No surprise that Joe Biden has ended his campaign. He’s been a fugitive from Madame Tussauds for a long time now and even when he was at the height of his powers, he was at best a 10-watt bulb. He has been a horrible buffoon and genuine menace to the body politic for a half century and his departure from the field is long overdue. I have long thought Bill Clinton was the most despicable person to occupy the Oval Office, but Biden provides strong competition for the title.
Kamala Harris is, at this point, the frontrunner for the Donks, but it remains to be seen if the powers that be on the port side are willing to let her be the nominee. Not sure they are. My guess is they would rather have a fresh face without the associated baggage to take on the Bad Orange Man. Who would that be? I can think of a few possibilities, in order of plausibility:
Josh Shapiro, Governor of Pennsylvania
Roy Cooper, Governor of North Carolina
Andy Beshear, Governor of Kentucky
Gretchen Whitmer, Governor of Michigan
Of that group, Whitmer likely has the highest profile, which is what makes her the least likely possibility. She’s got a definite air of Nurse Ratched about her and the only demographic that finds her appealing is human resources managers. Given his overall greasiness and demonstrably dismal performance, I don’t think Gavin Newsom is the one, nor do I see Pritzker of Illinois having a shot either. There are some delusional types (Betty McCollum, for example) who are touting Tim Jong Walz as a possible dark horse, but he’s a sputtering moron who would have no chance unless the entire Washington press corps morphs into Esme Murphy. And you can forget Skeletor Evers next door as well, as he has the charisma of lint.
I don’t doubt there will be any number of other adventures before we get to November; I would not be surprised if another assassination attempt is forthcoming, nor would I be surprised if the corrupt judge in the New York trial that saddled Trump with a bunch of “felonies” tries to put Trump in Rikers in the general population. Any other guesses? Place yer bets.
Chaya Raichik, of the account “Libs of TikTok”, and her seven-digit collection of followers, have gone scorched earth on social media accounts that cheered last weekend’s assassination attempt on former president Trump:
I get the urge. Perhaps more than most. I’ve had at least one job get tanked because some (very “progressive”) management found out about my alter ego life (which I have never, not once in 20 years, mentoined in a workplace. I don’t talk about politics at work – and yet I know of one contract job that didn’t get extended, notwithstanding the fact that I saved the project I was working on (long story for another time) because someone googled up some portion of my shadowy talk-radio existence and complained.
And that’s just the once I know about. I have suspicions about other jobs.
It was fine as far as it went – I found better jobs. But I’m not going to say I was never angry about it.
I never had the time, bandwidth or following to act on it like Raichik even if I had. And Raichik has certainly endured plenty of harassment herself. And the two of us aren’t alone.
Of course, on the right the “cultural memory” of the left’s social oppression is pretty hot and current; “cancellation”, including losing jobs, having professional license challenged, and other active harassment over quesitoning and refusing the Covid vaccine; losing jobs over photos in MAGA caps, having kids harassed because their parents were open conservatives.
And it is a little disturbing to see some people – doctors, nurses, teachers – not only cheering on the assassination, but actively wishing the same on half the population. It’d be great to help them recognize how stupid and evil they are being.
This is pretty much the definition of “punching down”.
I’ve had a policy on this blog from the beginning; I don’t go after peoples (non-elective) day jobs – and I am absolutely hands-off their families.
Does that make me a better person than those that don’t have those scruples?
Yes. Absolutely.
Has it deterred people going after me, my job and family? Well, not all of them. I don’t have the means to scorched-earth them all. WIth some, its irrelevant. With others? Karma’s a bitch. But I’m the one that has to live with myself.
SCENE: Mitch BERG is trimming weeds while listening to “Office Ladies” on headphones. He doesn’t notice Avery LIBRELLE has come up the sidewalk, looking for evidence of herbicide use.
LIBRELLE: Merg!
BERG: (Oblivious)
LIBRELLE: The so-called “assassination attempt” was pretty much a fake.
BERG: (No response, as he continues to listen to his podcast)
LIBRELLE: It looks like his ear was cut by a piece of glass! What a drama queen!
BERG: (Nothin’)
GUY RIDING PAST ON BIKE: So what do you think it was that accelerated this supposed piece of glass to a speed capable of taking a chunk out of the President’s ear?
WOMAN WAITING AT BUS STOP ACROSS THE STREET: Yeah! Perhaps magic?
GUY TRIMMING HEDGES DOWN THE BLOCK: Maybe the kids from Slytherin playing around with their wands again?
LADY IN KITCHEN, LISTENING THROUGH WINDOW: Maybe it was Umbrella Man?
BUS DRIVER (Picking up the woman across the street): Couldn’t have possibly been a bullet aimed at the candidate’s head, could it?
President Biden, in his remarkably dilatory and perfunctory statement about the murder of a Trump supporter and the attempt to murder his rival, called for “Unity”.
It was a chanting point that a lot of Democrats took a break for claiming Republicans were “threats to democracy” to gravely intone.
Let’s talk about it.
Back before they called online talk shows “podcasts”, I appeared on one. There was a panel of guests talking politics. There were online “phone callers”. It was sort of like a talk show, only without the radio.
The host introduced a caller. He identified himself as from Detroit. He had a very African-American accent; I say this to describe the sound, not to caricature the person.
He said “What this country needs is unity“.
Eventually, I asked the caller “So, let’s talk about this ‘unity’. True unity has to be consensual. That means everyone is going to compromise a little bit to achieve this ‘unity’. So tell me – what Republican principles are you willing to accept to achieve the ‘unity’ you’re talking about?”
“Oh”, he responded. “Republicans are BUUUUUL-shit”.
Democrat calls for “unity” seem about as perfunctory as someone who’s said the Lord’s Prayer so many times they’ve disconnected their brain from the act. Unity good. Disunity bad.
It’s empty. There is no effort behind it. It has no meaning.
As usual, Walter Hudson puts it better than most:
Thoughts on calls for "unity" as I arrive in town for the #RNCinMKE. Here's why they don't resonate.
They're obviously disingenuous. I could accept the sincerity of a political rival's call for unity and non-violence if they risked anything by offering it. But none of these… pic.twitter.com/uPP9Rpr8XC
Until they give on something, it’s all just words.
And they don’t have to give on much. Like, “all that yapping about ‘threats to democracy’ and ‘literally Hitler’ and ‘this could be our last election’ was a little overheated. We’re all on the same team. Let’s have a solid American-style election, here”.
You’d be crazy to hold your breath, of course. Dennis Prager says “being a leftist means never needing to apologize”. It’ll never occur to them.
Saturday’s murder of a Trump supporter and father of several, the serious wounding of at least two more, and the miraculously slight injury to candidate Trump, was shocking.
But it was far from unexpected.
First things first: Thomas Crooks was the one who pulled the trigger, killed Corey Comperatore, and tried his damnedest to kill former President Trump. On him alone lies the immediate responsibility.
But creating the atmosphere in which a 20 year old would consider blazing away at a crowd that included a Presidential candidate?
That’s been a team effort.
The left has spent 8 years telling the entire world this man is Orange Hitler, merely because they want government power. What's surprising is that this hasn't happened sooner. pic.twitter.com/EUHRpkf4cb
Of DNA And Psychiatry: This is what America does to dictators.
This is what we did to Nazis.
We’ve brought a lot of them down in our time:
Our cultural memory involves a lot of fighting against actual tyranny – indeed, it’s an inextricable part of our country’s DNA:
And so last Monday, a week ago, whenthe once-presigious New Republic ran this as their cover…:
…and supported it with this…:
We chose the cover image, based on a well-known 1932 Hitler campaign poster, for a precise reason: that anyone transported back to 1932 Germany could very, very easily have explained away Herr Hitler’s excesses and been persuaded that his critics were going overboard. After all, he spent 1932 campaigning, negotiating, doing interviews—being a mostly normal politician. But he and his people vowed all along that they would use the tools of democracy to destroy it, and it was only after he was given power that Germany saw his movement’s full face.
Today, we at The New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways. We can spend it debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, “He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.” We unreservedly choose the latter course.
I’m not saying the New Republic intended to inflame some nutbar to take a literal shot a Trump (and, let’s not forget, a crowd of his supporters, murdering one and leaving two more in the hospital). But if they were, it’d be hard to know what they’d do differently.
It’s nothing new:
Untermensch: Of course, it’s not just Trump – although he’s been the focus of most of Big Left’s efforts over the past 8-9 years.
The left’s noise machine has moved someone to put literal crosshairs on Republicans – but the rhetorical iron sights were in play long ago.
POTATUS? As recently as the day before the assassination attempt, this was the President (or at least his loathsome social media tweep):
It’s been a running theme of his entire presidency; here’s his entire “Independence Hall” speech in which, surrounded by fascist re-framings of totems of American democracy, he said that half the population – “MAGA Republicans” – wanted to “end democracy”.
I’m loathe to use phrases like “declaration of (fill in adjective) war” lightly. But it’s too corrosive a narrative to just call “collctive slander”. The President actively tried to stoke irrational fear in half ot the population, of the other half of the population, for purposes of inflaming passions to turn people out for a mid-term election the Democrats expected to lose.
But it’s about way, way more than just elections.
Bad History: Big Left – the collective institutions that support the larger leftist drive for power, the media, academia, big leftybusiness, the non-profit/industrial complex, the public employee unions – have been actively working to demonize, marginalize and dehumanize their opposition as a matter of “etermal campaign” policy for a solid decade and a half.
Locally? Let’s not forget the fact that Major Jacob “Humiliiating Mompants” Frey told the Minneapolis Police not to worry to hard about protecting people coming to see Donald Trump at Target Center in 2016 – and didn’t bother intervening in a wave of assaults on the street.
Also, the March 4 2017 attack by “Anti”-Fa on a group of Republicans in the rotunda the the State Capitol, injuring several in the immediate aftermath of the Trump inauguration.
In the latter two episodes, official actions can be seen as positive incentives to commit violence against Trump, his supporters and conservative dissenter is general.
The surprise is that it took this long to bubble up to Trump.
The counter-gaslighting has already begun:
“It was fake! They sounded like blanks!” (Tell it to the dead man)
“It was just a piece of glass from the teleprompter!” (That’s very unconfirmed – and irrelevant, since any “piece of glass” would have been propelled by f*cking bullet aimed at Trump’s head)
“The shooter was a registered Republican! (in an open primary state, who also donated to ActBlue. This one is in the process of falling apart).
But to me, for purposes of this piece, the worst is this:
Biden has never incited violence against Mr. Trump or any political opponent. Please stop with these unfounded accusations which have the potential to inflame more violence. That’s the last thing our country needs right now.
This is the culmination (so far) of a fifteen year long arc of stoking hatred for political gain. Caling it otherwise is delusion at best, evil at worst.
For Want Of An Inch: But Trump survived.
And the imaging is much more redolent of Churchill…
…whom, let’s be honest, Big Left hates just as badly.
While listening to the debate last week, I did hear one line that I fully expected Big Left’s chattering classes to try to exploit: Trump noted that illegal immigration would heavily impact “black jobs”.
And that brought out the heckling class:
Do you notice a pattern?
It’s a diverse crowd of hecklers. Some of them are upper middle-to-upper-class media figures:
That’s why I’m here in Wisconsin telling folks that today in America Black small businesses are starting up at the fastest rate in 30 years, Black unemployment has hit historic lows, and Black child poverty has been cut in half. pic.twitter.com/LAnpN0WQkl
SCOTUS: You can’t just throw your rival in prison because you don’t like him.
DEMOCRATS: So you’re saying we can drop bombs on him?
SCOTUS: You really can’t even charge your rival with a crime because his presidency made you mad.
DEMOCRATS: Got it. So we can incinerate his house with him in it?
SCOTUS: The Constitution protects officials from being terrorized with lawfare for official actions they undertook while in office.
DEMOCRATS: Ah. Makes sense. So we can officially assassinate everyone we don’t like?
SCOTUS: Prosecuting a politician because you don’t like his politics would destroy our country, and we’re not going to allow it.
DEMOCRATS: Roger that. So what you’re saying is: we are officially allowed to eliminate Trump and the Supreme Court as long as we, like, say it’s official and stuff?
And it’s been all over social media this past day or so.
At first blush, the question might seem to be “why do so many Democrat chanting heads have so much trouble with the phrase ‘”‘presidents have immunity from criminal prosecution for acts that are within the ambit of their executive authority'”?
But of course it’s not. The “elite” among the chanting heads know perfectly well that the SCOTUS just made a fairly moderate decision, remanding the case back to the lower court to sort out what behavior is public and what is private.
But that interpretation – the correct one – is too pollyannaish.
The Democrats, now that they’re committed to running the senile, doddering Biden – need to come up with some way of dragging the corpse across the line.
Panicking people by claiming this ruling gives a president absolute power, in a cycle where the Democrats only campaign hook is “ORANGE MAN LITERALLY HITLER” is the purpose.
“BUT!”, Democrats respond, “this lays the groundwork for unquestioned power!”
George Washington was offered a crown and the ground floor in a hereditary aristocracy.
Abraham Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus.
Woodrow Wilson used the “Sedition Act” to imprison political foes.
FDR trampled the Constitution in pursuit of socializing swathes of the American economy, and unilaterally imprisoned innocent Japanese-American citizens.
FDR, Truman, Ike, JFK, LBJ and Nixon to various degrees all used the FBI and CIA to spy on domestic opponents.
Obama used the military to extrajudicially murder an American citizen, used Federal law enforcement to try to discredit American gun stores and owners (leading to the death of an American border patrol agent and many Mexicans), sicced the IRS on the Tea Party, and used the FBI to spy on the Trump campaign.
The “roadmap” has always been there; the President already has unlimited power, if they want to use it – especially with the logarithmic growth in executive-branch power since the Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson administrations.
A president needs power to do the job to which they’ve been elected; deciding how much power, and keeping that power in check, has always been the job of a free people and its institutions.
And it took about four hours for all of that “Joe Biden is a modern titan!” to vanish down the memory hole:
Bear in mind, that the Democrat establishment is panicked about their candidate’s electoral viability.
Not the fact that he’s the guy with “the football”.
Not the fact that America’s enemies, who’ve been feasting on America’s diminishing potency, have got to be looking at the fact that America is led by a senile man, his power-mad Edith Wilson-style wife, and a coterie of useless Ivy League political staffers and grifters, and seeing that the shelf date might just end in 2025, not 2029. And maybe planning accordingly:
U.S. military bases in Europe were put on a heightened state of alert over the weekend as installations urged vigilance among their members. At U.S. European Command headquarters in Stuttgart, the Army garrison on Sunday issued a communitywide alert that the force protection threat level was elevated to condition “Charlie” until further notice. Similar directives were sent to other bases in Germany, including the Army’s Rheinland-Pfalz and Ramstein Air Base, which together form the largest U.S. military community overseas. The Rheinland-Pfalz garrison alert includes Baumholder and outlying installations in Romania and Bulgaria. Aviano Air Base in Italy also rose its condition level to Charlie, and other installations in Italy introduced enhanced security measures. The Charlie threat level “applies when an incident occurs or intelligence is received indicating some form of terrorist action or targeting against personnel or facilities is likely,” according to the Army’s website.
Read more at: https://www.stripes.com/theaters/europe/2024-06-30/us-military-bases-germany-terrorism-threat-14342506.html Source – Stars and Stripes
I have a sneaking suspicion Iran and its proxies, and Red China and theirs, are seeing a six month opening to make hummus or kimchi while the sun shines on a world where the keepers of Pax Americana have taken an ice cream break.
Some are saying “I told you so”:
That almost the entire media repeated the same lie with the exact same words is disturbing.
The legacy news is not merely fake, but also unoriginally fake!
And they – we – are right, because that same media that ran interference and told us not to believe our lying eyes, is trying to gaslight us in the other direction:
“It’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that—scattered stories and open questions aside—the American press corps failed to penetrate this White House as it did the last one, and failed to provide an accurate portrait of the president,” @semaforben writes. https://t.co/Gy9unzVbOm
That brings us back to [Bill Maher’s proposal, in the post linked] of simply handing the nomination to the nearest white male while overlooking Biden’s current running mate, the black woman Biden selected to be the next in line. The center-Left part of the party might — might — go along with that idea out of desperation. The progressive Left, as Matthews astutely points out, would go into an utter meltdown. Harris’ allies don’t want to win by giving up any power at all.
And in a real sense, they’d be correct to oppose it. Harris may not have been on the primary ballots this year, but Biden won 99% of the delegates with Harris explicitly remaining on the ticket. Newsom never even bothered to enter the race. If Biden pulls out, those delegates may be released in a legal sense, but Harris and her progressive allies have a very good argument that primary voters endorsed her as well as Biden. And you’d better believe that the same progressives that are conducting Occupy operations on college campuses and highways to support radical jihadi terrorists in Gaza will show up in much more force if Democrats pull a back-room switcheroo that leaves Harris without a seat when the music ends.
And you’d better believe the center-Left knows it, too…having anointed her as capable of being One Heartbeat Away in not one but two presidential cycles now, Democrats can’t just toss her into the garbage now. How do they explain her being competent enough to be Biden’s backup but not to run in his place?
Long story short – the Dems may have no choice but to triple down on gaslighting the public. They can count on it working with 33% of the population, anyway.
Snopes finally admits something conservative media has been saying for seven years and change:
No, then-President Donald Trump did not call neo-Nazis and white supremacists "very fine people" in 2017. Speaking about a deadly protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, he said those groups should be "condemned totally." https://t.co/AHjw0mwl3ipic.twitter.com/TtCH1BzZja
Not sure what it was that prompted them to cough up the truth.
Perhaps because, at least among the opinion-making class, the damage is done and irrecoverable; in this case, “Journalist” Christopher Ingraham of the MN Reformer:
Snopes has gone completely off the rails. They published this yesterday, for some reason. pic.twitter.com/XquphwXRoU
Biden may be a good man – signs say “no, not really” – but the “steadiness” of his “leadership” have left the Middle East and Ukraine in flames, and I’m not betting against bad things happening in Taiwan.
But let’s focus on Klink’s other bit: how Trump is “fascinated with dictators”.
Governor Klink:
Set up a snitch line
Presided over setting up a “badthink” database with no public visibility whatsoever
Classified people as “non-essential” – along largely political grounds
Enriched his and the Democrat party’s donors while squashing small business
Hid the math by which he justified his “emergency powers”…
…which, speaking of which, he kept for a solid year after the “emergency” was over.
I’m no Trump fan – but Klink is the one who actually cosplays dictator in office.
In other words: A woman with near 100% name recognition, especially among people who come out for special elections, beat someone nobody had heard of three weeks before the election.
By nine points.
In a district Keith Ellison won by 20, and Governor Klink by 30:
It’s so cute that the DFL thinks that most Trump voters don’t know this – I know many who stopped holding their noses and switched to full-face respirators to vote for him.
But we – especially if “we” are working class Minnesotans whose paychecks are 20% smaller than they were five years ago, and whose food budgets have gone up by half – might be willing to give it another shot at this rate.
Why do Democrats have such problems with cognitive dissonance?
When likely voters were asked if they’re “generally more inclined to vote” for a Republican, Democrat or candidate from another party, 45% said they prefer Republicans, 44% prefer Democrats, 8% were undecided and 3% preferred another party.
Minnesota Republicans are taking encouragement from this – as they should.
The same poll shows Trump and the First Potato in a dead heat:
According to our latest exclusive KSTP/SurveyUSA poll of Minnesota voters, Biden leads Trump 44% to 42%, with 11% saying they’ll vote for another candidate and 4% undecided. The poll has a credibility interval, similar to margin of error, of ±4.9%
“When you have a 2-point race in a presidential year, you’ve got a competitive state,” Carleton College political analyst Steven Schier said. “One that both campaigns will probably pay attention to.”
I’d urge a little caution along with the exuberance:
See that11% “Other Candidate” and 4% in the Presidential poll (and 11% between “Other” and “Undecided” in the House race)? I’m going to guess that, among the Legal Pot and Libertarian and Ventura Party dross, that involves a lot of “Uncommitted” DFLers. Democrat intraparty squabbling is like a couple of bull hogs fighting for the best patch of mud – but being essentially herd animals, Democrat voters almost always “come home”.
The numbers in the House poll refer to generic Republicans versus generic Democrats. It’s contingent on coming up with candidates who are better than generic. There is a strong undercurrent in the MNGOP of the same crowd that made Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Tayor Green into powerbrokers. Someone needs to teach some Minnesota GOP voters what legislatures are for. On the other hand, it shows that for exceptional candidates – people cut from the same cloth as Harry Niska, Eric Lucero, Pam Scott, Walter Hudson and Mary Franson – there is immense opportunity.
The Conventional Wisdom in 2016, when Trump came without two points of toppling Hillary!, was that Trump didn’t “almost win”; Hillary!, being a terrible candidate, almost lost. We’ll see if Trump has increased his cachet, but it’s entirely possible the First Potato is a worse candidate than Hillary! was.
Still, two years into the “trifecta”, we’ve had worse news.
Elon Musk illustrated the truth for many in America’s political “middle”:
I’m not in “the middle”, by any means. I used to call myself “center right”, but these days I am proud to call myself a Paleocon, from the “let’s get back to the Sharon Statement” school of paleoconning.
Trump from 2016 to 2020 governed largely, but far from consitently, as a conservative; he secured the border, exerted productive pressure to support US interests overseas, and cut a crap-load of regulations. He also blew up the deficit – just as Dubya and Lightworker before him, and not nearly as badly as Joe “Obama 2.0” Biden have. Never mind his Democrat origin story – I have one too – but he’s a populist standup comic, not an activist. He can, and is, publicly on any side of any issue that suits him. No different than his opposition.
But as the Biden campaign settles in to try to battle back from polls that, at the moment, seem a little encouraging to Trump, it’s worth asking – what is “the center” in America today? Or, more accurately, where are the American people as a mean, and who is closer to it?
Issue
Polling
Biden
Trump
The Border
Trump +21
Mayorkas: “The Administration bears no responsibility for the problems”.
Illegal immigration is destroying the country. Build the wall.
Abortion
Trump +5. 16 week ban has 48% approval.
Biden supports taxpayer-funded abortion until and after birth and repealing the Hyde Amendment.
Trump opposed a federal ban and the six-week ban, and is casually pushing the 16 week ban.
National Security
Trump +6
Do we even need to go into it?
“Make America strong again”. “Today, [the world] laughs at America”
Crime
Trump +13
Crime is a result of “systemic racism”.
“We should execute…” fentanyl smugglers.
Inflation
Trump +18
“Inflation is transitory, so let’s spend our way out of it”
Time to reel in the spending – but don’t touch
Jobs and the economy
Trump +5. Also – in 10/14, interventionism was nine points behind “government does too much”
Tripling down on “Bidenomics” – spending our way to
Pointing out, correctly, that Bidenomics is strangling the American dream.
Climate
Pew, 10/23: 30+ support phasing out fossil fuels
Administration is committed to “net zero by 2050”
“Drill, baby, drill!”
Israel vs. Hamas
82% of Americans support Israel. 62% say any ceasefire must be contingent on release of the hostages.
February 2024: “The hostages should be released, but…” Administration is actively undercutting the Israeli war cabinet supported by 80% of Israelis.
Trump advocates revoking student visas for antsemitic students.
Ukraine
54% of Americans support maintaining / increasing aid to Ukraine
Biden has no clear realistic end goal in sight. July 2023: “We’ll stay as long as it takes”, whatever that means.
Trump supports increasing aid with the goal of bringing Putin to an “off ramp”, a negotiated settlement. February 2024: “Trump is the only president who hasn’t given Putin what he wants”.
NATO
53% of Americans support NATO
BIden has pushed NATO in no direction in particular.
Trump pushes for NATO members to pay fair share, thus strengthening the alliance.
Education
Biden +2 (43-41) – hardly a mandate.
Biden backs CRT, racial division.
Promises cutting federal funding to school systems teaching CRT.
Say what you will about the value of moderation; I’m here to pull the conversation to the right however I can.
But if the center decides the election, then Trump might just have a shot.
Another campaign, another flap about Trump vs. NATO:
Trump still doesn't understand how NATO works, he still thinks allies "owe money" and he's sending a signal to Russia to attack them while the crowd cheers. An invitation to broaden the war. https://t.co/VUZUglr5kn
On the one hand, Trump’s rhetoric about NATO is…not “reckless”, so much as annoying.
On the other hand? At a policy level, Trump strenghened NATO – and his rhetorical, er, “unpredictability” seems to have caused America’s would-be enemies to sit out the aggression and wait for the US to change leadership to someone like, well, Obama and Biden.
But now, as in 2016, the NATO members complaining the hardest are the ones – like Germany – that didn’t get the actual message; hold up you end of the damn deal.
To be fair, Gemany’s spending has risen by something like 30% – although the Bundeswehr has thirty years of sloth to work off; the Luftwaffe’s fighter force at one point was 8% action-ready, the Army is a glorified Boy Scout troop that’s 1/6 of its 1992 size,
(And don’t think we’re not looking at you, Canada, whose Navy is about as old and decrepit as, well, the US’s current leader).
And then on the other hand there are the countries that didn’t need to get the message: Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and the other former “Warsaw Pact” nations.
PS: Just so we’re clear: everything you can say about personality cults can be said equally about anti-personality cults. The more insipid (to say nothing of deranged) Never-Trumpers are just as bad.
Since roughly the 2020 election, I’ve simultaneously:
Thought something was amiss about the elections; if not Chicago-style ballot stuffing, at least a world of irregularites with the “legal” changes due to Covid – mail in balloting, and the collusion between the DOJ, the Biden campaign, big media and big tech to “shape” the Hunter Biden story, among others
Told some of the more extreme election skeptics, especially on the air, “That’s an interesting theory, but until Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani bring an actual case with evidence to court, rather than beclowning themselves, what do you expect we’re going to do about it?”
After being falsely accused of rape by classmate Wanetta Gibson, Brian Banks spent close to six years in prison. In 2012, his conviction was overturned when his accuser confessed that she had fabricated the entire story. pic.twitter.com/Ixq5UnEpr4
The legal system isn’t perfect, but it beats most of the alternatives.
Which may or may not be good enough.
Second: In a separate, seemingly unrelated topic: in Minnesota, most judges are elected. But the candidate pool is intensely circumscribed because, as a lawyer once told me, running a campaign against a sitting judge in front of whom one will one day have to appear in court is pretty much a one-way trip toward spending the rest of your career chasing people who bounce checks.
Judges, by inference – who are charged with being our society’s stentorian impartial guardians of justice and fairness and due process – apparently have the egos of a bunch of middle school “mean girls”.
Reading between the lines: the reputation and social standing of practitioners among other practitioners is as much a part of the judicial system as due process and gavels and the literal letter of the law.
Socially Rigged
So – did the social pressure among lawyers, judges and everyone else in the legal profession that we discussed above affect the election, or the way the courts approached questions about it?
To: The Secret Service From: Mitch Berg, obstreporous peasant Re: SOPs
Secret Service,
Am I remembering wrong, or wasn;t there a time when “threatening a current or former President” was worth investigating, if not actually chargable?
Just curious – Rick Wilson, NPR’s sole GOP source and former head of an organization that had a bit of a “predators in leadership” issue, was on Twitter the other day:
Rick Wilson, the Founder of Intrepid Media on #MSNBC:
Last week, I asked “why all the hate for National Review?”
Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, responded:
I had a subscription to National Review for decades. I let it lapse when I realized O’Sullivan’s Law applied to his own magazine. The writers I admired – who stated my views better than I could – were no longer welcome there.
Samuel Francis. John Derbyshire. Mark Steyn. Conrad Black. Theodore Dalrymple. Victor Davis Hanson. Some of their names still appear on the website but they haven’t had an article published in years. The views of the magazine have shifted. Look at the articles in the last few issues, the most conservative guy is . . . James Lileks. I love his writing but he’s not the successor to William F. that I would have chosen to write insightful political commentary. I didn’t leave the magazine, the magazine left me but it’s worse than that.
“National Review is now run by a nest of never-Trumpers,” said Francis Sempa in 2021, and his comment is still on-point today. The man who is far and away the most popular candidate for the Republican nomination for President isn’t classy enough for National Review. He’s a boor. He doesn’t lose gracefully. And those tweets! He’d never get invited to one of National Review’s cruises.
Neither will I. My views are too extreme, too conservative. Like their former columnists and the former President, and the 80 million people who voted for Trump last time and the 120 million who will vote for him this time, I’m not good enough enough for National Review. Which puts me in mind of Grocho Marx: “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.”
Joe Doakes, former National Review subscriber, no longer in Como Park
Well, I do subscribe to the National Review. Some of my favorites are gone – Derb, Kevin WIlliamson – and others like Charles CW Cooke and Andrew McCarthy remain.
“Never Trump?” Some are. Some are, like me, Trump skeptics, or from the “what have you done lately?” crowd. Not sure if Trump isn’t classy enough for the NR, but I’ve never gelled with his personality, even back when he was a Democrat.
I didn’t vote for Trump in 2016. I did in 2020, although his behavior between the election and Biden’s coronation was almost as stupid as, well, the system he fought. I’ll be in Team Ron ’til the bitter end, but I won’t be voting, directly or indirectly, for a fourth Obama term. Make of that what you will.
But the Trump era is going to end – next summer, next November, or perhaps in January of 2029. And I want the GOP that picks up at the end of all that to be more like the GOP of 1994 than the Matt Gaetz clown car of 2023.
And the National Review, whatever else you say about them, is about the same thing.
I hear what Joe’s saying. I understand it. I even agree to a point. I’m also a conservative before I”m a Republican. There will be a post-Trump era, sooner or later. I’d like whatever replaces Trump to reflect beliefs I can get behind. Love Trump, hate him, or fall somewhere in the middle,
I don’t get the National Review hate – that might be worth a letter from Joe in and of itself.
Anywayt, Joe Doakes emails:
I know better than to read National Review Online but sometimes I can’t help myself. The recent article about Nikki Haley reminds me why that’s such a dumb thing to do.
I hate ‘gotcha’ questions. They are inevitably out of context and intended for use in a slanted, partisan media campaign. For instance (paraphrasing):
Q: What was the cause of the Civil War?
A: It was a dispute about who decides how a state will be run – the federal government or the people living in the state.
Q: You didn’t mention slavery.
A: Well, what do you want me to say about slavery? That wasn’t the cause of the war.
GOTCHA!!!!
Except she’s right. Elimination of slavery was not the cause of the war. We know this from two crucial pieces of history. You can look it up and should, because almost everything being said today is wrong.
First of all, if abolishing slavery was the reason for the war, why did four slave states – Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri – fight for the North? If those states had wanted to abolish slavery in their state, they could have done it any time. Instead, they joined the Union side to fight against the Secessionist side. Slavery was not the issue. Secession from the Union was the issue.
Second the publicity campaign to make the war about abolition of slavery came with the Emancipation Proclamation, announced long after the war was already going. It only applied to the states in rebellion – NOT to the slave states in the Union – further evidence that the abolition of slavery was not the reason for starting the war in 1861, but was simply a tactic intended to divert attention from federal government over-reach to a high moral crusade of abolition which would justify Lincoln’s unconstitutional actions during the war.
The historical evidence supports Haley but you can’t convince anybody of that today. Slavery is everything and always the most important thing, to Liberals and RINOs alike. Haley didn’t mention slavery so GOTCHA.
Infuriating.
Joe Doakes no longer in Como Park
I’m going to stake out one (actually two, given that I don’t get the zing at NR) difference Joe.
“Secession was the issue”. And what were they seceding about?
“Preserving the Union” – and what was the political issue breaking up the union? Slavery.
“Economics” – And what was the economic issue? Competition between an industralizing society and an agrarian plantation society based around slavery.
“Why were border states exempt?” – For the same reason the US allied with a rogues gallery of dictators when it was in their interests.
“Abolishing slavery” wasn’t the reason for the war – and yet all of the reasons for the war were one degree of separation away from slavery.
So the real answer, as usual, is everyone is wrong.
