A sign calling for utility company PG&E to turn the power back on is seen on the side of the road during a statewide blackout in Calistoga, Ca., Oct. 10, 2019. (Photo by John Edelson/AFP)
In my mid-twenties, I was trying to find a way to turn my History/Religious Studies degree into meaningful employment to support what was to be a burgeoning family. While in grad school, and taking a cue from a friend, I explored two avenues of study for employment: urban planning and teaching. I ended up in teaching. It slowly began to dawn on me, though, that the education and training in these fields was a grand muddle. Delving into urban planning wasn’t really scholarship but indoctrination into an ideology. Teacher training courses were frequently excursions into Summer-of-Love hippiedom and John Dewey’s socialism – a socialism applied to the classroom.
Inside the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in its earliest days. The clinic opened on June 7, 1967. Many of these people would go into the college schools of education, the teachers of teachers.
Parents, beware, your schools are hip deep in the junk to an even greater extent today. The balderdash remains and accounts to some extent for our population of college snowflakes.
Muddling (i.e., the action or process of bringing something into a disordered or confusing state), in fact, is what we do. Take for instance the ideology/science muddle. It’s the essence of environmentalism, or the effort to stitch together science factoids in support of a political scheme – i.e., socialism. What happens in real life when a muddle is at the root of public policy? A mess!
No better example can be found than in the latest craze to sweep the hominid world: greenie (“sustainable”, “renewable”, etc.) energy. Toward that end, we have the crazy-quilt of “net metering”. What’s that? It’s a ploy to bilk one energy consumer to benefit another. How? Stay tuned.
I was reading about it this morning. 40 states plus DC have elaborate schemes to force utility companies to buy the extra and unreliable electricity from mostly rooftop solar panels of homeowners – net-metering. Sounds like a great gig for the soccer mom/dads of suburbia. Right? No, it falls into the too-good-to-be-true category.
The burlesque of net-metering.
The problem lies in the “unreliable” part of the ruse. No one wants to buy a good or service if it cannot be expected to be there when needed. It’s every bit as true when contracting for lawn-mowing service as it is for PG&E or, up here, Northern Lights. The sun doesn’t align itself to the wishes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC). The utility must revamp it’s grid for the on-again/off-again nature of rooftop solar. The utility’s legal mandate to provide reliable 24/7 energy must be made to mesh with the unpredictable production of soccer mom/dad’s pigeon-shading solar panels. That’s expensive for the utility company to make work and maintain. It’ll show up in your bill, or in utility bankruptcy, or, also as in California, poorly maintained power poles going up in flames. The consequences of the muddling of “unreliable” with “reliable” will appear in many ways, many of them not good.
The alternative is simple. If you want the things, you pay and take full responsibility for them. Sounds like something that my dad told me when I was a teenager. Don’t try and get somebody else – the utility or the consumer who prizes simple reliability – to pay for your actions. But the allure of the seemingly something-for-nothing – either through tax rebates, subsidies, utility mandates, or all of the above – allows soccer mom/dad to delude themselves. The scheme is more productive of delusions than reliable energy.
For those attuned to the scam, the scheme is sold as a sacrifice for the good of the planet. Remember though, “sacrifice” is the very essence of utopia-mongering. You know, the ends-justify-means stuff. Or, as Nikolai Yezhov, head of Stain’s NKVD (Bolshevik secret police) would put it, “When you chop wood, chips fly.” AOC has interesting company.
Nikolai Yezhov, far right, next to Stalin.
Don’t buy into the racket. Furthering our descent into third-world status won’t alter India’s and China’s belching of CO2. The planet won’t be saved, our grid will resemble Venezuela’s, and we will have proven that a “smart” grid is essentially a “dumb” one. What does that say about us?
The Getty Fire burns near the Getty Center along the 405 freeway north of Los Angeles, California, U.S. October 28, 2019. (REUTERS/ Gene Blevins)
We aren’t well-served by the mass of our journalists or schools. Frequently as a simple reader or teacher I’ve come away from an article or textbook treatment of a topic with a lingering sense of bafflement. The stories don’t make much sense.
As a History teacher, for example, the common treatment of the Great Depression is awash in incoherence. Blame is placed on greed and “over-production”. What?! “Over-production” is everywhere present in an economy and is corrected by sell-offs with no hint of a depression, let alone a “great” one. As for “greed”, it’s been with us since Eve met the serpent, maybe before. It wasn’t invented by the 1920’s.
The New Deal’s answer for “overproduction” and the decline in agricultural prices.
Plus, the authors don’t attempt to explain why the thing lasted so long. The greed and over-production mantras are presented as a set-up for a love affair with FDR and all things New Deal. Interestingly the horror persisted and even worsened in ’36-’37. Textbooks and teacher training are composed of the long march of banalities, and we’re spreading the bunk to the youngins.
Ditto for news stories. Descriptions of today’s happenings are often muddled. Take for instance The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey in her piece, “California Is Becoming Unlivable”. The “unlivable” part of California is ascribed to the underlying factors of climate change and high housing costs. Both, according to Lowrey, led to California’s fires. The high cost of housing forced development into the wildland urban interface (WUI). Her answer is the totalitarian urge to herd people into apartment complexes, something the commissars in Sacramento have been trying to accomplish for at least a couple of decades. Could this have something to do with the high cost of housing? Something about the dementia of “doing the same thing and expecting a different result” comes to mind.
Could this be their vision for the future of California housing?
Mulberry Street, NYC, circa 1900.
Of course they won’t leave the topic without throwing the fire epidemic into the climate change vortex. But the climate change god doesn’t just pick on California. It’s a global phenomenon. What has turned California into matchsticks is a combination of its dry-summer climate, with its El Diablo winds, and the clowns in Sacramento. Wildland fire suppression tactics are so passé among the ruling class of lefties in Sacramento. Though, in the dry-summer chaparral biomes, it’s like playing with firecrackers in a refinery.
The clowns try to hide their incompetence behind a barrage of charges against the utility companies. They can only get away with it under conditions of collective amnesia. PG&E and the rest of the gang are under the PUC’s thumb and its lefty hobby horses. Hardening the grid in a dry-summer climate takes second fiddle to dreams of a greenie energy utopia. After piling up the firewood under the weakly-maintained power lines, the goofs are shocked that physics takes over. Astounding!
A power line goes up in flames along a hillside as the Cocos Fire continues to burn in San Marcos, California May 15, 2014. (REUTERS/Mike Blake)
Parents beware of the indoctrination of your kids. Additionally, you have to be leery of the network news and print and digital publications. I’m beginning to wonder about the benefits of ignorance when compared to propaganda. Mmmm, something to think about?
Accounts of the last moments of Abū Bakr al-Baghdadi depict him retreating into a tunnel with a dead end and blowing himself up with three of his children. The tale proves that a dead end is what you make of it. For al-Baghdadi, it was off to his 70 virgins (I don’t know where the kids ended up in Islamist theology.). For the Democrats in their incessant drive to impeach Trump, similarly at a dead end of facts, they are weaving a fairy tale in order to create the illusion of the light of dastardly and impeachable offenses at the end of the tunnel. The reality is that there is nothing but a wall of rock and compacted dirt.
Let’s see, we’ve experienced a “whistleblower” complaint which proved to be a collection of hearsay water cooler and lunch room talk among the minions of the administrative state.
The conspirators couldn’t spin the call at the center of their scheme because Trump released the transcript to everyone on the planet. Then the story is repeated, nothing much added, in the tales spun by others vaguely mentioned in the initial yarn. If anything is added, it’s nothing but feelings of anger of people who are upset about how the president is conducting foreign policy. They’re flabbergasted that an elected official – the president – would dare skip over they’re unelected, self-anointed wisdom. Then they’ve attempted to establish a “quid pro quo” as if something that is common in the course of foreign relations is somehow illegal, while it clearly isn’t. What does all this add up to? Nothing!
Shakespeare spun a tale of “Much Ado About Nothing”. The Democrats are trying to steal the mantle of master poet laureate. Their fiction, though, says more about them than Trump.
The Coriolis Effect: the natural bending of global air and water currents due to the earth’s rotation on its axis.
The global oceanic gyres from the Coriolis effect.
I’ve often wondered why liberals since the late 19th century have a reflex to lean ever further left. The tendency is very pronounced in today’s Democratic Party. Propositions that were soundly rejected only a couple of years ago have morphed into near dogma in the party. Take for instance the almost universal embrace of gargantuan social engineering in Green New Deals; or the racially charged seizure of wealth from one generation to fund awards to a current and specific racially-favored group 150 years removed from the wrong; or the open and broad avowals of faith in socialism, while, for some, still denying it; or the proud espousal of confiscatory taxation in spite of its historically ruinous effects (JFK would be shocked.).
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn presents a possible answer in the second volume of his 3-part historical novel, “The Red Wheel: November 1916”. In describing the rise of Russian left radicalism in the decades prior to the 1917 revolutions (there ended up being two in March and October), he compares the liberal’s leftward reflex to the natural phenomena of the Coriolis effect. Here’s how he puts it:
“Just as the Coriolis effect is constant over the whole of this earth’s surface, and the flow of rivers is deflected in such a way that it is always the right bank that is eroded and crumbles, while the floodwater goes leftward, so do all forms of democratic liberalism on earth strike always to the right and caress the left. Their sympathies [are] always with the left, their feet are capable of shuffling only leftward, their heads bob busily as they listen to leftist arguments – but they [are] disgraced if they take a step to or listen to a word from the right.” (p.59)
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn
Makes sense to me. Daniel Pipes in his magisterial works on the Russian Revolution described the blind spot in the outlook of the liberals as they deposed the Tsar in March of 1917 and tried to build a constitutional republic. If there was a threat, they were convinced it would come from the right. They ignored the warnings of the intelligence services that left extremists, the Bolsheviks, were arming and planning a seizure of power. Low and behold, Petrograd was left mostly undefended and the rest of Russian history thereafter is one of villainy and misery.
The 1930’s Holodomor, or Stain-engineered famine to destroy peasant resistance in southern Russia and the Ukraine.New arrivals to the expanding chain of concentration camps as part of Stalin’s war against the peasants in the 1930’s.
What lies in store for us as we approach the momentous date of November 2020? We have a president wounded by the incessant drumbeat of an increasingly radical left Democratic Party with numerous allies in the media, academia, entertainment, and among the campus and street mobs. His opposition, the Democratic Party, has become the vanguard of the radical left’s implementation of an all-encompassing transformation of all of society to fit their warped vision.
Antifa protesters burning American flags.
Will the political Coriolis effect in modern America duplicate the misery foisted on Russia? This is the time for some serious adult thinking on the question … before it is too late.
Proverbs 18:17 (ESV): The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.
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A 1930’s Stalinist show trial in the Soviet Union.Adam Schiff (l), chairman, and some of the House Intelligence Committee members.
The madhouse in DC over impeachment is more reminiscent of Stalin’s show trials during his purges than American jurisprudence. The House spectacle is all about a predetermined verdict being sold behind a facade of serious-sounding rubbish. The American public is being misled. Putin is taking notes.
The Democrats have been on a jihad since November 8, 2016. The latest gambit hinges on a nefarious Trump “quid pro quo”. If the ploy was limited to that, it’s a nothingburger. “Quid pro quo” literally means “something for something”. If that was all there was to it, it’s a very thin reed to support a massive structure of impeachment. Does the Louisiana Purchase remind you of anything? International relations are almost solely conducted on a quid-pro-quo basis.
Really, though, what the show-trial prosecutors are trying to conjure is something more: a quid-pro-quo-or-else. And that, the call’s transcript doesn’t support. The “favor” doesn’t mention the Bidens till further down in the conversation. At the top of Trump’s mind is the skulduggery conducted against him in 2016. The Bidens were an afterthought. Many interpretations are possible whenever a verbal conversation is put to paper, but you can’t say that only Schiff’s reading is the viable one.
The “or else” part is the withholding of a weapons sale, or so they say – while confusing a “sale” with “aid”. Well, whatever, the Ukraine got the weapons a month later. The only president to withhold military aid to Ukraine was Obama. And further, Zelensky and his government wasn’t even aware that they were being allegedly coerced. It’s a strange quid-pro-quo when quid has no knowledge of the purported quo. This is nonsense on stilts.
US javelin missile. It was the key part of Trump-approved weapons sale to the Ukraine.
Schiff and his sorcerers have to create the illusion of a grand evil out of thin gruel. How? It’s simple: control the process! In other words, hold a show trial but call it something else. The Dems liken this charade to a grand jury. They’re right in an infantile way: charges (articles of impeachment) come out of it. But there the resemblance ends. It’s a strange grand jury proceeding when people representing the defense (Republicans) are present alongside people representing the prosecutors (Democrats). Instead, the whole affair has the adversarial characteristics of a trial. As such, the situation cries for full due process, not the secret hearings with Schiff the only one allowed to call witnesses and his serial leaking of cherry-picked statements to make his fiction seem like non-fiction. All the while, the Republicans are muzzled by keeping the thing secret. This is scandalous.
Another underhanded excuse is often bellowed to make the outrage more digestible. The process is said to be exclusively “political” in nature. But is that true? No. Impeachment is a blend of politics and statute. If “politics” was the sole driving force, once we developed political parties in the late 18th century, opposing parties controlling the Presidency and Congress would be embroiled in impeachments right and left. The fact that we have had so few impeachments tells us something. It tell us that something more than the fulfillment of political vendettas should be at the core of the process. It must be anchored in a clear and unmistakable violation of the Constitution or a serious criminal statue. A high bar is required, not the low bar of grotesque interpretations of paper transcriptions of phone calls or previously Court-approved exercises of executive privilege.
U.S. President Bill Clinton points while being asked questions regarding his relationship with former White House intern [Monica Lewinsky] during his videotaped interrogation before a grand jury on August 17. The four hour videotape was released by the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee along with 2,800 pages of [Lewinsky] case evidence.If Trump is guilty, what of Obama’s use of his “phone and pen”? He created by his lonesome new categories of immigration law violators to be free of those same laws. Is this an example of the Article II branch acting like the Article I branch? What about “faithfully executing the laws”? Or how about the Fast and Furious episode in an entrapment scheme against our Second Amendment? Have we forgotten the IRS vendetta against Obama’s political opponents? There’s more here against Obama, using Pelosi’s standard, than there ever is against Trump.
Republicans, remember this time. It’s no holds barred regarding impeachment. The Democrats have unleashed the tactic of hiding election loss anger and ideological and policy disagreements under spurious claims of misbehavior. You too, Republicans, can follow the same show trial script when the time comes.
Authorities announced Wednesday that the 2017 Thomas fire was caused by Southern California Edison power lines.(Mike Eliason / Associated Press)
Once a myth gets firmly established, you’ll play like hell to correct the popular falsehood. Here’s one. We are said to use only 10% of our brain. It isn’t true. Neurologist Barry Gordon at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine says “… we use virtually every part of the brain, and that [most of] the brain is active almost all the time” (Read about it here).
The myth-making potential of human beings was fully on display as I was listening this morning to Rush Limbaugh. I normally don’t tune into the program but just happened to take a listen. At that moment, a caller was describing how a Californian could exploit the mandates and tax breaks to pay nothing for their electricity. Limbaugh was initially caught flat-footed. Then during a break he uncovered the reality of the scam. And so can anyone if they apply your brain.
The flim-flam is another rendition of the shell game. Like the peanut under the walnut shell, socialist governments move the community’s wealth around to create the illusion of getting something for nothing for a favored segment of the population. If the recipients far outnumber the coerced givers, you’ll run into Margaret Thatcher’s maxim: “‘The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money”. In other words, borrowing another epigram from Economics 101: “There is no such thing as a free lunch” (known by the acronym TINSTFL).
The state’s commissars use the smoke and mirrors of their laws to fabricate a distorted market. Artificial demand is concocted by ordering home builders and home buyers to install and buy the greenie equipment, or else pay the government-created and extortionate electricity rates. It’s like paying protection money. The costs are hidden by piling them onto the backs of taxpayers through subsidies and tax breaks, and forcing them onto the utility companies’ bottom line.
Installing solar panels in California. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
No wonder the state’s grid is deteriorating into a public hazard.
Gov. Gavin Newsom announced an executive order to shift gas tax dollars to “rail”, October 2019.
Native Americans since the days of the 17th century French double-dealing claimed the “white man spoke with a forked tongue”. The tradition thrives in California.
Guess what? The one-party Democrat state hawked a law in 2017 to hike gas taxes 12 cents per gallon, 20 cents for diesel, and vehicle registration fees from 25$-125$ for “road repairs”. The state’s electorate confirmed the swindle when it recently rejected the repeal of the hikes in Prop 6. The folks probably thought that they were getting money to address the state’s crumbling, unsafe, and massively congested roadways.
Wait, not so fast. The state’s slick-haired governor, Gavin Newsom, has just issued one of his ukases [executive orders] to siphon off some of the money for “rail”. These lefty Dems can’t resist that totalitarian reflex to order people’s lives down to the minutest detail. So “better roads” has come to mean herding people out of their cars and onto government mass transit. The deception is justified by the all-purpose excuses of “climate change” and “greenhouse gases”. There you have it, Californians: the Iroquios were right.
So, a transportation system that makes sense for densely packed areas (Western Europe, Japan, Bos-Wash) will be foisted on the 3rd largest state in land area. In the meantime, consider your relocation options as you send your daughter out on the increasingly dangerous task to get a gallon of milk.
When you elect zealots, you get ends-justifies-means forked tongues.
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren in a May interview in Iowa Falls. (Daniel Acker/For The Washington Post)
I remember a conversation with a friend and colleague who appeared to be apoplectic about Donald Trump’s lies during the campaign and up to the aftermath of the inauguration (when the exchange ended). Wow, looking back on it, over-stating crowd sizes seems awfully pale when compared to the whoppers coming out of the mouths of Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Lena Dunham, Jussie Smollett, and the adolescent Amari Allen at Immanuel Christian School. They have in common a desire to exploit ritual identity-victimhood, the central tenet of being “woke”.
Whew, let’s take ’em one at a time. Warren’s angle is to peddle a Native American heritage that doesn’t exist for professional advancement. She compounds the error by spreading a tale of losing a job for being pregnant, also fully debunked. At least the second tall tale takes advantage of something that she quite clearly is: a woman.
Former Vice President Joe Biden campaigns for president in Davenport, Iowa, on June 11, 2019. (Photo: Joshua Lott/Getty Images)
After Warren, we have Biden. This guy is famous for his whoppers. The one that should be most irritating is his rendition of the traffic accident that killed his wife and daughter. He bellows that they died at the hands of drunk driver. Sorry, Joe, not true. The authorities at the time said alcohol wasn’t involved and even more interestingly concluded that Mrs. Biden was the cause of the collision when she strayed into the truck’s path. What’s more galling is Biden’s sliming of the other driver as one who “drinks his lunch”. The man’s family demands a retraction. This is more than a mistake on Biden’s part; it’s evidence of a Biden character flaw.
If that’s not enough, along comes the mouth of the lefty celebrity community, Lena Dunham. She claims in her book that she was raped in college by, what else, a white College Republican. The only problem: it ain’t true. In fact, her publisher had to shell out a settlement to the innocent accused. Is there a congenital connection between being woke and lying? One wonders.
The fictions continue with the little Amari Allen at Immanuel Christian. It just so happens to be the place of part-time employment for Karen Pence, and, of course, being a place of traditional Christianity – the LGBTQ agenda is an awkward fit there.
Karen Pence at Immanuel Christian School. (Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press)
Well, anyway, the little girl came home with a story of abuse and physical assault by, what else, some white boys. The only problem – you guessed it – it ain’t true. At the time, for our woke press, it was a two-fer: racism, racism everywhere, and the VP’s wife is a functionary of the white racist machine.
Do you see a pattern here? I do. The woke folks are so enthusiastic about their lefty social engineering that they’ll defame anyone and anything to get there.
I can’t stop here. Does the slander of the Duke lacrosse team remind you of anything? How about the alleged rape culture at U. of Virginia, courtesy of Rolling Stone, and subsequently and fully discredited? The despicable and wild tales of Kavanaugh’s youth? Come on, let’s call them what they are: lies. Don’t be a bit surprised that more deceits lay in store after the completion of the investigation of the investigators of Russia-gate and whistleblower-gate.
I’ll ask once again: Is there something congenital between being woke and lying? One wonders.
RogerG
* You can read about many of these episodes in Kevin Williamson’s recent piece in National Review.
The second “whistleblower” complaint is probably a repetition of the same complaint from the same set of eyes with just a different figurehead from the group. By the way, the complaint makes reference to a group that increasingly sounds like a cabal. There’s a term for a form of espionage with the same information being used twice to create the appearance of confirmation. Bottom line, it’s in the toolkit of the intelligence community. And it’s probably operative here.
There’s more to this latest effort to impeach. “Whistleblowing” provides cover for the “whistleblower”. Labeling the person a “whistleblower” shields the identity of the person while also stonewalling efforts to plumb his or her identity for motivations – you know, like the complainant’s possible partisan political aims. Secondly, the non-inquiry inquiry is conducted to prevent a courtroom adversarial setting that would give evidentiary and debate rights to opponents. Keeping the process like a committee hearing, but just labeling it an “impeachment inquiry”, puts great power in the hands of the committee chairman and the Democratic leadership. It’s a tactic that would make Stalin beam with envy.
It’s a two-fer, and nothing but a political flim-flam.
I was drawn back to the Soviet concept of the “correlation of forces” after reading Yuval Levin’s piece from over a week ago (Sept. 27), “The Impeachment Train”. The Soviet notion was fully researched by one of our Defense Dept.’s agencies (DARPA) in a report, “The Soviet Concept of the Correlation of Forces”, in 1976.
Soviet era propaganda poster.
The Soviets sought to exploit what they considered to be favorable circumstances to advance their foreign policy goals at our expense – “the correlation of forces” so-called. The current period in our country’s history has all the ingredients for another “correlation of forces”, one that could drive the nation into strongly hostile camps resembling the antebellum divisions of the 1820’s to 1860, hopefully without the violence. The “correlation of forces” are present for all to see.
The divide has been described as a blue/red and urban/rural one. It’s true; we are deeply split in those two ways. I’ve written about this often. Since the divide is culturally-based, it has the capacity to be even more combustible. Enter Donald Trump. A divide that has been building for quite some time is deepened and widened by Trump’s style of politicking and personal mannerisms. Those manners drive people to their corners.
Part of the blame lies at Trump’s lack of a filter when he speaks (or Tweets). He’s not Bill Clinton who can compartmentalize. Trump in private is nearly the same as Trump in public. He doesn’t distinguish that much between a locker room and moments before microphones and cameras. He cares not about whether he’s talking to foreign dignitaries in private phone calls or crowds at one of his rallies. With Trump, you get what you see … everywhere. He’s unfiltered and inflammatory.
Trump rally, August 2019.
Thus, he elicits strong reactions. Trump’s presence isn’t a soothing one. Sparky talk incites sparky actions. Newton’s third law of motion comes to mind: for every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction.
And for hypersensitive Dems, their over-the-top reactions are easily facilitated when the party has been lurching ever leftward for the past few decades. Today, there’s not much difference between them and the radical left of the 60’s. Much of it is driven by the cultural radicalization of our urban and suburban areas. The radical has become mainstream in the party. Sure, Trump makes it easier for them to embrace extremist policies as they seek to distinguish themselves from what they considered to be a wholly detestable figure. As the cultural undertow pulls the middle of the party to the left, the more moderate elements get dragged along. Of course, Trump’s behavior is no excuse to foist the poison of socialism on the country.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey (right) speak during a press conference to announce Green New Deal legislation on Feb. 7. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
Trump is not the reason for the Democrats’ love affair with socialism and their leftward leap. Environmentalism is. Environmentalism is a pseudo-religious ideology. It’s religious for its faith in a materialistic explanation of reality. Interestingly, the combination of “religious” and “materialistic” in the same sentence makes for a classic oxymoron. Recognition of the fact by the cultural left won’t stop them from papering over the disjunction by turning Jesus and the Bible into citadels of wokeness, to go along with the long-desired surrender of humanity to a semi-deity, mother nature. It’s pantheism at best. The dogmas are grotesquely incoherent.
Environmentalism provides excellent cover, though, for socialism’s expansion of government power into every facet of life. Is it really all that surprising for the party of government to be a party of socialism? Environmentalism satisfies the Democrats’ itch for government control. The modern Democratic Party is so immersed in its socialism that it doesn’t take much for their opponents to be cast as evil. They don’t need a Trump. Anyone not drinking the Kool-Aid can be branded a “denier”, “racist”, “xenophobe”, “fascist”, and on and on. They didn’t wait for Trump to brand George W. Bush a religious fanatic, a hater, a wanton killer in the chant “Bush lied, people died”, a fascist, a corrupt stooge of Big Oil, an instigator of 9-11, etc., etc.
Code Pink at the White House, about 2005.A protester calling for the impeachment of Bush in June 16, 2005.
The word “impeachment” frequently graced their lips. Trump’s crude mannerisms make for an even easier target for their ideologically-driven hypersensitivities.
The entire gamut of woke communities – on our campuses, in our cities, among our super-rich tech and finance tycoons, amidst white collar public employees, et al – can be energized for lefty activism as need arises. Ask Brett Kavanaugh. Without a shred of evidence, accusers came out of the woodwork to level the worst kind of human conduct at him: perversion, rape, gang rape, a reveler in the grossest bacchanalias, you name it. Even the most “credible” accuser, Blasey Ford, turned out to be “incredible”. In law, we must keep in mind that a story is fiction till its proven. These were never proven, and probably couldn’t ever be proven. They are lies.
Brett Kavanaugh at confirmation hearings, September 2018.Protesters demonstrating against the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh on the steps of the Supreme Court.The discredited and unsubstantiated Kavanaugh accusers.
The script is repeated on Trump. Instead of an engineered line of supposed female victims, we have the denizens of public employment near the top of the Leviathan pyramid coming forward under the cover of “whistleblower”. They are proof of the existence of a government worker subculture with its own set of norms, values, and expectations that are distinct from their reason for existence. Some of those norms are ideological and partisan. Though, it must be admitted in the case of Trump that a “D” and “R” designation isn’t as relevant as the collective judgment at the water cooler that Trump is reprehensible. Nonetheless, there are vastly more D’s than R’s on the rolls of taxpayer-funded employment. Virginia is blue for the fact. The administrative state isn’t exactly a level playing field.
The ginning up of the activists will require additional gripes to increase the credibility of the charges as per the Kavanaugh caper. It doesn’t matter if the tales are true or not. What matters is the number. The one “whistleblower” story will be followed by others. As I write, a new complaint against Trump is currently percolating from the depths of the Leviathan.
Could Trump adjust by dialing down the bombast? Yeah, but not likely. Trump is like the big post man in basketball who drains a 3-pointer in the beginning of the game. After that, he cannot be found anywhere near the bucket for the rest of the game. Trump believes that his outspoken and unfiltered self is the reason for his shocking victory in 2016, while ignoring the loss of the ‘burbs and married women. So, that’s what we’re going to get for the rest of his time in the White House. He’ll continue to do it till he faces defeat.
But who knows, he may turn out to be a great 3-point shooter. Color me skeptical.
Trump’s saving grace is … today’s Democratic Party. All the talk about Trump’s incivility ignores the Democrats’ irresponsible embrace of socialism and the cultural left. Trump’s behavior may be deplorable, but the Democrats cannot be trusted with our nation. This is one of the weaknesses of some of the criticisms coming from the center-right, like Yuval Levin’s column. I don’t know of anyone who can claim that a dethronement of Trump won’t lead to an empowerment of the Democrats’ socialism. For the average citizen, their choices appear bleak: continue the Trump drama or ruin the nation by handing the keys of power to the Democrats’ leftism.
Levin is right when he says the biggest victim will be a loss of faith in our institutions. Yet, it’s not as if those institutions weren’t deserving of disrepute. The Supreme Court, and the courts in general, have been way out of their lane. Modern presidents have turned the presidency into an almost divine-right branch. Obama had his phone and pen. Congress is a eunuch that performs like a clown show. The administrative state is a law unto itself, so huge as to be unmanageable. The Constitution is made an empty document and open to the manipulations of the whims of men. We have the rule of men, not laws.
At the center of this governance by malfeasance is the institutional presence and power of the Democratic Party and its socialism-at-all-costs ethic. Trump may be personally repulsive; the Democrats are thoroughly unfit for office. The correlation of forces is lining up for a real brouhaha. The modern correlation of forces are a divisive figure in the White House, the Democratic Party’s muscular socialism, the ongoing cultural substitution of Christianity with Environmentalism, the emergence of a very partisan administrative state as the fourth branch of government, and the media serving as a megaphone for the advancement of the Democrats’ socialism and its cultural leftism. Many of these malignant forces are emanating from those blue dots on the electoral map.
Buckle up because impeachment promises to be a real donnybrook.
