazed state central committee. The state party’s chairman, David Shafer, was so humiliated by the defeat of the committee/Trump-endorsed choices up and down the ballot in the party’s primary that he’s given up pursuing another term. The state committee’s stance was stupid on steroids. Shafer and his endorsements may be simpatico with Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene but not to a huge majority of registered Republicans, let alone the general electorate. Successful politics is about addition, and not subtraction and performance-art politics. It means that the public wants good and safe schools, the potholes to be filled, crime to be defeated, and the sewers and garbage collection to function as billed. “Owning the libs” won’t suffice.

The same is true for the Trump fanatics officially running the GOP in states like Arizona. The writer Dan McLaughlin put it succinctly when he wrote, “It’s time to take the party back from the party.” Kemp is doing his part (see below).

The fallout from the 2022 elections is a siren-call warning to the GOP. Of course, the country appears evenly divided when one of the parties weakens its standing with choices lathered in the general odium of Trump and sloganeering psychodramas. The Democrats’ problem is the neo-Marxist Democratic Party and a hash that they’ve made of parts of the country under their control. The Republicans have the Trump millstone around their neck. Given that dynamic, of course we have parity . . . of foolishness.

A few examples illustrate the reflexive Republican foot-shooting that makes it easier on the neo-Marxist Democrats thereby levelling the playing field in a country overwhelmingly not fond of the hammer and sickle. In one heavily Republican Ohio congressional district, the Trump-endorsed/Q-Anon-dabbling J. R. Majewski lost in the general. Moving over to a Michigan House race, Joe Gibbs beat incumbent Peter Meijir in a Republican primary campaign wallowing on Meijir’s vote to impeach Trump, only to lose in the general by double digits. In Washington State, the Republican incumbent Jaime Herrera Beutler narrowly lost to Joe Kent in the primary with her vote to impeach Trump a key factor. Kent, saddled with ties to white nationalists and other elements of the unhinged right, and fully immersed in the hyperbolic language of the Trump caucus, lost in the general. No wonder that the expected red wave turned into scattered rain drops.

Republicans, if you don’t like rule by a commissariat, field better candidates with an eye to winning elections. Try that. Dah! Send Trump packing, and for his cadre of groupies, grow up and follow Mick Jagger’s advice: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.”

May be a cartoon of indoor

RogerG

Read more here:

* “Young Americans Are Increasingly Ungrateful. Here’s What to Do about It”, Alberto Coll, National Review Online, 2/26/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/02/young-americans-are-increasingly-ungrateful-heres-what-to-do-about-it/

* “Fox News Poll: Trump, DeSantis top 2024 Republican preference”, Dana Blanton, Fox News, 2/26/23, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fox-news-poll-trump-desantis-top-2024-republican-preference/ar-AA17X7hn

* “Brian Kemp: Time for the Georgia GOP to Leave the Georgia GOP”, Dan McLaughlin, National Review Online, 2/23/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/brian-kemp-time-for-the-georgia-gop-to-leave-the-georgia-gop/

* “Kemp moves to take command of GOP, leaving state party behind”, Greg Bluestein, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 2/23/23, at https://www.ajc.com/politics/politics-blog/kemp-moves-to-take-command-of-gop-leaving-state-party-behind/H6EYBMRZDFFCXBYNPPP3PY4WQA/

* An excellent summary of the influence of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci of the 1920’s and 30’s on today’s neo-Marxism in the Democratic Party and the commanding heights of the culture can be read here: “The Long March Back”, Nate Hochman, National Review Online, 2/16/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-long-march-back/

December 31, 2022December 31, 2022

The Stupid Party and Its Imbecile Caucus

May be an image of 1 person and suit — Matt Gaetz (R, Fla.), “Chairman” of the Imbecile Caucus

The GOP has its Freedom and Mainstreet Caucuses in Congress, among others. Now, we must add the Imbecile Caucus to the list of GOP factions. The charter members are Matt Gaetz, Ralph Norman, Andy Biggs, Bob Good, and Matt Rosendale, with room for the meanderings of Lauren Boebert. For some reason, they don’t like Kevin McCarthy as Speaker and are holding up the Republican majority from organizing the House. One of the Democrats’ greatest allies is this confab of the witless in Republican ranks. Thank them for the subsequent misrule and return of the neo-socialists to power in a couple of years.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell must be in a state of amazement when he glances over to the other wing of the Capitol Building. Maybe that’s the reason for the Republican support in the Senate for a big-spending omnibus bill instead of something smaller and of shorter duration. Any budget bill awaits the House chaos and the maw of the Imbecile Caucus after January 3. Better get something through before Republicans get blamed for another government shutdown.

Like McConnell, I shake my head in befuddlement. In a twist on an old banality, these knives couldn’t cut butter. What is this claque up to? What do they want? Right off the bat, let’s recognize that the only demographic group that they represent is the constituents of the kamikaze brigades. They represent no one but people who get giddy about flying planes into ships or rushing headlong through interlocking fields of machine gun fire.

They don’t seem to want anything but ways to systematize pandemonium. No Speaker for them who could discipline the wackos and present calm, mature leadership. Here’s their camera-hogging guru, Matt Gaetz: “House Republicans need a leader with credibility across every spectrum of the GOP conference in order to be a capable fighting force for the American people.” He adds, “That person is not Kevin McCarthy.” Who’s this clown to say that McCarthy doesn’t represent “every spectrum of the GOP conference”? First, no one can represent “every spectrum” because inevitably within that crowd of 222 there are a few cranks and fetishists – like the Imbecile Caucus. The best that can be hoped for is a realization that the outliers understand themselves to be outliers and agree to suppress their nuttery.

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Well, I’m not holding my breath. Even the additional congressman granted my home state of Montana was apparently wasted on Matt Rosendale. He has signed onto the Imbecile Caucus manifesto. He said, “Each member of Congress has earned and deserves equal participation in the legislative process.” Sure they do, but that shouldn’t be an invitation to replicate the worst of the anarchic Italian electoral system. He and the rest of the Imbecile Caucus shouldn’t be allowed to subject the Speaker to the whims and piques of a constantly disgruntled five, which is what they want.

At root, the problem for McCarthy is rooted in math. Five dimwits run the show in a Republican House. It wasn’t true for the Democrats. Pelosi managed to govern with 222 seats in spite of the four Squad kooks. Republicans are different. They are the party of principle, the principle of being shoved around by a few headstrong dullards.

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RogerG

Read more here:

“5 Republicans publicly oppose McCarthy’s speakership bid, putting ascension to leadership role in jeopardy”, Haris Alic, Fox News, Nov. 28, 2022, at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/republicans-publicly-oppose-mccarthys-speakership-bid-putting-ascension-leadership-role-jeopardy
“McCarthy offers key compromise in exchange for support on House speaker bid: Report”, Cami Mondeaux, Washington Examiner, Dec. 30, 2022, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/mccarthy-offers-compromise-in-exchange-for-house-speaker

December 10, 2022December 11, 2022

“Cleanup on Isle . . . “

May be an image of 2 people — Senator Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.) gestures during an election night party after a projected win in the midterm runoff election in Atlanta, Ga., December 6, 2022. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)

The dust is beginning to settle, or so I thought. The Trump-endorsed Herschel Walker lost in the Georgia runoff to the sharp-tongued leftist masquerading as a man of the cloth, Raphael Warnock. Georgia has a rabble-rousing socialist to represent it in the U.S. Senate, to go along with the state’s other non-card-carrying member of the Socialist International, Jon Osoff. But the state’s leadership went red. Go figure. And just as things were settling down, Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema dropped the Democrat label yesterday morning and officially became an independent, and we are back to choking on dust again. What does all this mean? Who knows, but I suspect there’s much to clean up on isle . . . for both parties.

The Georgia situation is perplexing. The results of the 2022 elections left the state in a condition of political dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder). Think about it: the radical left in the US Senate for the state and solid conservatives from the governor’s mansion to majorities in the state houses. How? What?

Republicans have some “cleanup on isle . . . ”. The mess comes in the form of the person of Donald Trump. The guy is simply not the winner of his boasts. He’s a big turn-off. He appeals to a narrow slice of the electorate, but he’s toxic in suburbia. One step forward, three steps back. Walker carried the Trump label, a liability too strong to overcome in a rough-cut newcomer.

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Some reports indicate that Trump convinced Walker to run, and thus exposed himself to the Democrats’ usual rectal examination. He came up short after the smears, but everywhere else on the ballot, Republicans did very well. Jim Geraghty of National Review Online lays out the results. He reports that Republicans in all the statewide races broke the 50% threshold in the general election and thus avoided runoffs, with the lone exception of Walker. And roughly 200,000 fewer Georgians voted for Walker in the runoff than the general. I won’t speculate on the meaning of that, but it’s clear that Walker is less appealing than the rest of the Republican slate. He’s got personal baggage, and additionally he’s got Trump to live down.

Walker joins a broad cast of characters who, instead of the union label, had the Trump label and lost. It was particularly true in battleground states, the states that Republicans have to win to become a majority. Pennsylvanians preferred a stroke victim to Oz. In the governor’s contest, Arizonians favored a millennial uptalking airhead who wouldn’t debate, and couldn’t win one, and avoided public appearances over the quick-witted, fast-talking, Trump-endorsed telecaster, Keri Lake. Like her inspiration, she’s suing and caterwauling over the election results. The Senate race wasn’t even close with Trump’s novice, Blake Masters, falling way short. To no surprise, In the deeper blue bastions of Lefty lunacy, Trump’s imprimatur didn’t prevent a shellacking.

It seems that Trump threw around his endorsements like a drunk trust-fund brat tossing chips in a Las Vegas casino. He appeared to be so flippant, focusing on the oddball, the ill-prepared, the inexperienced, anyone who could parade around under the clichéd banner “outsider”. Sometimes, there are very good reasons for some people to be “outsiders”. Trump has proven to be not very adept at distinguishing them.

Part of the Republican cleanup should include a better ground game. The Democrats adjusted the election system for theirs, which is chock full of the ill-informed, easily distracted, and unmotivated. First, they eliminated the concepts of election day and the secret ballot. The party of government used government to deform elections to their liking: depreciating personal responsibility in voting (like registering, staying informed, getting off the couch to vote in-person), and having a month to do it. Then, all they have left to do is to mine the rich veins of the politically illiterate in their base. That means a data base to identify them and the paid minions to harvest the ballots.

Certainly, it’s an insult to one man, one conscience, one vote. The loss of the “conscience” part is critical since mailing the things in the millions will land multiples of them on a kitchen table, or lie around the floor of the communal mailboxes, waiting for . . . whoever . . . to mark them. It’s a scam-made-legal. Republicans need to play the game by the Democrats’ rules.

If the Republicans succeed in shedding the Trump stigma, the Democrats’ own “cleanup on isle . . .” will be more glaring. The Democrats have to live down The Squad, “birthing people”, a reverse Jim Crow (CRT, “systemic racism”, punishing racial preferences, racial reparations, etc.), their disdain for holding hoodlums accountable for harming the innocent, the filth and degradation in places under their chronic suzerainty, and their destruction of prosperity in a wave of radical eco-mongering and spending. They will persevere in spite of their craziness if the Republicans continue to make Trump the face of the party.

May be an image of 6 people and people standing — Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) at a Sept. 13 gala wearing a gifted “Tax the Rich” gown, for which she is being investigated for House ethics violations.

Is there a broad and popular appetite for this stuff? The Republicans offer a cult of chaotic personality. The Democrats peddle lunacy. If there ever was a good reason for complacency, this is it. I’m pinning my hopes on the Republicans’ cleanup brigade because their task is easier. All they have to do is send Trump packing. The radical chic ethos runs too deep in the Democrats.

Protest in Minneapolis against the appearance of Pres. Trump in Oct. 2019. Prominent state Democrats energized the protest crowd with their appearance and chants, including the radical Democrat State Representative Aisha Gomez (DFL-Minneapolis).

Roger

Source:
* Jim Geraghty’s take on the Georgia election scene: “Are We Ready to Learn Our Lessons Now, Republicans?”, National Review Online, Dec. 7, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/are-we-ready-to-learn-our-lessons-now-republicans/

November 19, 2022

The Michigan Election and How to Get People to Ignore Their Lyin’ Eyes

See the source image — Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2021

The Democrats know how to play political hardball. After all, they are the party of government. They want it, worship it, and are highly motivated to take it over. They need it because they have so much to accomplish, like make all of us into them. Not surprisingly, they’re socialists, the American edition of Europe’s many Social Democratic Parties. No name-calling here. They just are, despite their face-saving protestations to the contrary. The 2022 midterm was their template for dominating the government. It illustrated how to make people ignore their lyin’ eyes.

The fly in the ointment is that this socialism doesn’t work, never will. Government’s control of the means of production, using a little Marxist lingo, is simply turning over nearly all the important stuff to an entity that operates like the DMV. Government is a sloth and can never be a cheetah no matter the volume of synthetic hormones or gender reassignment surgeries. The Squad and the self-deluded Bernie Sanders keep harkening to a Scandinavia that no longer exists, the region having long since eschewed the poison. Yet, the dream never died, notwithstanding its long record of failure. To avoid a shellacking, the Democrats discovered the recipe to electorally prosper despite their socialism’s inherent fiascos.

The Michigander and auto critic Henry Payne recently performed an interesting autopsy on Michigan’s election. Whitmer and the rest of the authoritarian gang overwhelmed the party of government restraint (GOP). Amazingly, the donkey party found a campaign strategy to make it possible for people to prefer the sewer that the Democrats made of their lives.

First, the party of government used their control of Michigan state government to choose their opponents. This sounds like Xi Jinping at work – by the way, another socialist. Credible opposition was ordered off the Michigan ballot, much like Xi commanding the removal of ex-CCP president Hu Jintao from the recent Party Congress. The Michigan Board of State Canvassers was convened under the overseership of the Soros-backed Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and on a pure party line vote of 2-2 disqualified the Republican front-runner James Craig, the former Detroit police chief with a huge following, and four other Republicans allegedly for fraudulent signatures on their petitions. The tie means that they’re gone. No Democrats were ever affected, just Republicans. It’s fishy as you get into the weeds of the case. In the end, the Republican primary ballot was amputated to include only the weak with Tudor Dixon winning the primary.

That’s not all by a long shot. The party knows how to exploit and champion the cultural barbarity that is now resplendent in certain demographics: the young, single women, mostly professional, and the quasi-educated with degrees. Of course, I’m speaking of some groups’ love affair with terminating pregnancies. Abortion has moved from trauma to a personal state of ecstasy in the psyche of some. We shouldn’t be surprised since the sex act has lost its procreational purpose and has become purely recreational in the minds of some. Humans being human, we get lazy and sloppy and babies unintentionally result. We can disagree on the starting line for human life, and compromise is possible between a complete ban and carte blanche to the moment of exit from the birth canal. All that is lost in the hubbub once the fear of losing power is on the table. Dobbs was mangled by the donkey party to fit the purpose of stampeding the base to quickly mark their mailed ballot.

Speaking of those mailed ballots, previously (2018), Michigan voters exhibited the now common and strange attraction for Rube Goldberg changes to their government through ballot initiatives. It’s an interstate phenomenon. For instance, the superficial glow of term limits in deeply blue California merely ended up replacing seasoned leftists with immature ones. The state’s adoption of the jungle primary means the routine choice between leftists in the general. Alaskans chose to mutilate their elections with ranked voting. For Michiganders, they chose in 2018 to grease the skids for the donkey party’s base, heavily populated as it is with low-information and low-motivated voters. Adult expectations of reasonable civic effort and responsibility has been reduced to nil with election-day registration and voting thereby complicating the tasks of verification for a government that can barely count them. Additionally, the no-fault absentee ballot – a device that makes mockery of the secret ballot – means that a person can remain in their pajamas and pause their Xbox hand controller for a short interval to vote their state into California-style chaos.

Shredded boxes and packages are seen at a section of the Union Pacific train tracks in downtown Los Angeles Friday, Jan. 14, 2022. Thieves have been raiding cargo containers aboard trains nearing downtown Los Angeles for months. (AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu)

With the election system duly lubricated, the ginned-up hysteria about Dobbs can be exploited by another contraption in the form of a state proposition: Proposition 3 to place in the Michigan state constitution alongside the usual Bill of Rights the “reproductive freedom” to end the existence of a fully formed baby in utero. The “protect the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant individual” language is pure jargon for infanticide. Notice that they can’t say “woman”; it’s “individual”. This whole thing is a monstrous theater of the absurd.

But it does work to get the sex-as-recreation crowd to vote early and often. Remember, this is a demographic at the start not too keen on the Dobbs’s federalism rationale. For them, federalism, what’s federalism? Anyway, the polyamorous are energized to show up and vote the state into oblivion.

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Like chain immigration, chain-propositions bring in tow the scandalously authoritarian politicos. It’s a strange authoritarianism though. Freedom is the mantra, but freedom isn’t the result. There’s no freedom for in utero babies. What about the “freedom froms”? There’s certainly no freedom from car thieves, smash-and-grabs, killers, burglaries, muggings, drive-bys, and the mentally unstable and addicts turning our sidewalks and parks into open sewers. Watch where you step.

The use of hysteria-propositions to elect and reelect people who ignore what they should be doing in order to pursue what they ought not to do is folly on stilts. Whitmer garroted life in Michigan from closing the schools to pronouncing an end to gardening and boating without a scintilla of “science”. And election 2022 showed how you can get away with it. Gauging by the returns, terminating pregnancies mattered more than the kids’ lost education and the decline into barbarity. The kids experienced a double whammy in the election. Was this the most anti-child electorate ever from womb to classroom? One has to wonder.

I will not try to absolve the electorate’s responsibility for this descent into dégringolade (rapid decline or deterioration). Don’t pretend that democracy always translates into wisdom. A majority vote is not proof of righteousness. It is only evidence that certain campaign tactics work: construct a well-funded political machine; rearrange the election system to enhance the operation of the political machine; incite the base with fabrications; and with initiatives, distract the people from the politicos’ manifest failures.

It worked. Expect to see more of it. As in the fable of Nero, election 2022 showed how to pass out fiddles to the electorate as Rome (Michigan) burned.

See the source image

RogerG

Read more here:

* “The Lessons for Republicans from Michigan’s Midterm Disaster”, Henry Payne, National Review, November 17, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/11/the-lessons-for-republicans-from-michigans-midterm-disaster/

* “Five Michigan GOP gubernatorial candidates booted from primary ballot”, Washington Examiner, May 26, 2022, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/five-michigan-gop-gubernatorial-candidates-booted-from-primary-ballot

* “Gretchen Whitmer Can’t Hide Her Track Record Of Shutting Michigan Children Out Of School”, Shawn Fleetwood, The Federalist, Nov. 1, 2022, at https://thefederalist.com/2022/11/01/gretchen-whitmer-cant-hide-her-track-record-of-shutting-michigan-children-out-of-school/

* An analysis of how strategically timed ballot initiatives can enhance a campaign’s electoral chances: “How ballot initiatives will impact voter turnout in the 2018 midterms”, John Hudack, Brookings, Oct. 22, 2018, at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookings-now/2018/10/22/how-ballot-initiatives-will-impact-voter-turnout-in-the-2018-midterms/

November 16, 2022November 17, 2022

American Elections: You Don’t Have to Win the Argument, Just Win the Vote

May be an image of 1 person and standing — Pres. Biden making his September 6, 2022, speech in Philadelphia

Margaret Thatcher once said, “First you win the argument, then you win the vote.” It’s become a cliché, but sometimes clichés are nonetheless true. Then again, we can make them no longer true. Today, it’s increasingly apparent that winning arguments aren’t necessary. You can win the vote without an argument, program, plan, defense, etc. Brand your opponents, refashion the election system to your likes, then harvest the votes. Thus, it’s possible to have a majority government of mediocrities, strident revolutionaries, nincompoops, power-seeking narcissists, and a laughingstock to the world. Welcome to America 2022.

Throughout 2022, I expected, like everyone else, a red wave for the midterms. It didn’t happen. I wasn’t the only one gobsmacked. The whole conservative commentariat was left filling baskets with jaws lying on the floor, including their own. Oftentimes, shock is soon followed by scapegoating those who we already had a well-established emotional investment in disliking. It’s a way of never having to admit you’re wrong. A prime example would be the Fox News primetime lineup of entertainer-critics and their gaggle of contributors such as Mollie Hemingway. They aren’t the only ones.

For others on the right, they talk and write as if we’re still in the bygone era when going to the precinct polling place, being handed a ballot, and taking it to a privacy cubicle to mark it in the sanctity of your conscience was the default setting for elections. Today, the secret ballot is dead due to the machinations of the Democratic Party and the excuse of COVID. Pundits like National Review’s Jim Geraghty refuse to recognize how voter behavior and electioneering has been dramatically altered for the worse as a result. The character and personality of our elections has mutated beyond recognition. People adapt to new environments, sometimes grotesquely. Do we need a psychologist to remind us?

The nightly Fox News primetime lineup replaced talk radio as opinion setters on the right. They glommed onto the rising Trump phenomena and out came the jargon of the “establishment” and “RHINO“ as objects of derision, and a romantic attachment to the “outsider”. The terms are invoked like magical incantations, absent of much content. The words are ways of emoting.

Earlier this week, speaking of gobsmacked, Hemingway on Ingraham’s show jumped at the opportunity to blame the leaders of the party – the “establishment” – for the debacle. She’s right, to a point, but that’s only half the story. The other half is the fact that most everyone on the right was caught off-guard. So, they condemn others for believing what they believed. Got that? Theirs is a criticism of others for reading the tea leaves as they did. It’s rank hypocrisy.

As the French philosopher and writer Rochefoucauld pithily put it, “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.” The vice of never having to say your sorry makes a hypocrite of us all.

Then we have the refusal to accept the fact that elections have radically changed, altering for the worse electioneering and what is expected of the voter. Jim Geraghty fell into this trap. He dismisses “conspiracies” as an explanation of the outcome, as do I. But a “conspiracy” is one thing, a revival of Tammany Hall and Chicago’s Daley Machine on a national scale is another. Bribery or a voter roll littered with the dead isn’t necessary. Just warp the system under the color of law so you don’t have to cheat. Some of the chicanery of an older time is legally permitted today. Many, many states have no-fault mail-in balloting and early voting. Ballots are shotgunned through the mail in some states from long out-of-date voter rolls. The secret ballot is dead, dead, dead, as ballots go into domiciles and get marked God-knows-how. Ballot harvesting invites highly partisan activists into the space between the voter’s conscience and its delivery into the box.

No, Hugh Hewitt, the harvesting isn’t the innocent act of collecting them. The older safeguards abounded not because everyone will violate moral norms without them. There’s a reason for the fingerprinting and background checks for school personnel. Without them, more miscreants will be quietly enabled to molest the kids. Ditto for partisan activists being kept as far away as possible from a person’s vote and its depository. The older voting safeguards were confidence-builders for the voter to be safe with his or her choice.

Geraghty cited the unevenness of the results throughout the ballot as proof of the absence of a “conspiracy”. For one, the election was not a conspiracy but exhibited the characteristics of political-machine style electioneering made possible by early voting, mail-in balloting, and ballot harvesting, etc. For instance, Laxalt loses the Nevada Senate race but the Republican captures the governorship. This line of thought ignores how a political machine might operate, particularly a national one, like stressing high-profile races, a laser-beam focus on keeping control of the House and Senate, and how closely a candidate adheres to the script. KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid – with emphasis on the “must-haves” frees up space on the ballot for disparate choices.

Hemingway dismisses candidate quality, as do I, and Geraghty thought it mattered. I think that if it was of consequence, both parties had a problem. Blake Masters was a novice and John Fetterman was unable to hold a train of thought or put a sentence or line of logic together. Katie Hobbs was a glaring millennial-uptalking/valley girl/airhead. The list is long and filled with charlatans and wastrels. Many Democrats refused to debate or only agreed to one after enough votes were locked up in early voting. Joe Biden in 2020 showed how political-machine campaigning is tailor-made for a basement strategy. This election season had few debates and very little face-to-face campaigning by the Democrats. The strategy was to hunker down, avoid any risk, and tar the other side with over-powering evil.

Was Chicago’s Richard Daley or Tammany Hall’s George Washington Plunkett ever known for their debate prowess? Their expertise was in running the machine of an army of operatives steeped in favor-peddling. Today, single potentates aren’t necessary, just have an overwhelming fundraising advantage to build a machine that facilitates a safe space/basement presence on a nonexistent campaign trail.

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Nobody was put through a wringer to make the average voter ferret out their preferences, because the wringer was absent, or reduced to irrelevance. In many places, especially in blue states, for many voters, the campaign season began and ended within a week or two after receiving their ballot in the mail. The machine went to work locking up these votes ASAP at favorable moments in a news cycle that they helped engineer with an always compliant media. Make broad, spurious charges – “a threat to democracy” or “MAGA Republicans” or “they want women to die” [abortion, Dobbs] – and contort anything to reinforce their self-created stereotype of their opponents (the Paul Pelosi incident). But, by all means, flood the bank with early votes before the public’s attention is drawn to the real issues, the ones that are hammering their daily lives.

In this election, given its structure, issues really didn’t matter – inflation, the border, the Kabul disaster, XY “girls” invading girls’ bathrooms and sports, crime, kids barred from their schools, urban barbarity, greenie authoritarianism, etc. – in order to keep the eyes trained on the meanie Republicans. That’s the reason for hunkering down and let Biden occasionally emerge from his bunker to plaster the meanies.

This style of campaigning leads to some real eye-opening results. The “they want to women to die” led to an endorsement of what can only be described as infanticide in more than a few states. Some state constitutions became festooned with carte blanche abortion. Persistent polls for decades have shown a popular rejection of late-term abortion. Did people really know that they were embracing it, and, in some cases, forcing other people to pay for them or others to perform them under criminal sanction, without parental consent? Did people really know that the “health of the mother” language is subterfuge for late-term abortion? In my own state, Montana, the voters couldn’t bring themselves to protect a baby who survived one. If there is a Judgment Day or some moment of cosmic justice, many souls are imperiled by what they were led to spuriously believe. In some not-to-distant future, will “my body, my choice” join the ranks alongside “racial purity”?

These results, grotesque as they are, are only possible if the vetting of traditional campaigning is replaced by our newly minted political-machine style. We’ll only get more of what we didn’t intend in a government filled with acolytes of the mindless talking point. Highly partisan activists and political groupies seldom make for statesmen/women.

Geraghty, Hemingway, Ingraham, and me too, would probably agree on the need for Republicans to follow suit. It’s a time of reciprocal escalation to avoid unilateral disarmament. However, Republicans should only get good at this malignant political-machine style in order to destroy it. End universal mail-in voting, make election day one day, re-enshrine the secret ballot, and secure the vote. It’s not hard, just use this bastardized system to gain power to end it.

Until we come to grips with a malignant election system that brings out the worst in all of us, anything that we do in the long run will be pointless. A government of shallow narcissists and brain-dead activists will only hasten the decline of a once mighty nation. Competing national political machines encouraging ill-considered voter behavior will guarantee it. Without correction, paste R.I.P on the once-great citizen republic called the United States of America.

See the source image

RogerG

Read or watch here for more:

* Jim Geraghty’s explanation of the midterm results: “The Magnitude of the GOP Midterm Debacle”, National Review, Nov. 14, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-magnitude-of-the-gop-midterm-debacle/

* Mollie Hemingway’s analysis of the midterm results on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show at https://youtu.be/cCyPdLtx844

November 12, 2022November 14, 2022

Can We Really Say What the People Said in This Election, Or Is It Too Horrible to Contemplate?

Arizona’s Maricopa County Starts Hand Count Audit as Numerous Ballots Remain Unprocessed — lection workers sort ballots at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center in Phoenix on Nov. 9, 2022. (John Moore/Getty Images)

Pundits galore have pronounced on what the “people” said in this election. Clearly, it’s sometimes hard to distill what the voting results actually mean from such a broad and disparate group of millions with innumerable and conflicting notions and motives dancing in their heads. The problem is compounded when you have a new and very different kind of electorate: one with 60-70% voting early and by mail. This time around, what came out the other end of the tabulation process is, to be quite frank, quite shocking.

Are the results proof of the greater prevalence of passions not tempered by reason, having less time to weigh the stakes, issues, and candidates with ballots going out a month before the election in many states but pressured to be in the “bank” weeks before the deadline? Could be, but something else might be at work. The outcome has the earmarks, as I have stated before, of the old political machines such as Tammany Hall or Kansas City’s Prendergast machine. Current circumstances and even active campaigning matter much less. You can do it from your basement and nearly avoid any face-to-face electioneering. The base is simply directed to vote up and down the ballot for the machine’s preferences without knowing who they are or the issues at stake. Political machine voting is like that, and so, I suspect, is voting early and by mail . . . which requires a well-oiled political machine.

It takes a political machine with heavy financial and technocratic resources to identify its base, make sure that they have a ballot, and round them up in a timely manner. And make adjustments if polling indicates that they need more, and all accomplished weeks before election day. Most people’s minds don’t even turn to politics till a week or two before the election. This apparatus short-circuits thoughtful reflection. As such, this kind of voting has more of an off-the-cuff flavor to it.

No red waves here.

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The results were a surprise to most political junkies. But is it an accurate reflection of public opinion, with two-thirds of the franchise encouraged to act in a preemptory fashion? Just recount the much-ballyhooed issues in this election.

Remember, the current state of the country matters a whole lot less in political-machine electioneering. Were the people actually content with the Democrats’ despoilation of the country? Their wreckage is strewn about for all to see. Did people actually vote for urban anarchy and their streets and parks becoming open sewers? Their schools as training centers of future statue-toppers? I don’t know about you, but I’m skeptical that the vote totals reflected a desire for barbarity. So, why vote for the clowns who brought it to you? Are you confused? I am.

What about other issues, like abortion? Pro-life measures were voted down in at least five instances, including in my home state of Montana. In our case, the voters of Montana couldn’t even bring themselves to protect the life of a baby who survived an abortion. Now, “my body, my choice” is a license to order the suffocation of a small, helpless person struggling to survive, whose DNA is different from the mother’s. This is Auschwitz stuff.

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faces3 — Ultrasound image of a baby at 27-34 weeks gestation

Do the people want to snuff out the future children who were developed enough to exit the birth canal? In these instances, the only difference between a fetus and a baby is one second. This time, in at least two states, maybe more, carte blanche abortion was planked into the state’s Constitution. But did the voters know of these measures’ contents, or was it simply a way to register disagreement with Dobbs and support for Roe v. Wade? High-profile hot buttons trump irritating details every time when you’re in a hurry and revved up.

What does the support for Roe v. Wade actually mean when few people know its contents, and don’t wait around to find out? Now there’s an indictment of our schools, media, and the broadcasting of ballots through the postal service a month before. Yet, even so, opinion polls have consistently shown broad bipartisan disgust for late-term abortion. But did the voter in the machine’s data base wait around to discover that Roe’s “health of the mother” standard and Casey’s “undue burden” paved a path to destroying a fully formed baby? Did they give themselves the chance to consider that their state’s measure actually codifies something that could be dispassionately viewed as infanticide? Once again, I’m skeptical. Broad ignorance surrounds the issue which is less likely to be corrected by political machine tactics. So much for the voice of the people.

Did the people actually vote for unaffordable fuel, 40-year record high inflation, further destruction of the work ethic, crippling national debt for their children, and the childish tax-the-rich antics? Surely not, but what then?

Did they vote for blackouts, forests of mammoth wind turbines and solar panels marring and blanketing the landscape, sky-high utility bills, and an end to Amazon Prime’s free delivery because diesel prices and shortages hit the fan? You vote for California-style politicians and you’ll get California-style chaos. How much did people know to establish a preference? Or is it the mesmerizing attraction of eco-utopian fairy tales and unicorns?

A Shell station displays gas prices of more than $7 per gallon on Sept. 29. — A Shell station on Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles displays gas prices of more than $7 per gallon on Sept. 29. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

Have people thought through the madness? What will electrified transportation be like with an unstable grid? Wind and sun don’t produce at your whim. When our demagogues place blame on the “rapacious” energy companies, how much do the people know of the demagogues’ hostility to more refineries, drilling, pipelines, indeed anything that’ll increase supply? At Democrats’ insistence, we’re closing down refineries, pipelines, and drilling. Do people grasp the idea that the suppression of supply has an effect on prices? They’re all open questions not answerable by political machine voting.

Do people actually believe that a man can become a woman (and vice versa) given all the biology, DNA, and bio-chemistry from blastocyst to adult? On the mere claim that he/she is one? He/she might be made to look like one, but are they one? Did people vote as if they believe it? Or what about the sanctity of their daughters’ sports, bathrooms, and locker rooms? Did people vote for an invasion of these spaces? Beats me. All we know is that many people romped who brought it to you.

None of these considerations can be addressed by the mere counting of ballots. But they can, and did, result in bringing to power those who will do what the people don’t understand. Today’s voting doesn’t measure popular sentiment. It’s not meant to. Election season isn’t about informing the public or convincing anyone. It’s about votes to stay in power. Public events, speeches, debates, rigorous press exposure, and responding to your critics aren’t necessary. Biden (2020), John Fetterman, Katie Hobbs, and the rest of the donkey party lineup showed that you can do just fine not facing hostile questioning, not debating, staying cooped up in your safe space, and sitting back as your campaign operatives harvest the votes and reap hordes of techie bucks to swamp the airwaves. That’s how the mentally impaired and provably incompetent can become president, senator, congressman, governor, or what have you.

The numbers have been trickling in. Here’s a taste. According to Fox News, 42 million people voted early as of Sunday, Oct. 30. Over half arrived weeks before election day. 43% were from Democrats and 34% from Republicans. In selected battleground states like Pennsylvania, 70% of early votes were from Democrats. It’s the well-oiled political machine at work, and out goes reason and contemplation.

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The results should make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end. This is much more than Trump’s repugnancy. Many people may not know it but they voted for barbarity. Now that’s something too horrible to imagine. Are we that far gone as a civilization?

RogerG

Read more here:

* “More Democrats Have Voted Early—But Election-Day GOP Votes Could Sway The Midterms”, Forbes, Sara Dorn, Nov. 7, 2022, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2022/11/07/more-democrats-have-voted-early-but-election-day-gop-votes-could-sway-the-midterms/?sh=14bbed6272ac

* “More than 20 million pre-election ballots cast in voting ahead of the 2022 midterms”, Ethan Cohen, CNN, Oct. 30, 2022, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/more-than-20-million-pre-election-ballots-cast-in-voting-ahead-of-the-2022-midterms/ar-AA13ycmJ

* “2022 early voting outpaces 2018 midterms by roughly 1 million votes”, Ron Blitzer, Fox News, Nov. 7, 2022, at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/2022-early-voting-outpaces-2018-midterms-roughly-1-million-votes

November 10, 2022November 11, 2022

Additional Takeaways from the 2022 Midterms: Democracy Is on Life Support and the Fox News Heavyweights Are Specious

After more time to ruminate on the midterms, I’ve drawn to two conclusions: democracy is in critical condition and the Fox News commentariat and much of the punditry on the right, clouded by “populism” (aka Trumpism), provided a distorted view of the political landscape. As such, the red wave didn’t materialize, and, for that matter, wave elections may now be a thing of the past. Elections no longer reflect the deliberations of an informed citizenry thus making a mockery of popular sovereignty. 2022 brought it into clear focus.

For one, it’s the return to the old practices of political machines, brought to you by the Democratic Party’s current fixation with mail-in balloting and its cousin early voting. Leave it to the Democratic Party to bring machine politics back into vogue since they pioneered the urban political machine in the late 19th century. Harry Truman began his political career in the Kansas City Prendergast machine and would spend the rest of it trying to break away (read David McCullough’s “Truman”). FDR adopted machine tactics on a national scale, using the federal New Deal purse and expanded regulatory power to steamroll the country into four straight terms and Congressional dominance for half a century (read Amity Schlaes’s “The Forgotten Man”). Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised by their latest edition since it is, after all, in their DNA.

Machine politics is back thanks to the absentee ballot. Hugh Hewitt in his post-election review yesterday (11/9) cut short any discussion of the wisdom of mail-in voting by saying it is “here to stay”. Regardless of its longevity, it’s corrosive to democracy. Fact! How? Democracy requires deliberation, information, debate, and attempts to make a convincing case. That means speeches, ad buys, and exhaustive travels to convince voters. Now, no longer. Get the political machine up and running, identify the party’s voters long before they’re any the wiser, put an absentee ballot in their hands, and collect it long before election day. It’s like the gambling house fronting the approved player with a mountain of chips before a single hand has been played. Campaigns are reduced to ginning up the base with fear, reducing public appearances, and eschewing the risk of exposure to the equivalent of cross examination in something called a debate. We’re back to the days of machine politics with the power to elect a cocker spaniel.

The Democrats got away with it throughout 2022. Heck, Biden got away with it in 2020. 2022 Democratic candidates avoided debates and rigorous interviews like the plague. If that isn’t enough, contrary views are censored in a cabal of Biden lackeys and Big Tech oligarchs.

COVID was the excuse to bring back machine politics. Not only did it result in stunting the education of our kids; it introduced “emergency mitigations” like the broadcasting of absentee ballots from dirty registration rolls and an election day stretching over a month, and sometimes after, with collection boxes scattered all over the landscape. With so many votes in the bank, the messiness of retail politics is avoided, especially important during times when you’re in power and royally screwed things up.

And we got a senescent president, an impaired stroke victim of Bolshevik sympathies in the Senate from Pennsylvania, a millennial-uptalking airhead/valley girl in a neck-and-neck race for Arizona governor, and other assorted nincompoops and wastrels potentially filling the seats of power – so long as they have a “D” after their name. Where’s the democracy, particularly if you think that it includes a voter weighing the candidates and issues? Frankly, it doesn’t exist and doesn’t matter. It’s been reduced to the mechanical act of punching a ballot. It’s shameful.

Thus, the polls may accurately pick up a red wave approaching election day but it doesn’t matter since so many votes have already been collected before anyone has a chance to change their mind. Polls may be accurate but much of what they’re registering is buyers’ remorse; their votes having long since been locked. The Machine invalidated the polls. A candidate’s high negatives and “wrong track” numbers were made irrelevant.

The Fox News blockbuster lineup looked gobsmacked the day after. Red-wave dreams in a mist of pixie dust were shattered. I watched Tucker, Hannity, and Ingraham stumble around groping for an explanation. Of course, they highlighted the GOP’s bright spots: DeSantis, Kemp, Vance, Johnson, a likely GOP takeover of the House, and the sending out to pasture of Beto and Stacey; however, at no time did “Trump” cross their lips. It could be that they are as scared of the mythological Trump Leviathan as current GOP officeholders since Trump boosters comprise a good portion of their ratings. Trump may be a Nielsen winner but he’s a turnoff to voters. He’s more than kryptonite to the GOP. He’s a bug light. Candidates attracted to his glow get zapped. In battle ground states, his endorsement acted as the light as these candidates flew into the electrified screen.

Laura came closest to admitting the baleful Trump influence. Listing as one of her lessons from the election, she mentioned that future GOP campaigns should have no room for “revenge and ego”, or some such. It’s a vague swipe at Trump. Good for her, but she goes on to miscast the results. Factors such as coattails evaded her gaze, and her ritual misuse of “establishment” soiled her commentary. And there’s more.

She couldn’t resist extolling the “populist” cause. She obviously attributes it to Trump, and she’s correct, to some degree. The party has broadened its appeal. Trump, though, isn’t the only one to credit. The Democrats contributed the most. They traded blue-collars of all demographics for the utopian visions of the faculty lounge. Anyone, regardless of race or gender, with a family must grapple with closed schools and stunted educations for their kids, bankrupting gas prices, unsafe neighborhoods, urban war zones, XY “girls” in the locker room and on the team with their daughters, abortion-infanticide, a national debt piling on the backs of their children, humiliations abroad, a steady influx of the “undocumented” to undercut their wages and overrun their towns, blackouts and sky-high utility bills, shortages, and a trip to the grocery store eating up what’s left of the paycheck. Blacks and Hispanics have eyes like anyone else and are noticing the consequences of Democrat rule. Trump just happened to be around when the Democrats went full-bore into Lefty ravaging mode.

Sadly, all this occurred when the Democrats turned democracy into machine governance. Many of the unwitting were roped into the charade before their attention could be drawn to the Democrats’ complicity in the realities about them. Trumpist pundits refused to admit that Trump’s influence in the GOP assisted the Democrats in their distraction campaign. In the end, democracy may not be dead, but it is certainly comatose.

Now, as per Laura Ingraham in her commentary, the Republicans must imitate or die. They will, and soon we’ll be off into escalation and the land of electoral mutually assured destruction. Republicans will have to follow suit or face unilateral disarmament. But somebody has to put a stop to this devolution and return us to a real election day and 90% of the electorate voting in-person. If not, everything from candidate quality to stump speeches will be made into antiquated notions in a fading memory.

Democracy has been defined down to the near-animal act of marking a ballot. The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote about what happens when standards decline in his essay “Defining Deviancy Down”. He stated, “By defining what is deviant, we are enabled to know what is not, and hence to live by shared standards.” Substitute “democracy” for “deviant” and you might begin to understand what happens when democracy as a standard is defined down to the equivalent of a psycho-motor tic.

RogerG

November 9, 2022

The Red Wave that Wasn’t. Thank You, Donald J. Trump.

Republican election night party in Washington, D.C., at 9:15 pm EST on 11/8/22. (photo: Luther Abel/National Review)

Republican election night party in Washington, D.C., at 2:45 am EST on 11/9/22. (photo: Luther Abel/National Review)

“Populist” Republican voters made Trump appear to be a winner in the 2022 primaries. Now, with the midterm election results trickling in, not so much. Trump is a millstone around the neck of the party. I once compared Trump’s antics during his term in office as the big man in a basketball starting lineup, not known for his outside shooting, miraculously making a 3-pointer at the start of the game and for the rest of the game, he’s throwing bricks from the 3-point line rather than playing strong inside. Trump actually thought his 2016 surprise victory was an endorsement of his behavior; so, he repeated it throughout his term and thereafter. Well, the same analogy applies to a significant part of the GOP’s base, and now it’s this “populist” constituency who is tossing bricks.

“Trumpian” became a popular word, a compliment, in the lexicon of some. It’s popularity, however, is only discernable in a narrow socio-political silo, places of rabid confirmation bias like all such cloisters. I’ve often complained of the blue bubbles or silos. There are also red ones. Opinions are constantly reinforced and a person quickly loses sight of the fact that not everyone sees the world like them. The implausible appears plausible, and the boorish and disgusting are distorted into the attractive. These clusters are carnival funhouses of warped mirrors.

Former President Donald Trump talks to the press on the grounds of his Mar-a-Lago resort on midterm elections night in Palm Beach, Florida, November 8, 2022. (photo: Ricardo Arduengo/Reuters)

That said, the country should be as frightened of the Democrat mantra of “Save our democracy” as many are of Trump. What democracy? What kind of “democracy” are the Democrats trying to save? We know that they are opposed to almost any accountability checks in elections: voter ID, regular and mandatory cleanup of the registration rolls, and efforts to ban the fraud-laden practice of ballot harvesting or place restrictions on open and broad mail-in voting. The Republican chant of “easy to vote, hard to cheat” is essentially countered by the Democrats’ “easy to vote, easy to cheat”. Whose voice is being recorded here? Frankly, it’s getting harder to say.

The core of the problem is the first half of both parties’ chant: “easy to vote”. No, it shouldn’t be hard, but it depends on what is meant by “hard”. Is it “hard” to expect people to be willing to break away from the Xbox to trundle down to the polling place to cast their “voice”? Is it hard to expect some civic and issue literacy before a person casts their vote? Instead, it’s just “vote, vote, vote”. The NFL during broadcasts pushed the mantra, even going so far as to turn their stadiums into repositories of ballots from God knows where and God knows who. These aren’t polling places staffed by neighbors with a list of registered voters from the neighborhood. Ballots come in from everywhere, overwhelmingly mail-in, which are the most problematic in terms of “one person, one vote”. Who knows who’s marking the things once they’re taken inside a domicile, later to be harvested by activists.

I doubt if Americans understand how freakishly unusual our voting procedures have become in a country who prides itself in being the gold standard of “democracy” . . . or how similar we’ve become to Third World kleptocracies, totalitarian “democracies”, and brutal thuggeries like Putin’s Russia. When mail-in voting replaces in-person, with many other now-legalized loosey-goosey practices, we are depressing the incentives for the serious voter, serious enough to get off their tush to go down the few blocks to a voting booth. Why vote only to have it canceled by a semi-literate blockhead?

The trends according to MIT should be considered shocking (see chart below). In 1992, 8% of ballots cast were mail-in. In 2020, it’s about half. And many of those are in states with no-excuse or universal, automatic broadcasting of ballots through the mail. And to think that most of it is from dirty registration rolls. Could it get any murkier?

May be an image of text that says 'Ballots cast by modes of voting over time 90% 75% 60% %0 aaterr 45% 30% 15% Early, person Election Day Mail/absentee 0% 1992 1996 2000 2004 2008 2012 2016 2020 Year Source: Voting and Registration Supplement the Current Population Survey (1992 2018) Survey Performance American Elections (2020) h/'

Israel restricts about 95% of its voting to in-person. Exceptions are only allowed for certain military or diplomatic personnel. We’ve gone the other way toward a government of whom?, by whom?, and for whom?

Advantage, Democrats. Why? They control the culture and the messaging to low-information, unmotivated voters. The Netflix viewership is primed for the Democrats’ childish themes of oppression and meanie white guys in suits. Low-information and unmotivated voters can be found across the spectrum, but the Democrats, I suspect, have richer veins to mine.

As of this writing, it isn’t all bleak news for Republicans. Many races are still undecided. It must be admitted, though, that the Republicans always had a cultural/media headwind to fight. Now, they must admit that have a Trumpian one to contribute to the gust.

Expect two more years of “wrong track”!

I’ll have more to say later after the dust clears.

RogerG

Read more here:

* “Voting By Mail and Absentee Voting”, MIT, March 2021, at https://electionlab.mit.edu/research/voting-mail-and-absentee-voting .