Visited a different church this weekend, and heard a new song. The musicians on stage played and sang. The congregation was instructed to shout, “That’s My King” when appropriate. Like all modern churches, they have giant tv screens hanging above the stage showing the words. I’ll skip to the part of the song that I found interesting:
That’s my God That’s my shepherd My protector That’s my king
That’s my rock That’s my anchor My defender That’s my king
Most Americans think of “king” as a picture on a playing card, not a part of the government. We mistakenly believe Our Precious Democracy is the ultimate form of government. I think that’s simplistic and dangerous. The Seventeenth Amendment, the effort to pack the Supreme Court, the demand to abolish the electoral college, these all move us away from checks-and-balances and toward absolute rule by whomever counts the ballots.
One need only look to the French Revolution to see why pure mob rule is a terrible idea. Elections aren’t everything – Hitler, Castro and Putin won their elections, too. Ben Franklin quipped: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner.” Robert Heinlein wrote: “A king is the people’s only protection against tyranny . . . especially against the worst of all tyrants, themselves.”
Throughout history before the Constitution, the most common form of government was kingship, partly because Might Makes Right, but also partly because Stability Brings Order. The subjects owe allegiance to their king, sure, but as the song from church points out, kings have a responsibility to their subjects, to protect them from enemies foreign and domestic. When there’s a vacancy on the throne, there’s chaos in foreign relations and confusion in domestic politics. That’s one reason some Founders wanted George Washington to agree to be king. He was a natural leader and a gracious gentleman whom ordinary people could admire and respect.
Looking around at the chaos caused by the vacant Rose Garden Throne in America today, and considering the two contestants for the office, only one strikes me as the sort of leader who can inspire people to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and get busy restoring this nation to greatness. Only one of them is fit to be king.
Joe Doakes
Some historian – I forget who – described the British monarchy of myth, from its origins until probably the 1600s, as the old-world equivalent of Mafia factions duking it out for the position of Capo di Tutti Capi, only with no FBI to prevent slop-over to the wider society. It took over 400 years, from the Magna Carta to the bitter end of the English Civil War, to turn the British monarchy into the most relatively small-l liberal significant monarchy (shaddap about Denmark) in the modern world.
And the greatest glory of the American experiment was that we were able to not only short-circuit that 400 years of dynastic tree-pruning and blood-batheing, but do it via elections and an orderly process, and implement it in 15 short years and keep it running smoothly for almost 250.
Who’s the best choice to try to keep that record going?
Democrats are shocked, shocked, that Trump is talking about using the guard “on citizens” (who are rioting and destroying cities).
Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:
Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock to keep order while they integrated the schools.
He used the military against segregationists, the enemy within, his political foes.
Was that wrong? Was Eisenhower also Hitler, same as Trump?
Kennedy also sent the regular Army to help quell anti-desegregation riots at the University of Mississippi. To be fair, modern Democrats, at least the ones in MInneapolis, likely think of Kennedy as a fascist today, too.
As noted earlier, the polls look all right for Trump – far better, in fact, than in 2016 and 2020.
But there’s no way to know what’s baked into the “special sauce” in the polls. Did they overcorrect from their embarassing showing in 2016 and 2020? Did they over-overcorrect for 2022? There’s no way to know.
I want to make sure readers understand that, given the closeness of this race, the unpredictability (and inevitability) of polling error, and the Electoral College geography, a Harris/Walz victory remains plausible. You are permitted here, for a moment, to luxuriate in the irony that minorities are now the “problem” for Democrats — increasingly detached from what progressives arrogantly assumed would be a permanent relationship of political patronage. But MAGA types should save the smugness for now, if for no other reason than that Harris’s victory, should it emerge, will be properly interpreted as a direct rebuke to them.
I early-voted yesterday – something I’d never have thought about four years ago.
It took an hour to get into the polling station. This was in Roseville, MN – a very blue suburb.
Beyond the presidency – flipping the MN House, and ending the ravages of the “Trifecta”, is also at stake.
Two years ago, I resisted the “Red Wave” hype – it never quite smelled right to me.
This year? “It’s Trump’s race to lose” is a little more plausible – and thus, more dangerous.
Vance calling the moderators on their fairly naked bias: After the moderators used their interstitial bits to finish Walz’s point for him while trying to “fact-check” Vance, Vance finally had enough, and beat them down pretty brutally.
“Misspoke”: Oh, yeah. Bias notwithstanding, the mods asked Walz to answer MPR’s reporting that he was not, in fact, in Hong Kong during the Tienanmen Square massare. And it was pretty glorious:
And his first answer was “I was born into a middle class family…”
No, really – although he’s spent his past eighteen years telling people every detail of that time in China, down to what he ate and which Communist-logo sweatshirt Gwen wore, he slammed on the brakes and phumphered away claiming that he was old knucklehead and had “misspoken”
Facts: Vance was able to shred Walz in detail on a few issues, including his signing of Minnesota’s radical abortion laws – which put Walz back on his heels (and showed us that Tom Emmer was in fact, a pretty effective debate prepper.
And the #1 highlight:
Walz was weird; Vance was not: Walz had his moments – but Vance never lost his cool, stayed on message. Walz did, and did not. Vance won on style and substance, and it wasn’t even close.
And this may have been the first Vice Presidential debate of my lifetime that might have an actual impact on the election.
Donald Trump was the target of what the FBI said “appears to be an attempted assassination” at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Sunday, just nine weeks after the Republican presidential nominee survived another attempt on his life. The former president said he was safe and well, and authorities held a man in custody.
U.S. Secret Service agents stationed a few holes up from where Trump was playing noticed the muzzle of an AK-style rifle sticking through the shrubbery that lines the course, roughly 400 yards away.
If the Harris/Walz ticket wins the presidential race, taht means Minnesota will be left with Peggy Flanagan as governor. Not only is Flanagan a died-in-the-wood radical, she is one of the least likeable people in Minnesota politics (or was, until we met the DFL’s legislative class of 2023).
And if Trump wins, Walz will return to Minnesota most likely weakened after running into a media that asks him questions more probing than “Pronto Pups vs. Corn Dogs – what’s your take?” for the first time in his political career.
This is an opportunity.
Now, some will say “The MNGOP will just screw it up”.
Let’s talk about that.
Let’s start off with two points:
MNGOP has MUCH less power over who runs for office and what they say than the MNDFL does.
Unlike the MNDFL, the MNGOP is controlled by activists (defined as “people who show up, who support candidate, and who try to convince people to vote along with them”). But it takes something MN Republicans are bad at; patience and sustained effort. Let’s talk about both.
The Car, Not The Driver
Like a lot of people who rail on about politics without having been all that involved, I used to think the MNGOP drives policy.
A very smart person who worked at the MNGOP grabbed me and hauled me off to lunch and explained things to me. Turns out…
…It doesn’t.
Campaigns, candidates and (eventually) elected representatives do.
So when people say “The MNGOP needs to DO something”? Their job is to support candidates who will…DO something. But you need the candidates.
If GOP activists bubbled up from the districts and endorsed 201 Michelle Bensons, Peg Scotts, Harry Niskas, Walter Hudsons, Mary Fransons and Jim Nashes, we’d be a red state and the MNGOP would reflect that will. If they kept that momentum doing and endorsed people of that caliber for govenor, the party would reflect that will – eventually. We’ll come back to that.
Point being, the party isn’t a policy-driving organization. Oh, it keeps the party’s platform – which is an enormous, unenforceable and occasionally self-contradictory agglommeration of wishes. And it runs the process by which those caucus, BPOU and district endorsements waft up to the state level.
But it doesn’t set policy.
If the activists endorse a majority of candidates who believe that the state anthem should be “Friends in Low Places”, and those candidates win elections, and the activists who nominated them and worked toward their elections stay active in the party and win seats in the State Central, then at some point in the future the policy of the MNGOP will be to enshrine that Garth Brooks song.
Provided they show up and win.
The Arena
But the party reflects what the activists who show up, and KEEP showing up, bring to the table.
And the activists control how the party works – via various BPOU, District and eventually State Central Committees.
Thing is, it takes a couple of years of concerted effort to take State Central. As in, *sustained* effort.
Remember the Ron Paul crowd? They came,they actually took over the 2012 convention, they sent their delegates to Tampa…
…and then largely left. A few of them stuck with the party and the process.
Before them – remember the Tea Party? They came, they *slaughtered* the DFL in 2010 – and they left (or got hijacked by the “confrontation is BETTER than winning!” crowd).
In other words the party is controlled, not by the people who showed up at caucuses last February, but by the people who showed up the previous 2-5 caucuses, and kept showing up.
That is very unlike the DFL, btw. The GOP honors the decisions of the party’s activists, even when they make clearly doomed endorsements.
In contrast, the last activist-endorsed DFL governor candidate (for an open seat) was Mike Hatch. In every open seat election since then, the DFL party leadership has stepped in to assert its will – in 2010 pushing Mark Dayton past Margaret Anderson-Kelliher in the primaries, and in 2018 dragging Tim Walz over the finish line against Erin Murphy and Erin Maye Quade.
For better or worse, the GOP goes with its activists.
Answers?
The answers are simple, but not easy or glamorous:
Show up
Endrose solid candidates for everything from school board to legislature to Governor and Senator
Suipport them – with caucus time, money, work (!), and convincing neighbors.
Keep doing ti – even if you lose some races. 2022 (and, let’s be honest, every statewide race since 2008) was a heartbreaker. So suck it up.
The Minnesota GOP reflects the will of those who show up and keep showing up”. It sounds like a platitude.
It’s not – for better or worse. It’s a challenge, and sometimes it feels like a curse. Democracy is so much easier when someone gives it to you, isn’t it?
Knock off the despair. If the Minneapolis City GOP can go out and scrap it out for every seat, people in Andover and Apple Valley can show up and win your purple ‘burbs.
Calling Republicans “weird”, and demanding “Joy”, is about as substantive a policy discusion as you’re going to get from a 2024 Democrat.
As Richard Fernandez reminded us in 2016, it’s largely Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert’s fault:
The process went something like this: Someone said something on Fox News that mainstream liberalism didn’t like; Stewart and/or Colbert aired a sustained critique of the idea and the thinking behind it; liberal internet publications hailed it as the greatest rhetorical victory since Darrow argued for Scopes; liberals’ Facebook feeds full of liberal friends filled up with clips of the takedown. No one learned anything, no one engaged with an idea, and nothing outside of a very specific set of ideas was given any real credence. As Emmet Rensin so perfectly put it:
Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy. … Over 20 years, an industry arose to cater to the smug style … and culminated for a time in The Daily Show, a program that more than any other thing advanced the idea that liberal orthodoxy was a kind of educated savvy and that is opponents were, before anything else, stupid.
As Rensin deftly discerns, this sort of intellectual elitism is probably part of the reason that the Democratic Party went from getting 66 percent of the manual laborer vote in 1948 to outpolling the GOP by just 2 points in 2012. It’s the inevitable consequence of eight years of reducing George W. Bush and all of his supporters to dumbass hicks, and choosing to denigrate the poor and uneducated (if only they read The Atlantic!), rather than doing real outreach to them. But as Christopher Hitchens learned on Bill Maher’s show, people don’t want to consider that possibility:
I – and many smarter than I – have been observing for well over a decade that the Democrat party’s messaging seems to be aimed exclusively at people who might have an MA or PhD, but left their critical thinking skills at graduation.
Tim Walz calls Trump a "threat to Democracy" and a "fascist" who will "put people's lives in danger" just two weeks after Trump survived an assassination attempt. pic.twitter.com/ssNQdGFqEr
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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?
