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.
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.
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.
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/
Donald Trump enters Manhattan for his arraignment hearing 4/4/2024.
* A common origin story attributes the quote to P.T. Barnum, but that is unlikely. Versions of it have been around for centuries. It probably was in widespread usage among 19th-century gamblers before anyone attempted to smear Barnum with saying it.
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Some have referred to the Republican Party as the “stupid party”. Certainly, more than a few use the phrase to denigrate anyone who disagrees with them. However, if the last three elections are any indication, the GOP might not be “stupid”, but they are proving themselves to be susceptible to Lucy’s tactics to get Charlie Brown to kick the football.
Trump is a loser because he’s repulsive, but all the Democrats have to do to get the Republicans to make Trump the face of the party is to make a grand show of persecuting him in impeachments, investigations, serial attacks on him and his family, and now indictments. Indicting him worked wonderfully for the donkey party. Trump, at least for now, is the face of the GOP. The result could be a four-peat after 2018, 2020, and 2022. Simply put, Donald Trump is the Democrats’ most effective weapon against the Republicans. And watch Republicans walk right into it. Lucy walks away laughing, thinking that “There’s a sucker born every minute” as Charlie Brown lies flat on the ground in humiliation.
The Democrats’ Lucy has learned that the Republican Charlie Brown walks right into the confidence scheme every time, like a moth drawn to the light. Opinion polls show, once again, that it is working. Trump’s approval numbers and donations skyrocket. Polls abound showing Trump with a growing and sizeable lead over DeSantis as publicity built in anticipation of the indictment mounted (see below). Since last Thursday, the day before the indictment, a Trump campaign spokesman said the campaign reeled in $7 million in contributions (see below).
A measure of Trump-mania in the GOP could be a comparison of the reactions to the possible indictment between the general public and registered Republicans. Right off the bat, I believe the indictment to be a moral monstrosity; yet, the comparison sets the stage for what will likely happen in a 2024 general election. Two polls a week before the indictment indicated 55-56% of Americans found the Bragg investigations into Trump fair. But for Republicans, 80% considered it to be a “witch hunt” (see below). However you slice it, a thoroughly senescent Democrat candidate in 2020 – or a Democrat stroke victim in a Pennsylvania Senate race against a Trump-endorsed opponent in 2022 – becomes competitive in the general election when running against Trump. What’s popular in Republican circles – like Trump – turns out to be not so popular among the general voting public. We’ve got a history to prove it.
If GOP partisans brush me off by pointing to the 2016 shocker, you are like the big post man in basketball who couldn’t make a free throw but drains a three-pointer at the start of the game. For the rest of the game, he’s camped at the three-line launching airballs. Trump hit a three in 2016 but then threw bricks in 2018, 2020, and 2022. Now, Republicans are ready to reinstate Trump at the three-line once again with the now usual result.
The senescent Joe Biden is greeted at the airport by the stroke victim John Fetterman.
The Democrats are ready, as they never were in 2016, with their fount of small-dollar donations, big-chunk contributions of lefty billionaires, and vote-by-mail harvesting schemes. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. The Democrats aren’t waiting to be fooled.
But Republicans are. The Democrats are doing whatever it takes to keep Trump in the limelight and therefore the face of the party. They can’t run on an inflation-rattled economy; energy costs driving people into the poorhouse; soaring crime; fiscal insanity; a bumbling foreign policy; boys in girls’ sports, locker rooms and bathrooms; neo-Marxist school curriculums; and greenie utopian campaigns that are destroying livelihoods. But they do have Trump. Trump is repulsive; he turns off more people than he turns on. He’s a winner among a rattled base in a party primary, but loser in the general. The Democrats know it.
The Democrats are quite crafty. They know enough to indict a ham sandwich, and watch Republicans flock to the rancid ham sandwich. Apparently, Republicans never listened to The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”. They are all into that – getting fooled, that is. Gamblers are right: there’s a sucker born every minute, and there’s a lot of them in the GOP.
Trump baggage!
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Trump’s Support Is Growing Among GOP Voters—Even As Possible Indictment Looms”, Sara Dorn, Forbes, Mach 27, 2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-s-support-is-growing-among-gop-voters-even-as-possible-indictment-looms/ar-AA198UkZ
* “Donald Trump cashing in on indictment, as news pays off for his 2024 presidential campaign: ‘witch hunt’”, Paul Steinhauser, 4/4/2023, Fox News, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/donald-trump-cashing-in-on-indictment-as-news-pays-off-for-his-2024-presidential-campaign-witch-hunt/ar-AA19qWpc
CPAC may be turning into a pure Trump personality cult. The first “C” in the anacronym stands for conservative, but truth in advertising demands that it be replaced by a “T” for Trump Political Action Committee – TPAC. If Steve Bannon’s recent speech before the group is any indication, and the thunderous reception that it received, the Trump hero-worship brigades are fully prepared to torpedo the GOP’s chances in 2024 and saddle us with more of the looney left in the seats of power.
Watch a portion of the Bannon speech in the link below.
Bannon is nuts, and so is the TPAC audience. If the numbers in a recent poll are reasonably accurate, 43% of registered Republicans support Trump as the party’s nominee. 43% of Republicans equates to 12% of all registered voters because 40% of all party registrations nationwide are Democrats versus 29% Republicans. Do the math. 43% of 29% equals roughly 12%.
A good portion of that 12% are diehards for an intensely polarizing figure. Let’s say half of the 12% are zealous true-believers (only-Trumpers) which reduces the kamikaze recruits to 6% of all registered voters. Trump only gets more polarizing as he pushes a “stop the steal” story that he can’t prove in court and mires others who were sympathetic into more legal trouble for lending some credence to it.
Dominion v. Fox News is only one case in point. The network and its primetime lineup should be applauded for their honesty rather than castigated by a fanatic like Bannon. The depositions and disclosures of Fox News internal communications in court forces me to partly reevaluate some of my earlier criticisms of Fox’s celebrity pundits. Those disclosures further confirm the out-of-their-mind emotional state of that 6%. The Bannon audience at TPAC, if it’s typical of the cranks attracted to Trump, can only lead the party to more dismal electoral performance – 2018, 2020, and the red wave of 2022 turning into a ripple.
The attacks on Paul Ryan are particularly galling. Somehow, the low-tax/small-government/free-market philosophy of every Republican from Coolidge to Reagan as represented by Ryan is besmirched by ad hominem attacks by the cult’s agitators. It’s just that Ryan won’t pledge fealty to Trump, and that list of dissenters from Trump megalomania has only grown as more people cross paths with the alleged demi-god. Now, we must add Fox News to the ever-lengthening enemy’s list. How many more dissenters from Trump worship must there be before the TPAC crowd begins to question their slavish devotion to a self-absorbed and octogenarian adolescent.
Ryan promises not to attend the Republican convention if Trump is the nominee. I’ll leave the presidential line on the ballot blank if he once again bamboozles the party into the nomination. The argument that it’s a binary choice has worn its welcome.
Trump is a loser. He turns off more than he turns on. His electoral performance over three elections is proof. The only way for him to deny the numbers is to label them as fraud without the proof to convince a judge and jury, let alone a majority of the electorate in a presidential contest. At a certain point, Trump is just embarrassing. Embarrassment doth not make a winner.
RogerG
* “CPAC Crowd Stands and Cheers as Raging Steve Bannon Vows to Bring Down Fox News: ‘We’re Going To Fight You Every Step Of The Way!’”, Mediaite, 3/3/2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/cpac-crowd-stands-and-cheers-as-raging-steve-bannon-vows-to-bring-down-fox-news-we-re-going-to-fight-you-every-step-of-the-way/ar-AA18cqic?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=e82b976dd18142c187e4f85ded29053a&ei=32
The ancients had much to say about hypocrisy and willful blindness in respect to problems. The prophet Isaiah admonished King Hezekiah on his deathbed (2Kings 20:1, NIV), “Put your house in order, because you are going to die; you will not recover.” And then there is this famous line against pretense from Luke’s gospel (6:42, NIV):
“How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
The Left – meaning today’s progressives and liberals – is nearly beyond redemption, philosophically and in many cases behaviorally. Its neo-Marxist collectivism is a national suicide pact. But a sizeable element of the Right is similarly proving itself unworthy. It is immersed in a performative style of politics, a politics as therapy – “Stick it to the libs, I feel better” – that lacks direction other than the desire to humiliate the other side in staged mini-dramas. They may get an emotional rush from the rhetoric and theatrical antics but it is repulsive to large swaths of the nation’s electorate. Principally for this reason, the last three election cycles have proven to be disappointments for those of a more conservative disposition.
Call it the Trump contagion. It entered the GOP’s bloodstream in 2015 and is proving resistant to cure. Trump still conjures a 43% plurality, 15 points better than second-place DeSantis, among Republican voters in the latest Fox News poll (see below). 43% are hungry for a four-peat of disappointment – to add to 2018, 2020, and 2022. Einstein’s famous insanity formulation keeps coming to mind. This large faction of Republicans remains oblivious to the fact that a candidate that survives them may not, and increasingly will not, survive the general electorate if the party’s base continues to choose candidates based on theatrics and their longings for an emotional release in their politics. The hardheaded on the Right need to understand one inescapable fact: first, as a party, to accomplish anything, you’ve got to win . . . the general! The stalwarts might celebrate victory in the intraparty feud in spring but after the dust settles in November, the donkey-party Left will still be making policy in the seats of power.
The contagion has overtaken the official GOP apparatus in some red/purple states. The effect of the takeover is turning some purple states blue. In places where it is deeply embedded, the infected exhibit the tendencies of those immersed in the blue bubbles, only this time, in a red one. Secure in the cloister of others like them, they are awkward when forced to confront people who disagree and promptly jump to condemnation. It’s true for both silos. Remember Obama’s “bitter clingers”, Hillary’s “deplorables”, and ritual abuse of the word “establishment” and “elites” by Fox News’s primetime “populists”, and Trump’s litany of juvenile insults?
Professor Alberto Coll of DePaul University School of Law, and an astute critic of today’s defunct civic education, is concerned about the decline of the republican civic virtues of prudence, deliberation, and moderation (see below). They are most fundamentally missing from K-12 and have been drummed out of higher ed, increasingly replaced by habitual Marxist oppressor-shaming. It’s an ideology more at home as a bankrupt theology with its unexaminable assumptions and heaven-on-earth end state. Not surprisingly, they behave much like jihadis with their statue-toppling, silencings on campuses, itinerant mobs, and the forcible injection of their ideology into all facets of the culture.
The Left’s inhumanity has elicited an analogous reaction on the Right. Gone is any semblance of prudence. Prudence dictates the recognition of complexities, consequences, and trade-offs. Instead, everything seems so simple in a constant branding of everyone as either evil (them) or good (us).
The Left’s infantilism shows as an attempt to facetiously adduce cause from correlation: socio-economic stats are unequal among identity groups therefore bigotry is at fault, or so they assume. If they can’t find sufficient numbers of bigots, they’ll make it airily “systemic”, which leads them right into the strawman fallacy. It’s ludicrous.
The Right sometimes stumbles into the “systemic” quicksand. They have a vocabulary of vague pejoratives to feed their obsessions such as the aforementioned “establishment” and “elites”. Anyone who has been around too long in the public arena is automatically suspect by that logic, especially if previously identified as one by the movement’s carnival barkers (Hello, primetime Fox News.). The terms encourage an instant distrust of credentials so academics, scholars, people in the professions, political figures, and leaders in business and civil society that disagree with them are summarily rejected. It’s another form of bigotry, something familiar to Antifa and Biden, Schumer, Pelosi, and The Squad in their usual hivemind.
Deliberation goes the way of prudence. Adults don’t display it. It begins with listening which is clearly absent from the halls of Congress. Have you seen the expansive number of empty seats on C-SPAN during speeches on the House and Senate floors? People talk past each other in party-approved talking points. The kids don’t see it modeled by adults in their media, or in their schools’ curriculums that refuse to establish a good grounding in language, the best of Western literature (Bible, Shakespeare), history, philosophy, and logic. They’ve been turned into vehicles for the voguish neo-Marxist orthodoxy.
I must admit that it’s hard on deliberation when one party – the Democrats – is committed to a revolution as complete as anything begun in 1917 Petrograd (see below about Antonio Gramsci).
As for moderation, what do you think after prudence and deliberation have been kicked to the wayside? The socialism of AOC becomes mainstream Democrat, and the kookery of the Marjorie Taylor Greene/Gaetz/Boebert/Trump clique seizes the reins of a Republican House caucus with the narrowest of majorities. 43% of the Republican base and the nearly entire elected Democratic Party, and maybe three-quarters of the Dem base, stand athwart each other separated with firehoses spewing rhetorical slime.
Since 57% of the Republican base retains some attachment to reality, the country’s hopes for a functioning republic reside with them. A pushback may have begun with Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp. He courageously stood against the Georgia state GOP that backed his opponent in the primary and went on to thump the Trump-backed shill in the primary and the odious Stacey Abrams in the general by 7.5 points. The victory means that the guy has street cred.
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp makes remarks during a visit to Adventure Outdoors gun shop in Smyrna, Ga., January 5, 2022. (photo: Alyssa Pointer/Reuters)
He warned big donors in the Georgians First Leadership Committee at a recent luncheon, “. . . we can no longer rely on the traditional party infrastructure to win in the future.” “Infrastructure” is a $10 word for a Trump-crazed state central committee. The state party’s chairman, David Shafer, was so humiliated by the defeat of the committee/Trump-endorsed choices up and down the ballot in the party’s primary that he’s given up pursuing another term. The state committee’s stance was stupid on steroids. Shafer and his endorsements may be simpatico with Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene but not to a huge majority of registered Republicans, let alone the general electorate. Successful politics is about addition, and not subtraction and performance-art politics. It means that the public wants good and safe schools, the potholes to be filled, crime to be defeated, and the sewers and garbage collection to function as billed. “Owning the libs” won’t suffice.
The same is true for the Trump fanatics officially running the GOP in states like Arizona. The writer Dan McLaughlin put it succinctly when he wrote, “It’s time to take the party back from the party.” Kemp is doing his part (see below).
The fallout from the 2022 elections is a siren-call warning to the GOP. Of course, the country appears evenly divided when one of the parties weakens its standing with choices lathered in the general odium of Trump and sloganeering psychodramas. The Democrats’ problem is the neo-Marxist Democratic Party and a hash that they’ve made of parts of the country under their control. The Republicans have the Trump millstone around their neck. Given that dynamic, of course we have parity . . . of foolishness.
A few examples illustrate the reflexive Republican foot-shooting that makes it easier on the neo-Marxist Democrats thereby levelling the playing field in a country overwhelmingly not fond of the hammer and sickle. In one heavily Republican Ohio congressional district, the Trump-endorsed/Q-Anon-dabbling J. R. Majewski lost in the general. Moving over to a Michigan House race, Joe Gibbs beat incumbent Peter Meijir in a Republican primary campaign wallowing on Meijir’s vote to impeach Trump, only to lose in the general by double digits. In Washington State, the Republican incumbent Jaime Herrera Beutler narrowly lost to Joe Kent in the primary with her vote to impeach Trump a key factor. Kent, saddled with ties to white nationalists and other elements of the unhinged right, and fully immersed in the hyperbolic language of the Trump caucus, lost in the general. No wonder that the expected red wave turned into scattered rain drops.
Republicans, if you don’t like rule by a commissariat, field better candidates with an eye to winning elections. Try that. Dah! Send Trump packing, and for his cadre of groupies, grow up and follow Mick Jagger’s advice: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.”
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Young Americans Are Increasingly Ungrateful. Here’s What to Do about It”, Alberto Coll, National Review Online, 2/26/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/02/young-americans-are-increasingly-ungrateful-heres-what-to-do-about-it/
* “Fox News Poll: Trump, DeSantis top 2024 Republican preference”, Dana Blanton, Fox News, 2/26/23, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fox-news-poll-trump-desantis-top-2024-republican-preference/ar-AA17X7hn
* “Brian Kemp: Time for the Georgia GOP to Leave the Georgia GOP”, Dan McLaughlin, National Review Online, 2/23/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/brian-kemp-time-for-the-georgia-gop-to-leave-the-georgia-gop/
* “Kemp moves to take command of GOP, leaving state party behind”, Greg Bluestein, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 2/23/23, at https://www.ajc.com/politics/politics-blog/kemp-moves-to-take-command-of-gop-leaving-state-party-behind/H6EYBMRZDFFCXBYNPPP3PY4WQA/
* An excellent summary of the influence of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci of the 1920’s and 30’s on today’s neo-Marxism in the Democratic Party and the commanding heights of the culture can be read here: “The Long March Back”, Nate Hochman, National Review Online, 2/16/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-long-march-back/
In the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus of the first century AD, zealots were the fourth and final of the Jewish religious sects in the Roman province of Palestine of his time. Today, we know the word to mean firebrands. They are understood to be absolutely committed, blinded to alternative knowledge, and can be monomaniacal to such an extent that the restraints of compassion and reason are stunted.
Thousands of Trump supporters at a November 2020 Trump rally shortly after Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. (photo: USA Today)
Firebrands are frequently blinkered and susceptible to committing atrocities and stumbling into big blunders. A class of fanatic, newly enthused by the late 19th century’s initial and facile discoveries in the science of heredity, appeared as devotees of eugenics: breed a better human as you would a hunting dog. Enthusiasts were everywhere in the period from the US Supreme Court (Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough”, Buck v. Bell, 1927) to Germany’s National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis) of the 1920’s and 30’s (see below).
In 1940, the fate of the wife of the journalist and writer Joseph Roth, Friedl Reichler, would be swallowed in the mania for the pseudoscience. Suffering from schizophrenia, she was institutionalized, and there she was in an asylum waiting to be rounded up in the Nazi euthanasia campaign of that year. She and fellow patients were gathered, transported to a camp, stripped naked, and marched into a gas chamber.
Boys with Down Syndrome at Dachau who were to be euthanized (l); the graves of the victims of the Aktion T4 euthanasia campaign outside the Hadamar Institute, one of the killing centers.
What makes a person an active participant in abject brutality? Mark Twain may have gotten it right when he wrote:
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
In my mind, it’s incomprehensible, but incomprehensibility is a common feature of our politics. A version has settled on the outskirts of the right in this moment. It has infected even normally sensible people. I admired Victor Davis Hanson until he exhibited signs of the disability. Since the case for the support of Ukraine is so strong, I’ve often wondered why he is a Ukraine skeptic till I listened to his podcast interview with Iddo Netanyahu, the brother of the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu (see below). Hanson and Iddo are simpatico on Ukraine.
Iddo and Hanson believe the war is unwinnable for Ukraine. So, they’re eager to advise cutting a deal. What kind of deal? They don’t say, nor how to get there without Putin’s concurrence. While they both reach the same conclusion, they probably unknowingly arrive at it from different angles. Iddo is an Israeli patriot with Israel’s precarious national security concerns in a very dangerous neighborhood at the forefront of his mind. Understandable. I would like to think that Hanson is an American patriot with an equal understanding of our unique responsibilities and interests as a global superpower. Last I checked, Israel isn’t part of NATO; we are, and should be. The interests of a superpower and a nation facing local existential threats often diverge because the circumstances of the two nations are so different. Hanson shows no sign of recognizing the distinction.
Israeli airstrike in Damascus, Syria, February 2023Russian base outside Palmyra, Syria
The Russians in Syria to prop up Assad illustrate our divergent interests. Israel needs Russian acquiescence to strike Hezbollah targets in the country. Iddo’s desire not to say anything to threaten the delicate relationship would make him circumspect on Ukraine. The US isn’t shackled by the need to cater to Putin’s sensibilities and whims. In fact, we didn’t worry about it when a large force of Russian mercenaries and Syrian fighters assaulted a small American post in northern Syria in 2018 resulting in 200 Wagner Group Russians dead from American firepower. A superpower must behave differently from a regional power.
American special forces in Manbij, Syria, near the border with Turkey, February 2018. (photo: Mauricio Lima, The New York Times)
By circumstance, our stance on Ukraine needs to be different from Israel’s. Hanson doesn’t get it, and neither does some of the other unhinged elements on the right. Hugh Hewitt got a full blast of the fringe-right’s kookiness during his radio talk show earlier this week (see below). He may have filtered callers to concentrate on critics of his pro-Ukraine position. Many sounded awfully similar to Rush Limbaugh’s seminar callers, but from the right. Rush noticed that they would lie about their affiliations and rigidly recite from a uniform set of talking points. Hewitt’s callers were monotonous with some variation of the same bullet points in opposition to support for Ukraine: (1) we’re ignoring our problems; (2) we should be spending the money on ourselves; (3) we’re depleting our stock of munitions and weaponry; (4) we can’t afford it; (5) Biden is a bad man; (6) the war is made endless with our involvement; (7) we have no interest there; and (8) the Russians have nukes so we ought to be afraid.
One person or group doesn’t have to be orchestrating the callers. More feasibly, the monotony shows a slavish devotion to a narrow cast of sources. Suspect influencers include the self-styled “populists” on Fox News primetime, the Gaetz/Boebert/MTG wing of the Republican caucus, and a selected chorus of online sources feeding their biases.
Among the guiding lights on the right is Molly Hemingway, a guest on the same Hewitt episode and exhibiting no more coherence than the callers. Stock Hemingway complaints were our prolonging of the war (another WWI) and the exhaustion of our stockpile of weapons and munitions. Neither holds water. A hamstrung military industrial supply chain is a call to unshackle it, not an excuse to leave Ukraine dangling. Increasing our industrial capacity is something we have to do anyway if we are to follow Molly’s advice to take on the CCP.
Her fear of another WWI is actually a call for the appeasement of Putin since our only real leverage is with Ukraine. We can force them to the bargaining table because they are dependent on us. The idiosyncrasies of the Kremlin’s rule and the marketability of Putin’s fossil fuels diminish our clout on the boss. Besides, sanctions and near-uniform international condemnation did nothing to dissuade the invasion or prevent his inhuman conduct of the war.
Victims of Russian atrocities in body bags in Bucha, Ukraine, 2022
The loopy right is guilelessly borrowing the Left’s playbook from the Vietnam War era. At the time, peace, peace, peace, negotiate, negotiate, negotiate was the drumbeat without much thought of a balanced settlement or how to get there. Really, the Peace Movement just wanted us out of South Vietnam which left the South Vietnamese in the same situation as the shortsighted right would leave Ukraine. War-game it. Its practical effect is appeasement. When will we finally show signs of learning that the actual consequence of appeasing aggressive dictators is a shattering of deterrence for other blustery assailants on the world’s stage? The world becoming the equivalent of South Chicago will only increase Prozac sales.
All the other arguments are equally specious. We can’t afford something that is less than a rounding error in the bloating federal debt? We could spend it on ourselves, but on what, and with what effect? More money for the folks that gave us the War on Poverty and our inner-city war zones? Yes, we could spend it on other things, maybe even efficaciously, rather than give the Ukrainians the wherewithal to resist on the front lines in the battle against the Axis of Evil so we won’t have to in Poland or the Fulda Gap.
You know, we could do both – help distressed Americans and Ukraine – by actually showing some guts in reforming our bankrupting entitlements. Don’t talk of selective spending restraint while avoiding the big elephant in the room – entitlements! The talk is risible.
The Ukraine skeptics often complain of the lack of an “end game” in Ukraine. Really? Do they have one in their gung-ho pivot to confront the CCP? If it is to stop and corral the CCP, why wouldn’t that be good enough in regard to Putin? Putin being forced to withdraw from the Ukraine, with Putin in caged retirement at some dacha as icing on the cake, are indeed pleasant thoughts.
The incoherence is astounding, about as muddled as the thinking of the peaceniks in the revolving door between the 1960’s Anti-War and 1980’s Nuclear Freeze Movements. Move over Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, and David Dellinger (of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam), Trump barges in and co-opts the rhetoric. Trump has his nose in the air, like any demagogue, and gets a whiff of anti-Ukraine fever on the right as anti-South Vietnam dementia was all over the New Left of the 1960’s. “Warmongers” and “teetering on the brink of World War Three” could have just as easily dripped from the mouth of Abbie Hoffman in one of his rants on the Berkely campus as it did Trump on Tuesday (February 21, see below).
Abbie HoffmanSixties anti-war protest
Trump tries to not completely turn off his audience on the right by magically trying to square his circle of bombast. Out of the other side of his mouth he blurts “peace through strength”, not explaining how “strength” is not the language of a “warmonger”. He leaves us with the hollow “right kind of leadership” – meaning his – to lather over the discrepancy. His silver tongue will magically transform Putin into a monk. He, the Great Trump, will talk Putin into niceness. Doesn’t this sound a bit delusional?
Even more flummoxing to a sane person is an honest accounting of Trump’s past, which shows him to be a “warmonger” yesterday as he condemns the “warmonger” of today, all the while trumpeting the warmonger’s “peace through strength” line. Got that? It’s rhetorical hash to stake out an identity among an element of the party blinded by fury. To be blunt, the gambit is Trump’s usual performance art as politics.
The caterwauling will only embolden Putin and cut Ukraine off at the knees. Don’t ever complain about Biden’s Afghanistan debacle when you are prepared to create one in Ukraine.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Nazi euthanasia campaign: “Aktion T4, The Nazi Program That Slaughtered 300,000 Disabled People”, Richard Stockton, ATI, 6/3/2021, at https://allthatsinteresting.com/aktion-t4-program
* Victor Davis Hanson’s interview with Iddo Netanyahu: https://victorhanson.com/from-the-sea-of-galilee-iddo-netanyahu-on-israeli-politics/
* The unhinged right was on abundant display in High Hewitt’s show on Tuesday (2/21): https://hughhewitt.com/todays-podcast-325/
* Donald’s latest video comment on Ukraine from 2/21/23: “Trump: In My Next Term, The Warmongers, Failures, And Frauds In Our National Security Establishment Will Be Gone”, Tim Haines, Real Clear Politics, 2/21/23, at https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2023/02/21/trump_in_my_next_term_the_warmongers_failures_and_frauds_in_our_national_security_establishment_will_be_gone.html
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R, Fla.) and Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene (R, Ga.)Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) and Pres. Joe Biden at the microphone
When does just being wrong cross over into insanity? Einstein had an answer during his debate with the proponents of quantum theory (mechanics) in the 1920’s. The quantum theory presented the possibility of unpredictability in the atomic and subatomic world: identical circumstances can produce different results. Flippantly, Einstein threw off the one-line response, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Thus, according to Einstein, quantum theory proponents such as Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg were engaging in folly.
Niels Bohr (left) with Albert Einstein in the late 1920s, when quantum mechanics was in its infancy. (Photo credit: Emilio Segre Visual Archives/AIP/SPL)
Today, we have good reason to know better. Micro reality behaves differently than macro. Einstein’s explanation of the cosmos (macro) can’t account for activity in the atomic and subatomic realm (micro).
However, applying Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to human affairs would be an invitation to chaos. Out the window would go any universal principles like deductive/inductive reasoning, equal protection of the laws, rules of due process, standards of decency, human rights, anything regarding the proper regulation of human conduct in a society, the scientific method itself if taken to an extreme. Yet, that is where we are going. We are heading back into places that were known to be thickets of danger and malevolence.
Passion and bias overwhelm good sense. Indeed, that happenstance may be the only true constant in human conduct through the ages, down to the present, and into the future.
We pride ourselves in being better than our ancestors, progressives being the most hubristic. Their entire belief system is based on it. Yet, an earlier incarnation of today’s progressives produced improvements in how a democracy registers the will of the people, advances that modern progressives are busy dismantling. Is this “progress” or a return to an atavistic past, one that their ideological ancestors were trying to escape?
Thomas Nast cartoon of Boss Tweed of the Tammany Hall Democrat political machine of NYC.
Einstein’s insanity definition is fully operational when it comes to the Democratic Party’s efforts to shred the accomplishments of 19th century progressives. Back then, progressives were aghast at the corruption of a powerful few in smoke-filled backrooms. Their efforts at broad political, economic, and social reform were thwarted by a clique with the power to manipulate elections. Before they could accomplish anything, elections must be cleaned up. The process must be professionalized with nonpartisan administration of elections, clean voter rolls, the secret ballot, and diligent prosecution of fraud. Only then, they believed, could they circumvent the self-serving few stuffing the ballot boxes.
Professor Richard T. Ely of Johns Hopkins U. and the U. of Wisconsin, influenced Woodrow Wilson, Rober La Follette, Theodore Roosevelt, etc. (photo: public domain/via Wikimedia)
After, other election reforms would kick in: the popular election of Senators, popular vote primaries, the referendum, initiative, and recall. More democratization, but first in clean elections, was thought to be the cure. Now, it’s back to stuffing the ballot box. Democrats resist efforts to make voter rolls match the actual eligible warm bodies in a precinct, like removal of the dead and noncitizens or those who moved. They thwart voter ID initiatives, whose purpose is to ensure that the person showing up to vote is actually the person on the list. And they are enthusiastic proponents of mail-in balloting, unmonitored drop boxes, the third party harvesting of ballots, same-day registration, voting beyond election day, the kinds of proposals that place a huge question mark over election integrity. What could go wrong? Is it completely unreasonable to find these ideas at least troubling?
Not for Democrats. They don’t have misgivings, blinded as they are by the rhetorical device of “disenfranchisement”, the bogeyman of systemic racism, a zeal to win elections at all costs, and making it so easy to vote that the insentient, uninterested, and those desiring to vote and vote often have an open field. Public faith in the result is sacrificed in the fury of everyone, dead or alive, having a ballot(s) in their hand. My sons still receive California absentee ballots years after ID and registration in Montana.
The New York Times in a brief moment of sanity declared, “Voting by mail is now common enough and problematic enough that election experts say there have been multiple elections in which no one can say with confidence which candidate was the deserved winner” (see below). My faith in elections has taken a hit since easy-to-voting/easy-to-cheat has become the official doctrine of the Party and in jurisdictions under its control.
Their whole scheme was encapsulated in the Democrats’ Senate Bill 1 of 2021, the horribly misnamed “For the People Act”. All of the above would be imposed on the entire country if a couple of Democrat Senators had decided to follow the rest of the lemmings over the cliff.
Far from leaving the Democrats’ Tammany Hall past in the dust, they are now embracing it. The single biggest threat to election integrity is the mail-in ballot. Think about it: instead of a ballot given to a confirmed eligible voter in front of many witnesses, and the person is observed going to a booth to secretly mark it, and it is dropped into the box under the eye of a nonpartisan official, the Democrats want to shotgun ballots in the mail. Yes, participation will increase . . . but by whom?
Absentee ballots below the mailboxes at a Paterson, NJ, apartment complex, May 2020.
The ballots lie on the floor in piles in apartment mailrooms. Multiple ballots are delivered to a single residence and what happens to them once taken inside is anyone’s guess. The sole bow to authentication is a Boy-Scout-oath signature on a perjury line. So much for the single ballot reflecting the conscience of a single person. It doesn’t take the imagination of Lewis Carroll to picture what might be happening beyond the domicile’s door. Add the likelihood of a partisan activist delivering and collecting the things (ballot harvesting) – and who knows what else they’re doing – and no wonder I’m ready to throw up my hands and be done with voting.
The Democrats forestall any steps to allay concerns. They glibly point to the rarity of voter fraud prosecutions. Get real, they’ve created a system that makes it hard to identify fraud. The signature on a mail-in ballot is no guarantee of authenticity because it was produced in the same manner as the marked ballot – behind a closed door. Once the things are collected and delivered, they are shorn of their envelopes and placed in piles. Authentication is gone, gone forever.
How can fraud be uncovered at this point? People have to be extremely stupid to be caught. Prosecutions are a measure of stupidity and not election integrity. The secret ballot is dead, dead!
Slipshod voting is as bad as slipshod policing. In the latter, you may get killed, pistol-whipped, or face wrongful prosecution. With the former, you will be ruined by political hucksters. Come to think about it, what’s the difference?
Under the skin of today’s Democratic Party progressives is an old-fashioned and venal Tammany Hall ward heeler. They are back to a deeply rooted behavior that progressives of an earlier incarnation would find abhorrent and a bit insane.
The other party, the current Republican Party, hews even more closely to Einstein’s definition. A significant block of the Party can’t shake its fetish for Donald Trump no matter how many times he embarrasses the Party and its electoral chances. This influential chunk of the Party’s base would rather die on the hill of confrontation than make room for the part of the electorate who are 70% with them but can’t take the juvenile boorishness. This blinkered part of the party can’t get their heads around the fact that politics is about addition and not subtraction. Reliance on the cult-of-personality cohort in the party’s base to choose nominees will only guarantee more Democrat inaugurals.
Mehmet Oz concedes to John Fetterman, Nov. 9, 2022.
You’d think that the November 2022 midterms would wake them up. No such luck. Back then, in many key primary races when a more experienced and more popular candidate in relation to the Democrat frontrunner squared off against a Trump-endorsed one for statewide offices (Senator for example), the Trumpist won and then proceeded to lose the general. The current Democrat majority in the Senate owes much to Trump’s endorsement of untested and “anti-establishment” candidates.
Einstein’s insanity still afflicts a majority of the party’s base. They are proving it weekly. A spate of polls in January 2023 exhibits the same tendency. Emerson, Morning Consult, and Harvard Harris show Trump besting DeSantis by 26, 19, and 20 points respectively for the nomination. Public opinion is fluid with polls providing only a snapshot, albeit a fuzzy one. Still, Republicans show that they can’t seem to kick their Trump fix.
Trump’s stature with the general electorate is more troubling. A deep dive into the Harris poll shows him besting Biden by 5 points. DeSantis does so by 3. Good news for Trump? Not so fast. Biden is standing atop a wrecked economy, border, culture, schools, and public safety – underwater by 14 in his favorables. Yet, Trump only looks marginally better than a wholly discredited Biden. Among possible Republican challengers, Trump shares negative likeability numbers (-3) with Ted Cruz (-2) and Mike Pompeo (-4). DeSantis beams brightly, up by 13 in the sunny uplands of likeability. Amazingly, Republicans in the poll still favored the one with the higher negatives, and therefore with weaker prospects. At this juncture, they are poised to do to America what Arizona and Pennsylvania Republicans did to their states. Knowingly choosing weakness might be an additional definition of insanity.
It won’t require much donor cash from the Democrats’ cadre of billionaire smear merchants to remind people of Trump’s vulgarity. The guy daily confirms the worst about him: occasionally cavorting with the lunatic fringe and incessant recourse to worn out narcissisms.
He opens his mouth and middle-class suburbanites cringe. The schtick leaves only the diehards who revel in politics as performance art – “owning the libs”, “Trump being Trump”. Thus, the Trump following is starting to resemble Grateful Dead groupies: bellicose, aging, and regularly depleted by admissions to nursing homes and funeral parlors. Don’t look here for a winning coalition.
With Democrats professing affection for Marxist folly (in CRT, systemic oppression, the too-numerous …phobias, eat the rich), and resorting to Tammany Hall electoral tactics, one has to wonder about their grip on sanity, or honesty, or at least good sense.
Republicans are proving themselves to be no better. Shockingly, many, maybe a majority, have come to fondle crassness and crudity as some kind of winner. Combine those bestialities with inexperience and naivete in candidate choice and we end up with Democrats getting a Mulligan (second chance) to make more hash of our lives. Republicans don’t have a grip on the first rule of politics: first, you’ve got to win elections. Republicans hitching their wagon to Trump, and candidates like him, will only guarantee another wild ride over the cliff.
We can’t even discuss these matters sanely, intelligently. Our vocabulary is riddled with empty generalities. Mostly they are straw-man figures of hate. A good portion of the chattering classes on the right lambast the “establishment” and “RHINOS” without much definition beyond somebody who might have governing experienced and lacks a hair-trigger Defcon 3 personality. Democrats are straitjacketed by a paranoia about a fascist under every rug, “systemic” racism when you can’t find real racism, Gaia-worship in climate-change mania, and an ever-expanding list of “protective classes” in need of their paternalistic care . . . at our expense. Listening to Tucker Carlson or Matt Gaetz on the right is as shrill to the ears as Biden, MSNBC, or AOC on the left. If they aren’t insane, why do they talk like it?
Whew, woe be to the American republic at this degenerate phase in its life cycle. We appear to be so insane.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Trio of polls show Trump clawing back momentum from DeSantis”, Zachary Basu, Axios, 1/24/23, at https://www.axios.com/2023/01/24/trump-desantis-polls-2024-presidential-election
* Harvard-Harris Poll, January 18-19, 2024, at https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/HHP_Jan2023_KeyResults.pdf
* NYT skepticism of mail-in voting can be found in “It Takes a Superspreader to Know a Superspreader: Whether Sturgis, BLM, or voting by mail, the media chooses narrative over facts every time.”, Gerald Baker, Wall Street Journal, 9/14/2020, at https://www.wsj.com/articles/it-takes-a-superspreader-to-know-a-superspreader-11600097758
* Additionally, NYT’s skepticism can be found here: “Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises” at https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-by-mail-faulty-ballots-could-impact-elections.html
* The differences between modern progressives and their 19th century cousins can be found here: “Modern Vs. 19th-Century Progressives”, Jason Merchey, 11/22/2017, at https://valuesofthewise.com/modern-vs-19th-century-progressives/
