The term (radioactive personality) comes from the National Review editors’ op-ed on the eve of the Iowa caucuses (see below). Indeed, Trump is a radioactive personality. It bodes ill for the GOP in November.
No doubt about it, it’s true, and it’s true not because Trump drives the Left – which means the root-and-branch of the Democratic Party – nuts, but because everyone, even his friends and loyal supporters, recognize his self-absorbed boorishness and then run to a banal recitation of his accomplishments. The reprehensive demeanor is hard to avoid. This simple fact has profound repercussions. Going into this election’s primaries, Trump is the weakest rival to Biden in a general election, also, no doubt about it. If the Democrats should change their standard bearer, all bets are off for even the rosiest Trump scenario of a narrow victory in November.
How radioactive is he? His avid fans are giddy about his head-to-head slight lead (within the margin of error) in some major polls. Remember, he’s running against a guy who every day reminds the public that he belongs in a nursing home and not the oval office. In addition, look at the hash Biden’s party has made of the country and our national security. Everything from Abbey Gate (the deadly Kabul fiasco), inflation, the uncontrolled border, the assault on our standard of living in eco-totalitarianism, the neo-Marxism in DEI, the boosterism for transgenderism’s teenage genital mutilation in “gender affirming care”, the orchestrated annihilation of American education, et al, doesn’t leave much for the donkey party to run on, except the looming Trump ascendancy if he is the GOP’s avatar.
The tone for the general election is set. Biden’s speech last week in Blue Bell, Penn., made Trump the focus of evil in the world. It’s a replay of the strategy in the 2022 midterms. Did it work then? I don’t know, but the expected GOP banner year turned out to be The Great Disappointment. Apparently, it’s safe to assume that enough people fell for it. If anything, the person of Trump animates the Democrats and sends shivers down the spine of at least a sliver of Republicans. Not good for someone who’s already a close-run thing.
Biden’s “Jim Crow 2.0” speech from Sept. 2022 in the runup to the 2022 midterms
The polls tell the tale, and have been telling the same tale for quite some time. The second-place candidate in the Republican primary contest does significantly better than Trump in a face-off with Biden in the general. The crazy Trump indictments and other Democrat shenanigans have certainly contributed to a heavy sympathy vote among Republicans for Trump. While they have contributed to Trump’s political ballast among GOPers, once Trump gets out of the safe confines of the Republican primary, expect Democrats to cater to the electorate’s already deep disdain for the man from Mar-a-Largo, if only they can successfully distract the voters away from Biden’s catastrophes – a big “if”.
Follow the FiveThirtyEight aggregate of polls and follow them from 2023 on (see below for the latest). The trend is clear. At best, Trump eeks out a lead in the margin of error. The polling details vary (for instance, registered vs. likely voters) but the direction is obvious. Biden screws up, Trump improves, slightly! Yesterday (Jan. 10), the YouGov/The Economist poll registered a Biden and Trump tie at 43%. Both are stinkers with negatives in the mid to high 50s. The last time, December 2023, a general pairing of Haley or Trump versus Biden by the Wall Street Journal shows Haley smashing Biden by 17% with Trump squeaking out only a 4-point lead (see below). For the life of me, why are Republicans determined to make their election prospects so difficult? It makes me wonder if this is populist sadomasochism at work.
Nikki Haley (l)
I’ll leave the prognosis of sadomasochism to the field of psychology, but, at the very least, one must conclude that we live in crazy times. Trump is still radioactive, and Biden is a bumbler after having surrendered to his party’s neo-Marxism. Oh, America, why are we so gun-ho for mediocrities, and repulsive ones at that?
RogerG
Sources:
* “Republican Voters Can — and Should — Rethink Nominating Trump”, The Editors, National Review online, 1/10/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/republican-voters-can-and-should-rethink-nominating-trump/
* Latest FiveThirtyEight polling at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/
* “Why Nikki Haley polls better against Joe Biden than Donald Trump does”, Steven Shepard, Politico, 12/9/2023, at https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/09/haley-electability-trump-biden-polls-00130926
If you’ve listened to someone often enough, you might already know what they’re going to say before they say it. This is not necessarily a criticism – heaven knows, it’s true of me on many subjects (talk to my wife and adult children). But sometimes the monotony repetitively takes you to some unacceptable opinions. This is my predicament with Victor Davis Hanson (VDH). It is well-known that Hanson is an unflinching supporter of Donald Trump to such an extent that any Trump criticism is heavily muted, when there’s ample grounds to be critical from any perspective, while other of Hanson’s views appear newly adapted to momentary Trumpisms and the meandering and muddled political movement that has recently come into being around him. It’s disturbing to me.
For the record, I am not new to VDH. I own and have read many of his books, attended to his commentary on Fox News, and have been an avid listener of his podcast, The Victor Davis Hanson Show, among others. I am well-versed on VDH’s positions; however, the Trump boosterism of late has been taken to absurd lengths.
How absurd? The movement attached to the Trump banner is a protectionist one, an opponent of entitlement reform, near isolationist in foreign policy, and will turn on a dime at the behest of the latest self-serving political burp of its leader. So, if DeSantis stands in the way, Trump will dust off the Left’s tax-cuts-for-the-rich and charge the Florida governor with the sin that he’s out to get your Social Security, and the legion of Trump parrots soon erupt in unison. If, as in 2016, Jeb Bush stands athwart Trump’s path, bash the Bushes, their “forever wars”, and the ill-defined “establishment”, going so far as to come close to imitating the abuse of returning Vietnam vets by anti-war activists. Trump’s loathing of John McCain, for instance, approaches those spittle-laced lows when he said, “He [McCain] is not a war hero” and “I am not a fan of people who surrender”, quite a statement from a candidate for commander-in-chief and later an occupant of that office. The fact that many vets remained loyal to this man is unfathomable.
John McCain’s courage, braving attacks over the skies of North Vietnam, refusal to be released ahead of his fellow Americans in the Hanoi Hilton, and torture at the hands of his communist jailers deserves more than “I am not a fan of people who surrender”. And all this coming from a man who benefited from five draft deferments. Go figure. The behavior hasn’t daunted Hanson’s Trump-praise.
Hanson’s silence over Trump’s protectionism is absolutely befuddling from a man of such a stellar academic background. There’s simply no recognition of the potential devastation that tariffs and other trade-protectionisms has wrought. His commentary avoids the role that homegrown government regulation, taxes, and union favoritism at all levels has played in hallowing out America, creating the Rust Belt. Reagan disbanded PATCO (the air traffic controller union) and fired its striking air traffic controllers; Trump masks the unions’ complicity in their own demise by patronizing them with a blame of foreigners.
Any Econ 101 student knows that a foreign company doesn’t pay a tariff, but apparently not Donald Trump or Hanson, if Hanson’s silence means anything. We hear plenty about “globalization” and “bi-coastal elites” from Hanson but nary a word about Trump’s blathering economic incoherency. Let me set the record straight, even if Hanson won’t: when taxed, companies are pass-through agencies – the new taxes (tariffs in this case) descend on the consumer, and always will, always with price increases, sometimes with fewer choices, and many times with the loss of jobs in other sectors. It’s a classic example of self-inflicted foot-shooting. Remember Smoot-Hawley? Look it up.
Then, how do you reinvigorate blue-collar work, a key interest of Hanson’s – and mine? Start by cleaning your own house. Answer this question: Why are American companies fleeing our shores? Or maybe this question: How is it that an illiterate peasant from the Chinese outback is more appealing than an American with generations of advanced cultural and human capital? The answer lies in more than labor costs. Hint: the first flight of American fabrication was to destinations below the Mason-Dixon line, thereby escaping the clutches of the AFL-CIO and the big-government and big-tax/regulation Democrat regimes above it.
Or, how about the devastating effect of our fascination with college-is-for-everyone? Taxpayer grants and student loans, with taxpayers on the hook, were fire-hosed to make it happen. Consequently, working with one’s hands became construed as placing a person barely above the apes in evolutionary development. It’s all so crassly dopey. Yet, the practical corollary to the largesse is a turn to the labor of semi-literate Chinese peasants so Americans can enjoy student loan debt, Sociology and ****-studies courses, their meth and the dole in depopulating neighborhoods, or extended adolescence in a growing number of failures-to-launch. Education in America is as much a disaster as Detroit. All of it homegrown.
In this respect, though, Hanson can be spot-on in his condemnation of the condition of our schools, K to grad school – but, Victor, please connect the dots. Tariffs and protectionism will do nothing but mask this glaring deficit. If you care about expanding opportunities in the “dirty jobs” sector and making the made-in-America chant more than a cover for union featherbedding, I suggest that we make our bed, clean our room, and, by God, make ourselves competitive rather than wallow in perpetual whinerhood. And it begins with classical curriculum, classical instruction, accountability, and the rejection of government as helicopter parent.
Speaking of government as helicopter parent, Trump has staked his name to hostility to entitlement reform, and particularly the two biggest ones, by far: Social Security and Medicare. They’re both headed to insolvency – Medicare first, soon followed by SS. Trump, as Hanson prostrates in silence, is waiting till we saddle every American child with unrecoverable future debt, or we can no longer defend ourselves with the two domestic fiscal behemoths gobbling up more and more of the nation’s purse. And to think that it’s only a cynical ploy to buy the votes of the seasoned citizenry with fiscal foolishness and outright lies. The Third Rail of Politics had better be reformed or we’ll have to get used to an America with the military gravitas of Canada. Reform is not an option.
No area is more infected with Trumpisms than in thoughts about America’s role in the world. In this respect, Trump’s “America First” chant has morphed into a cover for a new isolationism on the right. No issue exposes this new feature on the right more than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As a historian, Hanson must realize, in the current circumstance of a hyper-aggressive Putin, that the parallels with 1939 Europe are straightforward. Yet, Hanson dismissively expresses a quick and offhanded support for Ukraine as he muddles this backing with the new right’s pessimism about Ukraine’s longevity and our dwindling military stocks.
The incoherence should knock a sane person over the head. The lack of Ukrainian endurance could be a self-fulfilled prophecy by the incessant complaint about our “dwindling stocks”. More than the Ukrainian drain of our own military readiness, unwittingly, the new right is admitting that our superpower status is a joke. It’s an admission that we can’t defend our interests and supply a country the size of Uganda in their fight against being gobbled up. It’s 1938-9 Czechoslovakia and 1939 Poland all over again.
The Soviet Union kept the communist North Vietnamese in the field for a couple of decades, and we can’t aid a Uganda? What makes people like Hanson think that we can defend Taiwan against the #2 economy in the world with the largest army and navy? Ineluctably, this line of argument is a quiet admission that the “pivot” to face the CCP threat is a suicide mission.
Actually, Ukraine is a wakeup call. Stopping one leg of the new Axis in Ukraine is directly tied to stopping the other leg in the Pacific. Don’t think that for a moment that Xi and his minions aren’t watching our enfeebled internal debates about Ukraine. Instead, we ought to be alerted to getting our act together by injecting steroids into our defense industrial complex and conforming our defense capabilities to the new reality of “quantity has a quality all its own”, and stop grousing about our lack of 155 munitions. We can do that, first, by stopping our deficit-spending-till-bankruptcy, and restraining our utopia-searching and robbing-Peter-to pay-Paul domestic fiscal schemes. Our fiscal balance sheet can only tolerate so much greenie nonsense, equality-mongering, and blank checks to the elderly and everyone else “oppressed”. At least Rush Limbaugh had the temerity to call the AARP “greedy geezers”. Instead, with Hanson and Trump, we get fiscal insanity. Come on, Victor, speak up, make sense.
Rush Limbaugh at National Review Institute’s fall gala, 2019. (Lila Photo)
Making sense is what we need at this stage in our country’s history, and all-to-frequently we aren’t getting it. The reign of incomprehensibility even affects the language that we use to discern the difference between liberal and conservative. Check this out: Hanson labeled as “liberal” conservatives who are still conservative but weary of Trump. His charge that National Review is “liberal” is particularly stunning. One can only conclude that Hanson’s distinction between liberal and conservative hinges on a person’s or organization’s stance toward Trump. So, Victor, which one of these articles in the July 31 issue of National Review is “liberal”?
• “Family Policy Meets Deficit Politics: For solutions, consider the supply side”: a call for the use of conservative economics (supply side) to assist families.
• “Throwing Off China’s chains”: a defense of those in and outside of Communist China who risk their lives – many already lost them – to resist the tyranny.
• “Our Chosen Chains: Smartphones, handguns, and the destructive use of freedom”: an article on the debilitating effect of modern media, especially social media, on ourselves and our children.
• “The Restrained Roberts Court: Pace their critics, the justices respect precedent”: a retort to the leftist complaint that the Robert Court is “activist” as well as a defense of originalism, the conservative jurisprudence.
• “Supreme Modesty: Conservatives have saved the Court from itself”: the piece speaks for itself.
• “Elite Universities’ Affirmative-Action Reaction: Biased admission practices are no way to address historical injustice”: a defense of the Court’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision that banned racial favoritism in college admissions.
• “A Year after Bruen: The current Second Amendment test leaves questions”: the article defends the Court’s protection of the Second Amendment in recent cases but admits there are problems that still need clarification.
Et cetera.
A conservative position is manifest in every issue. I’ve been a subscriber since the early 1980’s.
The same is true for National Review Online. Don’t take my word for it; go see for yourself (https://www.nationalreview.com). The woke would go ballistic. But here’s the crux: on the whole, the magazine is no fan of Trump and is mostly pro-Ukraine. I can only conclude that since Hanson is at least modestly pro-Ukraine, the decisive factor for being “liberal” is whether one is a Trump fan or not. If you can’t countenance Trump’s appalling behavior, narcissism, incessant capacity to make foes of friends, and gross immaturity to blame others for his own misfortunes, you must be “liberal”. What?!
I’ve had enough of Trump after voting for him twice. Am I now a “liberal” by Hanson’s metric? Funny, I don’t think and feel like one.
For want of a better explanation, Hanson appears to have fallen victim to presentism, what I call the tyranny of the present. Strange for a historian of antiquity. In the minds of many people, current happenings and concerns are of overriding existential import, more so than anything else … ever! Some people get caught up in the cognitive and emotional fevers of the moment, like a social contagion. Today, the personage of Trump looms large … undeservedly so. Trump is too small a vortex to cram the actual meaning of conservative/liberal. Trump is only the fascination of the moment. He too will pass. One more GOP election disappointment to add to the growing list ought to perform the cure.
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?
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.).
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
RogerG
Read more here:
* 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
* 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.
**************
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”.
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
I was an avid follower of Victor Davis Hanson’s podcast. I appreciated his astute observations on the state of play in the country. But lately, I’ve discerned derangement when it comes to Ukraine. It’s the same mania that has a grip on the loonier fringes of the right. Why did some Republican congresspeople stand in still defiance of Zelensky in his December 2022 speech to Congress? Why do some mouthpieces of the right’s chattering classes (Tucker Carlson for instance) never miss an opportunity to smear Zelensky and Ukraine? It’s so very odd given the fact that the talk emanating from this faction is chock full of complaints about Ukraine but is glaringly empty of any suggestions as to what we should do in response to one nation attempting a blatant conquest of another on a continent historically beset with near-apocalyptic conflagrations. It’s a bitch session without any practical suggestions.
Marjorie Taylor Greene stands motionless as others clap during Zelensky speech to Congress in December 2022.
The behavior boggles the mind. Not since Saddam Hussein barged into Kuwait, or the Wehrmacht’s 1930’s plunge into Czechoslovakia and Poland, has the world experienced such naked aggression as this. Gauging by the reaction of neighbors and some adamantly neutral nations – Sweden and Finland – something very big had happened when Putin unleashed his military forces on Kyiv. Sweden, a country that during the Cold War had its fighter jets on the tarmac simultaneously facing east and west, is rushing to the arms of NATO. Finland, since Stalin’s time a strictly nonpartisan pacifist nation, has declared its intention to join the alliance as well. The already skittish Baltics are in a panic, and rightly so. Yet, for people like Tucker and Marjorie Taylor Greene, it’s the Alfred E. Neuman line of Mad Magazine fame, “What- Me Worry?” More than that, they seem to have stocked up on a supply of broad coarse brushes and buckets of tar to lather on Zelensky and Ukraine.
I got a full dose of VDH’s mental state in regard to Ukraine in his February 9 podcast (see below). It was full of vitriol about Ukraine and Zelensky but nary a word about what he would propose to counter a brazen act of conquest on a continent already the scene of the world’s two greatest bloodbaths that were ignited by nearly identical aggressions – Belgium/France 1914, 1930’s Austria/Czechoslovakia/Poland. The lambast included a characterization of Zelensky as an ingrate, but by a standard that would make Churchill one. Hanson’s depiction of the comparative weights (population, economy, nuclear weapons, etc.) of the two sides, while superficially correct, isn’t dispositive of the end result if history is any guide. From the battlefields of Plataea, Marathon, and Salamis of ancient Greece to the jungles of Vietnam and the mountainous uplands of Afghanistan, small forces with esprit de corps and allies can defeat a much bigger one. Hanson clearly knows this, so why does he suggest that the Ukrainian defeat is inevitable? Once again, it boggles the mind.
Greeks defeat the Persians at Marathon in 490 BC.Mujahideen fighters in position against the Soviet army in Afghanistan in the 1980’s.
Far from it, Ukraine could gain the upper hand in this thing. The question then will be: who got worn down? One French estimate puts Putin’s losses at around 250,000 since he started the invasion (see below), not to mention the hundreds of thousands of fighting-age men who have fled.
Hanson’s trump card, though, is the Russian possession of nuclear weapons. That somehow makes Putin unbeatable, which does more to explain why the Kim family of North Korea and the mullahs of Iran want them. But the problem with a nuclear arsenal was the same one during the Cold War: use them and you’re done. Mutually assured destruction either though a nuclear response, prolonged siege of sanctions and isolation, a forever red-dot bullseye on Putin’s forehead, or a Milosevich-type prosecution at the Hague awaits the Kremlin. Remember, victims and survivors of holocausts are unrelenting in their pursuit of the perps. Two names illustrate the point: Simon Wiesenthal and his pursuit of Nazis and Israel’s capture of Adolf Eichmann (and many others) in 1960. Use a nuke, tactical or otherwise, and Putin will have a life of sleepless nights. Don’t you think that he knows this? Who wants to share space in history books with Heinrich Himmler?
But here’s the rub with Hanson’s rant: none of his points about Ukraine make much sense outside a reference to American domestic politics. A faction of the right judges almost every issue in light of its relation to Trump. A Ukrainian energy company hired Hunter. Trump’s “perfect” phone call – which honestly wasn’t perfect, nor illegal, nor impeachable – was with Zelensky. Some Ukrainian policymakers favored Hillary, which isn’t unusual since all nations with a gun to their head – like Ukraine – nuzzle up to the likely winner of the leadership post of the big dog that can save them. Heck, everyone including Trump thought he was going to lose in 2016.
Ironically, we also play the election-interference game in places like Israel, post-Soviet Russia, and elsewhere. It’s therefore hardly surprising, even if illegal, for foreigners to interfere in our domestic politics.
Then there’s the notorious ex-Ukrainian US Colonel Vidman whose testimony at Trump’s impeachment hearing helped lead to the spurious abuse-of-power charge. See, you paint enough anti-Trump stuff on Ukraine and Trump sycophants begin to view Ukrainians as outside their tribe. Sure, it’s sophomoric, “the politics of the junior-high lunchroom” (see below), but it works as an important signifier for those who have difficulty constructing a coherent thought on their own.
Colonel Vidman in testimony in impeachment hearing of Pres. Trump in 2020.
So, we are experiencing the sophomoric thinking that goes along with the sophomoric behavior of the Trump influence on our current political scene. VDH dips his toe into this pond scum.
VDH, I’ve got your complaints. Now, what do we do? If all is so bad about Ukraine, what do you propose that we do about bald-faced, naked aggression on the continent of Europe? Are America’s other problems truly a justification for standing idly by? Do we restrain ourselves till we have solved our border problems, opened up ANWR, created more entitlements, corrected our birth dearth and declining labor participation rate, etc.? It seems strange to hold foreign policy hostage to success at solving every other internal problem. It’s essentially an argument for not having a foreign policy.
It still comes down to one question: what do we do? Do nothing? If we choose to take that route, prepare for conquest in the world’s other tinderboxes. I wonder how that will sit with Xi as he makes his preparations for swallowing Taiwan. Don’t ever bring up Biden’s Afghanistan debacle if you’re willing to create a Ukraine one.
Negotiations could end this imbroglio, but it can’t be under a prostrate Ukraine for that will only sanction subjugation with words. If the goal is to deter this kind of behavior, Putin’s forces must suffer on the battlefield. Ukrainians are proving quite adept at providing that. Keep them in the fight and give them the wherewithal in the form of tanks, fighter aircraft, Patriot batteries, whatever, to make Putin see the negotiating table as his only practical way out. Make Ukraine a too hard of a nut to crack for him.
Ukrainian soldier launches drone to destroy a Russian tank (r).
Additionally, talks at the stage of a near Ukrainian defeat after we starved them of supplies will be an inspiration for Xi. The CCP armed forces invade and take Taiwan, then negotiate a new Hong Kong style status for the island to seem moderate, which in due course will morph into full incorporation into the regime. Bye, bye Taiwan, to go along with the addition of the new Russian province of Ukraine. It’s Churchill’s world crisis of 1939 all over again.
My bet is that we’ll get every bit of that international horror after this unhinged talk runs its course, and our domestic situation will still be a mess. Reversing our decrepit culture and corrupting entitlements is a much more monumental task than shipping Abrams tanks to Ukraine. Think about it, VDH: an unsafe and wracked USA compounded by an unsafe and wracked world. That is the ultimate conclusion that we’re left drawing from your harangue on Ukraine.
RogerG
See and read more here:
* Feb. 9 VDH podcast “Our Broken Kaleidoscope” on Spotify at https://open.spotify.com/show/5pmfHJqJDIRkbZuRqZyRIE
* “EU estimates Russian casualties in Ukraine at 250,000 killed and wounded”, Yahoo News, Jan. 4, 2023, at https://news.yahoo.com/eu-estimates-russian-casualties-ukraine-183600085.html
* “Why Progressives Can’t Quit Their Masks”, Kevin D. Williamson, Nation Review Online, Feb. 13, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/why-progressives-cant-quit-their-masks/
Screenshot from CNN report: ‘It’s like living in an igloo.’ People are turning off their heat as prices surge.
Referring to her home, “It’s like living in an igloo”; so says Charmaine Johnson of Philadelphia this weekend (Nov. 19-20, 2022) who works as an operator at a non-profit call center assisting low-income people heating their homes, and also personally experiencing the awful tradeoff of eat or freeze.
Here we go again. We have another government-sponsored trainwreck to add to history’s ever-lengthening ribbon list of failure. Yes, today, many people have a choice between eating or hypothermia. We never seem to learn that meddlesome ideologues with power screw things up. It makes no different if they’re commissars of the Soviet central planning agency, Gosplan, or Biden’s climate-change zealots. The consequences were famine in the Donbas, or massive shortages and waste and mismanagement in Soviet factories, or today’s sky-high heating bills dropped in American mailboxes. The misery has the same source: government with too much power.
The French word for the culprit is dirigisme, or an economic doctrine in which the state exercises a strong directive over a capitalist market economy.
Charmaine recently spent $1,000 to fill her fuel oil tank. Tim Wisely of Philadelphia, completely reliant on his Social Security benefits, will pay $1,500 to fill his. Wiseley said that he won’t raise the thermostat till his “teeth chatter”. He says, “It’s 50 or 55 degrees in here. To me that’s not unbearable yet.” He adds, “You can’t go food shopping and get oil. It’s one or the other.”
Tim Wisley’s thermostat settingScreenshot from CNN report: “It’s like living in an igloo.”
Nationwide, the cost of heating your home jumped 17% last year with another 18% for this year. The numbers are statistical abstractions until you run into people like Charmaine and Tim.
What’s amazing is that the source of the story, CNN’s Gabe Cohen, can’t bring himself to mention that the looney policies of Biden and his people are a principal cause of the misery. Anything but government is the go-to in our lefty newsrooms. Citing another government agency, the Energy Information Agency (EIA), Cohen repeats the agency’s desultory list of suspects which includes the Ukraine War (of course), OPEC+, increase energy exports, reduced energy inventories, and a higher demand for natural gas for electricity generation. Wait a minute, take a breath, isn’t this the all-too-common evidentiary slime trail of government-empowered zealots run amok?
It’s hard to blame Putin and the Ukraine War since heating bills began to spike in 2021 (17%), long before the thrust to Kiev in February 2022. A stronger correlation aligns with January 20, 2021 (Biden’s inauguration). The best that can be said to hide the donkey party’s full culpability is that Putin made worse what Biden triggered.
Suspect #2, the decision of OPEC+ to cut production, like Putin’s Ukraine adventure, is another after-the-fact that magnifies the fallout of Biden’s well-established ambition to lower the sea levels around Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard estate. Biden and his people accuse OPEC+ of doing what he intended to do: lower production — to assist a “transition” to a California-style Shangri-la. Everything from denying permits on federal lands, increasing the regulatory hoops to explore and produce, starving producers access to capital with new and demonizing SEC regulations, and vetoing pipelines works in the same manner as OPEC’s announcement of a 2,000-bpd cut. Do you believe for a moment that in this atmosphere anyone with capital to spare would spend it on a new refinery? I’m sure that the Sierra Club’s c-suite is dancing a jig over $7-pg diesel.
Los Angeles in a blackout?
Higher demand for natural gas? This is winter. Has anyone checked with Buffalo? Do ya think that Exxon isn’t aware of the seasons? This excuse makes farce look like a compliment.
Then there’s the “increase in energy exports”. What “energy exports”? It’s natural gas, liquified natural gas to Europe, the thing that Biden is trying to transition us from. You see, Biden is attempting to copy Europe in “net-zero” buffoonery. Germany did it . . . and became dependent on Putin. Hitching your wagon to Putin’s ambitions is a scarry energy strategy. But they did it, along with all the vast landscapes devoted to windmills and solar panels. The erratic production must be supplemented by something, and a hugely expensive infrastructure to make the erratic more stable. All for what? A hypothetical 1.5-degree Celsius increase in a century? We’ve had warming periods in the past. Heck, Britain once had vineyards. And cooling periods aren’t great for the food supply and public health (the Black Death). Europe and Biden adopted a “transition” to anguish.
The 2022 midterms were a referendum on . . .? I can’t believe it was a preference for this. Surely, people don’t desire vulnerability. Besides the retort “Don’t call me Shirley”, people must realize that they are exposed to bankruptcy and increased threats to their health. Biden’s “transition” is only a nice sounding word for vulnerability to misery. In the annals of state-sponsored misery, Biden’s greenie die-hards join the ranks of Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety, Lenin’s politburo, Soviet Gosplan, Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward, and the North Korean Kim dynasty’s “Juche”, the dirigisme of “self-sufficiency” and “self-isolation”.
Biden has ample company, and now, we get to experience the same results as the rest of the world’s hoi polloi. I can’t help but be reminded of the definition of insanity. You know, doing the same thing but . . . .
RogerG
Read more here:
* “‘It’s like living in an igloo.’ People are turning off their heat as prices surge”, Gabe Cohen, CNN, Nov. 20, 2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/success/home-heating-prices
* “OPEC announces the biggest cut to oil production since the start of the pandemic”, Hanna Ziady, CNN, Oct. 5, 2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/05/energy/opec-production-cuts/index.html
* “Heating costs forecast to soar this winter”, Chris Isidore, CNN, Oct. 12, 2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/12/energy/heating-costs/index.html
* “Biden Has Bungled Fossil-Fuel Policy”, Casey B. Mulligan, National Review Online, Nov. 2, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/11/biden-has-bungled-fossil-fuel-policy/
Biden’s a liar, but the Republicans have to contend with Trump. What a pickle for the American people. Trump makes it possible for Biden to rule and make a hash of our lives. It’s hard for Republicans to make the case when they’re constantly trying to live down one of the most repugnant characters on the political scene campaigning under their banner.
There is a chunk of the GOP base that remains enthralled by Trump. They are stuck in 2016. Back then, Trump was the fresh face with an outsized personality and no political track record to excoriate. He won and we quickly learned that it wasn’t an act. He gave us four years of repellant behavior and hasn’t stopped. Like it or not, he became the easily caricatured face of the party, and the necessary distraction for the Democratic Party to avoid accountability for their descent of the country into “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Thomas Hobbes, 17th century). The embrace of Trump has allowed the Democrats to get away with it.
Smath-and-grab in a high-end store in Los Angeles, November 2021
Trump is a big turn-off, and he’s turning off more. The act is getting old. He has a vendetta against people who have no vendetta against him, but against whom he might play second fiddle. Governor Ron DeSantis was insulted with “DeSanctimonious”. Governor Youngkin was pasted with an anti-Asian slur on Truth Social: “Young Kin (now that’s an interesting take. Sounds Chinese, doesn’t it?) in Virginia couldn’t have won without me.” What a narcissist. Because National Review isn’t sufficiently worshipful, he blasts them “as being led by lightweights that couldn’t shine the shoes of Bill Buckley.” Speaking of Buckley, he laid out the common-sense approach to choosing a candidate by advising conservatives to vote for the most conservative ELECTABLE contender. After three losing election cycles – 2018, 2020, and 2022 – Trumpkins are showing themselves to be a kamikaze brigade, and willing to take down the party with them. He isn’t the most conservative and he’s far from the most electable. Need more proof?
Republicans need to excise Trump’s influence from the party before we can hold Biden and the Democrats accountable for their engineered misery. No mistake about it, Biden gave us a 360-degree world of hurt. Energy is at the root of all that we do, especially economically. It’s hard to imagine prosperity with a Biden-imposed recession in the energy industry. Biden chose to take the advice of the teenage Greta Thunberg and lead us into a greenie fantasyland. And he’s lying about it.
Biden trotted out Energy Secretary Granholm in June 2022 to perpetuate the don’t-blame-me and the gaslight-the-public PR strategies. Granholm: “We are now at close to record levels of [domestic] oil production here in the U.S. . . . .” Lie. See chart below. Biden in October 2022: “Today, the most common price of gas in America is $3.39 – down from over $5 when I took office.” Lie. What other word qualifies when it’s as demonstrable as my current runny nose?
Energy Sec. Granholm at a press conference
There’s more where those came from. It’s as if Orwell’s Ministry of Truth leapt off the pages of “1984” and landed in D.C. Economist Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago puts it plainly when he wrote in October of 2022, “. . . we are well short of the production levels and trends that were occurring just three to four years ago.” The pandemic crushed everything, and we haven’t bounced back. Keep in mind that fracking made us into the Saudi Arabia of the western hemisphere. We have the abundant capacity so why haven’t we upped our game? Why hasn’t the supply side of the market responded as it always had before to price increases? The answer is found in the fact that the Thunberg-influenced Biden is signing executive orders to turn America’s grid into California’s. No big pipelines for you, America. Oh, let’s tax and EPA-regulate production on federal lands and offshore into near oblivion. Of course, let’s lie about it. While we’re at it, let’s herd the population into ev’s so we all can experience “range anxiety” together. If that isn’t enough, let’s strangle producers’ access to capital with new lefty ESG regulations from the SEC.
A capped oil well in the US.
Former Fed chairman Greenspan spoke of “animal spirits” in the market. Fear is an animal spirit. So is hostility. You’d have to be in a cryogenic state not to get the clues that the federal Leviathan hates you if you’re a supplier of the stuff that keeps people from freezing in the winter. Better to play along with algae, corn, tides, or anything that pops into the heads of the yoga-room minions on the Meta campus. Forget about more refineries and more exploration. Pardon an oil company CEO for not seeing the guillotine as the Welcome Wagon.
The concept of supply elasticity clearly stretches the mental capacity of the eco-fantasists around Biden. The responsiveness of supply to price changes has inexplicably taken a hiatus under Biden. Take my memory of the Kern River oilfields outside Bakersfield, Ca. Price goes up, wells are uncapped and the secondary-recovery generators turned on. Price goes down, there’s no justification for the expenses. It’s topsy-turvy if you’re Jimmy Carter of the 1970’s and put your foot on the neck of producers with a cap on domestic crude oil prices. Biden of 2021 put his foot back on the neck of producers to the point that the law of supply elasticity disappeared. Then he lambasts them for responding to his hostility by restraining their capital investments. It’s a replay of Stalin’s hunt for “wreckers” or “kulaks” after the blunders of his Five Year Plans in the 1930’s.
Lesson: Don’t expect the equivalent of the DMV to beneficially determine what to produce, how much of it to produce, and who’s to get it for everyone, everywhere, always. It’s a cluster*#&@. Welcome to Biden world.
Biden’s escape from the real world can be seen in his October price boast. Gas wasn’t $5 per gallon when he took office. It was $2.39. Is this old age infirmity at work or prevarication? Remember, this guy has a long history of wild exaggerations and untruths. Going back to his college days, blatant plagiarism and embellishment of his record were standard for him. Today, I’m not certain if it’s pure senility or the serial untruths of his youth ossifying into imaginary truths in a decaying brain. Is this a difference without a difference? Can’t say.
Fuel prices in Los Angeles, March 2022
Fuel prices normally gyrate through the year. It’s not month-to-month changes that are most relevant. It’s year-to-year, or June 2022 compared to June 2021. Biden is responsible for the elevated gyration plateau of 2021/2022 when compared to the gyration valley of 2019/2020 or 2020/2021 and before. For me, Biden’s falsehoods are true to form with a kicker of infirmity.
The lie reduced to one line has more appeal in this age of the internet attention span of a five-year-old than a reasoned analysis in a three-thousand-word essay. People can’t sit still long enough when Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and YouTube are beckoning. Biden ritually does it. Trump too, but he’s brazenly repugnant as he does it. Republicans would do the country a great service by putting Trump out to pasture. With him out of the way, the country might be in a mood to open up space in the same field for Biden and his lefty coterie. Something to ponder.
Then-VP Joe Biden finds two quarters on the sidewalk in Burlington, Vt., 2016. “I found two quarters.”Biden’s inauguration
RogerG
Read more here:
* The administration lying to the press at a June 2022 press briefing: “Press Briefing by Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm”, The White House, June 22, 2022, at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2022/06/22/press-briefing-by-press-secretary-karine-jean-pierre-and-secretary-of-energy-jennifer-granholm/
* Biden’s false claim of cheaper gas prices: “Fact check: Biden falsely claims the most common gas price was over $5 when he took office”, CNN, Oct. 28, 2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/28/politics/fact-check-biden-gas-prices/index.html
* Casey Mulligan’s piece: “Biden Has Bungled Fossil-Fuel Policy”, National Review Online, Nov. 2, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/11/biden-has-bungled-fossil-fuel-policy/
Alas, Tulsi Gabbard left the Democratic Party after some years of abuse typified by Hilary Clinton branding her a Russian agent. I can’t say I blame her. She went from the Democratic Congressional Caucus to the arms of the Fox News punditry, a go-to for Tucker Carlson and the “populist” Right. There’s wisdom in crowds – the idea that crowds are wiser than “experts”, thus “populism” – and also mass mania, unfortunately another facet of “populism”. Right now, the foreign policy fad of the moment on the “populist” Right is a retreat to fortress America. It’s incoherent, but there it is. Bubble #1.
That’s not all. Bubble #2 is the grip of climate-change ideology among our so-called elites. The simple fact that climate changes is exploited for a wholesale revamping of our way of life. This won’t end well since we are starting to see the first signs of its horrendous fallout as Putin utilizes his oil/gas/coal weapon.
Commissar Putin’s invasion of Ukraine carries the pin to pop both bubbles. In the first fantasy, the limits of collective security, collective solidarity, collectively imposed anything are borne out. One overriding behemoth must be available to thump the world’s worst malefactors. In the 19th century the role was filled by Britain and her navy; the baton passed to the U.S. in the 20th and 21st centuries, like it or not. Sorry Tulsi and Tucker. One nation must fill the role of the one power who scoundrels must watch over their shoulders. Is this carte blanche for intervention? No, but we must be in a position to act when necessary, Tulsi and Tucker be damned. When a vacuum exists, we get the barbarian 5th-century sacking of Rome and the descent into Hobbesian chaos, Europe as a Napoleonic grand duchy, the slaughter pens of the WWI trenches, blitzkrieg and the Holocaust, and communist expansion at the barrel of a gun (or tank, or ICBM) and more mass slaughter in the late 20th. Weakness invites horrors.
Collective solidarity gambits like the UN or EU are no substitute for the behemoth. A majority of the UN could probably fit into the international malefactors’ caucus, which makes the occupants of the building on Turtle Bay a dubious enforcer of goodness and light. As for the EU, it is proof that once an ideological frenzy like climate-change ideology grips continental elites all the nations in the club will step back a century in prosperity. The result is a decline in energy freedom and a fall into a dependence on the whims of Putin and his Kremlin kleptocrats, and a choice between wintertime of mass hypothermia or quietude on the rape of Ukraine.
Russian energy giant Gazprom
Working on the Nordstream 2 pipeline in December 2019, now halted due to Russia’s Ukraine invasion. (The times of London photo)
Make no mistake about it, today’s thugs-with-nuclear-weapons act like Jack the Ripper, always looking to see if the night watchman is distracted or asleep. For 10 years, in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union, the world chose to be spectators as Russia suppressed Chenya. The appetite wasn’t whetted with a few Chechens so Putin turned his gaze to the bigger prize of the Ukraine in his campaign to reconstitute the USSR. Interestingly, the role of night watchman at the time was filled by Obama, but Obama was busy with the eight-year run of his apology tour. Obama was caught promising Putin a dismantlement of missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic if Putin would play nice for his reelection campaign. Done deal. Obama gets reelected and afterwards Putin invaded and annexed Crimea and used proxies to lop off two eastern districts of the Ukrainian Donbass. After the Trump interregnum, Putin pounced with Obama II, Joe Biden, at the helm fumbling Afghanistan, dispiriting the American military with an inquisition to ferret out the nefarious kulaks of “white supremacy” in the ranks, and wrecking the US economy in wild spending and a full-frontal assault on our bountiful energy resources – a textbook example of how to voluntarily dismantle a nation.
In the meantime, Tucker and Tulsi are aghast that the semi-senescent Biden would dare empty US weapons inventories in support of a Ukrainian fighting force of high esprit de corps. And the Ukrainians are giving a good accounting of themselves. But Tucker, Tulsi, and the “populist” Right in the podcastry are in the grip of fear of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. What do they propose to do as Putin brazenly invades? I don’t know, they won’t say, but they heap scorn on Zelensky and his country. Odd. It’s perplexing. Is it due to an unstated love affair with nationalism, even if it is of the Russian variety?
Anyway, no better inducement for nuclear proliferation cannot be imagined. Go nuclear, and you too can establish the caliphate, starve your people and unite the Korean peninsula under a monomaniacal family junta, or fulfill your wish to reimpose the iron fist of the USSR. Just get the bomb and watch the “populist” Right media sweat bullets if our government should dare arm the victims.
Victims of Russian atrocities in Bucha, Ukraine, waiting for burial.
No nation should put itself at the mercy of nuclear blackmail. The possession of nuclear weapons should not mean that a nation’s rulers have the winning lottery ticket to the mega-prize as the rest of the world cowers in acceptance. Cowering is no answer; deterrence is, as it always has. Sī vīs pācem, parā bellum: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” Not even diplomacy works without it. That is, make the cost of using these WMD’s far greater than any benefit. The cost can come in the form of nuclear retaliation and/or Russia’s status as a pariah in the full sense of the word and/or threats to Putin’s personal safety. Being Interpol’s no. 1 fugitive will not contribute to an autocrat’s peace of mind. State the costs up front and be prepared to carry it out. Sweating bullets is for Putin, not the pundits in the Fox News studios.
The formula applies to us as well. To stand by, appease, or sanction aggression will only green-light more of it. The costs of the populist Right’s dithering and fear are far greater than any benefits. Why shouldn’t Red China initiate a “special military operation” on Taiwan since the politburo in Beijing has nuclear weapons too? Say goodbye to Taiwan. Speaking of a Hobbesian world beset by anyone with the “bomb” license. No matter what the Right’s appeasement caucus has to say, you can’t replace a calculation that is as old as humankind with dithering and fear.
Ukraine is forcing another cost/benefit dose of reality and the bursting of Bubble #2. Putin’s ambitions are smashing any illusions of a costless “transition” to a carbon-free ecotopia. Indeed, the wakeup call of the cure being worse than the disease may be the one Putin gift to the world from the Ukraine imbroglio. The so-called cure of greenie energy promises a devolution to a 19th century GDP, with very little likelihood of any impact on global temperatures. The world watching a voluntary descent into economic struggles isn’t likely to inspire much of a following. Self-immolation isn’t a successful recruitment tool.
North Sea windmills
Germany called it Energiewende (energy transition), their effort in reality to transition from industrial powerhouse to Putin concubine. Under the EU’s own Green Deal, the continent is to be carbon free by 2050, and all the while cementing an addiction for Putin energy as their backbone, and particularly for Germany: 55 percent of Germany’s natural gas, a third of its oil, and half its coal. Try running the factories of Mercedes-Benz Group AG on the kind of electricity that makes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez smile.
Unsaid about the “transition” is the absolute need for a fossil fuel backbone to buck-up those ugly and vast arrays of Bunyanesque windmills and solar panels. But the electricity production is unavoidably spasmodic. The hours of full sunlight in Germany, for instance, translate into the annual daylength equivalent of 158 days, or conversely 207 days of cloud cover. And sometimes, inexplicably, the North Sea wind fails to blow, which happened in September 2021 and lasted weeks. When nature didn’t cooperate with the dream of Berlin’s central planners, Germany double downed on stupid by closing the three remaining nuclear power plants (now delayed). Germany learned that zero-carbon/zero-nuclear means blackouts, rationing, skyrocketing rates, job losses, and the prospect of widespread hypothermia deaths in this and future winters if they refused to pay the Khan’s ransom.
In the upside-down logic of the greenie crowd, not paying the ransom means an even greater attachment for Alices’ Wonderland. For these dreamers, Putin’s cutoff is more of an excuse to transition to . . . blackouts, rationing, skyrocketing rates, job losses, and the prospect of widespread hypothermia deaths in this and future winters. Alice’s logic is evident on the “populist” Right. Their substitute for “peace through strength” is . . . dithering and fear. Diplomacy driven by dithering and fear leads to a dark place. At this juncture, the loons of the Left, enveloped in eco-madness, and the loons of the “populist” Right, in the grip of Russian nuke-fear paralysis, have nothing to offer but wreckage.
Late spring freeze in Europe, 2017. This scene is from Chisinau, Moldova. Try heating your home or getting to work with no nuclear power and Putin reducing your fossil fuel supply by a third to a half. Don’t expect much help from “sustainables”.
Electric vehicle catches fire in Florida after Hurricane Ian.
In Rob Reiner’s “This Is Spinal Tap”, the boys in the band are asked about the unexpected deaths of some of their drummers, including one who mysteriously erupted in spontaneous combustion.
It’s hilarious, but not so funny for Florida electric vehicle (EV) owners in the wake of Hurricane Ian. We now know that water and EV batteries don’t mix. The things don’t need a spark. After the deluge and submersion in flood waters, they’ll just quietly simmer in a super-hot chemical reaction, smoke a little, and then erupt. Watch the Good Morning in America (GMA) report below.
The EV is the darling of our eco-central planners and the eco-acolytes who sit atop many of our institutions. For the elected ones, they didn’t gain their seats of power and influence by accident. We chose them. Through the franchise and Electoral College, we made the choice to give power to those who would force us out of our deep family investments in clean and fuel-efficient sedans, mini-vans, and SUV’s and into the thing that could set a packed parking lot and neighborhood ablaze. Add to that the range anxiety from inoperable, scarce, and inconvenient charging stations; dishonestly advertised operational distances if one takes into account running life-support and other systems like air conditioning and the heater; and the threat of hypothermia as we wait the hour or two for enough juice to get the thing up and running in a Michigan winter.
Wait, there’s more. The same folks who are foisting the EV on us are creating the most unstable grid distributing the most expensive electricity. An ever-growing expanse of giant windmill forests and broadening seas of solar panels marring ever greater portions of the earth’s surface will be our future if they have their way. And if that isn’t enough, much of that grid is exposed to the annual seven-month firestorm season from eco-crazed forestry practices that annually belches millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air, like the 130 million tons from last year’s conflagrations in California – the equivalent CO2 of 25 million regular autos. So, they shove everyone into EV’s to allegedly save the planet as they encourage the buildup of debris to burn it up. Go figure.
Trees and brush erupt in flames in a California wildfire from 2019.
Incidentally, try to find a place to charge up the thing if you happen to be in the path of the flames, the lines are down, and the cell towers are incinerated. It’s a perpetual motion machine of eco-nuttery. Lesson: Don’t sell that old Camry with the regular unleaded in the gas tank.
Who’s at fault? We are. We elected the clowns who thought that showering the country in paper money was economically righteous and think that eco-central planning is somehow different from the Soviet variety.
It’s not that the donkey party hid it from us. Nancy Pelosi and The Squad have been busy concocting the Green New Deal since Pelosi took the gavel (2019) and Biden the oath of office (2021). Anyone above the sentience level of a worm should have known. Biden repeatedly bellowed their intent when he, for instance, looked into the eyes of a teenage girl (a real XX-chromosome one) in 2019 and said,
“I want you to look at my eyes. I guarantee you. I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel.”
Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden pumps his fist as he speaks during a campaign stop, Friday, Sept. 6, 2019, in Laconia, N.H. (AP Photo/Mary Schwalm)
True to his word, he’s trying to euthanize the entire industry: practically ending oil development on federal lands and offshore, axing pipelines, lavish spending on loopy “sustainables”, and a quiet strangulation of the energy companies by frightening financial capital away from them. For this gang, real, affordable energy is a dragon to be slain.
The choice of candidates in the 2020 presidential race was between the uncouth with the right policies (for the most part) and a revolutionary ethos of class warfare, neo-Marxist race-baiting, transgenderism, open borders, law unenforcement, and greenie fanaticism. As it turned out, a majority preferred the revolution. Look no further than the mirror for the cause of our troubles if you thought that the uncouth drove you into the arms of the revolutionary. A candidate is much more than the fact that he’s not the other guy.
RogerG
Read here for more:
* “Red Tape Is Making Wildfires Worse”, Shawn Regan and Tate Watkins, National Review Online, Oct. 4, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/red-tape-is-making-wildfires-worse/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=capital-matters&utm_term=third
* “About Those Green Jobs . . . They Keep Vanishing”, Andrew Follett, National Review Online, Oct. 15, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/about-those-green-jobs-they-keep-vanishing/
* “Climate Policy Should Pay More Attention to Climate Economics”, John H. Cochrane, National Review Online, Sept, 3, 2021, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/climate-policy-should-pay-more-attention-to-climate-economics/
* “In intimate moment, Biden vows to ‘end fossil fuel'”, Steve Peoples, ABC News, Sept, 6, 2019, at https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/intimate-moment-biden-vows-end-fossil-fuel-65442382
President Biden during his speech on Thursday, 8/1/22, in Philadelphia.
Biden’s speech of last Thursday in Philadelphia was red meat for a Red base. Breaking it apart, “red meat” is rhetoric “that is forceful and poignant, as will excite or inflame their supporters”, and “Red” to characterize a political faction isn’t to be confused with the red/blue designations on US political maps. “Red” is drawn from the traditional color assigned to adherents of the socialist movement. It’s historical and dates back to the 19th century Socialist International with its red flag and workers-of-the-world-unite anthem, of which Karl Marx was the titular figure. Just to be clear.
The Democratic Party of today is the American manifestation of the many socialist parties around the world. The heart of the party’s most fervent members lies in the broader socialist movement. Notwithstanding the leaders’ proforma denials, the party’s political program meshes quite nicely with the socialist aim of greater government control of the economy and life, the same advocacy found in the Labor Party of the UK or any of the other European socialist parties. There’s a reason why Bernie, the Senate’s self-described socialist, caucuses with the Democrats. Birds of a feather. Don’t be fooled by the brush-off.
It was certainly fitting that the camera view of Biden at the lectern had a background bathed in red. From it, Biden spewed inflammatory words that had little place in rational discourse. This isn’t the tone of your local crisis counselor. It was a red speech for a Red cause.
I delayed my commentary till I could hear the speech in total and unfiltered. Bluntly put, it was shocking. Its only conceivable purpose was to rev up the base to forestall a long-anticipated Republican wave in November. It was filled with raw appeals to emotion, stoking fears, incoherent, and riddled with hypocrisy. It was the kind of stemwinder used to get the Parisian mob to storm the Bastille. And if you know anything about the Bastille events on July 14, 1789, you’ll know that the place only imprisoned a few, and they were the most heinous miscreants (the Marque de Sade among them). After the surrender, the guards were butchered, their heads cut off and mounted on pikes and paraded around Paris. Biden lifted a page from the playbook of the hate-filled rabble-rouser Paul Marat; I hope without the detached heads.
Contemporaneous illustration of the Bastille guards with their heads on pikes after their surrender on July 14, 1789.
To kindle his partisans, he stood behind the trappings of the presidential office to deliver language more appropriate for a fire-breathing sermon. One ploy was the abundant use of the phrase “MAGA Republicans”. Mao wannabes need a neat word or phrase to encapsulate the “enemy”, a target, to roll up the opposition. Marx invented “capitalist” as a focal point of opprobrium, Stalin had his kulaks, and for Biden, his “MAGA Republicans”. Soon, afterwards, it was all over the airwaves as if the party’s media sycophants got the robo chain text.
Do you think that he limited his gaze to the MAGA subspecies of Republican? Not on your life. The speech’s language was fungible enough to tar any Republican, even the ones that Trump hates, if they continually stand athwart the political thrusts of his party’s radicalized base. Just lather them with “intimidated”, another gambit in the speech.
Rhetorical ground was laid to attack all of them since being pro-life and following the Apostle Paul on marriage were lumped together with January 6 “insurrectionists”. The constant reference to “going backwards” is the well-worn refrain of all revolutionaries. Progress is synonymous with revolution and neither has any room for the venerable and time-tested, no matter the allusion to the Constitution and rule of law. Both were cynically and repeatedly violated by this man bathed in red light.
I was waiting for the tag on Republicans as defenders of slavery (Biden golden oldie: “put you all back in chains”) and Jim Crow, completely oblivious to the fact that it was the Democratic Party that rammed through the secessionitis defense of slavery of the Civil War and constructed Jim Crow in the aftermath. These historical Democrat actions came about as reactions to the rise of the Republican Party. Biden and Democrats, get your facts straight!
In essence, Biden condemned the “MAGA Republicans” as subversives to our civil order under the banality of a “threat to our democracy”, leaving unsaid the simple fact that we don’t have a “democracy”. It’s a constitutional republic, something a bit more sophisticated than a simpleton’s 50%-plus-1 standard of mail-in ballots to decide public issues. The Constitution and the rule of law belts our public officials in all kinds of restraints in spite of Gallup.
Really, the threat that Biden had in mind wasn’t the clearly observable 574 riots, $2 billion in damage, 2,000 police casualties, and anywhere from 17 to 35 killed as a consequence of the 2020 Antifa/BLM summer of riots. No, for Biden, it was January 6 with the only death accruing to a Trump supporter. Sorry, Biden, no men in blue died in it.
The bombast left unsaid the many ways that he was soiling the Constitution and rule of law. No separation of powers for Biden with the lawmaking authority in a Congress and a president limited to executing the laws. In 2021, he tried to extend an eviction moratorium although simultaneously recognizing its illegality. He knew that he was violating the Constitution, which was later confirmed by a Supreme Court decision (Alabama Association of Realtors, et al v. Dept. of Health and Human Services, et al, Aug. 26, 2021). Most recently, he invented student loan forgiveness out of thin air in direct contradiction to the previously announced position in June of his fellow-traveler, Speaker Pelosi.
It’s not just his cutting loose from the Article II restraints which limits him to carrying out laws made in Article I (Congress). He even ignores his Constitutional duty to perform the carrying out. Item #1: immigration law. The US code is chock full of provisions that define law-abiding and non-law-abiding immigration. Word has spread like wildfire in the troubled regions of the world that the border is such an open sieve that localities east and south have been emptied of their residents to join caravans in the long trek to a border manned by a Border Patrol that has been morphed into a Welcome Wagon. After a greeting by the Border Patrol, the illegal crossers are awarded plane travel to a destination of their choice.
Caravan of immigrants approaching the US southern border in 2021.
Don’t forget, these aren’t refugees from Cuba or Middle Eastern jihadist goons. Biden, in effect, has redefined refugee in such a way as to declare 8 US Code Section 12 (Immigration and Nationality) null and void under the guise of “prosecutorial discretion”. That’s right, “discretion” is stretched to cover the nearly blanket non-enforcement of 8 US Code Section 12 by imperial presidential dictat. Hardly can Biden wrap himself in the Constitution and rule of law when his actions make him eligible for impeachment. The word is projection: hiding your intentions behind false accusations of your opponents doing what you have done.
A pattern of Democrat campaigning is evident: don’t tack to the middle, but gin-up your party’s normally uninterested, ill-informed, and lackadaisical voter base to counter the enthusiasm of the other side. It worked for Obama in 2012, Pelosi and Schumer in 2018, and Biden in 2020. The heart of the strategy is to embrace the Left, not run from it. Use absurdities, gross hyperbole, and illusory threats to get your people to the polls. For 2022, it is to make the campaign a referendum on Trump and not on the party in power with much to answer for. And all of this bombast was present in Biden’s speech.
The speech was an insult to the office of the presidency. Fear of the electorate punishing your party at the polls is no excuse for turning Independence Hall into a Nuremburg Rally. People quite rightly have an aversion to escalating food and fuel prices, shortages, crime surges, their cities becoming open sewers, their children suffocating behind filthy masks, their schools being turned into woke reeducation camps, blackouts, greenie fanaticism, the socialism – i.e., the general Democratic Party program and its consequences. Biden would profit from Clinton’s dose of sobriety after the Republican blowout in the 1994 midterms (the R’s gained 54 House seats): “The era of big government is over.” Instead, Biden gave us red meat for his Red base.
Doubling down on stupid may work if it gets Biden’s Red-oriented base to show up. Sad, but true.
RogerG
Sources:
* Numbers of casualties and damage attributed to the 2020 summer riots are curiously hard to come by. They can be found if a person expands the search beyond Wikipedia, the CNN/MSNBC nexus, and legacy media. Other than vague generalities, specifics are nowhere to be found in those venues. Here’s a list of some sources with specifics:
“More Than 2,000 Officers Injured in Summer’s Protests and Riots”, Police Magazine, Dec. 3, 2020, at https://www.policemag.com/585160/more-than-2-000-officers-injured-in-summers-protests-and-riots
“Riot deaths ignored by major networks; watchdog finds 99.3% of protest coverage focused elsewhere”, Washington Times, June 4, 2020, at https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jun/4/riot-deaths-ignored-by-major-networks-watchdog-fin/
“2020 BLM/Antifa Riot Deaths”, National Conservative, at https://national-conservative.com/extremist-files/2020-blm-antifa-deaths/
“Police chief association releases number of officers injured during violent riots”, Fox News, Dec. 1, 2020, at https://www.foxnews.com/us/police-chief-officers-injured-riots?fbclid=IwAR0wFsq7Ndyhr7HyBQQnZ10Gn4WI_eJz4gH67vbg5ehPJ8u6WBGCKgF80H8
“RIOTS BY THE NUMBERS: POLICE CASUALTIES, PEOPLE KILLED DURING ‘PEACEFUL PROTESTS’”, Louder with Crowder, July 31, 2020, at https://www.louderwithcrowder.com/riots-by-the-numbers-police-casualties-people-killed-during-peaceful-protests
Nikki Haley (l)
