The Great Awokening in the wake of George Floyd, and spurred on by Obama’s decade-long sermonizing, was actually The Great Disconnect for the Democratic Party. The Party is simply out of touch. No better example can be found of the Party’s separation from most people’s lives than the picture of a hard-working and dirty coal miner attending a University of Kentucky basketball game with his son (see below). This coal miner is as far removed from the funhouse/playhouse campus of Twitter as one can imagine – in ways more than geography. The picture captures the Democrats’ predicament.
The Democratic Party traded blue-collars for the pampered denizens of faculty lounges and white-collars sheltered in air-conditioned offices and free to be enraptured without consequences by gauzy ideologies. The hunt to combat climate change, an undefinable racism, and transphobia jumped to the front and center and over the concerns of people facing worsening family budgets, schools, and safety.
What do the Democrats have to offer? Nothing but misery. They’re after that guy’s job. Biden goes out on the stump and proclaims an end to drilling and the use of coal. The Party is all agog in fantasies of forests of windmills and vast expanses of solar panels replacing nuclear, coal, and natural gas. And why are they so enthusiastic about taking away that man’s livelihood? Answer: a climate-change hysteria that is as unscientific as it is illogical. It’s more religious than anything. It can only be entertained in the isolated and pleasant indoor climates made possible by the toil and sweat of people like that dirty miner in the stands with his son. The Party has become an institutional affront to most of working America.
Do you think that only he knows the dirty secret of the Party turning its back on him? To borrow from Biden, come on, man. Working America encompasses both sexes and all races and ethnicities. Work is color and gender blind. So, regardless of melanin count and genitalia, many are walking away from a party much more identified with techie billionaires, Antifa, and Sierra Club conferees. Thus, a rising GOP black and Latino vote.
For a Democrat, the picture below should hit you in the gut. What are you doing to that man and his son?
Michael McGuire covered in soot after a shift in the mines. He rushed to be with his son, Easton, for the first live basketball game together at the University of Kentucky. (photo: WKYT)
President Joe Biden delivers remarks on prescription drug costs, Social Security and Medicare, during a campaign event, in Joliet, Ill., November 5, 2022. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
Election Day is nigh, and our politics are a mess. Shame on the Culprits.
Biden goes on a rant about the “idiots” who actually take the Democrats for their word: the Democrats are “socialists” if not in self-acclamation, then in deeds. But you are an “idiot” for noticing. Trump fulminates in his usual adolescent way by insulting a potential rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis, as “DeSanctimonious”. When will that 20% of the GOP electorate actually grow up? Our 2024 choices at this juncture could be between the revolutionaries’ old fart (Biden) or an old-but-narcissistic browbeater (Trump). It’s a real binary because only one of the two could be inflicted on us after 2024.
Former President Donald Trump speaks during a pre-election rally to support Republican candidates in Latrobe, Pa., November 5, 2022. (Mike Segar/Reuters)
How did we end up with two septuagenarian-to-octogenarian figures to represent our political divide? One is clearly senile and the other is an embarrassing oaf who hasn’t outgrown schoolyard bullying because it sells in our hyperactive digital age. While the two mouthpieces have an equal measure of their own version of decrepitude, the two parties are not as equivalent in their rot. The Democratic Party went off their rocker into full-blown ultra-Left fanaticism. The Republican Party is the one left to buttress the nation against the lunacy, being now the only adult left in the room, but, sadly, they are anchored down by the telegenic buffoon. He just might get a second shot at it in 2024.
The GOP’s barker, Trump, had his 4-year turn with the brass ring but ran into a buzzsaw of Left/bureaucratic hostility that dominates our increasingly putrefying culture and administrative state. The thing that attracts clicks and cameras – a dramatic persona, or BDE (look it up) in the words of Trumpkins – also stirred the entrenched Left to attempt to shred our Constitutional order, which they tried to do in short order after they were returned to power under the senescent Biden in January 2021 in calls for court packing, elimination of the Electoral College, engineering four new Senate seats for themselves, calling for an elimination of any voice for the minority in the Senate (it is said that the filibuster is a “relic” of Jim Crow), pushing a federal takeover of elections to legalize election fraud to expand their voter base and ensure dominance over the horizon, etc.
And then the wheels came off the nation under their refashioned version of Il Duce’s old slogan of “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” No energy for you if it didn’t come from a windmill or solar panel. No car for you if it doesn’t take 2 hours to 2 days to charge, and won’t burst into flames after being inundated in a storm surge. The Green New Deal central planners are going to hogtie you into their utopian rabbit hole with or without your consent.
As for your sidewalks and parks, be careful because addiction on the streets and in the green spaces is “decriminalized”. Plus, you get the opportunity to see nihilism in practice with the rampant smash-and-grab mobs, property crime, and raging assaults – Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange” brought to life. Heck, just keep your mayhem under $950, and even if you don’t, no-cash-bail and non-prosecution ensures that the miscreants will never get a chance to look from the wrong side of bars. It’s a huge subsidy for Hobbes’s old prediction of the “war of all against all”.
Our girls’ locker rooms have been invaded by XY “girls”. Our daughters aren’t safe, and their lifetime efforts and achievements cut short by XY “women” athletes. All of this brought to you by a party that wants to make all things a matter of human will. No obvious boys and girls, and all is subject to choice and human interventions. High school dances are now a real adventure for all concerned.
The so-called kitchen table isn’t exempt because you are increasingly unable to afford much to put on it. Your nest egg (401k, pension) has tanked. Shortages are disguised in euphemisms like “supply chain crisis”. It’s always a crisis with these central-planning folks. Central planning has its shortcomings. And, if you had a job, the highways just became useless since you can’t afford the juice to turn the wheels of your car, or the home charger was made inert by a blackout. “Sustainable” also has its shortcomings.
The ultimate in central planning – the pandemic lockdowns, closures of businesses, schools, and civil life, and the mandates, and the incessant tinkering with essential and nonessential – has contributed to much of the disruption of ordinary life that we experience today, setting back our kids for a year or two. COVID central planning is like Soviet central planning or the kind run out of Pyongyang: shortages and a stunted existence.
But what’s there to complain about? Much, oh so very much. The blathering blowhard of the GOP won’t be on the ballot till 2024, but Biden’s “idiots” – the average person that makes the country click by living and working – face an existential threat: Biden and his big-government party. Vote like your life depended on it, because it actually does.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Biden calls anti-socialism protesters ‘idiots’ in Illinois stump speech attacking GOP”, Washington Times, Nov. 5, 2022, at https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/nov/5/biden-calls-anti-socialism-protesters-idiots-illin/ .
* “Trump hits DeSantis as ‘Ron DeSanctimonious’ at rally amid 2024 announcement rumors”, Washington Times, Nov. 5, 2022, at https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/nov/5/trump-hits-ron-desantis-ron-desanctimonious-rally-/ .
What’s next after a red wave? If it happens – big “if” – It’ll depend on how the results will be interpreted. Will it be viewed as an endorsement of Trumpism or rejection of a radical-Left Democratic Party or both? Regardless, Trump senses a triumphal return to the White House. That’s “what next”. He shared a clip of Meghan Kelly predicting “He [DeSantis] won’t win against Trump.” Trump attached to the clip, “I agree”. See below.
This guy is running, and with his usual uncouth cockiness. What does he offer? His appeal is encapsulated in “He owns the libs”. His in-your-face style is appealing to a certain type of voter, thus a rabid following of 20-25% of the electorate. But this combative charisma repels as much as it attracts. As such, Trumpism as a political personality is not the stuff of decisive victories. Politics is about addition, not subtraction, and Trump brings both at the same time.
Michael Brandon Dougherty (in many ways a Trump admirer) in National Review Online makes the point that Trump is charisma, not policy. I agree. Trump’s term in office was characterized by management chaos and the farming out most policy initiatives to Congress. Trump is no policy wonk. Other than immigration, issues like tax cuts, deregulation (Congressional Review Act repeals of regulations), and judges were at the behest of, and impossible without, Paul Ryan (House) and Mitch McConnel (Senate). Even “energy independence” and immigration he must share with the party leadership since many of the policy aspects of these issues originated in long-established party platforms and previous Republican congressional actions. In many ways, the country benefitted not necessarily from Trump but from not having a Democrat in the Oval Office to block them.
The Trump return is predicated on an overwhelming view within the party that Trump was cheated (“screwed” in popular Trump parlance) in the 2020 election. The claim is only half right. He claims that he won, but no, no one can say that. Once the ballots entered the many registrar offices for counting, no one can say how they were marked, how they got there, nor where they came from. Indeed, the election procedures in place throughout much of the country were the ones most prone to the kind of fraud that is nearly impossible to prove in court. Tracing a ballot to a fraudulent voter is next to impossible once you bypass the controls of in-person voting with the mass-mailing of ballots. That’s the wrong half of Trump’s indictment. Trump and his backers would be on firmer ground to complain of the mass-mailing of ballots, the use of dirty registration rolls, unsupervised drop boxes, ballot harvesting, provisional ballots, same-day registration, anywhere voting, etc. The most unsecure method of voting that put an end to the secret ballot was used in 2020. That’s the right half of the Trump complaint.
So, did he win? No, because he can’t prove it, no one can. A ballot stripped of its envelope is dropped into a sea of undifferentiated ballots. He should have known, screamed to high heaven when the procedures were jerry-rigged, but saved most of his vituperation after he lost. At this point, he looks and sounds like a petulant child. You want to talk about a huge turn-off?
Trump is so yesteryear. His appeal is yesteryear – “I was cheated” and “own the libs” – and he can only offer us what he has already given us: some very good policies, like many good Republicans, and repellant behavior and mismanagement. So much for the “virtue” of having a vaunted businessman behind the Resolute desk. As the 2022 red wave and 2024 elections recede, if Trump gets the nomination and wins, the memory will quickly wane of the Democrats’ embrace of radical-Left revolution, to be replaced by, once again, X-rated presidential antics.
We – meaning Republicans – have options. Our bench is long. Romney milquetoasts are not the order of the day. A compromise with radical-Left revolution is a semi-radical-Left revolution. Socialism and neo-Marxism – agreed, they are similar – is poison no matter the dose. A spine is required. We have many backboned political leaders but without the boorishness. Republicans have a choice to salve an inflated ego or establish a winning coalition for a decade(s). Trump in his second term can only bring more subtraction than addition.
Please watch the clip. Meghan’s prediction is a warning, not a promise.
* “The Coming Fight over Trumpism: Charisma or Policy?”, Michael Brendon Dougherty, National Review Online, Oct. 28, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/the-coming-fight-over-trumpism-charisma-or-policy/.
Today, the word “politician” is considered foul language in political discourse. Well, what about “revolutionary”? If you are repelled by politicians, what do you get when uncompromising ideological activists are swept into power? These people are defined by a radical vision to transform your life. We’ve seen this before, and it isn’t pretty. And the Democratic Party is in the grip of it. Biden lied in Philadelphia, September 1, for the threat isn’t coming from “MAGA Republicans”. He needs to look at himself and those running the show in his party.
2022 is starting to resemble 1793 in more ways than one. France, in a maelstrom of revolution since 1789, was divided between those who favored a constitutional monarchy in the mode of Britain, those who wanted to rip the Ancien Régime (Old Regime) of divine right and aristocracy, root and branch, out of the country, and a mushy middle that shifted between the two. It’s the beginning of our commonplace political jargon of right/center/left.
Jacobins on the Committee of Public Safety during the Reign of Terror
Today’s Democratic Party has evolved into 1793’s The Montagnard (The Mountain) of the legislative National Convention in Paris. The Left of the revolution clustered in the seats high up in the chamber and used the Jacobin Club to gather and plot. Quickly, they succeeded in gaining control of the Convention and set the country on the path to the Reign of Terror. The similarity between the Democratic Party of today and the Montagnards isn’t in the advocacy of a bloodbath but in their radical dream of a refashioned society. The people of our modern Left, like the protégés of Robespierre, aren’t content with tinkering and adjustments – no “politicians” need apply – but in radical transformations in everything from the definition of male and female to the meaning of infanticide. Traditional institutions are to be steamrolled and constitutional checks-and-balances obliterated. Make no mistake about it. They’re advocating a revolution.
This is a political party, if given unitary control of our federal government, that would make our country unrecognizable. Rattle off their agenda: out goes the filibuster and in comes the rule of momentary majorities to rock the country between extremes; in comes court packing and a Supreme Court to rubber stamp the revolution; the Equality Act which would pit the federal government against Bible-based Christianity and anyone who would seek its guidance on matters of marriage, faith, morals, and family; the requisition and creation of huge sums of money to fund the revolution (Build Back Better), inflation be damned; a pseudo-ecotopia to destroy our way of life; say goodbye to a border; say hello to easy to vote and easy to cheat (For the People Act); the equity crusade to indoctrinate our kids and dole out rewards by race and other politically favored identities; the unleashing of crime under “restorative justice” and equity schemes; the passage of the “Women’s Health Protection Act” to green light all abortions up to birth and force conscientious objectors out of the medical profession; the single-minded pursuit of “gender affirming care” to practice chemical infertility and sex-change surgeries on our children — without parental consent; a general disarming of the public and demonization of the firearms industry; . . . . And this is what they’ve publicly announced.
How could a suburban soccer mom endorse this kind of thing? If truth be told, she probably doesn’t, but they hear something about the Dobbs decision ending all abortions and unknowingly end up voting for our modern Montagnards’ agenda. They don’t know any better because our mainstream, legacy media is complicit in hiding the agenda’s dark side.
Take for instance the Washington Post’s fact-checking guru, Glenn Kessler. He felt compelled to correct Marco Rubio’s legitimate contention that the Democrats’ “Women’s Health Protection Act” (WHPA) would authorize abortion up to birth. In truth, Kessler doesn’t correct Rubio. The woman’s “health” provision in the Act would encompass “all factors physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age” (Supreme Court in Doe v. Bolton) to sanction abortion throughout the pregnancy. Late-term abortion would be codified. Instead, the WaPo’s intrepid reporter tried to undercut Rubio’s statement by mentioning something that Rubio never said. Kessler goes on a tangent about the rarity of such abortions. That’s not Rubio’s point! The Act grants carte blanche to any “health care provider”, whether it be a midwife, nurse, or doctor, to approve the ending of the life of a fully formed baby if they judge it to be a threat to the broadly defined “health” of the mother. The number of such abortions is irrelevant. The WHPA sanctions an act that should shock the conscience of any normal human being.
But when you’re in a fevered pitch for revolution, “normal” is an enemy to the desired ends. Revolutionaries don’t want normal. The Montagnard of the Democratic Party want a radical change in everything about us: our self-perception, social and economic arrangements, and political institutions. This is a thoroughgoing revolution, totalitarian in scope. This is what is on the November ballot. Punching a ballot next to a Democrat candidate is an endorsement of much more than the person.
“Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true.” Whoever first coined the quip was onto something.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “The GOP claim that Democrats support abortion ‘up to moment of birth’”, Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post, Sept. 22, 2022, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/22/gop-claim-that-democrats-support-abortion-up-moment-birth/ .
* “Questions for Glenn Kessler on Late-Term Abortion”, John McCormack, National Reivew, Sept, 22, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/09/questions-for-glenn-kessler-on-late-term-abortion/ .
* “If the Dems Win It All”, John McCormack, National Review, Sept. 15, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/10/03/if-the-dems-win-it-all/
President Biden during his speech on Thursday, 8/1/22, in Philadelphia.
Biden’s speech of last Thursday in Philadelphia was red meat for a Red base. Breaking it apart, “red meat” is rhetoric “that is forceful and poignant, as will excite or inflame their supporters”, and “Red” to characterize a political faction isn’t to be confused with the red/blue designations on US political maps. “Red” is drawn from the traditional color assigned to adherents of the socialist movement. It’s historical and dates back to the 19th century Socialist International with its red flag and workers-of-the-world-unite anthem, of which Karl Marx was the titular figure. Just to be clear.
The Democratic Party of today is the American manifestation of the many socialist parties around the world. The heart of the party’s most fervent members lies in the broader socialist movement. Notwithstanding the leaders’ proforma denials, the party’s political program meshes quite nicely with the socialist aim of greater government control of the economy and life, the same advocacy found in the Labor Party of the UK or any of the other European socialist parties. There’s a reason why Bernie, the Senate’s self-described socialist, caucuses with the Democrats. Birds of a feather. Don’t be fooled by the brush-off.
It was certainly fitting that the camera view of Biden at the lectern had a background bathed in red. From it, Biden spewed inflammatory words that had little place in rational discourse. This isn’t the tone of your local crisis counselor. It was a red speech for a Red cause.
I delayed my commentary till I could hear the speech in total and unfiltered. Bluntly put, it was shocking. Its only conceivable purpose was to rev up the base to forestall a long-anticipated Republican wave in November. It was filled with raw appeals to emotion, stoking fears, incoherent, and riddled with hypocrisy. It was the kind of stemwinder used to get the Parisian mob to storm the Bastille. And if you know anything about the Bastille events on July 14, 1789, you’ll know that the place only imprisoned a few, and they were the most heinous miscreants (the Marque de Sade among them). After the surrender, the guards were butchered, their heads cut off and mounted on pikes and paraded around Paris. Biden lifted a page from the playbook of the hate-filled rabble-rouser Paul Marat; I hope without the detached heads.
Contemporaneous illustration of the Bastille guards with their heads on pikes after their surrender on July 14, 1789.
To kindle his partisans, he stood behind the trappings of the presidential office to deliver language more appropriate for a fire-breathing sermon. One ploy was the abundant use of the phrase “MAGA Republicans”. Mao wannabes need a neat word or phrase to encapsulate the “enemy”, a target, to roll up the opposition. Marx invented “capitalist” as a focal point of opprobrium, Stalin had his kulaks, and for Biden, his “MAGA Republicans”. Soon, afterwards, it was all over the airwaves as if the party’s media sycophants got the robo chain text.
Do you think that he limited his gaze to the MAGA subspecies of Republican? Not on your life. The speech’s language was fungible enough to tar any Republican, even the ones that Trump hates, if they continually stand athwart the political thrusts of his party’s radicalized base. Just lather them with “intimidated”, another gambit in the speech.
Rhetorical ground was laid to attack all of them since being pro-life and following the Apostle Paul on marriage were lumped together with January 6 “insurrectionists”. The constant reference to “going backwards” is the well-worn refrain of all revolutionaries. Progress is synonymous with revolution and neither has any room for the venerable and time-tested, no matter the allusion to the Constitution and rule of law. Both were cynically and repeatedly violated by this man bathed in red light.
I was waiting for the tag on Republicans as defenders of slavery (Biden golden oldie: “put you all back in chains”) and Jim Crow, completely oblivious to the fact that it was the Democratic Party that rammed through the secessionitis defense of slavery of the Civil War and constructed Jim Crow in the aftermath. These historical Democrat actions came about as reactions to the rise of the Republican Party. Biden and Democrats, get your facts straight!
In essence, Biden condemned the “MAGA Republicans” as subversives to our civil order under the banality of a “threat to our democracy”, leaving unsaid the simple fact that we don’t have a “democracy”. It’s a constitutional republic, something a bit more sophisticated than a simpleton’s 50%-plus-1 standard of mail-in ballots to decide public issues. The Constitution and the rule of law belts our public officials in all kinds of restraints in spite of Gallup.
Really, the threat that Biden had in mind wasn’t the clearly observable 574 riots, $2 billion in damage, 2,000 police casualties, and anywhere from 17 to 35 killed as a consequence of the 2020 Antifa/BLM summer of riots. No, for Biden, it was January 6 with the only death accruing to a Trump supporter. Sorry, Biden, no men in blue died in it.
The bombast left unsaid the many ways that he was soiling the Constitution and rule of law. No separation of powers for Biden with the lawmaking authority in a Congress and a president limited to executing the laws. In 2021, he tried to extend an eviction moratorium although simultaneously recognizing its illegality. He knew that he was violating the Constitution, which was later confirmed by a Supreme Court decision (Alabama Association of Realtors, et al v. Dept. of Health and Human Services, et al, Aug. 26, 2021). Most recently, he invented student loan forgiveness out of thin air in direct contradiction to the previously announced position in June of his fellow-traveler, Speaker Pelosi.
It’s not just his cutting loose from the Article II restraints which limits him to carrying out laws made in Article I (Congress). He even ignores his Constitutional duty to perform the carrying out. Item #1: immigration law. The US code is chock full of provisions that define law-abiding and non-law-abiding immigration. Word has spread like wildfire in the troubled regions of the world that the border is such an open sieve that localities east and south have been emptied of their residents to join caravans in the long trek to a border manned by a Border Patrol that has been morphed into a Welcome Wagon. After a greeting by the Border Patrol, the illegal crossers are awarded plane travel to a destination of their choice.
Caravan of immigrants approaching the US southern border in 2021.
Don’t forget, these aren’t refugees from Cuba or Middle Eastern jihadist goons. Biden, in effect, has redefined refugee in such a way as to declare 8 US Code Section 12 (Immigration and Nationality) null and void under the guise of “prosecutorial discretion”. That’s right, “discretion” is stretched to cover the nearly blanket non-enforcement of 8 US Code Section 12 by imperial presidential dictat. Hardly can Biden wrap himself in the Constitution and rule of law when his actions make him eligible for impeachment. The word is projection: hiding your intentions behind false accusations of your opponents doing what you have done.
A pattern of Democrat campaigning is evident: don’t tack to the middle, but gin-up your party’s normally uninterested, ill-informed, and lackadaisical voter base to counter the enthusiasm of the other side. It worked for Obama in 2012, Pelosi and Schumer in 2018, and Biden in 2020. The heart of the strategy is to embrace the Left, not run from it. Use absurdities, gross hyperbole, and illusory threats to get your people to the polls. For 2022, it is to make the campaign a referendum on Trump and not on the party in power with much to answer for. And all of this bombast was present in Biden’s speech.
The speech was an insult to the office of the presidency. Fear of the electorate punishing your party at the polls is no excuse for turning Independence Hall into a Nuremburg Rally. People quite rightly have an aversion to escalating food and fuel prices, shortages, crime surges, their cities becoming open sewers, their children suffocating behind filthy masks, their schools being turned into woke reeducation camps, blackouts, greenie fanaticism, the socialism – i.e., the general Democratic Party program and its consequences. Biden would profit from Clinton’s dose of sobriety after the Republican blowout in the 1994 midterms (the R’s gained 54 House seats): “The era of big government is over.” Instead, Biden gave us red meat for his Red base.
Doubling down on stupid may work if it gets Biden’s Red-oriented base to show up. Sad, but true.
RogerG
Sources:
* Numbers of casualties and damage attributed to the 2020 summer riots are curiously hard to come by. They can be found if a person expands the search beyond Wikipedia, the CNN/MSNBC nexus, and legacy media. Other than vague generalities, specifics are nowhere to be found in those venues. Here’s a list of some sources with specifics:
“More Than 2,000 Officers Injured in Summer’s Protests and Riots”, Police Magazine, Dec. 3, 2020, at https://www.policemag.com/585160/more-than-2-000-officers-injured-in-summers-protests-and-riots
“Riot deaths ignored by major networks; watchdog finds 99.3% of protest coverage focused elsewhere”, Washington Times, June 4, 2020, at https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jun/4/riot-deaths-ignored-by-major-networks-watchdog-fin/
“2020 BLM/Antifa Riot Deaths”, National Conservative, at https://national-conservative.com/extremist-files/2020-blm-antifa-deaths/
“Police chief association releases number of officers injured during violent riots”, Fox News, Dec. 1, 2020, at https://www.foxnews.com/us/police-chief-officers-injured-riots?fbclid=IwAR0wFsq7Ndyhr7HyBQQnZ10Gn4WI_eJz4gH67vbg5ehPJ8u6WBGCKgF80H8
“RIOTS BY THE NUMBERS: POLICE CASUALTIES, PEOPLE KILLED DURING ‘PEACEFUL PROTESTS’”, Louder with Crowder, July 31, 2020, at https://www.louderwithcrowder.com/riots-by-the-numbers-police-casualties-people-killed-during-peaceful-protests
FBI agents block one of the gates at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago during the raid on August 8.
What stinks? The FBI’s newly released affidavit in support of a search warrant, that’s what (see below). Oh, it’s heavily redacted but what it does expose is the insidious operational habits of the Washington Insiders Club, of which the upper echelons of the FBI are charter members. And to think that a judicial officer approved this monstrosity. Amazing.
The first big tip-off was the author and chief protagonist for the Trump investigation and the search warrant being “a Special Agent with the FBI assigned to the Washington Field Office”. I smell a rat, the same set of rodents that scamper the hallways of the J. Edgar Hoover Building (FBI), the Executive Office Building, Langley (CIA), and Pentagon, not to mention the incestuous political den of lobbyists and big-wheel legal eagles who wallow in the same rarified DC cauldron.
The second thing that glaringly stood out was the “referral” to the FBI from the administrators at the National Archives. It seems that, when it comes to Donald Trump, the big wheels in DC snap to 11, to borrow a little from “This is Spinal Tap”. They’re on a hair trigger. In January 2022, the Archives received 15 boxes of materials from Trump. Hardly did a month go by and they’re off to the FBI demanding a criminal investigation of Trump. Mmmm, does Hillary/Clinton in 2015 and 2016 remind you of anything?
This is completely unprecedented. The people who run the National Archives are not gods. Their demands do not attain the automatic status of the Ten Commandments from the hand of God. Implicitly recognizing this fact, there’s normally an extended period of negotiations after the transition from one administration to another. And Trump was cooperating. Who among that claque would have dared to behave in this manner with Barack Obama?
The statutory basis for the warrant is astoundingly absurd. The affidavit is junked-up with references to the Presidential Records Act and various provisions on the handling of classified materials. There’s even a startling mention of an executive order. What? Executive Orders exist at the whim of the president. They are a creature of him and his office. They only count if he chooses, or unchooses, to make them count. This only shows that the vigilantes wanted to throw the kitchen sink at Trump.
For the rest of the statutory laundry list, there’s the litany of what constitutes classified materials and the improper handling of them. When I read this part of the screed, the thought of Hillary Clinton kept popping into my head. Wasn’t she conducting the nation’s foreign policy from her own private server and cellphone? And, interestingly as it turned out, there was evidence of the hacking of her devices. Trump is accused of hypothetical carelessness; Hillary actually did it to the advantage of foreign adversaries. There’s evidence of it. And then-Director Comey goes before the press in 2016 to announce that “there really wasn’t a prosecutable case”. And there is on Trump? Incredible.
The lack of inquisitiveness and what constitutes a “prosecutable case” has an obvious partisan lean to them. The affidavit supporting a warrant on Hillary would sound much like the one served on Trump, except there was more evidentiary basis of actual harm to the nation on Hillary’s home server and her personal cellphone. This should have gone to trial. And the hush, hush in regards to the laptop of the scion of the Biden dynasty, Hunter, going so far as to troop out other DC partisans who never saw the laptop to tout the line that it was “Russian disinformation” without a shred of evidence, is execrable. The brazen double standard screams injustice.
Then, if you notice, the warrant’s author engages in an opinion spat with supporters of Trump. It’s something that belongs on Twitter or the op-ed pages of his/her favorite NY Times or WaPo, going so far as to cite a TV news report of “‘Moving Trucks Spotted At Mar-a-Lago” (item #30). That’s worse than hearsay. No one is placed under a presumption of legal sanction to tell the truth in such stories, and they are notorious for casting events to fit a preconceived view.
In what has all the appearances of petty spite, the producer of this gem writes like Paul Krugman picking a fight with Larry Kudlow on Twitter. He/she targets Breitbart and Kash Patel for special abuse (item #53). It’s very unseemly in a document meant to justify a government invasion of a person’s home. This kind of government behavior should anger any American as it did John Hancock, enough to have him sign with a flourish the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
What of the redactions in the affidavit? If the denizens of the DC snake pit can go before the press to tout the laptop as “Russian disinformation” with no proof, then this discredited crowd has no grounds to dismiss my speculation on the blotted-out names, sources, and methods of investigation. They boil down to Trump’s possession of classified materials or an assessment of Trump’s evil intent by a group of long-discredited people. The possession of classified materials by a recent ex-president shouldn’t be surprising. Negotiations, compromise, and a back-and-forth period are to be expected. Just because the demi-gods of the Archives in a pique of Trump animus want to go to 11 doesn’t mean that the public ought to tolerate this partisan jihad.
The affidavit still stinks to high heaven. I am convinced now more than ever that the FBI and the rest of the agencies, bureaus, departments in DC should be farmed out to rest of the country, far beyond the Beltway. Breakup DC! Only the most essential skeleton staff should remain. People like the “Special Agent with the FBI assigned to the Washington Field Office” should get a daily dose of what the rest of the country thinks of them.
RogerG
Source:
* The affidavit at https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.617854/gov.uscourts.flsd.617854.102.1.pdf
Randy Weingarten, AFT president, and empty classroomRally for John Fetterman with Bernie Sanders at Philadelphia City Hall in 2018 (photo:Jared Guenwald)
What seems to be happening in the dog days of summer 2022? On the one hand, 1.5 million students went kapoof in national public-school enrollment from 2020 to 2021. And more recently, opinion polls show an improvement in Democrat fortunes. After all that has happened in the past two years, what gives? The former is not surprising. The latter is downright insane given the riots, the overall urban breakdown of civil order, the schools being turned into revolutionary propaganda mills, the mandatory masking and school closures, the inflation and shortages, the “transition” of energy from affordable and available to extortionate and unreliable, and the full-throated attack on the family sedan to, by hook or by crook, force people into the lifestyle preferences of the DNC donor class. The economy is in a shambles.
The Greeks and Romans of antiquity saw the Mediterranean heat of mid-to-late summer changing people into mad dogs, thus the “dog days of summer”. Are parents mad for leaving the public schools in droves? Hardly. A clue can be found in the places with the greatest defection numbers. Big city districts are quickly losing the warm bodies to fill the desks. NYC Mayor Eric Adams put it succinctly when he called it a “massive hemorrhaging of students.” The city’s public schools, the largest school district in the nation, lost 4 percent at the start of the 2020-2021 school year, and nearly another 2 percent in 2021-2022, a total of 64,000 youngsters. Over the last five years, the total runs to 120,000. Democrat bastions are experiencing the greatest disaffection.
Flipping over to the west coast, Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest, has fallen from 737,00 to 430,000 over the last 21 years, and the picture gets even bleaker with the district projecting a further 30 precent erosion to 309,000 into the next ten years. It’s a dismal picture for other big cities such as Detroit and Chicago.
The losses in places like Los Angeles can only be partially explained by the very real Great California Exodus. New York State, in one year alone, 2020-1, in the midst of its own exodus, lost over 319,000 residents, the largest decline of any state. Yes, Democrat-governed states dominate the flight statistics. The classroom overcrowding problem of a few decades ago has shifted to states like Texas and Florida.
Another facet of the trend has little to do with loading a U-Haul. Increasingly, parents are developing a love affair with options that free their kids from the grip of Randy Weingarten’s (AFT) and Becky Pringle’s (NEA) teachers’ unions.
Fifth-grade teacher Madeline Schmitt directs her students at St. Patrick School in Huntington, N.Y., on Sept. 9, 2020. Most Catholic schools returned to in-person learning earlier than public schools during the Covid-19 pandemic. (CNS photo/Gregory A. Shemitz)
Private, sectarian, charter, micro (private with 15 students or less), and home schools are some choices rising in popularity. Maybe the pandemic exposed to parents who’s running their kids’ classrooms. The racism-against-racism CRT claptrap and sex-change ideology, with the attendant display and glorification of sex-addiction behavior to adolescents, and the thought of their daughter sharing bathrooms and locker rooms with penis-girls, have shocked parents out of their lethargy. Many are coming to the conclusion that the trillions of “investment” in government schools is a monumental loser, more of a jobs program for special-interest clients of the DNC. It isn’t about the kids. That’s just empty rhetoric for the plebes.
Simultaneously, as school boards are reintroduced to the socio-political phenomena of people voting with their feet due to a growing revulsion of Democrat-led schooling, the political prospects of Democrats have brightened a bit, amazingly. Opinion polls show a tightening in the generic ballot. In key Senate races, Dem neo-socialists hold leads. In North Carolina and Ohio, it’s a dead heat. Oz is down double digits in Pennsylvania to a stroke-addled Bernie Sanders acolyte. How is it possible given the complete Dem-inspired unraveling of civilization from the summer of 2020 to summer 2022?
My best guess is a trifecta: it’s still the “dog days”; the Dem’s Trump campaign strategy; and inherent Republican political disabilities. Oh, the polls are junk, so it’s actually a quadra-fecta. Taken together, this is a bad time to gauge the state of play.
The “dog days” don’t have to mean madness. Sometimes, the dog of public opinion sleeps or is distracted during these hazy, lazy days of summer. Assessing what the public thinks at a time when people are vacationing and cramming bar-b-ques, ball games, concerts, yard work, and activities, activities, and activities, and expecting it to be authoritative, is absurd. Unless you are Antifa and BLM and have the convenience of a viral video to exploit and bountiful free time to indulge in recreational rioting, most people have other things on their minds.
The public is generally distracted and the Democrats want to keep diverting their eyes away from the disorder and decay all around them. Look, over there, it’s Trump, they say. In the 2018 midterms, they made it all about Trump and swept the near octogenarian, now octogenarian, Nancy Pelosi into the speakership. In 2020, they did same thing to such an extent that they got away with another near octogenarian, Joe Biden, campaigning from a basement computer. Governor Gavin Newsom in the recall election hung Trump around the neck of Larry Elder and the effort to remove him from office. They’re at it again.
Though, it’s hard for the shopper who just experienced sticker shock after a look at the supermarket cash register receipt. At the pump, at the utility meter, at the hardware store, you name it, the sense of dystopia surrounds us. The Dem’s best strategy, a proven winner, at a time when they have soiled themselves and us so badly, is to somehow make the election about Trump. Could that be behind the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago?
All of a sudden, it’s all about Trump again. Trump squeezes other GOP hopefuls out of prime-time news coverage. Trump sops up media attention and fundraising cash that might have gone to down-ballot races. At least for a short while, the raid jumbled the complexion of the federal midterm races.
Former President Donald Trump speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Fla., February 26, 2022. (Octavio Jones/Reuters)
It – the raid – may have worked in a perverse way. Trump’s personal approvals tick up and the GOP’s tick down. Trump gets to play the part of victim, which he could very well be, and the rest of the GOP gets momentarily lost in the news cycle. For the Democrats, the strategy is to avert the public’s attention from the representative and senator who defended rioters, defund the police, the DA’s who unilaterally ignore most of the criminal code to the detriment of us and our property, voted for more inflation through trillions of new spending, and have assisted in dismantling what it means to be woman. For those potentially in the gravitational pull of the Democratic Party, the prospect of an imminent Trump reappearance trumps everything. The strategy worked in 2018 and to a great extent in 2020. Why not this time around?
We’ll see how long the Democrat hall-of-mirrors campaign obscures the horrifying facts of life for most Americans under Democrat rule. We’ll also see how GOP command central responds. They’re lack of aggression and the Trump anchor may militate against a powerful counter. Working against them is . . . Trump. Just think, if that $100 million in Trump’s war chest had gone to Oz or to the National Republican Senate Committee (NRSC), the current donkey party bump would have been compressed to a micro-second blip. Trump in his semi-retirement has all the time in the world, two years away from the next presidential election, and is frenetic in his fundraising far earlier than any other braggart in history. The rest of the GOP is left to be the dog licking the crumbs falling from the table.
Trump is a mega-magnet due to his ego-run-amok. His overbearing brashness is a cheap imitation of what Alice Roosevelt Longworth said of her father, Theodore Roosevelt: “My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.” I reckon that Trump prefers to see a lot of TR in himself. He sucks media attention out of a room, and fundraising cash out of the pool of GOP donors.
Maybe he’ll shovel some of his cash to his preferred candidates, making them even more beholden to him. Some of those selections in Senate primaries were . . . bizarre. In some cases, the weakest general election candidate was endorsed. But Oz, only recently a convert to the GOP and with no previous political footprint, and a man with carpetbagger and national loyalty liabilities? The same consternation in Ohio (J.D. Vance). The same in Arizona (Blake Edwards). But Eric Greitens in Missouri, wife beater and abuser of his children?
Dr. Oz in recent campaign ad
What explains the choices? The most controversial endorsements reflect what Trump sees in himself: “anti-establishment” and “outsider”, meaningless words that frequently grace the lips of Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. The “establishment”? Well, after a process of elimination, it must mean anyone in the party opposed to Trump. It’s that simple. Anyone finding Trump abhorrent is automatically assumed to be a country clubber. It’s an outdated cliché since the millionaire and billionaire class is just as likely, if not more likely, to be a Democrat booster than a Republican one. As for “outsider”, history is littered with them from Paul Marat (Parisian mob rabble rouser of the French Revolution) to Lenin’s Bolsheviks to Jane’s Revenge. “Outsider” isn’t limited to being a moniker for someone with a fresh perspective. It could, and mostly does, mean a person so revolting to broad sensibilities to cause people to cringe and keep them at arm’s length.
Still, these are the Trump chosen in Senate races that he has fobbed off on us, and a large tranche of Republican voters have foisted on us in their primaries. In the general election, important races will pit a campus-socialist Democrat against a Republican with both feet immersed in the narrow habitat of the Trump cult. I fail to see why this shouldn’t be a red-tsunami year, given all the carnage that the Democrats have gifted to Republicans. Instead, much of the Republican base, enchanted by Trump’s self-serving verbiage, have turned sure-winners and easier gets into toss-ups and double-digit holes. Indeed, at this juncture, Biden may have a radical-Left Senate majority in January 2023 to rubber stamp us into an inflationary spiral and the centrally planned existence of the Green New Deal by executive edict.
Democracy is not synonymous with wisdom. The crooked timber of humanity is evident at the micro and macro levels. In 1964, Goldwater was pasted by LBJ in what many observers described as a sympathy vote in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. A popular mania gave us a bloody, miasmic morass in Vietnam and a morally bankrupting War on Poverty. Guns and butter profligacy would wreck our country for the next decade and a half. Then came the 1980’s and the beginning of a turnaround. 2022 could be the beginning of our turnaround, but will we seize the opportunity?
It would be lot easier if Trump stopped being so self-absorbed and divisive in the ranks of those trying to right the ship. Meanwhile, parents are taking matters into their hands by taking their kids away from the influence of Democrat client groups. I daily thank God that Trump hasn’t made any endorsements in school board races.
RogerG
Sources:
* “New Federal Data Confirms Pandemic’s Blow to K-12 Enrollment, With Drop of 1.5 Million Students; Pre-K Experiences 22 Percent Decline” at https://www.the74million.org/article/public-school-enrollment-down-3-percent-worst-century/#:~:text=A%25203%2520percent%2520decline%252C%2520measured,of%2520roughly%25201.5%2520million%2520pupils.
* “With Plunging Enrollments, A Seismic Hit to Public Schools”, New York Times, at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/us/public-schools-falling-enrollment.html
* “Census Bureau: N.Y. population loss greatest in nation”, The Daily Gazette, Dec. 23, 2021, at https://dailygazette.com/2021/12/23/census-bureau-n-y-population-loss-greatest-in-nation/.
* “Latest Polls”, FiveThrtyEight, Aug. 19, 20222, at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/.
* “Poll Finds Increase in Number of Republicans Who Support Trump over GOP”, Brittany Bernstein, National Review, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/poll-finds-increase-in-number-of-republicans-who-support-trump-over-gop/.
Former President Donald Trump speaks during a rally to boost Ohio Republican candidates ahead of their May 3 primary election at the county fairgrounds in Delaware, Ohio, April 23, 2022. (Gaelen Morse/Reuters)
Based on what I’ve seen of Trump’s public performances, I would not seek his company. Loud, overbearing braggarts are not my cup of tea. That aside, a vendetta, clearly partisan and dripping in class condescension, has accompanied him since the day he rode down the escalator at Trump Tower in June of 2015. If nothing else, the presence of Trump on the stage has exposed a persistent campaign to get Trump and almost any Republican of consequence by the powers-that-be. Now, the raid. How should we view any subsequent prosecution of him?
“Find a room full of Americans without college degrees, one in which partisan Democrats are scarce. In three minutes or less, lay out your best evidence and explain why what Trump has done is clearly and obviously against the law — obvious not just to lawyers, but to everyone. If the room is convinced, then and only then will you know that the case demands you cross the Rubicon.”
Given all that has been done to him by partisan, bureaucratic, and cultural elite interests in the Manhattan-Beltway union, anything less than an obvious and unambiguous case would be seen by at least half the country as a coup. And that includes the current civil suit pursued by the den of Democrat legal militia in New York under the suzerainty of the state’s Democrat AG, Letitia James. At work is more than an insidious institutional Democrat favoritism but a trampling of the equal application of the laws. Nothing galls an observant public more than selective prosecution for political gain.
Batten down the hatches and get prepared for a hurricane.
Republicans are bedeviled by the spawn of Trump and Democrats are enthralled by neo-Marxism in their combination of rank socialism and malignant identity pandering. While Democrats engage in a headlong rush into college-campus extremism, many Republicans seem intent on adopting the philosophy of Smoot-Hawley, ignoring Adam Smith’s lessons on the inherent foolishness of politicians managing trade or the general economy, shunting Hayek’s knowledge problem to the corner, and an emulation of Soviet Gosplan (central planning) only with them in the catbird seat. As a Republican in the Buckley-Reagan tradition, it’s galling. Trump is responsible for unloading this hash of blustery claptrap on the sole remaining party that should know better.
The steamy love affair with government by some of today’s Republicans shouldn’t catch anyone by surprise. Every politician loves to bring home the bacon, so politics can make hypocrites of us all. Yet, this is different. An orthodoxy developed around Trump’s buffoonery. Suddenly, Republicans and others on the Right started walking around proclaiming the evils of the free market.
It’s not surprising that Trump should be their spiritual leader. Here’s a man who made fame and fortune in real estate, the economic sector most debased by politics and government at every level. Government can help you make millions, indeed billions. Government is a partner for a big developer who needs local potentates to eliminate competitors, get approvals, and steamroll recalcitrant homeowners. Trump happened to have a career in an industry that found government not necessarily an obstacle but just another factor of production. The transition from Big Government Developer to Big Government Republican is easy in that matrix. Add a little 60’s Queens street tuff to the public persona and you too can have people walk over broken glass to attend your rallies.
The Republican slide into incoherence came to the fore at the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s American Economic Forum on July 29. Billed as the antidote to Davos’s left-leaning World Economic Forum, it interestingly emulated Davos. Both confabs provided ample grist for government control of the economy. The only difference is the targeted beneficiaries.
A defensible role for government as referee against brute force and monopoly in the market is one thing. It’s quite another to play Karl Marx in distorting economic activity to the advantage of one class. For Rick Santorum, it’s blue-collar workers – not much different from Marx’s Cinderella class of the proletariat. Subsidies, the tax code, and regulatory powers should be geared to cementing the working class to the GOP in Santorum’s grand design – admirable as a political goal, but lousy economic advice. Did it ever grace his mind that blue-collar workers need blue-collar industries? And blue-collar industries need investment, i.e., capital, i.e., Wall Street. The economy is a synergistic whole. The only answer from Santorum and company is to grease the skids for manufacturing, mindless of the effect on the rest of the economic web.
Rick Santorum
It doesn’t work. Thomas Sowell’s famous dictum cannot be repealed: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” The reality is that some manufacturers get favored treatment over others. Some get the resources that are sucked away from others.
And what of those labor unions who turned themselves into the false champions of those blue collars? Remember, the same unions that drove two of the big three automakers into the arms of a government bailout in 2008-9 are manifestations of the one currently aggravating the supply-chain crisis at west coast ports, the featherbedding International Longshoreman and Warehouse Union. Anchored cargo ships are visible over the horizon. A blue-collar organization meant to benefit blue-collars does so at the expense of every other facet of economic life, and other workers. Government has a congenital habit of only turning its gaze to the squeaky wheel and to heck with the other three. Try driving a car with three flat tires. Trade-offs anyone, aggravated by government winner-picking?
How do tariffs fit into Santorum’s quest for the blue-collar vote? Good question, but another participant at the talkfest, Trump’s trade czar Robert Lighthizer, is a fanboy of them. He is a practitioner of economic snake oil, just like his patron, Donald J. Trump. With “balanced trade” as code for tariffs, he proclaimed that they wrought “astonishing results”. Really? I hear “post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy” (two events happening chronologically with the earliest one mistakenly assumed to be the cause) in the bombast. So many reforms were swirling around in 2017-2018, thanks to a Republican Congress, to overwhelm the impact of the tariff silliness.
Robert Lighthizer
Thus, attributing the so-called “Trump economy”, pre-COVID, to the orange man’s tariffs is demagogic self-puffery. Take the “Trump” tax cuts. They were really the Paul Ryan/Republican-caucus tax cuts, a distillation of ideas running around Republican policy circles since at least the 1990’s. Trump just happened to be in office to put his signature to something that was mostly the work of others. The business tax reductions were testosterone for economic muscle growth. And it showed according to AEI’s James Pethokoukis. Let’s just call the “Trump” tax cuts what they really were: the “Paul Ryan/Republican” tax cuts.
Oftentimes, cutting regulations can act like tax cuts. Remember the Congressional Review Act (CRA) of 1996? It codified a Congressional veto power over the administrative state’s rule-making juggernaut. Keep in mind that the Democrats love the administrative state going back to Woodrow Wilson so don’t expect them to exploit the power. Thus, Congress’s successful use of the CRA is dependent on the vagaries of presidential elections. A repeal requires a president’s signature like any bill. From 1996 to 2001, a repeal succeeded only once when a Republican, George W. Bush, was in the Oval Office. We’d have to wait another 16 years for a Republican-controlled Congress to remind itself of its power. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell in 2017 jumped at the chance and sent to Trump’s desk 14 veto resolutions bringing to heel the federal eco-agencies, FCC, Department of Labor, SEC, the Ed Department, etc., of our community-organizer-in-chief, Barack Obama. Trump simply put his signature to a political impetus that began elsewhere by other people.
For Lighthizer to bully his way to the podium at the American Economic Forum to take credit brings braggadocio to new heights, like his mentor, the prince of Mar-a-Lago.
The tax cuts, reining-in the pit bulls of the Left’s administrative state, and unleashing American energy production have long been Republican talking points and planks in the party platform, and not the lab creatures of Trump, Robert Lighthizer, or Peter Navarro (by the way, a former SoCal Dem no-growther). The GOP has long been a booster of opening up ANWAR, fracking, horizontal drilling, pipelines, refineries, offshore platforms, things that would incite conniptions in Silicon Valley lunchrooms. Trump just happened to be the sympathetic warm body to not stand in the way of affordable energy.
As for Trump’s beloved tariffs, they are sand tossed into the economy’s gears. They are a drag since tariffs are taxes. Surprise! Impose them and you just increased the burden on consumers and businesses. The Trump 25% tariff on imported steel slabs is a case in point. American steel producers remanufacture these slabs into sheet metal for fenders and appliance housings among other American-made desirables. Well, guess what? Since March 2020, the price of steel ballooned by 215%. While Biden’s eco-craziness and socialism has a role, Trump’s contribution to our current travails is his mindless worship at the altar of “balanced trade”, i.e., tariffs. If business tax cuts are testosterone, then tariffs are a flesh-eating virus. Give ‘em a little time before we end up in intensive care. The Republican Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 showed the way.
Smoot-Hawley Tariff in the newspaper, June 17, 1930
Not only that, tariffs needlessly make enemies, especially at a time when you need allies, unless, of course, you want America First to be America Alone. Red China has discovered its inner hegemon. Many Pacific countries are fearful of entering the maw of the CCP and are turning to the US as the only counterforce. The relationship between trade ties and military ones is well known. Just as we were about to draw much of the Pacific rim into a closer cooperation with us, 2016, a presidential election year, came upon us. The Dems practiced their usual fealty to the AFL-CIO and Hillary trashed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), something negotiated across multiple administrations. Not to be outdone, Trump in his usual bombast blasted the deal as “a continuing rape of our country”.
Well, what is this “rape”? The pact would slash tariffs all around the Pacific rim from the US to Brunei to Chile. For an America First/Alone enthusiast like Trump, the TPP is the perfect whipping boy. He torpedoed the deal and then boasted about it, repeatedly. But he made it harder to begin a “pivot to Asia” by initiating a trade war with our natural allies. His economic advisors must have been aghast and suggested their own pivot from “rape” to “bilateral”. The rhetorical gimmick was to disparage the adjective “multilateral” (TPP) and substitute “bilateral” in agreements. So, Trump’s people scrambled around the region to cement a smorgasbord of individual pacts to substitute for the omnibus one, all to save face from admitting to the slander.
One way to prevent the much-hated “forever wars” and bankruptcy of the US treasury is to have many allies. Their contributions may be small but together think of them as forcing upon Red China a weakening by a thousand cuts. We provide the biggest military piece but it’s better than having to pay for the whole piece which would be the consequence of the America Aloners.
The Aloner evangelists such as Tucker Carlson or Tulsi Gabbard, or even the conservative Tom McClintock (R, Ca.), stray into the logical dead end of more-allies-means-more-wars. Actually, that is only one possibility, and the least likely one. More allies mean more deterrence. A worse buzzsaw cannot be imagined for Putin’s Russia and Xi’s CCP for them to venture into an attempted reconstitution of the USSR and a Red Chinese-led Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The addition of Sweden and Finland to NATO intensify deterrence on Russia and trade pacts with miliary cooperation in the Pacific rim makes Xi’s Middle Kingdom dream seem more like a nightmare.
Coups are frequently associated with costly adventurism by despots. Everyone does cost-benefit analysis, unless they’re crazy. Even then, deterrence raises the costs to prohibitive levels for any compadres-of-convenience in the regime to continue to follow the lunatics. Still, anyway, if the crazy should practice a Nigh of the Long Knives (Hitler’s 1934 elimination of his rivals), you’ll definitely need those allies more than ever.
Foreign relations and a nation’s economy are intricately connected. Our national prosperity cannot survive a world with the renminbi as the world’s reserve currency, the World Bank headquartered in Beijing, the world’s shipping lanes policed by the PLA Navy, a NATO decaying in its nearly vacant Brussels headquarters, and a new USSR bullying its way westward and southward. Then we will be really alone. And it begins when we start to mangle economics and our recent history to fit the ambitions of narcissists and the hucksters of economic nostrums. I am worried that we are seeing too many of both among the people who should know better.
PLA Navy on maneuvers 2022
Specifically, the golden years, pre-COVID, from 2017 to early 2020 should not be referred to as the Trump economy. It was the Republican economy, all of it emanating from the Republican “establishment”. Anyone but Tucker Carlson fanboys should realize it.
RogerG
Sources:
*“Did the Trump Tax Cuts Work? The Answer May Not Be What You Think”, James Pethokoukis, American Enterprise Institute, at https://www.aei.org/economics/did-the-trump-tax-cuts-work-the-answer-may-not-be-what-you-think/
*” Trump’s Steel Tariffs Still Harming Producers and Consumers”, Bob Luddy, Brownstone Institute, at https://brownstone.org/articles/trumps-steel-tariffs-still-harming-producers-and-consumers/
*”Congressional Review Act”, Ballotpedia, at https://ballotpedia.org/Congressional_Review_Act
*”Where Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump stand on Obama’s legacy trade deal”, Business Insider, at https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-tpp-2016-9
*” Central Planning with Conservative Characteristics”, Dominic Pino, National Review Online, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/08/central-planning-with-conservative-characteristics/
*Tom McClintock’s vote against support for adding Finland and Sweden to NATO in “One California congressman voted against Finland and Sweden joining NATO. Here’s why”, in the Sacramento Bee, at https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article263626043.html
Yard signs in Kansas regarding the upcoming vote on Amendment 2, August 2, 2022.
I’m reminded of the truism in military strategy of knowing your enemy. In the arena of great policy debates, it takes the form of knowing and being able to summarize your opponent’s arguments. Don’t expect such awareness among the general public. They have neither the time nor inclination to do the homework. More commonly, they have vague analogies and precepts in their heads to help them make sense of the world. The origins of these ideas are unknown, just blindly accepted as fact, and for which they have adapted their lives around. Thus, not knowing that these fuzzy ideas have a birthdate, it’s very hard to get the electorate to reverse a notion maybe born in their childhood but one that they have grown accustomed to.
We are simply stuck with the democracy that we have.
Yesterday, Kansas voters soundly rejected Amendment 2, an attempt to remove an earlier exercise of raw judicial power when the state’s high court wrote into the Kansas constitution something that isn’t there, namely the right to abortion. “Raw judicial power”, yes!
That gets to the crux of the matter. The general public is mostly unaware that the Kansas high court was egregiously out of their lane, actually to the point of deserving impeachment and removal from office. They legislated from the bench, a habit taught to them by the Warren Court and its federal progeny.
Formerly, new rights, powers, and privileges were in the wheelhouse of our elected representatives, our legislators. If you can’t get an idea past our elected representatives, well, that’s called a democratic republic. Don’t run to black-robed jurists trained in the application of laws to make the laws for you on the fly. That’s called autocracy. Distinctions in the basic functions of government aren’t taught and, therefore, most people only have the experience of their limited experience to guide them. Our instructional and informational organs have fallen flat on their face.
As a result, relatively new ideas – new in the sense of a lifespan of only a generation or two – have an extended grip for an understandably oblivious public. They do their duty, go to the polls, and express a discomfort in reversing something whose origin and basis is mostly unknown to them.
No, don’t mistake this for popular “wisdom”. It’s always “wisdom” if your side wins. It’s “racism” or some other scapegoat if your side loses. Welcome to the airheads of The Squad and fans of Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Who is to blame? Not the general public, for how can we expect them to exhibit a mental acuity that large groups have never shown before? If you have a desire to point fingers, aim them in the direction of the media and schools, or maybe the proponents for not doing the necessary groundwork.
The media and schools have been particularly derelict. Don’t expect your teacher or mediagenic news personality to patiently explain “raw judicial power”. That would require knowing the existence of the first three articles of the US Constitution. They establish three branches with their own lanes of competence: to legislate, to carry out the law, and to apply the law. Today, the appliers now legislate, ergo “raw judicial power”. How? The propagandists of the imperial courts claim the law says something that it doesn’t. Well, it doesn’t say it in clear words, they say, but the words that do exist can be stretched to cover what it doesn’t say. Got it?
For those 17-year-olds taking US History, it’s called “The Living Constitution”, and in the high school where I did the bulk of my teaching, the textbook has an entire chapter devoted to it. The “grooming” starts early.
No wonder people get attached to The Living Constitution. Yet, opinion polls consistently show disapproval of its consequences. How else can one get to racism as anti-racism from equal protection in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments? How else can one get to defund the police, no-cash bail, non-prosecution of crimes, blanket early releases from prison, and filthy, homeless, dangerous, and drug-addled streets and parks? How else can one codify in court opinions the newly minted wall of separation between gender and chromosomes? And as a result, get masturbation, new ideas for playtime, and drag queens in elementary school and public libraries? How else can sports designed for one set of chromosomes be destroyed by the forced acceptance of those with a different set? How else can we get to Obama and Biden Justice Department letters threatening Title IX actions against schools who insist on keeping distinct bathrooms for each set of chromosomes? Want your ten-year-old daughter to share a bathroom with a twelve-year-old XY “girl”? The Living Constitution folks do. The malformation of the Constitution knows no bounds.
It doesn’t stop there. Try to announce the obvious and you’ll face condemnation, maybe prosecution, disciplinary action, termination of employment, ostracism, and a life under the chronic threat of Twitter-hell. There are dire consequences for speaking truth to . . . .
If we are ever to get back to law being law, and not just an utterance of the zeitgeist, people who are cognizant of the nonsense must stand up and work to correct the miseducation coming from our educrats and telegenic poseurs. Strap on your waiters for this is going to be a long hard slog.
