Trump – Page 7 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

January 31, 2023

A Time of Political Insanity

Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene won't commit to Capitol rally in support of Jan. 6 rioters ... — Rep. Matt Gaetz (R, Fla.) and Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene (R, Ga.)

Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) and Pres. Joe Biden at the microphone

When does just being wrong cross over into insanity? Einstein had an answer during his debate with the proponents of quantum theory (mechanics) in the 1920’s. The quantum theory presented the possibility of unpredictability in the atomic and subatomic world: identical circumstances can produce different results. Flippantly, Einstein threw off the one-line response, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Thus, according to Einstein, quantum theory proponents such as Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg were engaging in folly.

Black and white photo showing Bohr and Einstein sitting side by side in conversation. — Niels Bohr (left) with Albert Einstein in the late 1920s, when quantum mechanics was in its infancy. (Photo credit: Emilio Segre Visual Archives/AIP/SPL)

Today, we have good reason to know better. Micro reality behaves differently than macro. Einstein’s explanation of the cosmos (macro) can’t account for activity in the atomic and subatomic realm (micro).

However, applying Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to human affairs would be an invitation to chaos. Out the window would go any universal principles like deductive/inductive reasoning, equal protection of the laws, rules of due process, standards of decency, human rights, anything regarding the proper regulation of human conduct in a society, the scientific method itself if taken to an extreme. Yet, that is where we are going. We are heading back into places that were known to be thickets of danger and malevolence.

Passion and bias overwhelm good sense. Indeed, that happenstance may be the only true constant in human conduct through the ages, down to the present, and into the future.

We pride ourselves in being better than our ancestors, progressives being the most hubristic. Their entire belief system is based on it. Yet, an earlier incarnation of today’s progressives produced improvements in how a democracy registers the will of the people, advances that modern progressives are busy dismantling. Is this “progress” or a return to an atavistic past, one that their ideological ancestors were trying to escape?

Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall cartoon by Thomas Nast | American History | Pinterest | Tammany hall ... — Thomas Nast cartoon of Boss Tweed of the Tammany Hall Democrat political machine of NYC.

Einstein’s insanity definition is fully operational when it comes to the Democratic Party’s efforts to shred the accomplishments of 19th century progressives. Back then, progressives were aghast at the corruption of a powerful few in smoke-filled backrooms. Their efforts at broad political, economic, and social reform were thwarted by a clique with the power to manipulate elections. Before they could accomplish anything, elections must be cleaned up. The process must be professionalized with nonpartisan administration of elections, clean voter rolls, the secret ballot, and diligent prosecution of fraud. Only then, they believed, could they circumvent the self-serving few stuffing the ballot boxes.

Professor Richard T. Ely of Johns Hopkins U. and the U. of Wisconsin, influenced Woodrow Wilson, Rober La Follette, Theodore Roosevelt, etc. (photo: public domain/via Wikimedia)

After, other election reforms would kick in: the popular election of Senators, popular vote primaries, the referendum, initiative, and recall. More democratization, but first in clean elections, was thought to be the cure. Now, it’s back to stuffing the ballot box. Democrats resist efforts to make voter rolls match the actual eligible warm bodies in a precinct, like removal of the dead and noncitizens or those who moved. They thwart voter ID initiatives, whose purpose is to ensure that the person showing up to vote is actually the person on the list. And they are enthusiastic proponents of mail-in balloting, unmonitored drop boxes, the third party harvesting of ballots, same-day registration, voting beyond election day, the kinds of proposals that place a huge question mark over election integrity. What could go wrong? Is it completely unreasonable to find these ideas at least troubling?

Not for Democrats. They don’t have misgivings, blinded as they are by the rhetorical device of “disenfranchisement”, the bogeyman of systemic racism, a zeal to win elections at all costs, and making it so easy to vote that the insentient, uninterested, and those desiring to vote and vote often have an open field. Public faith in the result is sacrificed in the fury of everyone, dead or alive, having a ballot(s) in their hand. My sons still receive California absentee ballots years after ID and registration in Montana.

The New York Times in a brief moment of sanity declared, “Voting by mail is now common enough and problematic enough that election experts say there have been multiple elections in which no one can say with confidence which candidate was the deserved winner” (see below). My faith in elections has taken a hit since easy-to-voting/easy-to-cheat has become the official doctrine of the Party and in jurisdictions under its control.

Their whole scheme was encapsulated in the Democrats’ Senate Bill 1 of 2021, the horribly misnamed “For the People Act”. All of the above would be imposed on the entire country if a couple of Democrat Senators had decided to follow the rest of the lemmings over the cliff.

Far from leaving the Democrats’ Tammany Hall past in the dust, they are now embracing it. The single biggest threat to election integrity is the mail-in ballot. Think about it: instead of a ballot given to a confirmed eligible voter in front of many witnesses, and the person is observed going to a booth to secretly mark it, and it is dropped into the box under the eye of a nonpartisan official, the Democrats want to shotgun ballots in the mail. Yes, participation will increase . . . but by whom?

Mail-in ballots on the floor at the Park East Terrace Apartments. — Absentee ballots below the mailboxes at a Paterson, NJ, apartment complex, May 2020.

The ballots lie on the floor in piles in apartment mailrooms. Multiple ballots are delivered to a single residence and what happens to them once taken inside is anyone’s guess. The sole bow to authentication is a Boy-Scout-oath signature on a perjury line. So much for the single ballot reflecting the conscience of a single person. It doesn’t take the imagination of Lewis Carroll to picture what might be happening beyond the domicile’s door. Add the likelihood of a partisan activist delivering and collecting the things (ballot harvesting) – and who knows what else they’re doing – and no wonder I’m ready to throw up my hands and be done with voting.

The Democrats forestall any steps to allay concerns. They glibly point to the rarity of voter fraud prosecutions. Get real, they’ve created a system that makes it hard to identify fraud. The signature on a mail-in ballot is no guarantee of authenticity because it was produced in the same manner as the marked ballot – behind a closed door. Once the things are collected and delivered, they are shorn of their envelopes and placed in piles. Authentication is gone, gone forever.

How can fraud be uncovered at this point? People have to be extremely stupid to be caught. Prosecutions are a measure of stupidity and not election integrity. The secret ballot is dead, dead!

Slipshod voting is as bad as slipshod policing. In the latter, you may get killed, pistol-whipped, or face wrongful prosecution. With the former, you will be ruined by political hucksters. Come to think about it, what’s the difference?

Under the skin of today’s Democratic Party progressives is an old-fashioned and venal Tammany Hall ward heeler. They are back to a deeply rooted behavior that progressives of an earlier incarnation would find abhorrent and a bit insane.

The other party, the current Republican Party, hews even more closely to Einstein’s definition. A significant block of the Party can’t shake its fetish for Donald Trump no matter how many times he embarrasses the Party and its electoral chances. This influential chunk of the Party’s base would rather die on the hill of confrontation than make room for the part of the electorate who are 70% with them but can’t take the juvenile boorishness. This blinkered part of the party can’t get their heads around the fact that politics is about addition and not subtraction. Reliance on the cult-of-personality cohort in the party’s base to choose nominees will only guarantee more Democrat inaugurals.

2022 Midterms: Dr. Mehmet Oz calls John Fetterman to concede Pennsylvania's US Senate race — Mehmet Oz concedes to John Fetterman, Nov. 9, 2022.

You’d think that the November 2022 midterms would wake them up. No such luck. Back then, in many key primary races when a more experienced and more popular candidate in relation to the Democrat frontrunner squared off against a Trump-endorsed one for statewide offices (Senator for example), the Trumpist won and then proceeded to lose the general. The current Democrat majority in the Senate owes much to Trump’s endorsement of untested and “anti-establishment” candidates.

Einstein’s insanity still afflicts a majority of the party’s base. They are proving it weekly. A spate of polls in January 2023 exhibits the same tendency. Emerson, Morning Consult, and Harvard Harris show Trump besting DeSantis by 26, 19, and 20 points respectively for the nomination. Public opinion is fluid with polls providing only a snapshot, albeit a fuzzy one. Still, Republicans show that they can’t seem to kick their Trump fix.

May be an illustration of one or more people, people standing, suit and text

Trump’s stature with the general electorate is more troubling. A deep dive into the Harris poll shows him besting Biden by 5 points. DeSantis does so by 3. Good news for Trump? Not so fast. Biden is standing atop a wrecked economy, border, culture, schools, and public safety – underwater by 14 in his favorables. Yet, Trump only looks marginally better than a wholly discredited Biden. Among possible Republican challengers, Trump shares negative likeability numbers (-3) with Ted Cruz (-2) and Mike Pompeo (-4). DeSantis beams brightly, up by 13 in the sunny uplands of likeability. Amazingly, Republicans in the poll still favored the one with the higher negatives, and therefore with weaker prospects. At this juncture, they are poised to do to America what Arizona and Pennsylvania Republicans did to their states. Knowingly choosing weakness might be an additional definition of insanity.

It won’t require much donor cash from the Democrats’ cadre of billionaire smear merchants to remind people of Trump’s vulgarity. The guy daily confirms the worst about him: occasionally cavorting with the lunatic fringe and incessant recourse to worn out narcissisms.

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He opens his mouth and middle-class suburbanites cringe. The schtick leaves only the diehards who revel in politics as performance art – “owning the libs”, “Trump being Trump”. Thus, the Trump following is starting to resemble Grateful Dead groupies: bellicose, aging, and regularly depleted by admissions to nursing homes and funeral parlors. Don’t look here for a winning coalition.

With Democrats professing affection for Marxist folly (in CRT, systemic oppression, the too-numerous …phobias, eat the rich), and resorting to Tammany Hall electoral tactics, one has to wonder about their grip on sanity, or honesty, or at least good sense.

May be an image of text that says 'RI 2 BIDEN MODERATE MARX @Ramireztoons POLICIES BEHIND the MASK michaelpramirez.com'

Republicans are proving themselves to be no better. Shockingly, many, maybe a majority, have come to fondle crassness and crudity as some kind of winner. Combine those bestialities with inexperience and naivete in candidate choice and we end up with Democrats getting a Mulligan (second chance) to make more hash of our lives. Republicans don’t have a grip on the first rule of politics: first, you’ve got to win elections. Republicans hitching their wagon to Trump, and candidates like him, will only guarantee another wild ride over the cliff.

We can’t even discuss these matters sanely, intelligently. Our vocabulary is riddled with empty generalities. Mostly they are straw-man figures of hate. A good portion of the chattering classes on the right lambast the “establishment” and “RHINOS” without much definition beyond somebody who might have governing experienced and lacks a hair-trigger Defcon 3 personality. Democrats are straitjacketed by a paranoia about a fascist under every rug, “systemic” racism when you can’t find real racism, Gaia-worship in climate-change mania, and an ever-expanding list of “protective classes” in need of their paternalistic care . . . at our expense. Listening to Tucker Carlson or Matt Gaetz on the right is as shrill to the ears as Biden, MSNBC, or AOC on the left. If they aren’t insane, why do they talk like it?

Whew, woe be to the American republic at this degenerate phase in its life cycle. We appear to be so insane.

RogerG

Read more here:
* “Trio of polls show Trump clawing back momentum from DeSantis”, Zachary Basu, Axios, 1/24/23, at https://www.axios.com/2023/01/24/trump-desantis-polls-2024-presidential-election
* Harvard-Harris Poll, January 18-19, 2024, at https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/HHP_Jan2023_KeyResults.pdf
* NYT skepticism of mail-in voting can be found in “It Takes a Superspreader to Know a Superspreader: Whether Sturgis, BLM, or voting by mail, the media chooses narrative over facts every time.”, Gerald Baker, Wall Street Journal, 9/14/2020, at https://www.wsj.com/articles/it-takes-a-superspreader-to-know-a-superspreader-11600097758
* Additionally, NYT’s skepticism can be found here: “Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises” at https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-by-mail-faulty-ballots-could-impact-elections.html
* The differences between modern progressives and their 19th century cousins can be found here: “Modern Vs. 19th-Century Progressives”, Jason Merchey, 11/22/2017, at https://valuesofthewise.com/modern-vs-19th-century-progressives/

December 10, 2022December 11, 2022

“Cleanup on Isle . . . “

May be an image of 2 people — Senator Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.) gestures during an election night party after a projected win in the midterm runoff election in Atlanta, Ga., December 6, 2022. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)

The dust is beginning to settle, or so I thought. The Trump-endorsed Herschel Walker lost in the Georgia runoff to the sharp-tongued leftist masquerading as a man of the cloth, Raphael Warnock. Georgia has a rabble-rousing socialist to represent it in the U.S. Senate, to go along with the state’s other non-card-carrying member of the Socialist International, Jon Osoff. But the state’s leadership went red. Go figure. And just as things were settling down, Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema dropped the Democrat label yesterday morning and officially became an independent, and we are back to choking on dust again. What does all this mean? Who knows, but I suspect there’s much to clean up on isle . . . for both parties.

The Georgia situation is perplexing. The results of the 2022 elections left the state in a condition of political dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder). Think about it: the radical left in the US Senate for the state and solid conservatives from the governor’s mansion to majorities in the state houses. How? What?

Republicans have some “cleanup on isle . . . ”. The mess comes in the form of the person of Donald Trump. The guy is simply not the winner of his boasts. He’s a big turn-off. He appeals to a narrow slice of the electorate, but he’s toxic in suburbia. One step forward, three steps back. Walker carried the Trump label, a liability too strong to overcome in a rough-cut newcomer.

May be a cartoon of text

Some reports indicate that Trump convinced Walker to run, and thus exposed himself to the Democrats’ usual rectal examination. He came up short after the smears, but everywhere else on the ballot, Republicans did very well. Jim Geraghty of National Review Online lays out the results. He reports that Republicans in all the statewide races broke the 50% threshold in the general election and thus avoided runoffs, with the lone exception of Walker. And roughly 200,000 fewer Georgians voted for Walker in the runoff than the general. I won’t speculate on the meaning of that, but it’s clear that Walker is less appealing than the rest of the Republican slate. He’s got personal baggage, and additionally he’s got Trump to live down.

Walker joins a broad cast of characters who, instead of the union label, had the Trump label and lost. It was particularly true in battleground states, the states that Republicans have to win to become a majority. Pennsylvanians preferred a stroke victim to Oz. In the governor’s contest, Arizonians favored a millennial uptalking airhead who wouldn’t debate, and couldn’t win one, and avoided public appearances over the quick-witted, fast-talking, Trump-endorsed telecaster, Keri Lake. Like her inspiration, she’s suing and caterwauling over the election results. The Senate race wasn’t even close with Trump’s novice, Blake Masters, falling way short. To no surprise, In the deeper blue bastions of Lefty lunacy, Trump’s imprimatur didn’t prevent a shellacking.

It seems that Trump threw around his endorsements like a drunk trust-fund brat tossing chips in a Las Vegas casino. He appeared to be so flippant, focusing on the oddball, the ill-prepared, the inexperienced, anyone who could parade around under the clichéd banner “outsider”. Sometimes, there are very good reasons for some people to be “outsiders”. Trump has proven to be not very adept at distinguishing them.

Part of the Republican cleanup should include a better ground game. The Democrats adjusted the election system for theirs, which is chock full of the ill-informed, easily distracted, and unmotivated. First, they eliminated the concepts of election day and the secret ballot. The party of government used government to deform elections to their liking: depreciating personal responsibility in voting (like registering, staying informed, getting off the couch to vote in-person), and having a month to do it. Then, all they have left to do is to mine the rich veins of the politically illiterate in their base. That means a data base to identify them and the paid minions to harvest the ballots.

Certainly, it’s an insult to one man, one conscience, one vote. The loss of the “conscience” part is critical since mailing the things in the millions will land multiples of them on a kitchen table, or lie around the floor of the communal mailboxes, waiting for . . . whoever . . . to mark them. It’s a scam-made-legal. Republicans need to play the game by the Democrats’ rules.

If the Republicans succeed in shedding the Trump stigma, the Democrats’ own “cleanup on isle . . .” will be more glaring. The Democrats have to live down The Squad, “birthing people”, a reverse Jim Crow (CRT, “systemic racism”, punishing racial preferences, racial reparations, etc.), their disdain for holding hoodlums accountable for harming the innocent, the filth and degradation in places under their chronic suzerainty, and their destruction of prosperity in a wave of radical eco-mongering and spending. They will persevere in spite of their craziness if the Republicans continue to make Trump the face of the party.

May be an image of 6 people and people standing — Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) at a Sept. 13 gala wearing a gifted “Tax the Rich” gown, for which she is being investigated for House ethics violations.

Is there a broad and popular appetite for this stuff? The Republicans offer a cult of chaotic personality. The Democrats peddle lunacy. If there ever was a good reason for complacency, this is it. I’m pinning my hopes on the Republicans’ cleanup brigade because their task is easier. All they have to do is send Trump packing. The radical chic ethos runs too deep in the Democrats.

Protest in Minneapolis against the appearance of Pres. Trump in Oct. 2019. Prominent state Democrats energized the protest crowd with their appearance and chants, including the radical Democrat State Representative Aisha Gomez (DFL-Minneapolis).

Roger

Source:
* Jim Geraghty’s take on the Georgia election scene: “Are We Ready to Learn Our Lessons Now, Republicans?”, National Review Online, Dec. 7, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/are-we-ready-to-learn-our-lessons-now-republicans/

November 20, 2022November 23, 2022

Biden, the Prevaricator-In-Chief; Trump, the Obstacle; and an Eviscerated Energy Industry

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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.

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?

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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?

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 natural gas wellhead. — 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 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.

Glenn Russell/The Burlington Free Press via AP — Then-VP Joe Biden finds two quarters on the sidewalk in Burlington, Vt., 2016. “I found two quarters.”

RogerG

Additional Takeaways from the 2022 Midterms: Democracy Is on Life Support and the Fox News Heavyweights Are Specious

After more time to ruminate on the midterms, I’ve drawn to two conclusions: democracy is in critical condition and the Fox News commentariat and much of the punditry on the right, clouded by “populism” (aka Trumpism), provided a distorted view of the political landscape. As such, the red wave didn’t materialize, and, for that matter, wave elections may now be a thing of the past. Elections no longer reflect the deliberations of an informed citizenry thus making a mockery of popular sovereignty. 2022 brought it into clear focus.

For one, it’s the return to the old practices of political machines, brought to you by the Democratic Party’s current fixation with mail-in balloting and its cousin early voting. Leave it to the Democratic Party to bring machine politics back into vogue since they pioneered the urban political machine in the late 19th century. Harry Truman began his political career in the Kansas City Prendergast machine and would spend the rest of it trying to break away (read David McCullough’s “Truman”). FDR adopted machine tactics on a national scale, using the federal New Deal purse and expanded regulatory power to steamroll the country into four straight terms and Congressional dominance for half a century (read Amity Schlaes’s “The Forgotten Man”). Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised by their latest edition since it is, after all, in their DNA.

Machine politics is back thanks to the absentee ballot. Hugh Hewitt in his post-election review yesterday (11/9) cut short any discussion of the wisdom of mail-in voting by saying it is “here to stay”. Regardless of its longevity, it’s corrosive to democracy. Fact! How? Democracy requires deliberation, information, debate, and attempts to make a convincing case. That means speeches, ad buys, and exhaustive travels to convince voters. Now, no longer. Get the political machine up and running, identify the party’s voters long before they’re any the wiser, put an absentee ballot in their hands, and collect it long before election day. It’s like the gambling house fronting the approved player with a mountain of chips before a single hand has been played. Campaigns are reduced to ginning up the base with fear, reducing public appearances, and eschewing the risk of exposure to the equivalent of cross examination in something called a debate. We’re back to the days of machine politics with the power to elect a cocker spaniel.

The Democrats got away with it throughout 2022. Heck, Biden got away with it in 2020. 2022 Democratic candidates avoided debates and rigorous interviews like the plague. If that isn’t enough, contrary views are censored in a cabal of Biden lackeys and Big Tech oligarchs.

COVID was the excuse to bring back machine politics. Not only did it result in stunting the education of our kids; it introduced “emergency mitigations” like the broadcasting of absentee ballots from dirty registration rolls and an election day stretching over a month, and sometimes after, with collection boxes scattered all over the landscape. With so many votes in the bank, the messiness of retail politics is avoided, especially important during times when you’re in power and royally screwed things up.

And we got a senescent president, an impaired stroke victim of Bolshevik sympathies in the Senate from Pennsylvania, a millennial-uptalking airhead/valley girl in a neck-and-neck race for Arizona governor, and other assorted nincompoops and wastrels potentially filling the seats of power – so long as they have a “D” after their name. Where’s the democracy, particularly if you think that it includes a voter weighing the candidates and issues? Frankly, it doesn’t exist and doesn’t matter. It’s been reduced to the mechanical act of punching a ballot. It’s shameful.

Thus, the polls may accurately pick up a red wave approaching election day but it doesn’t matter since so many votes have already been collected before anyone has a chance to change their mind. Polls may be accurate but much of what they’re registering is buyers’ remorse; their votes having long since been locked. The Machine invalidated the polls. A candidate’s high negatives and “wrong track” numbers were made irrelevant.

The Fox News blockbuster lineup looked gobsmacked the day after. Red-wave dreams in a mist of pixie dust were shattered. I watched Tucker, Hannity, and Ingraham stumble around groping for an explanation. Of course, they highlighted the GOP’s bright spots: DeSantis, Kemp, Vance, Johnson, a likely GOP takeover of the House, and the sending out to pasture of Beto and Stacey; however, at no time did “Trump” cross their lips. It could be that they are as scared of the mythological Trump Leviathan as current GOP officeholders since Trump boosters comprise a good portion of their ratings. Trump may be a Nielsen winner but he’s a turnoff to voters. He’s more than kryptonite to the GOP. He’s a bug light. Candidates attracted to his glow get zapped. In battle ground states, his endorsement acted as the light as these candidates flew into the electrified screen.

Laura came closest to admitting the baleful Trump influence. Listing as one of her lessons from the election, she mentioned that future GOP campaigns should have no room for “revenge and ego”, or some such. It’s a vague swipe at Trump. Good for her, but she goes on to miscast the results. Factors such as coattails evaded her gaze, and her ritual misuse of “establishment” soiled her commentary. And there’s more.

She couldn’t resist extolling the “populist” cause. She obviously attributes it to Trump, and she’s correct, to some degree. The party has broadened its appeal. Trump, though, isn’t the only one to credit. The Democrats contributed the most. They traded blue-collars of all demographics for the utopian visions of the faculty lounge. Anyone, regardless of race or gender, with a family must grapple with closed schools and stunted educations for their kids, bankrupting gas prices, unsafe neighborhoods, urban war zones, XY “girls” in the locker room and on the team with their daughters, abortion-infanticide, a national debt piling on the backs of their children, humiliations abroad, a steady influx of the “undocumented” to undercut their wages and overrun their towns, blackouts and sky-high utility bills, shortages, and a trip to the grocery store eating up what’s left of the paycheck. Blacks and Hispanics have eyes like anyone else and are noticing the consequences of Democrat rule. Trump just happened to be around when the Democrats went full-bore into Lefty ravaging mode.

Sadly, all this occurred when the Democrats turned democracy into machine governance. Many of the unwitting were roped into the charade before their attention could be drawn to the Democrats’ complicity in the realities about them. Trumpist pundits refused to admit that Trump’s influence in the GOP assisted the Democrats in their distraction campaign. In the end, democracy may not be dead, but it is certainly comatose.

Now, as per Laura Ingraham in her commentary, the Republicans must imitate or die. They will, and soon we’ll be off into escalation and the land of electoral mutually assured destruction. Republicans will have to follow suit or face unilateral disarmament. But somebody has to put a stop to this devolution and return us to a real election day and 90% of the electorate voting in-person. If not, everything from candidate quality to stump speeches will be made into antiquated notions in a fading memory.

Democracy has been defined down to the near-animal act of marking a ballot. The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote about what happens when standards decline in his essay “Defining Deviancy Down”. He stated, “By defining what is deviant, we are enabled to know what is not, and hence to live by shared standards.” Substitute “democracy” for “deviant” and you might begin to understand what happens when democracy as a standard is defined down to the equivalent of a psycho-motor tic.

RogerG

November 7, 2022November 7, 2022

Our Politics Are a Mess. Shame on the Culprits.

President Joe Biden delivers remarks on prescription drug costs, Social Security and Medicare, during a campaign event, in Joliet, Ill., November 5, 2022. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Election Day is nigh, and our politics are a mess. Shame on the Culprits.

Biden goes on a rant about the “idiots” who actually take the Democrats for their word: the Democrats are “socialists” if not in self-acclamation, then in deeds. But you are an “idiot” for noticing. Trump fulminates in his usual adolescent way by insulting a potential rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis, as “DeSanctimonious”. When will that 20% of the GOP electorate actually grow up? Our 2024 choices at this juncture could be between the revolutionaries’ old fart (Biden) or an old-but-narcissistic browbeater (Trump). It’s a real binary because only one of the two could be inflicted on us after 2024.

Former President Donald Trump speaks during a pre-election rally to support Republican candidates in Latrobe, Pa., November 5, 2022. (Mike Segar/Reuters)

How did we end up with two septuagenarian-to-octogenarian figures to represent our political divide? One is clearly senile and the other is an embarrassing oaf who hasn’t outgrown schoolyard bullying because it sells in our hyperactive digital age. While the two mouthpieces have an equal measure of their own version of decrepitude, the two parties are not as equivalent in their rot. The Democratic Party went off their rocker into full-blown ultra-Left fanaticism. The Republican Party is the one left to buttress the nation against the lunacy, being now the only adult left in the room, but, sadly, they are anchored down by the telegenic buffoon. He just might get a second shot at it in 2024.

The GOP’s barker, Trump, had his 4-year turn with the brass ring but ran into a buzzsaw of Left/bureaucratic hostility that dominates our increasingly putrefying culture and administrative state. The thing that attracts clicks and cameras – a dramatic persona, or BDE (look it up) in the words of Trumpkins – also stirred the entrenched Left to attempt to shred our Constitutional order, which they tried to do in short order after they were returned to power under the senescent Biden in January 2021 in calls for court packing, elimination of the Electoral College, engineering four new Senate seats for themselves, calling for an elimination of any voice for the minority in the Senate (it is said that the filibuster is a “relic” of Jim Crow), pushing a federal takeover of elections to legalize election fraud to expand their voter base and ensure dominance over the horizon, etc.

And then the wheels came off the nation under their refashioned version of Il Duce’s old slogan of “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” No energy for you if it didn’t come from a windmill or solar panel. No car for you if it doesn’t take 2 hours to 2 days to charge, and won’t burst into flames after being inundated in a storm surge. The Green New Deal central planners are going to hogtie you into their utopian rabbit hole with or without your consent.

As for your sidewalks and parks, be careful because addiction on the streets and in the green spaces is “decriminalized”. Plus, you get the opportunity to see nihilism in practice with the rampant smash-and-grab mobs, property crime, and raging assaults – Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange” brought to life. Heck, just keep your mayhem under $950, and even if you don’t, no-cash-bail and non-prosecution ensures that the miscreants will never get a chance to look from the wrong side of bars. It’s a huge subsidy for Hobbes’s old prediction of the “war of all against all”.

Our girls’ locker rooms have been invaded by XY “girls”. Our daughters aren’t safe, and their lifetime efforts and achievements cut short by XY “women” athletes. All of this brought to you by a party that wants to make all things a matter of human will. No obvious boys and girls, and all is subject to choice and human interventions. High school dances are now a real adventure for all concerned.

The so-called kitchen table isn’t exempt because you are increasingly unable to afford much to put on it. Your nest egg (401k, pension) has tanked. Shortages are disguised in euphemisms like “supply chain crisis”. It’s always a crisis with these central-planning folks. Central planning has its shortcomings. And, if you had a job, the highways just became useless since you can’t afford the juice to turn the wheels of your car, or the home charger was made inert by a blackout. “Sustainable” also has its shortcomings.

The ultimate in central planning – the pandemic lockdowns, closures of businesses, schools, and civil life, and the mandates, and the incessant tinkering with essential and nonessential – has contributed to much of the disruption of ordinary life that we experience today, setting back our kids for a year or two. COVID central planning is like Soviet central planning or the kind run out of Pyongyang: shortages and a stunted existence.

But what’s there to complain about? Much, oh so very much. The blathering blowhard of the GOP won’t be on the ballot till 2024, but Biden’s “idiots” – the average person that makes the country click by living and working – face an existential threat: Biden and his big-government party. Vote like your life depended on it, because it actually does.

You’re the Lifeguard?

Terrifier

RogerG

If a Red Wave Happens, What Next? More Trump?

See the source image

What’s next after a red wave? If it happens – big “if” – It’ll depend on how the results will be interpreted. Will it be viewed as an endorsement of Trumpism or rejection of a radical-Left Democratic Party or both? Regardless, Trump senses a triumphal return to the White House. That’s “what next”. He shared a clip of Meghan Kelly predicting “He [DeSantis] won’t win against Trump.” Trump attached to the clip, “I agree”. See below.

This guy is running, and with his usual uncouth cockiness. What does he offer? His appeal is encapsulated in “He owns the libs”. His in-your-face style is appealing to a certain type of voter, thus a rabid following of 20-25% of the electorate. But this combative charisma repels as much as it attracts. As such, Trumpism as a political personality is not the stuff of decisive victories. Politics is about addition, not subtraction, and Trump brings both at the same time.

Michael Brandon Dougherty (in many ways a Trump admirer) in National Review Online makes the point that Trump is charisma, not policy. I agree. Trump’s term in office was characterized by management chaos and the farming out most policy initiatives to Congress. Trump is no policy wonk. Other than immigration, issues like tax cuts, deregulation (Congressional Review Act repeals of regulations), and judges were at the behest of, and impossible without, Paul Ryan (House) and Mitch McConnel (Senate). Even “energy independence” and immigration he must share with the party leadership since many of the policy aspects of these issues originated in long-established party platforms and previous Republican congressional actions. In many ways, the country benefitted not necessarily from Trump but from not having a Democrat in the Oval Office to block them.

The Trump return is predicated on an overwhelming view within the party that Trump was cheated (“screwed” in popular Trump parlance) in the 2020 election. The claim is only half right. He claims that he won, but no, no one can say that. Once the ballots entered the many registrar offices for counting, no one can say how they were marked, how they got there, nor where they came from. Indeed, the election procedures in place throughout much of the country were the ones most prone to the kind of fraud that is nearly impossible to prove in court. Tracing a ballot to a fraudulent voter is next to impossible once you bypass the controls of in-person voting with the mass-mailing of ballots. That’s the wrong half of Trump’s indictment. Trump and his backers would be on firmer ground to complain of the mass-mailing of ballots, the use of dirty registration rolls, unsupervised drop boxes, ballot harvesting, provisional ballots, same-day registration, anywhere voting, etc. The most unsecure method of voting that put an end to the secret ballot was used in 2020. That’s the right half of the Trump complaint.

So, did he win? No, because he can’t prove it, no one can. A ballot stripped of its envelope is dropped into a sea of undifferentiated ballots. He should have known, screamed to high heaven when the procedures were jerry-rigged, but saved most of his vituperation after he lost. At this point, he looks and sounds like a petulant child. You want to talk about a huge turn-off?

Trump is so yesteryear. His appeal is yesteryear – “I was cheated” and “own the libs” – and he can only offer us what he has already given us: some very good policies, like many good Republicans, and repellant behavior and mismanagement. So much for the “virtue” of having a vaunted businessman behind the Resolute desk. As the 2022 red wave and 2024 elections recede, if Trump gets the nomination and wins, the memory will quickly wane of the Democrats’ embrace of radical-Left revolution, to be replaced by, once again, X-rated presidential antics.

We – meaning Republicans – have options. Our bench is long. Romney milquetoasts are not the order of the day. A compromise with radical-Left revolution is a semi-radical-Left revolution. Socialism and neo-Marxism – agreed, they are similar – is poison no matter the dose. A spine is required. We have many backboned political leaders but without the boorishness. Republicans have a choice to salve an inflated ego or establish a winning coalition for a decade(s). Trump in his second term can only bring more subtraction than addition.

Please watch the clip. Meghan’s prediction is a warning, not a promise.

Trump just posted this pic.twitter.com/tu9SM72BOu

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) October 27, 2022

RogerG

For more, read here:

* “The Coming Fight over Trumpism: Charisma or Policy?”, Michael Brendon Dougherty, National Review Online, Oct. 28, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/the-coming-fight-over-trumpism-charisma-or-policy/.

August 27, 2022

It Stinks to High Heaven

What stinks? The FBI’s newly released affidavit in support of a search warrant, that’s what (see below). Oh, it’s heavily redacted but what it does expose is the insidious operational habits of the Washington Insiders Club, of which the upper echelons of the FBI are charter members. And to think that a judicial officer approved this monstrosity. Amazing.

The first big tip-off was the author and chief protagonist for the Trump investigation and the search warrant being “a Special Agent with the FBI assigned to the Washington Field Office”. I smell a rat, the same set of rodents that scamper the hallways of the J. Edgar Hoover Building (FBI), the Executive Office Building, Langley (CIA), and Pentagon, not to mention the incestuous political den of lobbyists and big-wheel legal eagles who wallow in the same rarified DC cauldron.

The second thing that glaringly stood out was the “referral” to the FBI from the administrators at the National Archives. It seems that, when it comes to Donald Trump, the big wheels in DC snap to 11, to borrow a little from “This is Spinal Tap”. They’re on a hair trigger. In January 2022, the Archives received 15 boxes of materials from Trump. Hardly did a month go by and they’re off to the FBI demanding a criminal investigation of Trump. Mmmm, does Hillary/Clinton in 2015 and 2016 remind you of anything?

This is completely unprecedented. The people who run the National Archives are not gods. Their demands do not attain the automatic status of the Ten Commandments from the hand of God. Implicitly recognizing this fact, there’s normally an extended period of negotiations after the transition from one administration to another. And Trump was cooperating. Who among that claque would have dared to behave in this manner with Barack Obama?

The statutory basis for the warrant is astoundingly absurd. The affidavit is junked-up with references to the Presidential Records Act and various provisions on the handling of classified materials. There’s even a startling mention of an executive order. What? Executive Orders exist at the whim of the president. They are a creature of him and his office. They only count if he chooses, or unchooses, to make them count. This only shows that the vigilantes wanted to throw the kitchen sink at Trump.

For the rest of the statutory laundry list, there’s the litany of what constitutes classified materials and the improper handling of them. When I read this part of the screed, the thought of Hillary Clinton kept popping into my head. Wasn’t she conducting the nation’s foreign policy from her own private server and cellphone? And, interestingly as it turned out, there was evidence of the hacking of her devices. Trump is accused of hypothetical carelessness; Hillary actually did it to the advantage of foreign adversaries. There’s evidence of it. And then-Director Comey goes before the press in 2016 to announce that “there really wasn’t a prosecutable case”. And there is on Trump? Incredible.

The lack of inquisitiveness and what constitutes a “prosecutable case” has an obvious partisan lean to them. The affidavit supporting a warrant on Hillary would sound much like the one served on Trump, except there was more evidentiary basis of actual harm to the nation on Hillary’s home server and her personal cellphone. This should have gone to trial. And the hush, hush in regards to the laptop of the scion of the Biden dynasty, Hunter, going so far as to troop out other DC partisans who never saw the laptop to tout the line that it was “Russian disinformation” without a shred of evidence, is execrable. The brazen double standard screams injustice.

Then, if you notice, the warrant’s author engages in an opinion spat with supporters of Trump. It’s something that belongs on Twitter or the op-ed pages of his/her favorite NY Times or WaPo, going so far as to cite a TV news report of “‘Moving Trucks Spotted At Mar-a-Lago” (item #30). That’s worse than hearsay. No one is placed under a presumption of legal sanction to tell the truth in such stories, and they are notorious for casting events to fit a preconceived view.

In what has all the appearances of petty spite, the producer of this gem writes like Paul Krugman picking a fight with Larry Kudlow on Twitter. He/she targets Breitbart and Kash Patel for special abuse (item #53). It’s very unseemly in a document meant to justify a government invasion of a person’s home. This kind of government behavior should anger any American as it did John Hancock, enough to have him sign with a flourish the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

What of the redactions in the affidavit? If the denizens of the DC snake pit can go before the press to tout the laptop as “Russian disinformation” with no proof, then this discredited crowd has no grounds to dismiss my speculation on the blotted-out names, sources, and methods of investigation. They boil down to Trump’s possession of classified materials or an assessment of Trump’s evil intent by a group of long-discredited people. The possession of classified materials by a recent ex-president shouldn’t be surprising. Negotiations, compromise, and a back-and-forth period are to be expected. Just because the demi-gods of the Archives in a pique of Trump animus want to go to 11 doesn’t mean that the public ought to tolerate this partisan jihad.

The affidavit still stinks to high heaven. I am convinced now more than ever that the FBI and the rest of the agencies, bureaus, departments in DC should be farmed out to rest of the country, far beyond the Beltway. Breakup DC! Only the most essential skeleton staff should remain. People like the “Special Agent with the FBI assigned to the Washington Field Office” should get a daily dose of what the rest of the country thinks of them.

RogerG

Source:
* The affidavit at https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.617854/gov.uscourts.flsd.617854.102.1.pdf

August 23, 2022August 23, 2022

Students Flee the Public Schools and the Dems’ Polls Improve. Go Figure.

Rally for John Fetterman with Bernie Sanders at Philadelphia City Hall in 2018 (photo:Jared Guenwald)

What seems to be happening in the dog days of summer 2022? On the one hand, 1.5 million students went kapoof in national public-school enrollment from 2020 to 2021. And more recently, opinion polls show an improvement in Democrat fortunes. After all that has happened in the past two years, what gives? The former is not surprising. The latter is downright insane given the riots, the overall urban breakdown of civil order, the schools being turned into revolutionary propaganda mills, the mandatory masking and school closures, the inflation and shortages, the “transition” of energy from affordable and available to extortionate and unreliable, and the full-throated attack on the family sedan to, by hook or by crook, force people into the lifestyle preferences of the DNC donor class. The economy is in a shambles.

The Greeks and Romans of antiquity saw the Mediterranean heat of mid-to-late summer changing people into mad dogs, thus the “dog days of summer”. Are parents mad for leaving the public schools in droves? Hardly. A clue can be found in the places with the greatest defection numbers. Big city districts are quickly losing the warm bodies to fill the desks. NYC Mayor Eric Adams put it succinctly when he called it a “massive hemorrhaging of students.” The city’s public schools, the largest school district in the nation, lost 4 percent at the start of the 2020-2021 school year, and nearly another 2 percent in 2021-2022, a total of 64,000 youngsters. Over the last five years, the total runs to 120,000. Democrat bastions are experiencing the greatest disaffection.

See the source image

Flipping over to the west coast, Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest, has fallen from 737,00 to 430,000 over the last 21 years, and the picture gets even bleaker with the district projecting a further 30 precent erosion to 309,000 into the next ten years. It’s a dismal picture for other big cities such as Detroit and Chicago.

The losses in places like Los Angeles can only be partially explained by the very real Great California Exodus. New York State, in one year alone, 2020-1, in the midst of its own exodus, lost over 319,000 residents, the largest decline of any state. Yes, Democrat-governed states dominate the flight statistics. The classroom overcrowding problem of a few decades ago has shifted to states like Texas and Florida.

Another facet of the trend has little to do with loading a U-Haul. Increasingly, parents are developing a love affair with options that free their kids from the grip of Randy Weingarten’s (AFT) and Becky Pringle’s (NEA) teachers’ unions.

Fifth-grade teacher Madeline Schmitt directs her students at St. Patrick School in Huntington, N.Y., on Sept. 9, 2020. Most Catholic schools returned to in-person learning earlier than public schools during the Covid-19 pandemic. (CNS photo/Gregory A. Shemitz)

Private, sectarian, charter, micro (private with 15 students or less), and home schools are some choices rising in popularity. Maybe the pandemic exposed to parents who’s running their kids’ classrooms. The racism-against-racism CRT claptrap and sex-change ideology, with the attendant display and glorification of sex-addiction behavior to adolescents, and the thought of their daughter sharing bathrooms and locker rooms with penis-girls, have shocked parents out of their lethargy. Many are coming to the conclusion that the trillions of “investment” in government schools is a monumental loser, more of a jobs program for special-interest clients of the DNC. It isn’t about the kids. That’s just empty rhetoric for the plebes.

Simultaneously, as school boards are reintroduced to the socio-political phenomena of people voting with their feet due to a growing revulsion of Democrat-led schooling, the political prospects of Democrats have brightened a bit, amazingly. Opinion polls show a tightening in the generic ballot. In key Senate races, Dem neo-socialists hold leads. In North Carolina and Ohio, it’s a dead heat. Oz is down double digits in Pennsylvania to a stroke-addled Bernie Sanders acolyte. How is it possible given the complete Dem-inspired unraveling of civilization from the summer of 2020 to summer 2022?

My best guess is a trifecta: it’s still the “dog days”; the Dem’s Trump campaign strategy; and inherent Republican political disabilities. Oh, the polls are junk, so it’s actually a quadra-fecta. Taken together, this is a bad time to gauge the state of play.

The “dog days” don’t have to mean madness. Sometimes, the dog of public opinion sleeps or is distracted during these hazy, lazy days of summer. Assessing what the public thinks at a time when people are vacationing and cramming bar-b-ques, ball games, concerts, yard work, and activities, activities, and activities, and expecting it to be authoritative, is absurd. Unless you are Antifa and BLM and have the convenience of a viral video to exploit and bountiful free time to indulge in recreational rioting, most people have other things on their minds.

The public is generally distracted and the Democrats want to keep diverting their eyes away from the disorder and decay all around them. Look, over there, it’s Trump, they say. In the 2018 midterms, they made it all about Trump and swept the near octogenarian, now octogenarian, Nancy Pelosi into the speakership. In 2020, they did same thing to such an extent that they got away with another near octogenarian, Joe Biden, campaigning from a basement computer. Governor Gavin Newsom in the recall election hung Trump around the neck of Larry Elder and the effort to remove him from office. They’re at it again.

Though, it’s hard for the shopper who just experienced sticker shock after a look at the supermarket cash register receipt. At the pump, at the utility meter, at the hardware store, you name it, the sense of dystopia surrounds us. The Dem’s best strategy, a proven winner, at a time when they have soiled themselves and us so badly, is to somehow make the election about Trump. Could that be behind the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago?

All of a sudden, it’s all about Trump again. Trump squeezes other GOP hopefuls out of prime-time news coverage. Trump sops up media attention and fundraising cash that might have gone to down-ballot races. At least for a short while, the raid jumbled the complexion of the federal midterm races.

Former President Donald Trump speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Fla., February 26, 2022. (Octavio Jones/Reuters)

It – the raid – may have worked in a perverse way. Trump’s personal approvals tick up and the GOP’s tick down. Trump gets to play the part of victim, which he could very well be, and the rest of the GOP gets momentarily lost in the news cycle. For the Democrats, the strategy is to avert the public’s attention from the representative and senator who defended rioters, defund the police, the DA’s who unilaterally ignore most of the criminal code to the detriment of us and our property, voted for more inflation through trillions of new spending, and have assisted in dismantling what it means to be woman. For those potentially in the gravitational pull of the Democratic Party, the prospect of an imminent Trump reappearance trumps everything. The strategy worked in 2018 and to a great extent in 2020. Why not this time around?

We’ll see how long the Democrat hall-of-mirrors campaign obscures the horrifying facts of life for most Americans under Democrat rule. We’ll also see how GOP command central responds. They’re lack of aggression and the Trump anchor may militate against a powerful counter. Working against them is . . . Trump. Just think, if that $100 million in Trump’s war chest had gone to Oz or to the National Republican Senate Committee (NRSC), the current donkey party bump would have been compressed to a micro-second blip. Trump in his semi-retirement has all the time in the world, two years away from the next presidential election, and is frenetic in his fundraising far earlier than any other braggart in history. The rest of the GOP is left to be the dog licking the crumbs falling from the table.

Trump is a mega-magnet due to his ego-run-amok. His overbearing brashness is a cheap imitation of what Alice Roosevelt Longworth said of her father, Theodore Roosevelt: “My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.” I reckon that Trump prefers to see a lot of TR in himself. He sucks media attention out of a room, and fundraising cash out of the pool of GOP donors.

Maybe he’ll shovel some of his cash to his preferred candidates, making them even more beholden to him. Some of those selections in Senate primaries were . . . bizarre. In some cases, the weakest general election candidate was endorsed. But Oz, only recently a convert to the GOP and with no previous political footprint, and a man with carpetbagger and national loyalty liabilities? The same consternation in Ohio (J.D. Vance). The same in Arizona (Blake Edwards). But Eric Greitens in Missouri, wife beater and abuser of his children?

What explains the choices? The most controversial endorsements reflect what Trump sees in himself: “anti-establishment” and “outsider”, meaningless words that frequently grace the lips of Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. The “establishment”? Well, after a process of elimination, it must mean anyone in the party opposed to Trump. It’s that simple. Anyone finding Trump abhorrent is automatically assumed to be a country clubber. It’s an outdated cliché since the millionaire and billionaire class is just as likely, if not more likely, to be a Democrat booster than a Republican one. As for “outsider”, history is littered with them from Paul Marat (Parisian mob rabble rouser of the French Revolution) to Lenin’s Bolsheviks to Jane’s Revenge. “Outsider” isn’t limited to being a moniker for someone with a fresh perspective. It could, and mostly does, mean a person so revolting to broad sensibilities to cause people to cringe and keep them at arm’s length.

Still, these are the Trump chosen in Senate races that he has fobbed off on us, and a large tranche of Republican voters have foisted on us in their primaries. In the general election, important races will pit a campus-socialist Democrat against a Republican with both feet immersed in the narrow habitat of the Trump cult. I fail to see why this shouldn’t be a red-tsunami year, given all the carnage that the Democrats have gifted to Republicans. Instead, much of the Republican base, enchanted by Trump’s self-serving verbiage, have turned sure-winners and easier gets into toss-ups and double-digit holes. Indeed, at this juncture, Biden may have a radical-Left Senate majority in January 2023 to rubber stamp us into an inflationary spiral and the centrally planned existence of the Green New Deal by executive edict.

Democracy is not synonymous with wisdom. The crooked timber of humanity is evident at the micro and macro levels. In 1964, Goldwater was pasted by LBJ in what many observers described as a sympathy vote in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. A popular mania gave us a bloody, miasmic morass in Vietnam and a morally bankrupting War on Poverty. Guns and butter profligacy would wreck our country for the next decade and a half. Then came the 1980’s and the beginning of a turnaround. 2022 could be the beginning of our turnaround, but will we seize the opportunity?

It would be lot easier if Trump stopped being so self-absorbed and divisive in the ranks of those trying to right the ship. Meanwhile, parents are taking matters into their hands by taking their kids away from the influence of Democrat client groups. I daily thank God that Trump hasn’t made any endorsements in school board races.

May be a cartoon of text that says 'THE INFLATION REDUCTION ACT HAS NO EFFECT ON INFLATION, so WHY DON'T THEY CALL IT THE GLOBAL WARMING REDUCTION ACT ? BECAUSE IT HASNO EFFECT ON GLOBAL WARMING EITHER. ©2o22 Rl CREATORS.COM'

RogerG

Sources:

* “New Federal Data Confirms Pandemic’s Blow to K-12 Enrollment, With Drop of 1.5 Million Students; Pre-K Experiences 22 Percent Decline” at https://www.the74million.org/article/public-school-enrollment-down-3-percent-worst-century/#:~:text=A%25203%2520percent%2520decline%252C%2520measured,of%2520roughly%25201.5%2520million%2520pupils.
* “With Plunging Enrollments, A Seismic Hit to Public Schools”, New York Times, at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/us/public-schools-falling-enrollment.html
* “Census Bureau: N.Y. population loss greatest in nation”, The Daily Gazette, Dec. 23, 2021, at https://dailygazette.com/2021/12/23/census-bureau-n-y-population-loss-greatest-in-nation/.
* “Latest Polls”, FiveThrtyEight, Aug. 19, 20222, at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/.
* “Poll Finds Increase in Number of Republicans Who Support Trump over GOP”, Brittany Bernstein, National Review, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/poll-finds-increase-in-number-of-republicans-who-support-trump-over-gop/.

August 12, 2022

The Error of Following a Person and Not What They Say: A Lesson that the Right Needs to Relearn

We are in an age of personality cults. Maybe we always have been to one extent or another. Regardless, we are in one, big time.

The decline in religiosity could be a partial explanation for people who need something to look up to after they have relegated heaven to myth. It’s easier to replace God with a human being. It’s evident across the political spectrum. The Left has theirs in the many academic offshoots of Karl Marx. On the Right, icons have arisen in the person of people from Jordan Peterson to Donald Trump. They may be correct in much that they say, but being human, they occasionally step on a rake. Then, the followers parrot the mistake while jettisoning their brain, the same brain that God gave them, that they don’t recognize that it was God who gave it to them.

Today’s brain is ill-informed of history. The schools have failed. We study history for what it says about human nature. And, yes, there is such a thing as human nature. Many won’t recognize the errors of the present because they are unaware that we’ve committed the blunders many times before. For instance, some of what today’s Right seems to be saying about the Ukraine War is an imitation of the rhetoric of the 60’s radical Left. Jean Kirkpatrick, a longtime Democrat and a defector from the looming socialistic, neo-Marxist takeover of her party, spoke to the 1984 Republican Convention nominating Ronald Reagan for a second term (see below). Her speech was a bold rejection of the “San Francisco Democrats” (Sound familiar?) and the Left’s “blame America First”.

Today, you’ll hear echoes of the same condemnable language of the 60’s radical Left coming from the likes of Donald Trump, Jordan Peterson, and their media apologists.

Trump introduced the Left’s oratory to the Right when he morphed the Left’s “blame America First” into “American First”. His 2015-2016 bombast against the Bushes led to a harangue about “endless wars”, i.e., the War on Terror, almost identical to the Left’s complaint about the Vietnam War. Trump made the chant of “America First” and its cousin “MAGA” into a reflex for isolationism, something ever-present in the GOP going back to 1940 and Lindbergh’s America First. Don’t’ forget, implicit in “Make America Great Again” is the claim that we aren’t great, which for the Right is due to our decadence. For the Left, we are censured as “exploiters”. As decadent or “exploiters”, the Right has made common cause with Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda.

See the source image

Seemingly taking their cue from Trump in his odd admiration for Putin, some on the Right chide our support for Ukraine. The culture war is used as the excuse to criticize support for Ukraine. Tucker Carlson is scornful of the Zelenskyy government for its alleged autocratic tendencies; Laura Ingraham complains of our aid lost in purported Ukrainian corruption; and Jordan Peterson provides an alibi for Putin’s invasion as Putin fending of western decadence, a decadence resplendent in transgenderism. He comes close to aligning with Putin and when confronted backs off. The quote that got him into trouble was as follows:

“The culture war is now truly part of why we have a war [in Ukraine]. It is certainly the case that we do not therefore have all the moral high ground…. In fact, how much of it we have at all is something rightly subject to the most serious debate.”

In my view, transgenderism is a civilizational catastrophe, but to mingle it with Ukraine is sophistry. That puts Putin as a defender of goodness and light. If so, where does that put the CCP’s Xi? After all, Xi is leading a campaign to stop the feminization of men. Have you seen those PLA recruitment ads? They’re nothing like those gushing rainbow LGBTQ+ ads by our Marine Corps. Carlson, Ingraham, and Peterson would find themselves boxed into the corner of opposing US support for Taiwan against a Red Chinese invasion just to remain consistent. What kind of world would we have if our decadence or any other domestic policy failing is a straitjacket on our ability to stop this generation’s fascist and communist aggressors? Look to history for the answer.

Jean Kirkpatrick in 1984 outlines the stakes of a Trump/Carlson/Ingraham/Peterson foreign policy. It’s the same one advanced by the “San Francisco Democrats”. If you have 21 minutes, please listen to her riveting speech. It’s the antidote to the bile in this new era of personality cults.

RogerG

Sources:

*”Jordan Peterson claims Russia attacked Ukraine to stop the spread of ‘degenerate’ US culture wars. . .”, Daily Mail, July 12, 2022, at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11005863/Jordan-Peterson-says-Russia-attacked-Ukraine-culture-wars-left-degenerate.html
*Transcripts of Jean Kirkpatrick’s speech to the 1984 Republican Convention at https://speakola.com/political/jeane-kirkpatrick-blame-america-first-gop-1984

August 11, 2022August 11, 2022

In the Wake of the Raid on Mar-a-Lago, How Are We to Judge Legal Action Against Trump? With Skepticism!

Former President Donald Trump speaks during a rally to boost Ohio Republican candidates ahead of their May 3 primary election at the county fairgrounds in Delaware, Ohio, April 23, 2022. (Gaelen Morse/Reuters)

Based on what I’ve seen of Trump’s public performances, I would not seek his company. Loud, overbearing braggarts are not my cup of tea. That aside, a vendetta, clearly partisan and dripping in class condescension, has accompanied him since the day he rode down the escalator at Trump Tower in June of 2015. If nothing else, the presence of Trump on the stage has exposed a persistent campaign to get Trump and almost any Republican of consequence by the powers-that-be. Now, the raid. How should we view any subsequent prosecution of him?

A writer at National Review Online and lawyer, Dan McLaughlin, lays out a useful standard:

“Find a room full of Americans without college degrees, one in which partisan Democrats are scarce. In three minutes or less, lay out your best evidence and explain why what Trump has done is clearly and obviously against the law — obvious not just to lawyers, but to everyone. If the room is convinced, then and only then will you know that the case demands you cross the Rubicon.”

Given all that has been done to him by partisan, bureaucratic, and cultural elite interests in the Manhattan-Beltway union, anything less than an obvious and unambiguous case would be seen by at least half the country as a coup. And that includes the current civil suit pursued by the den of Democrat legal militia in New York under the suzerainty of the state’s Democrat AG, Letitia James. At work is more than an insidious institutional Democrat favoritism but a trampling of the equal application of the laws. Nothing galls an observant public more than selective prosecution for political gain.

Batten down the hatches and get prepared for a hurricane.

Political Cartoons by Michael Ramirez

RogerG