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Speaking Truth to the . . . Unhinged

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Our politics are insane, much more so than normal.  Our national figures act as if they walked off the drawing boards of the cartoonists for Warner Brothers Looney Tunes.  Our two major political parties modulate between a cult of personality and a nest of neo-Marxist revolutionaries.  It’s deranged.  Why vote?

Of special note is Donald Trump’s grip on the GOP.  Opinion polls consistently show him to be the far-and-away front runner for the nomination.  Objectively, by any measure, the guy is loathsome.  Would you actually like your children if they grew up to behave like him?  Think about it.  The bombastic self-promoting narcissism has left a trail of former allies, now turned enemies, in its wake.  All that’s left are sycophants and a chunk of the party base seemingly in the grip of a mass psychosis, for want of a better term.

To understand the gravity of Trump’s scorched earth of the party, first we must grasp the fact that there aren’t any serious RINO’s – “Republican in name only” in the mold of Lowell Weicker or the Rockefellers – in the party anymore.  Reaganite fusionism defined the character of the party, and for most still does.  RINO has been mindlessly coopted by Trumpers for anyone not enthralled by the man from Mar-a-Lago.  “RINO” is conjoined to “establishment” and the “swamp” to make the nonsense compelling to those consumed in jargon and sloganeering, and nothing else weightier.

Speaking of nothing else weightier in the head, so bound up in jargon are Trumpkins, and so ill-informed, that a gaggle of them showed up at a July 29 meeting of the California GOP to protest a rules change at the behest of their political guru, DJT.  They thought that it was the “establishment” trying to screw Trump, completely unaware that the rules change was concocted by the Trump campaign for the benefit of Trump.  Whew, go figure.

Let’s examine the line of corpses along Trump’s path to power.  Jeff Sessions, an early endorser and Trump’s first AG, was one of the first to end up on the cult’s blacklist.  The Bushes, not as flamboyant as the orange man, were reduced to wishy-washy “neo-conservative” and “establishment”, not that most of the cult’s enthusiasts could define the words.  Ex-military commanders such as John Kelley (chief of staff) and James Mattis (SecDef) quickly learned that working with an ignorant blowhard is untenable.  Hawks of the peace-through-strength variety like John Bolton – the Democrats’ bette noir and now Trump’s – was tarred for not acceding to Trump’s impulsive isolationism.  Bill Barr, Trump’s latest AG and bulwark against the Democrats’ Mueller grotesquerie, was blasted for not being sufficiently supportive of Trump’s stop-the-steal drivel.  One could go on and on.  The track record would invite the conclusion that anyone friendly to Trump will eventually become an enemy, given enough time.  The closer you get, the more likely you will get burned.

It’s even true for that mainstay of conservatism, Mike Pence, VP under Trump.  He’s now enemy # . . . for not rejecting Electoral College votes from states of Trump’s choosing on January 6. Trump besmirched Pence with the schoolyard taunt “Liddle Mike Pence” after Pence forthrightly recalled on Fox News, “The American people deserve to know that President Trump and his advisers didn’t just ask me to pause.  They asked me to reject votes, return votes, essentially to overturn the election.”  As if on cue, Trumpists showed up at a recent Pence event in New Hampshire yelling “traitor” and “sellout” as he tried to speak.

Pence brutally heckled, called a ‘traitor’ by Trump supporters at Iowa ...
Pence heckled by Trump supporters in New Hampshire

The stupidity should blast anyone in the face still in charge of their wits.  Trumpkins enjoy the jargon of epithets, such as “neo-conservative” as a substitute for adult reasoning.  That abuse of “neoconservative” by Trumpkins obscures the policy reality of “peace through strength”. Strength for what?  Yes, peace, but also a peace worth living. Reagan’s “evil empire” and “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” is the quintessence of what used to be standard Republican foreign policy.  If Trump exercised a little (liddle?) self-reflection, it was his too. Only, since the guy doesn’t read – he’s “too smart” for that – Trump had to first see it on tv: the bodies of gassed children after an Assad bombing.  It took tv before Trump realized that’s there’s something more to foreign policy than “America First” sloganeering.

Go figure, dump Reagan to chase after an opinionated cretin.  I refuse to follow the lemmings.  That old saw about the election being a binary won’t wash a third time.  I am not going to let a cult force me into seeing Trump as our only bastion against neo-Marxism.  If the country chooses neo-Marxism to Trump, which seems likely, many Republicans will have to face life outside the cult and the country will have to face life inside a hellscape.  Republicans should have presented a better option to the country.

And that’s speaking truth to the . . . unhinged.

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RogerG

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* The Trump/Pence imbroglio is recounted in, of all places, Newsmax: “Trump Says ‘Liddle Mike Pence’ Has Turned to Dark Side”, August 6, 2023, at https://www.newsmax.com/politics/donald-trump-mike-pence-truth/2023/08/06/id/1129783/

* The ill-informed but excitable Trump following at the July 29 meeting of the California GOP: “Tensions flare as California GOP gives Trump a boost by overhauling state primary rules”, LA Times, July 29, 2023, at https://news.yahoo.com/tensions-flare-california-republicans-trump-211138809.html

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A Banana Republic of the Execrable

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Jack Smith, Special Counsel

“Give me the man, and I will find the crime [for him].”  Stalin’s chief prosecutor, Andrey Vyshinsky, or Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s head of the NKVD (secret police)

Which one made the historic quote from the 1930’s in Bolshevik Russia?  Possibly both, but it doesn’t matter.  It’s the official governing philosophy of a country that long ago aborted the rule of law.  The law is whatever those in power say it is, a classic definition of tyranny.  Welcome to the USA, circa 2023.

Stalin And Beria | Russian history, Soviet union, Joseph stalin
Beria and Stalin
22 novembre 1954 - Muore Andrey Vyshinsky, procuratore di Stalin | Massime dal Passato
Andrey Vyshinsky

Execrable people do execrable things, such as pretend to use the law, absent any law, to target a person, just like the Stalin gang.  To be honest, though, Donald J. Trump is an execrable character.  Well, to be honest, Jack Smith, Special Counsel, is an execrable character.  Well, to be honest, the entire cabal of talking heads of the Democratic Party and their media sycophants are pretty execrable characters.  If for no other reason, this is damning proof of our descent to the level of governing respectability of the Assad regime (without the barrel bombs and poison gas) or Burma, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan (from Freedom House’s list of the worst of the worst).  Execrable potentates produce execrable government.

As such, banana republic may not go far enough in describing our fall from grace.

“Execrable” behavior, it must be admitted, is not necessarily a crime.  Marriage infidelity is not a crime (ergo Bill Clinton and Donald Trump), but it certainly is ruinous to the pocketbook in divorce court and lawsuits.  Ask them.  Politically, the only decent way to remove execrable characters is to vote them out of the way, and hopefully not empower other execrables in the process.  If a narcissistic, self-serving blowhard is not to your liking, here’s a clue, don’t vote for them.  But don’t take a law and stretch it to the breaking point around the necks of the detestable-but-politically-viable, as is the habit of Jack Smith and his discreditable Washington, D.C., grand jury.

But such is the modus operandi of the Democratic Party.  In the latest episode of the execrable targeting the execrable, Smith laid before us a third indictment of Trump.  Read the monstrosity here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.232192/gov.uscourts.dcd.232192.275.0.pdf.

In the plethora of Trump verbalisms since the 2020 election, Smith (er, Vyshinsky) thinks that he found the smoking gun of Trump’s state of mind, because Smith’s overly distended application of the law demands clairvoyancy of the inner recesses of Trump’s brain.  In a discussion with senior advisers, Trump alludes to a matter being turned over to the next president.  What a thin reed to hang a political rival.  Do I really need to go over this flimsy thread of legal mishmash?

Yesterday (8/2/23), Bill Barr, Trump’s ex-AG, went on CNN to declare that the indictment has validity.  Hogwash.  Entering into state-of-mind divination is a dubious gambit, and doubly so when aimed at one’s political rivals.  Now, Barr may be right in that the indictment presents only a bare-bones preview of the case against Trump.  Regardless, the appearance of impropriety will do more damage to our national reputation than any actual impropriety.  If actions aren’t clearly illegal, delving into the equivalent of psychological augury won’t make them smell any better.

The administrative state’s open Democrat favoritism, the Russia Collusion hoax, the chicanery of the tech biggies and politicized intel heavies to shove Hunter’s laptop down the memory hole, the obvious double standards so numerous as to boggle the mind, etc., should make any sentient adult cringe.  We have disqualified ourselves as assessors of any other nation’s governing practices.  We should be under international observation, not be the observers.  And I don’t need Barr’s mumbo-jumbo, whatever Barr’s state of mind might be, to mask the stench oozing out of this indictment.

The second impeachment had legitimacy, mostly because impeachment is as much a political act as anything.  Trump’s behavior post-election was, and continues to be, reprehensible.  Reprehensible behavior is impeachable.  For all practical purposes, a legal pretext is nice but not necessary.  Not everything can be innocently written off as Trumpiness.

The documents indictment similarly has legal legs.  But prosecution for expressing a belief about some set of circumstances, whether actually believed or not, takes us into very dark and unsavory places.  It’s the stuff of governance in most countries of the UN General Assembly and Putin’s Russia.  Are poisonings and mysterious falls from 15-story windows next?

Are we a banana republic or something worse?  What’s even more troubling is the fact that many of the people on the public stage and with ultimate authority are either supported or elected by us.  Is this the best that we can come up with?

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RogerG

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Donald Trump, The Democrats’ Best Friend

Trump arraigned: Former president pleads not guilty to 34 felony counts
A stone-faced Donald Trump pled not guilty to a 34-count felony indictment in a Manhattan courtroom in April 2023. Trump is the first U.S. president, former or current, to be charged with a crime.

I’ve been a Republican for almost the entirety of my adult life.  As a conservative, where else is one to go?

Now, my party has a love-struck teenage fixation on Donald Trump.  Regardless of the reason for the infatuation, he stands head and shoulders above the rest in the Republican 2024 field, according to polls.  But that’s a sampling within a minority of the total electorate.  While Trump is dearly loved among a majority of that minority, he is thoroughly detested in the general electorate.  Nominating Trump will make the Democrats’ task so much easier.

The fact of broad disgust toward Trump is only one part of the bad political calculus for the GOP.  The majority of a minority seems intent on making Trump the face of the party at a time when he faces multiple criminal investigations across many fronts – namely Atlanta and Special Counsel Jack Smith – some of them more serious than others.  The majority of the minority callously sweeps aside these legal threats as if they were Russia Collusion all over again.  That would be a mistake.  Expect these existential threats to more fully hit the fan after he secures the nomination.  For the three months of the 2024 election season, the party will be saddled with a criminal defendant at trial and quite possibly a perp-walk post-election, whether he wins or loses the election.

As for his down-ticket pull – remember the results of 2018, 2020, and 2022? – a criminal defendant to lead the charge only worsens the party prospects across the board, state and federal.  An improbable win on election day would mean immediate impeachment and removal from office, with criminal sentencing later, by a decidedly hostile Congress.  Thinking beyond the momentary thrill of the political lust, a GOP trainwreck looms.

The guy is abhorred in the general voting public, and that isn’t just an opinion.  FiveThirtyEight lays out the evidence.  In eight polls from June 27 to July 11, Trump’s unfavorables outrank his favorables by no fewer than 12 points.  By July 18, the level of detestation ballooned to 16.1 points.  He’s no more likeable than Biden (see below).  For Democrats, if you’re saddled with political dead weight (Biden or any of the other substitute lightweights), bring your opponent down to your level, and that means assisting the Republicans in seppuku (suicide) – nominating Trump.  A bad hand quickly becomes a winnable one.

At this moment, Republicans are choosing seppuku while the Democrats face their own existential threat from No-Labels.  The group has a greater potential of siphoning off votes from Democrats uneasy about adolescent genital mutilation (gender-affirming care) without parental consent or knowledge, abortion at any time prior to the exit from the womb (maybe after), boys in girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, sports, kowtowing to the CCP, the crime, the crime, and more crime.

No doubt, though, the Republican base is intent on making it possible for the Democrats to escape their vicious wrongdoing.  The Democrats have to live down their noxiousness, but the great leveler is Donald Trump.  Look at the numbers.  They haven’t changed much and will only get worse for the GOP as we proceed to election day 2024.

Yep, Donald Trump is the Democrats’ best friend . . . and maybe their only hope.

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RogerG

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* “Latest Polls”, FiveThirtyEight, July 18, 2023, at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/

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Adolescent Fantasies in Our Politics

Reagan vs. Trump: Two entertainer-politicians compared | Salon.com
Reagan had policy chops having spent decades reading, thinking, writing, and engaging with policy pundits to establish what he thought and why. Not so with Trump. Yet, he is the darling of strident and nuttier elements on the right.

Complexity at almost any level isn’t high on the list of those things appreciated by many people, maybe most, especially if the forces at work don’t stare the average person in the face.  A popular default position is the childlike reduction of circumstances into a single person, such as the economic boom that is attributed solely to Trump by his congregation of worshippers.  Don’t bother them with the details.

Like the Age of Augustus for Rome, we have that “Trump” economy (’17-’19), the “Bush” financial crisis (’07-’08), the “Reagan” boom following the “Reagan” recession, the “Hoover” depression (’29-’32), etc., etc.  The adolescent fantasy is particularly acute when considering economic matters.  It’s almost as if, in presidential elections, that we are choosing a god to deliver us from the vagaries of life.  Quickly, millions of economic actors as free and independent producers and consumers, technological trends, social disruptions in the form of the decline in public morality and the family, huge government incentives and disincentives to be both unproductive and productive, and misbegotten popular beliefs are erased in a mad rush to praise a group’s patron saint.  No wonder that we get so much wrong because many of us understand so little.  Now isn’t that a clear condemnation of our system of education?

12 Common Mistakes We're All Guilty Of Making But Need To Stop Immediately

Nature abhors a vacuum, and the same is true in a person’s head.  A lack of knowledge leads to the resort to the equivalent of magic.  For instance, one person is our savior or master villain. Seldom is it that simple.  A classic example of this mass psychomotor tic is the so-called “Trump” economic boom.  Trump boosters reduce everything to the “genius” of Trump.  In fact, the guy was more of a braggadocious surfer than a George Washington or reincarnation of ancient Rome’s Cincinnatus.

Trump benefitted from two years of united Republican control of the elective branches of the federal government in the first half of his only term as president.  To address the huge government discouragements to be productive, the Republican playbook was unleashed.  Not long after Trump took the oath, Congress under a Republican majority and Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Leader Mitch McConnell set to work to reverse the neo-socialism of the prior Pelosi Congress and Obama administration.  The Congressional Review Act was dusted off to veto by congressional vote the Obama rampaging Leviathan’s regulations in the workplace and EPA.  Trump had no idea, but he was around to sign the repeals.  See, deregulation works, as predicted in the free-market sermons of the Chicago school economists (Friedman, Stigler, etc.).

PPT - Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics PowerPoint Presentation - ID:1459998

Stagflation in the 1970s Educational Resources K12 Learning, Economics, History, United States ...

Capitalism and Freedom: REAGANOMICS, THE ECONOMICS OF SUCCESS

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2018 was festooned with the free-market, small-government ideas that have been bouncing around Republican circles and conservative think tanks since Reagan.  If a nation wants to keep its businesses, stop beating them over the head with one of the highest capital gains tax regimes in the world.

If you want your people to be productive, put down the tax lash that was applied to their backs too.  Republicans for years were slammed with “tax cuts for the rich”, so this time around, most of the benefits accrued to the middle class while additional slices of the population were removed from the tax rolls entirely.  These ideas bounced around the Republican caucus for decades, long before Trump came down the escalator to bash “the swamp”.  Trump showed and expressed no interest or knowledge in the intricacies of tax policy, except maybe what directly affected the family real estate empire.  He had no idea about the strategic triad in national security nor supply-side economics.  He’s not a reader nor deep thinker.  He just happened to be the man behind the Resolute desk to hector the Republican caucuses to give him a trophy (a win) so he could revel in the Roman-like triumph of a signing ceremony.  In that sense, narcissism proved useful.

Criminal justice reform in Congress: Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan try to get along - POLITICO
Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House, and Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader, in 2018 at the time of the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Trump’s ubiquitous self-aggrandizement has been routinely applied to increased domestic energy production during his term.  Simply put, Republicans don’t have the Democrats’ fossil-fuel phobia, which is a healthy beginning. It’s not necessarily a Trump thing; it’s the Republican Party platform of many iterations past.  They’ve always wanted to open up ANWR, and I don’t know of many Republican leaders opposed to pipelines.  They got through without a hitch when the GOP was in charge, pre-Trump.  Ditto for approving domestic production on public lands.  Trump only did what was established GOP doctrine.

The GOP was itching at the chance to rescind the donkey party’s draconian fuel-efficiency standards, which was a sleight-of-hand way to coerce you into a frivolous electric vehicle and ditch the far more practical piston-driven family sedan.  Expressing the GOP’s longstanding faith in free markets, when the GOP is in power, the free-to-choose philosophy has dominant sway.  The dictat was lifted like some of the other near-totalitarian nonsense of the donkey party.  Not necessarily a Trump thing, a free-market GOP thing.

The results were a repetition of the Reagan-era boom, which is just shorthand for the implementation of the outlook coming out of the Hoover Institution, Heritage, and the American Enterprise Institute, the free market Club for Growth, etc. – some of them predating Reagan, and some bashed today by Trump for insufficient toadying.

The Federalist Society, the source of many of Trump’s judicial picks, dates back to the second year of Reagan’s first term. Without that Federalist Society list, who knows, we might be faced with Trump’s older sister, Mary Trump Barry, sitting on a federal circuit or the Supreme Court.  To no surprise, Trump relied on the originalist Federalist Society to secure the support of an originalist GOP in order to appoint originalist judges.  Even an ill-read Trump could figure that one out.

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Trump’s originalist Supreme Court nominations: Amy Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch

Speaking of Mary Trump Barry, appointed by Reagan as a US Attorney and later elevated by Bill Clinton to a district judgeship, she has some misgivings about her brother. Obviously with some animus, Trump’s niece, Mary L. Trump, recorded Mary T. Barry in a conversation about her brother.  Speaking of a hot mic, this one sizzles.  Mary Barry:

“All he [Trump] wants to do is appeal to his base.  He has no principles.  None.  His goddamned tweeting and lying… oh my God.  I’m talking too freely, but you know.  The change of stories.  The lack of preparation [he doesn’t read].  The lying.  Holy shit….  It’s the phoniness of it all.  It’s the phoniness and this cruelty.  Donald is cruel.”

Republicans and Trump associates against Trump. Part nineteen. Even his sister?

If this was an episode of Family Feud, it would be a civil war with the direct family offspring versus the extended one.

The country was rewarded by the GOP’s Reaganomics in the two years of unified Republican control of the elective branches of government.  From Jan. 2017 to Jan. 2019, Trump was one of 290 Republicans in the 115th Congress and the 45th presidency: 238 R congressman (majority) + 51 R senators (majority), + the R chief executive.  The “I”, “I”, “I” of Trump is such a gross exaggeration that it borders on a lie.

The Pelosi House that took office in Jan. 2019 couldn’t stop the positive wave of Reaganomics through the economy.  Average family income grew by $4,600 in 2019 alone, and all racial groups benefitted; the poverty rate plummeted; inflation hovered around the fed’s target; unemployment for all groups hit historic lows.  Frequently, the quarterback is accorded the limelight, but how many weren’t the next Tom Brady because their career ended with an ambulance trip to the hospital due to a porous line, or their receiver corps was plagued with slow feet and stone hands?  Trump just so happened to benefit from a great offensive line and receivers.  And there wasn’t a Hillary around to protect the donkey party’s entrenched collectivism.

It didn’t take long for that self-proclaimed “winner” to be outed as an inveterate loser.  In 2018, he lost the House.  In 2020, his antics cost the Republicans the presidency and the Senate.  In 2022, a Trump endorsement was the kiss of death, except in the deepest blood-red precincts.

Now, a good portion of registered Republicans seem prepared to trade their party identity for that of a lemming.  What didn’t work in 2018, 2020, and 2022 is enthusiastically embraced for 2024 according to polls.  Einstein’s formulation of insanity keeps coming to mind – doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

The truth is that the Electoral College doesn’t choose a god.  It elects a chief executive to carry out the laws, and that’s it.  Trump didn’t invent sensible economics.  Heck, the little that he knows was given to him by the constellation of Republican advisers that attend to every Republican president.

Even Trump couldn’t screw up what was handed to him in 2017 to 2018.  What he did manage to do was to see to it that it didn’t last beyond Jan. 2019.  First, Pelosi seized the House gavel, then Schumer took the one in the Senate, and at the same time, a senescent oldster campaigning from his basement rest home bested him and moved into the White House.  That orange-haired “winner” is a loser, loser, loser, thrice over.

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Trump tries to take all the credit that rightfully belongs to a throng of conservative pundits, think tanks, and public figures.  Instead, a bombastic clown dominates the scene.  Four charges from Mary Trump Barry keep resonating: “lack of preparation”, “lying”, “cruel” and “phoniness”.  That says about it all.

And to think that a large number of Republicans want to do it all over again.  Amazing, absolutely amazing.

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RogerG

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* The comments of Mary Trump Barry can be read in a Wikipedia post, and in the Washington Post (Aug. 22, 2020), “In secretly recorded audio, President Trump’s sister says he ‘no principles’ and ‘you can’t trust him’”, Michael Kranish, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/maryanne-trump-barry-secret-recordings/2020/08/22/30d457f4-e334-11ea-ade1-28daf1a5e919_story.html

* The success of Trump’s unacknowledged Reaganomics can be read in “The Biden Economy and How It Could Be Fixed”, Andrew Puzder, Imprimis, Hillsdale College, March 2023, at https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Imprimis_Mar_3-23_8pg_4-3Web.pdf

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Debunking “2,000 Mules”

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Dinesh D’Souza

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* Please read John McCormack’s rebuttal to “2,000 Mules” at https://www.nationalreview.com/…/06/12/sorry-trump-lost/

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John McCormack

I have been asked to watch Dinesh D’Souza’s “2,000 Mules” by people who believe it to be gospel on the November 2020 election.  I didn’t because spending the money elsewhere mattered more to me.  Heaven knows, I got the gist from a host of Trump-friendly publications and websites without the added expense.  Being a man on the right, access is no problem.  After reading about many of the same sources referenced by D’Souza in the film, D’Souza’s argument ranks up there with anything written by the author Dan Brown (“Angels & Demons”, “The Da Vinci Code”, and “Inferno”, etc.).  The only difference between the two D’s is that Brown acknowledges his work to be fiction.

There is a debate here that needs to be aired.  Trump, the leading contender for the Republican 2024 crown, is running on … what for it … November 2020.  His contention that the election was stolen is the centerpiece of his campaign, along with the long trail of verbal abuse directed at anyone he doesn’t like, normally people who haven’t shown sufficient obeisance.  He made it the focus of his return to the center stage, so it deserves a careful examination.  John McCormack gives one of the best and most concise critiques of the Trump claims that I’ve come across.

First, from the get-go, the notion that a massive, sprawling plot mostly across five states, maybe more, involving hundreds of thousands of fellow conspirators with none of this huge crowd being detected or slipping up boggles the mind.  That alone, without seeing the film, should cause a person to be very leery.  There are millions of spine-tingling stories across the internet of mysterious dark forces bringing down the world.  How is this one any different?  They, like all tall tales of expansive conspiracies, have to maintain an inhuman level of operational secrecy.  The absence of at least a few dufuses to spill the beans among the hundreds of thousands of participants (voters, couriers, organizers) simply can’t pass the smell test.

Here’s one rule for rationally assessing conspiracy claims: believability is in inverse proportion to the number of participants.

The “mules” in the film are the 54,000 couriers (not 2,000) who allegedly stuffed ballot boxes in key locations.  None has been fingered by Trump’s army of independent bounty hunters, nor law enforcement, to prove the existence of the plot.  Nor will the producers and publisher divulge the names of the left’s NGO’s who are supposedly at the center of the scheme.  Dominion’s $787 million lawsuit award hangs over the producers and publishers who might be inclined to name some.  Apparently, millions of dollars for over-priced attorneys and the need to bribe some in the jury pool is a bit too daunting to run the risk.

The database for the story consists of cellphone pings and security camera footage on adjacent buildings.  I’m reminded of the techie acronym gigo: garbage data goes in, garbage comes out.  Data doesn’t stand alone; it is massaged by prior assumptions.  So, if you go into the issue assuming something is fishy, don’t be surprised that in your imagination a fish pops out.  But it’s not a fish; it’s the lingering smell in your nostrils from cleaning the garbage cans the day before.  The pings could be delivery and Uber drivers and the surveilled clutches of ballots at drop boxes turn out to be a family member legally depositing ballots for the family.

Not that fraud doesn’t happen.  Of course, it does.  It occurs in every election, and is made easier by ballot harvesting, no voter ID, and shot gunning ballots through the mail turning election day into election season.  But it doesn’t happen like this.  When you have elections like this, elections begin to lose respect and you end up fanning the imaginations of the already unhinged.  That’s the real lesson of 2020.

Let’s go back to election day being . . . election day, and 70% of the ballots cast in-person.  Add voter ID and we might have more people accepting the results.  We don’t need to follow a self-serving narcissist into another electoral defeat.  The GOP’s self-preservation should trump Trump.

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RogerG

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The Trump Indictment, Part II: King Oedipus Meets Dr. Faustus

Donald Trump
The Shitty Christian Blog: [OE008] The Story: Oedipus
Oedipus, King of Thebes
Donald Trump dismisses fears his massive indoor Nevada rally could spread coroanvirus | Daily ...
MAGA/Trump supporters, 2023
Doctor Faustus is back...and this time it’s personal | The Exeter Daily
Dr. Faustus selling his soul to the devil

In 2015, I had this sinking feeling that once Trump sunk his tentacles into the GOP, he’d be hard to cleanse from the party’s bloodstream.

He is a tabloid personality with a harsh mouth and revels in political theatrics.  Republicans, as it turned out, were in a mood for a drama queen in 2016, and many still are.  They wanted somebody to “own the libs”.  Trump first gave them drama about Obama’s birth certificate and followed it with a litany of juvenile banter in “crooked Hillary” (honestly, she may be), “slow/low energy/clueless/not a man” Jeb, “I’ve never seen a human being [John Kasich] eat in such a disgusting fashion”, and now he’s progressed all the way to “coward/weak/lazy/low life/gutless pig” Bill Barr.  And to think that there are people who still defend this man and his behavior to this day.  According to recent polls, he’s the overwhelming choice to be the Republican nominee.  Disgusting.  It’s enough for a rock-ribbed Republican such as myself to rethink my party registration.  Is this what it means to be a Republican?

He’s embarrassing.  I’m embarrassed.

The latest Trump dust up is his federal indictment under:
• 18 U.S.C. § 793(e), “Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information” (31 counts)
• 18 USC §1512, “Tampering with a witness, victim, or an informant” (3 counts)
• 18 U.S. Code § 1519, “Destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy” (1 count)
• 18 USC § 1001, “Statements or entries generally” (concerns false statements, coverups, etc.) (3 counts)

The first 31 counts draw from Section 793 of the US Code which relates to parts of the old Espionage Act.  If you look at the kinds of documents that were bouncing around at his Mar-a-Lago estate and elsewhere – intelligence briefings, contingent US military plans, foreign and domestic military assessments, etc. – this is much more than diary entries, gifts from one head of state to another, personal letters, etc.  The highly sensitive nature of the documents demands a different treatment in law.  That’s one of the reasons for Section 793 and not the Public Records Act.

The other 7 counts, if true, are evidence of Trump’s pure hubris.  I suppose that if you’ve dodged so many bullets, you might come to think of yourself as immune.  It’s as if he thinks that he is wearing an invisible Lakota Sioux ghost shirt which makes him invulnerable to the bullets from DC’s henchmen.  Like other forms of magic, it works till it doesn’t (the one surviving ghost shirt from the 1890’s has dried blood around holes in it).  In this case, there is an evidentiary basis in the indictment for obstruction of justice.  They’ve got Trump on tape discussing attempts to mislead investigators and hide the documents, suborning others to commit perjury.  Then there’s the corroborative testimony of people in Trump’s inner circle.  Granted, the prosecution’s evidence will have to withstand cross examination and counter arguments by Trump’s legal eagles, but if the evidence is valid, it should raise more than a few eyebrows, with the possible exception of the most committed diehards.

Most troubling is the reaction of the media on the right.  The commentary can be summed up in “double standard, double standard, double standard”.  Very little of it focuses on the contents of the indictment.  Some of it is silly in the extreme.  Hugh Hewitt, a radio host that I respect for his generally calm and reasoned demeanor on air, expressed his disappointment that a rumored selling by Trump of classified information to the Saudis didn’t materialize in the indictment.  His reaction after reading it: “Is that all there is?” Upon hearing that, I said, “What!?”  Is the fact that the indictment failed to live up to the wildest speculation on MSNBC or the ladies on The View a real argument against it?  Hewitt, you’ve got to be kidding.

He was dismissive of the first 31 counts, the claimed Espionage Act violations, ostensibly because of the unprosecuted transgressions by Biden, Pence, Hillary, and Clinton proteges like Sandy Berger – the double standard argument morphed into an excuse for the mindlessly casual treatment of highly sensitive national security papers.  In effect, may as well shred this part of the US Code.  This Hewitt response was without seeing the exact nature of the documents, which will come out in court.  The prosecutors know this; Trump knows it; the legal eagles know it.  If it turns out that all they’ve got is love letters between Trump and “rocket man”, or some such, the DOJ will be wiping egg from its face and providing one more reason to defenestrate the FBI and defang the Garland gang.  If these documents prove to be extremely sensitive, the raw egg will be dripping down the face and all over the casual attire of a good portion of the right’s punditry class.

One of those in need of a washcloth will be Mollie Hemingway, a noted commentator in the conservative, pro-Trump firmament.  Today (6/13/23), on Hewitt’s show, she ostentatiously proclaimed in hyperbolic bombast, “For me to take this [the fed’s Trump indictment] seriously . . . I need to see hundreds of Russia-collusion-hoax people in jail.”  Ruminate on that rant for a moment.  Until we retroactively correct for all those who got away, we cannot enforce the law.  It’s ludicrous.  She’s making the case to selectively not enforce the law à la Alvin Bragg or any of the other Soros-backed DA’s who have been recently inflicted on us.  She does this while also admitting that the case against Trump in the indictment is troubling.  Is she an advocate of ignoring the evidence till enough Democrat scalps are tied to her lance?  Where does this line of illogic stop, at the point where the US Code is effectively eviscerated?  Ignore the evidence against Trump till we get Hillary in chains?

If the highly classified nature of the documents proves genuine, while honestly not a fan of Karl Marx, his famous dictum will apply to this current crop of the right’s commentariat: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

The second batch of charges – those involving obstruction (of justice) – at least causes a pregnant pause for some of Trump’s past stalwart defenders.  The guest lineup on Fox News was left with stumbling admissions of Trump in serious trouble.  That’s when they were forced to elevate their assessment beyond their “double standard” shibboleth and into the details of the indictment.  All the talk about “double standard” will ring hollow if in court the highly classified nature of the documents is born out and evidence of Trump’s perfidy and irresponsibility is shown to be valid.

The main problem for the media on the right is that they have manufactured a pickle for themselves.  They have not cultivated a conservative audience but instead nurtured a Trump one.  The creation of a base reliant on such an unstable personality is asking for trouble.  This media runs the risk of alienating this base if they are forced to deal honestly with the facts.  That audience is likely to be siloed in their own echo chamber and not appreciative of the exposure of their demigod emperor as not wearing any clothes.  For most people, including Trump, nudity will not enhance their appearance.

The media on the right, right now, acts as if they are sitting on pins and needles.  They reach for the thin reeds of silly arguments.  They fail to come to grips with their central problem: they hitched their wagon to a wild horse.  Or more accurately, they made a bargain with the devil.  So, Trump is a reincarnation of Sophocles’ Oedipus, King of Thebes (see “Oedipus Rex”), experiencing the wages of his pure hubris, and the Trump base is impersonating Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, selling one’s soul for instant gratification.

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RogerG

Read more here:

* Jack Smith’s indictment can be found at https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.3.0.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0A-iRN3cPhLLJJwVT7jbt8WOR6ymkohVTX0v7r634xtVjR5SeHV7SeMp0

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Hooray for Chris Christie; Vivek Ramaswamy, Not So Much

Chris Christie Goes After Ivanka and Jared Kushner

* Please watch the entirety of Chris Christie’s presidential announcement below.  It’s a hoot.  It shows a guy with the capacity to talk extemporaneously, with good sense, and without the juvenile rhetoric of the man from Mar-a-Lago.

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Today’s pundits frequently refer to America’s political scene as one composed of tribes. Actually, “cults” is more accurate.  We have the woke cult (neo-Marxism), a gender fluidity cult, climate cult, the Gaia cult, etc.  Well, for some on the right, let’s add the Trump and nonsense cults.  Frequently, those two overlap.

So, what is a cult?  Words such as “excessive admiration”, “a fashionable person or thing among a particular group”, “veneration or devotion for a particular figure or object” stand out in the dictionaries.  Putting it together, it’s a siloed group of people who are transfixed by a person or idea and revel in confirmation bias (seek only information that supports their biases).

Regarding Chris Christie, he has stepped forward to call out the cult in the midst of the Republican base – the cult of the orange man.  Prior to him, all Republicans in the Republican presidential derby, and before, pranced around like they were walking on egg shells, afraid to upset the delicate sensibilities of Trump’s rabid followers.  Quite frankly, it’s about time the cult was challenged.  Thanks to his fortitude, Christie jumped to near the top of my score card.

And Vivek Ramaswamy leaped to the bottom.  There is a crazy element in the right’s “populist” base – another aspect of the orange man’s cult – that believes our fiscal problems are driven by excessive spending on . . . foreign aid.  Not only that, they think that appeasing aggressors leads to peace.  Hmmmm, where have we heard that before?  No “Si vis pacem, para bellum” of the Roman general Vegetius for this panderer to the mob – er, cult.  If you’re interested, it means, “If you want peace, prepare for war”.

WATCH: Vivek Ramaswamy On Why Left And Right Should Fight Woke Capital - Big League Politics
Vivek Ramaswamy

No sure path to appeasement can be imagined than knee-capping the victim by ending their access to U.S. foreign aid.  Foreign aid, though, represents less than 1% of our federal budget ($39 billion).  That’s 1.7% of our two biggest drivers of the federal budget – Social Security and Medicare – at $2.2 trillion annually.  We are not even talking about peanuts. More accurately, we are talking about a particle of a peanut that unhappily fell under the track of an Abrams tank.  So, Vivek will lead the charge against the smallest budgetary particle of a particle going to Ukraine on his way to bootlicking a thug, Putin.  He’ll have to share the other boot with Trump.

As Christie says of Trump, the man of Mar-a-Largo would quickly end the Ukraine War by giving Ukraine to Russia.  And Vivek would be cheerleading the entire way.  This duopoly of demagoguery is an insult to rationality.  Get this: show your spine to the CCP by showing how quickly you cave to a thug, an ally of the Beijing thug.  And this on the heels of the Afghanistan bugout.  Abandonment and surrender are a show of strength?  How does that work? Chairman Xi must be shaking in his boots, the same boots that Xi shares with Putin, the same ones dripping in Vivek/Trump spittle.

Hooray for Christie bringing all this lunacy to light.  I hope that he keeps it up.  He’ll steal the stage from a man whose sole theatrical tact is to bully.  As for Vivek, fresh from the taste of leather in his mouth, Christie in comparison shows himself to be the adult in the room.

RogerG

Read more here:

* Vivek Ramaswamy’s appeasement policy: “Vivek Ramaswamy willing to give ‘major concessions to Russia’ to end Ukraine war”, Ryan King, Washington Examiner, 6/4/23, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/vivek-ramaswamy-give-concessions-russia-ukraine

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Trump Is No Heroic Renegade

High Noon (1952)
Gary Cooper in “High Noon”

Some people like to compare Donald Trump to some sort of hero who doesn’t conform to the dominant social norms, a kind of heroic anti-hero commonly found in movies and generals who are constantly running afoul of their superiors and the media, but are necessary to set things right.  Think of John Wayne’s Ethan in “The Searchers”, Gary Cooper’s Sheriff Will Kane in “High Noon”, Yul Brynner’s band of lovable rogues in “The Magnificent Seven”.  Think of Patton, MacArthur, Matthew Ridgeway, William T. Sherman in uniform.  Truth be told, Trump is no Ethan, or any of the others.  More accurately, “populist charmer” works better, or maybe “demagogue”, and certainly not a “genius”, political or otherwise.

Trump: The buffoon who got America to listen - Shout Out UK

The characterization of Trump as the admirable renegade was used by Victor Davis Hanson to explain Trump’s appeal and his usefulness (see the Hanson video below).  It’s an awkward description.  The distinctive factor that separates history’s successful outsiders from the man of Mar-a-Lago is the former’s uncanny genius for success, and Trump’s lack of it.  Trump won in 2016 not due to any unique insight but to a highly unusual set of circumstances that can only be described as a black swan event.  A constellation of factors came together that hasn’t happened since. Trump has failed to repeat his success, having floundered in 2018, 2020, 2022, with prospects not any better for 2024.

The reason is simple.  He’s been the center of attention for the past seven years and is too well-known, and repugnantly so.  He’s no longer the fresh face that many people were going to take a chance on, as they did in 2016.  The 2016 Trump was the new kid on the block facing a notoriously infamous one.  Even with that advantage, he lost the popular vote by 3 million and could have fallen short in the Electoral College if 107,000 votes in three states had gone the other way.  After that, it has been downhill for Trump.  That’s hardly the genius of Patton.

It’ll be more misery if the 2022 midterms prove to be prophetic.  Ferreting out the easy Republican victories and those with universal GOP support, and focusing only on the hotly contested races, Trump endorsees were either lackluster or dismal failures.  Their poor performance is more than old news because it’s nonetheless real.  From Georgia to Arizona to Pennsylvania to eastern Washington State, across the country, Trump monotonously helped snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  This guy is no Matthew Ridgeway stabilizing the lines in Korea after the longest retreat in American military history, recapturing Seoul, and promising more than the one million Communist Chinese casualties that he and his men already inflicted on them.  Trump is no Patton who could engineer the dash across France after the Normandy breakout and turn on a dime to rescue Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge.  Instead, Trump is channeling William Travis at the Alamo.

Patton (second from left) reviewing a map in his dash to rescue Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge

Already, 2023 polling in dribs and drabs points to a looming GOP disaster in 2024 if Trump headlines the Republican ticket.  A massive poll in April of this year shows Trump to be a loser to Biden and DeSantis a winner (see below).  Yet, Trump registers a 20+ point lead over DeSantis among Republicans while at the same time Trump remains slightly more repellant in his high unfavorables than Biden to the general electorate.  A Nevada poll puts DeSantis ahead of Biden in the state and Trump a loser (see below).  Wait for the gauntlet of legal troubles that the Democrats have in store for Trump, of course delayed till after he secures the nomination for maximum effect.  Trump will smell worse than the remains of yesterday’s fish catch in a warm garbage can.

Gov. Ron DeSantis asks justices to weigh in on felons’ voting rights
Florida governor Ron DeSantis

Clearly, an unflattering image has crystallized about Trump, one that has turned the reliably Republican suburbs into fertile grounds for Democrat votes.  Whoever he attracts is more than offset by the numbers who run away.  Plus, the Democrats won’t be caught again with their pants down.  They have rejiggered voting laws to the advantage of their base’s massive cohorts of the apathetic with the wild expansion of lazy mail-in voting, ballot harvesting, and blocking voter ID and efforts to clean up registration rolls of the dead and moved.  What could go wrong?  Lots, and none of it to the advantage of Republicans and Trump.

All Trump has to offer is the same stale act: juvenile insults, narcissism, patronizing platitudes, bragging, and bluster.  The bragging centers around accomplishments that were impossible without the canniness of others, like the much-abused Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.  Trump benefitted from a brief two-year period of unitary GOP control of the elective branches.  The economy took off after job-destroying regulations were repealed in a series of Congressional Review Act vetoes in the Ryan/McConnell-led Congress. What Republican wouldn’t greenlight pipelines and expand energy leases on federal lands during the era of the fracking technological revolution?  The tax cuts were not Trump’s ideas but were germinating in the Republican congressional caucus for years.  Ditto for the judges.  The nominees were originalists, the official judicial philosophy of the party, whose prospects would be fruitless without McConnell’s procedural smarts.  If you’re a Trumper, please leave room in your praise for Ryan, McConnell, and the Republican “establishment”.

If not, it’s another sign of blinkered cultic behavior that joins the Left’s climate cult ruining livelihoods and the neo-Marxism clan of the woke.  Yes, they’re often called tribes, with the Trumpkins becoming just another one as obvious as the Yankton Sioux on the Missouri bluffs encountered by Lewis and Clark in 1804.  If not treated very gingerly, a calamity will ensue.  Better yet, try to reroute around them, or convince them of the wisdom of abandoning their daft ghost-dancing shaman.

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RogerG

Watch and read more here:

* Victor Davis Hanson’s mention of Trump as the useful renegade: “George S. Patton: American Ajax”, Victor Davis Hanson at Hillsdale College, 2/13/2020, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJsC-buIkSE

* An April polling assessment in FiveThirtyEight: “Latest Polls”, FiveThirtyEight, May 4, 2023, at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-primary-r/

* The Nevada poll: “DeSantis leads Trump in Nevada, GOP poll says”, Jessica Hill, Las Vegas Journal-Review, April 24, 2023, at https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/politics-and-government/nevada/desantis-leads-trump-in-nevada-gop-poll-says-2767010/

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An Irrational Affection for the Bad Boy

Marlon Brando y James Dean...¿romance masoquista?
James Dean (l) and Marlon Brando

Donald Trump Brings Theatrics to Iran Nuclear Deal Protest - First Draft. Political News, Now ...

James Dean and Marlon Brando catapulted to fame on the silver screen playing the rebel or goodhearted bad boy.  It works on the silver screen with good acting, directing, and scripts to manufacture a glorious ending for the renegade.  In real life, well, most times it’s a different story, but don’t tell your typical Trump fan too beguiled to face unwelcome news.  Not only is Trump a bad boy; he’s bad news.  The unpalatable evidence is piling daily.  This time, it comes from Trump’s own pollster, Tony Fabrizio.

In a Fabrizio poll for the Wall Street Journal, DeSantis does better in a head-to-head matchup with Biden than Trump (see below).  DeSantis is up 3 while Trump is down 3.  Surely, all within the margin of error but still indicative of a trend that can only get better for DeSantis and worse for Trump.

Trump has hefty baggage that’ll only get heavier, and DeSantis is coming off a 19-point victory in a bellwether state.  Trump is a known quantity of repulsiveness, legal troubles, and rabid loyalty from a limited base.  DeSantis has the advantage of being the fresh face on the scene with major achievements in the third largest state.  DeSantis has a huge upside as a general election campaign proceeds, much like Reagan in 1980.  Trump has the stench of Hoover in 1932, but without Hoover’s moral uprightness.

Donald Trump last month; Herbert Hoover circa 1930.

Trump’s stench won’t go away.  Despite the double-digit lead over DeSantis in a face-off in a cloistered Republican primary, Trump’s likeability with the general electorate is atrocious.  His unfavorables/favorables are slightly worse than Biden’s, in the same doghouse where they’ve been for most of his time in the public eye (see below).  Rightly or wrongly, there’s too much of the appalling Trump on tape to fill the multimillion-dollar ad buys by the Democrats’ stable of c-suite billionaires.  The Trump schtick is for groupies, not for people raising kids.  As for DeSantis, it’s an entirely different story.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R., Fla.) speaks in Davenport, Iowa, March 10, 2023. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

Think of it this way: after the celebrations, confetti, and rousing cheers of Trump victories in the Republican primaries, his boosters will joyously march off to . . . the Alamo.  Bad boys sometimes lead others into massacres.

May be pop art of Superman, poster and text that says 'INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY 2016 CREATORS COM BUT WE'RE NOT FLYING. WE'RE FALLING! OF COURSE YOU'RE FALLING for ME.I'M I'M AMAZING!! AV9 Aia @Ramireztoons www.investors.com/cartoons'

RogerG

Read more here:

* “Trump’s Pollster Finds DeSantis Leading Biden and Biden Leading Trump”, John McCormack, National Review Online, 4/21/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trumps-pollster-finds-desantis-leading-biden-and-biden-leading-trump/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

* “Latest Polls”, FiveThirtyEight, 3/21/2023, at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/ron-desantis/. From here, you can toggle over to the other major candidates in the field.

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The Reign of the Delusional in the GOP

How a crowd at a Trump rally responds: An audio analysis - Washington Post
The delusional at a Trump rally

In 1967, William F. Buckley, Jr., laid down his standard when choosing a candidate in a primary election in an interview with Bill Barry.  He said, “I’d be for the most right [conservative], viable candidate who could win.”  Who could win!  Translation: vote for the most conservative electable candidate.  Such advice is like whispering to a group of the delusional in a hurricane, such as the third to a half of the Republican franchise who can’t see beyond Donald Trump (DJT).

Fact is, many haven’t come to grips with the forever truth that DJT isn’t very popular beyond their self-reinforcing cloister.  Astoundingly, their detachment from reality extends to the amazing and unexamined assumption that he’s won the general if he wins the primary election.  Surely, they think without thinking, the guy must be as loved as he is among them.  This is the biggest leap of faith to rival anything required of the Branch Davidians (jump in the wayback machine to 1993 and Waco, Tx.).

The numbers and recent elections do the talking.  DJT is a loser, writ large. Moving beyond the debacles of 2018, 2020, and the evaporation of a red wave in 2022, polling largely tracks these election results.  Repulsiveness isn’t an attractive trait, and DJT has typecast himself for the last eight years as an ogre to at least half the overall electorate to begin any race that he has a role.  Then add a quarter who merely find him distasteful.  It’s a deplorable way to begin the general.

Also, let’s not forget that he’s the same guy who led a trash-talking tabloid life that would be excusable in a Brooklyn street urchin but disgusting in a 76-year-old man and ex-president.  He can’t, and won’t, shake the habit of demagogic bluster and juvenile insults because there’s an appetite for the schtick among his WWF-style fans in the party.

FiveThirtyEight lays it out.  DJT consistently, going back to 2016, has double-digit unfavorables over his favorables (55%-, 40%+ as of April 20).  That puts him in Biden territory (53%-, 42%+).   He polls no better than the guy who has wrecked the economy, unleashed racial favoritism, greenlighted boys into girls’ locker rooms and bathrooms, made getting to work and heating our homes a near impossibility for many, pushes neo-Marxist indoctrination on our kids, and is a roving international embarrassment.  Trump honestly, for the most part, did none of these things but he’s so repulsive that a stroke-addled Democrat (Fetterman) and a mental-fatigued oldster (Biden) campaigning from his basement begin to look better to an electorate outside the walls of the Trump asylum.

And then add the Dems’ huge advantage in money and their immense vote-harvesting machine and the Democrats’ ransacking of our way of life for the past few years will matter less and less.  The Democrats continue to deliver an opportunity for a Republican victory on a silver platter but the Republicans turn away to the slop on the floor.

It’s what happens when you let the deranged run your affairs, or determine your party’s nominee.  Here’s a bit of advice for the Trump-addled: try having an eye on the general.  It’s better to win a general election with a person 90% to your liking than to lose with a 100% clone.

Look for yourself at FiveThirtyEight, https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/

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“The morning after” the 2022 election.

RogerG