Yes, Academics are this dumb!

“Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”

There are countless examples from history – as that Orwell quote shows – as well as our present day (see Souxie Wiles and Michael Baker).

Yet I still find myself being surprised by such stupidity, as with this story of then freshly minted President Biden meeting with a bunch of US historians in March 2021.

The enlisted attendees, all credentialed progressives, included Michael Beschloss and Doris Kerns Goodwin, each of whom has written on several presidencies; Joanne B. Freeman, a Yale professor and expert on Alexander Hamilton’s life; and Walter Issacson, many of whose books touch on presidential power.

I liked Goodwin in Ken Burn’s series Baseball, where she described the agony of being a Boston Red Sox fan, especially in 1986. But it would be fair to say she’s been tarnished in recent years by (accurate) accusations of plagiarism. Freeman is excellent on Hamilton, as Issacson is on more general US history, especially when it comes to the modern Hi-Tech period.

They had all gathered at the request of another historian, one Jon Meacham, whose ethical standards shine throughout:

Meacham was credited with writing Biden’s acceptance speech at the Democratic convention; he later characterized the speech as “poetic” on MSNBC without disclosing his authorship.

It looks like Biden, like so many other Democrat Presidents, was trying for a bit of JFK magic by mixing with intellectuals as he had, reaching for his strand of the mystic chords of memory.

They had assembled to advise the President on how his presidency might be shaped to be considered “historic.” Press reports hinted that the President’s staff saw an opportunity to nudge their boss into adopting an ambitious domestic agenda by crafting an image of Biden consulting history as a guide.

The historians were fully onboard with these plans:

He was, they argued, in a special position to undertake a programmatic agenda that would transform the nation’s civic and economic life. He could achieve that which President Obama had promised but failed to produce.

The advice is reported to have come in simple phrases—go really big, go really fast. The conjured image of what Biden could achieve was a fusion of the accomplishments of FDR and LBJ, only bigger, to meet the enlarged aspirations of a woke society.

Biden had just beaten a guy with some of the highest negatives in Presidential poling history, who had almost never been above 50% approval in his term, and Biden had been helped along further by one of the biggest voter turnout operations in Democrat history, the machine fueled by some $350 million supplied from the billionaire owner of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.

But even if the resulting 81 million votes did fool them into thinking Biden had a mandate rather than just the Trump-hate vote, the threadbare results of the Democrats in the House, where they lost seats and won none, and the Senate where they barely got the two they needed merely to get a tie, in post-2020 special elections in the state of Georgia (an unlikely-to-be-repeated fluke), surely should have been a clue that the Democrats did not.

When FDR launched the New Deal in 1933 he did so after a landslide win, plus coattails that delivered him huge majorities in the House and Senate. Same with LBJ and his Great Society programs in 1965. Obama had only slightly less power in 2009-2010.

For historians, so deeply informed not just of American history but American political history, to suddenly ignore their own knowledge because they had glittering Leftist prizes in their eyes, is almost criminally stupid.

Suffice to say that Biden, with fifty years of sometimes rough and raw political experience of winning and losing behind him, certainly should have known better as he surveyed the lay of the land. Bill Clinton post 1994 should have been the model, as it likely will soon have to be after this year’s Mid-Term elections.

But sometimes ordinary people and politicians are as stupid as intellectuals.

An amazing interview

Now that even the NYT and Washington Post, plus reef fish like CNN and MSNBC, have acknowledged that Hunter Biden’s laptop and contents are the real deal and not “Russian Disinformation”, it’s interesting to go back to the source of the story, the Mac repair guy, and see what he has to say about it.

The following lengthy Breitbart interview of the man is both fascinating and horrifying. There are several portions that I think need to be quoted. First up, his dealings with the FBI about the laptop:

JM: I don’t look at it that way. My ‘What if?’ is ‘What if the FBI had done its job?’ What if they had taken the drive in October of 2019 and done something with it instead of doing nothing with it?’ I count four times, including the time Rudy handed it to them, that the FBI had the opportunity to do something and chose not to. If they had done something two-and-a-half years ago, maybe now I would have a job and I wouldn’t have had to have gone to Giuliani and Giuliani wouldn’t have had to go to the Post to get the truth out.

Then there is that Washington Post contact by Giuliani:

JM: I remember, the day after the story broke, it was October 15 [2019],  and I had CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post in my store. It was immediately obvious they were only there to catch me in a lie. They were not there for the truth. They wanted to catch me revealing their narrative. I told them everything. I offered to show them a photo of Hunter’s signed authorization. They weren’t interested. They were only interested in their narrative. They were only interested in what their trusted government sources were feeding them. So they published nothing I said because it wasn’t what they wanted to hear— that this was a valid, factual, and consequential story.

Yesterday, I left a comment with the Washington Post and they probably won’t publish that.

BNN: CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post didn’t use anything you said back when the story first broke?

JM: They were only interested in discrediting me. If not, they would have told the public what I told them. The thing that messed me up is that I wasn’t ready for this. No one coached me. I didn’t even know what I could or could not say. I’m cornered in my shop by five members of the press. It was a very awkward interview. I was as uncomfortable as I have ever been. My main concern was protecting my family. I didn’t want my dad harassed so it was awkward.

I find it amazing that Giuliani could have been naive enough to think that the WaPo would treat the story as evidence of Hunter Biden’s corruption and then follow-up with hard questions for Joe Biden and further investigation: that he never thought they’d run the opposite angle. It’s a key lesson for every single GOP politician and activist: never, ever trust the NYT, WaPo or any of the MSM again. They’re actively working for the Democrat Party and they will destroy you, even if you’re a nobody, in order to get Democrats elected. As the journalist who interviewed him, John Nolte says:

You can’t go to the media anymore. It used to be that if you could just get the truth to the media, the media would publish the truth and the truth would protect you. There are all kinds of movies about this, about how the goal is to find a heroic journalist who will tell the truth and save you… The Three Days of the Condor, The Pelican Brief, The China Syndrome… The idea was always this: if the government and big business were about to crush and destroy you — you, the individual, the brave truth-teller, the lonely whistleblower —  there was always a safe place to run. 

No more. They’re all in on it.

In this case “JM” had to abandon his business and get out of Biden’s state, Delaware, for a year. Even now he’s still getting harassed as a “Putin stooge” and a “criminal hacker”, despite having jumped through every legal hoop to do it right, including with the FBI. He did at least get good protection from the local cops in the face of multiple death threats from Biden supporters. But there’s still damage:

JM: Bankruptcy is possible. I could lose my house. I’m not there yet and I hope not to lose my house. A friend finally convinced me to let her open a GiveSendGo account to help me out. That’s helping some. I’m also doing odd jobs, like going to people’s homes and picking up trash for twenty dollars an hour. It’s not like fixing computers like I used to. I’m reluctant to go back into that business because I have no control over who will show up.

Speaking of trust there’s this from “JM”: he doesn’t blame the WaPo after they “failed” to protect his identity by not blurring out the name of his little shop from a photo in their article, which is when the trouble started:

JM: (laughs) With the New York Times finally coming out last week and admitting the laptop was real, that’s what I want to see more of. The more that news gets out that I’m not a hacker, not a Russian spy, not a traitor, the more quickly and efficiently I can rebuild my life. Once people realize ‘He’s not these things, He did the right things,’ then I feel I will have an opportunity to rebuild my life. Last week, with the New York Times’ admission, that was the first glimmer of hope I’ve had in over a year. It’s only one news source, but the Washington Post just reached out to me, so…
…
JM: You have to trust that system, that it’s going to work. Once you go outside the system, it has no purpose.

Oh dear. He also still believes in the system that largely destroyed him.

Election conspiracy theory updates

As a long-time observer of US elections in my lifetime, and with great interest in their history, leading to being an avid reader of books like Down For The Count (Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America) by Guardian writer Andrew Gumbel, I got quite a kick out of the sudden and dramatic turnaround of the US Democrat Party, the MSM and all “balanced and impartial observers” with regard to claims of election corruption in the wake of the 2020 US Presidential election.

Suddenly all those claims about corruption and cheating in the 2000, 2004 and 2016 US elections started to get memory-holed. It’s perhaps not surprising then that the book quoted above, first published in 2005 and updated in 2008, does not have a Wikipedia entry (it’s also known as Steal This Vote)!

However, perhaps the reason is that the people who won the election for Joe Biden in 2020 actually didn’t keep quiet about it, but burst forth into print just a few months later to boast about their efforts in the now infamous TIME magazine article, The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election. Rather than memory holing, the tactic was blatant spin as the election was “fortified” (not stolen you see).

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

You see! It was Trump that was stealing the election and the USA was “saved” by all these brave and honest billionaires and Democrat activists.

Also “behind the scenes” since then has been a major effort by the Republican Party across the USA to fix up the process and make sure the sort of crap pulled in 2020 does not happen again, at least not on as large a scale and not in swing states. Interestingly the progress that has been made shows up the same things that the TIME article noted – except from a POV that they were corrupted things rather than good ones.

First up is a Wisconsin legal decision on ballot drop boxes:

A judge in the state of Wisconsin ruled on Thursday that the use of ballot boxes in the 2020 election was, in fact, illegal. Joe Biden was declared the winner over Donald Trump in the state by 20,682 votes.

This stunt was pulled in various places leading up to the 2020 election: various election practices not approved of by the state legislature as legally required. In this case simple instructions issued by election bureaucrats, along with no legal requirements on what a drop box could be, on protecting them or even having a chain of custody log or ballot count.

The Healthy Elections Project reports that, during the 2020 election, “only eight states explicitly permit[ed] or require[d] ballot drop boxes by statute or regulatory guidance,” but that drop boxes were nonetheless available to voters in at least 19 states. In other words, under the umbrella excuse of COVID!, at least 11 states used drop boxes without legislative authorization to do so.

By an odd coincidence, Wisconsin is one of a handful of swing states where “midnight magic” occurred on election night. These were the states where, at some point in the wee hours, massive vote dumps produced huge jumps in Biden’s, and only Biden’s, vote tallies.

Associated with this was testimony from former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who led an audit of the 2020 election in his state, that the election was so corrupt that the state legislature should “take a very hard look at the option of decertification of the 2020” presidential election. Purely symbolic at this stage re “President” Biden of course and it’s more important to focus on future elections.

Then there’s another big swing state, Pennsylvania, where the ballot mail-in laws have been found to be unconstitutional:

This will be bittersweet news for a lot of people. A five-judge panel has ruled that Pennsylvania’s universal mail-in voting law violates the state’s constitution, an argument conservatives have been making since it was enacted in 2019. That election law went on to play a pivotal role in delivering the state for Joe Biden in 2020, who trailed on Election Night, but pulled ahead as more and more mail-in votes were counted.

Now this is not the end of the matter. Democrat Governor Tom Wolf will appeal the decision and it will make its way to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, where the Democrats have a majority so it will likely be reinstated. I’d like to think that it will then be taken to the US Supreme Court, given how important it is, both as an election-corrupting law in general and as an example of how constitutions don’t matter a crap to the Democrat party unless their ox is being gored.

We live in an era where the judiciary is simply an activist wing for Democrats. While you are always holding your breath on how a Republican-nominated judge will rule, those put in place by Democrats typically vote in lockstep.
…
The idea that the “right to vote” only exists in the absence of any and all guardrails is moronic. But that’s the argument Democrats are making all over the country, including in Pennsylvania. By their logic, why not let people vote on their phones? Heck, let’s have a full year of early voting. If all procedures and protections qualify as voter suppression, as Democrats claim, then what’s the argument for not just blowing up everything?

As an addendum to this, recent video and audio recordings from the state’s Delaware County (3rd largest in Pennsylvania), have revealed ever more systemic problems with the voting than previously suspected:

To date, the videos have exposed a wide array of problems with election integrity, including on-tape admissions that the election laws were not complied with, that 80 percent of provisional ballots lacked a proper chain-of-custody, that there were missing removable drives for some of the voting machines, and that election workers “recreated” new drives to response to the Right to Know request.
…
With boxes of voting sheets lining the basement floor of a Delaware County building, the election worker tells Miller, “There were six precincts in one location and all of the machines were, all of the scanners were, programmed to accept any ballot of those six precincts.”

“It was a nightmare,” the Delaware County official explained, adding that “you couldn’t, there’s no way you could reconcile” the results.

To a certain extent what is described there is little different than what Gumbel describes in his hilarious (and hair-raising) chapters on electronic ballots, mail-in ballots and scanners, starting in the 1970’s. This is just bigger than the elections he looked at.

They’ll be more stories to come from many US States as they repair the system and with Chinese Lung Rot in abeyance the primary reason for mail-in ballots, ballot-harvesting and the like will also recede. One note not mentioned in these articles or cases is that while the number and proportion of mail-in ballots showed massive increases in 2020 the error rates collapsed:

• Georgia: 6.5% rejections in 2016 to a mere 0.2%, more than 30 times lower.
• Pennsylvania: 1% in 2016 to 0.03% this year.
• Nevada: 1.6% in 2016 to around 0.75% this year.
• Michigan: 0.5% in 2016 to 0.1% this year.
• North Carolina: 2.7% in 2016 to 0.8% this year.

The folks at FiveThirtyEight provide several sober reasons for this incredible improvement in quality control, but given the screwups in so many other areas of the election that looks like special pleading that would not be used if Trump had won.

We’ll have to wait for the 2024 elections to see if these miracles re-occur.

Meantime I’m reminded of a line from Down For The Count where the advisor of one long-forgotten losing candidate’s said of his opponents: “They cheated fair and square”.

Kill Big Tech – and the CIA, DHS

The next GOP President needs to treat Google, FaceTwit and the rest of the Silicon Valley biggies the same way that Teddy Roosevelt treated Standard Oil.

Bust them up.

People thought oil was a dominant energy as early as the 1900’s, when we were less reliant on it than we are now.

But these people control the information flows of the world, and in the wake of the 2020 election and the shit they pulled with Hunter Biden’s laptop, plus other things about Joe Biden that should have been put before the American voter, it’s obvious that such dominance in the field is far more powerful.

Also, the next GOP President needs to take a hammer to US intelligence agencies, as GW Bush did not do in the wake of the massive failure of the CIA, FBI and the rest on 9/11. Instead he threw yet another blanket of bureaucracy over the top of them called The Department of Homeland Security that supposedly would tie them together more effectively.

They’ve always been political, but now it’s reached levels that are not acceptable for a democracy. They’re not so good at stopping the US getting screwed by its enemies but they’re very good at playing political games in Washington D.C.

Read the Powerline article for the specific list of these assholes and what they’re saying now about Hunter Biden’s laptop in response to follow-up questions. Note also their jobs: there’s no consequences for members of The Establishment.

Another Powerline article sums up the response more accurately

The New York Times expresses no regret because it doesn’t regret what it did. The Times isn’t a newspaper, it is a mouthpiece. Its purpose was obvious. It was the same purpose that animated many other news outlets, Twitter, and the 51 lying spies: they were trying to get Joe Biden elected president.

That effort succeeded. Lying about the laptop was just one of many corners they cut to achieve their desired objective, but poll data suggest that it was one of the most important. If voters had realized how demonstrably corrupt Joe Biden is–no one has ever bribed Hunter Biden–polls suggest that Donald Trump would have been re-elected. Liberal news outlets are proud of the fact that they acted together to prevent that awful possibility. If it took some lies to accomplish the mission, so what?

Thus, I attribute little significance to the New York Times’ casual acknowledgement that it blew the Hunter laptop story–really, it blew the 2020 election, if you think the Times is trying to report objectively on the news. But of course no one thinks that. For the Times, Twitter, and countless other liberal institutions, their lies about Joe Biden and Donald Trump accomplished the intended mission. There will be no apologies, no regrets–only, behind the scenes, discreet high fives.

The same is true of every person around the world who supported Joe Biden.

The fate the Left would love for all Trump supporters

American investigative reporter Julie Kelly has done sterling work reporting on the aftermath of the January 6, 2021 “Insurrection” and the reaction of America’s security state to the rioters.

But even her reports of the lengths the US State has gone to in destroying these people has not been exceeded by this latest:

Matthew Perna did nothing wrong on January 6, 2021. The Pennsylvania man walked through an open door on the Senate side of the building shortly before 3 p.m. that afternoon. Capitol police, shown in surveillance video, stood by as hundreds of Americans entered the Capitol. Wearing a “Make America Great Again” sweatshirt, Perna, 37, left after about 20 minutes.

Less than two weeks later, Perna was ensnared in what the former top U.S. prosecutor called a “shock and awe” campaign to round up Trump supporters and deter them from demonstrating at Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021. After he discovered his image on the FBI’s most wanted list for January 6, Perna immediately contacted his local FBI office and voluntarily submitted to questioning; on January 18, six FBI agents arrested Perna at his home.

His life from that point turned into a nightmare. Perna was indicted by a grand jury in February 2021 on four counts including obstruction of an official proceeding and trespassing misdemeanors. Despite his nonviolent participation in the events of that day — he did not assault anyone, carry a weapon, or vandalize property — Biden’s Justice Department and local news media nonetheless made his life pure hell. Whenever his hometown paper, the Sharon Herald, published an article on its social media account about Perna, the majority of replies were “horrible and brutal,” his aunt, Geri Perna, told me on the phone Sunday. After more than a year of legal and public torture, Perna saw no way out.

On Friday night, Matthew Perna hung himself in his garage.

“They broke him, they mentally broke him,” Geri said through racking sobs as she explained why her loved one ended his life. “He had run out of hope. I know he couldn’t take it any more.”

Who needs Putin when you’ve got the FBI and the Department of “Justice” in your own country.

I’d forgotten this but here it is, courtesy of Liberal law professor Ann Althouse’s US blog post on the subject:

“As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’
When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
Abraham Lincoln

The Triumph of Trunalimunumaprzure

Back in 1896 Republican William McKinley’s presidential campaign team ran an interesting strategy that came to be known as The Front Porch Campaign. It turned out to be the bridge between old-fashioned Presidential campaigns where the candidates stayed out of sight and let others do all the work, and the modern system where candidates are front-and-centre all the time, racing around the key swing states needed to win.

The 1896 campaign was the perfect contrast of those two styles. Instead of going to the voters McKinley’s campaign brought the voters to him. Over a period of months, something like 750,000 people came in organised delegations by train to the town where McKinley lived and then to his house, where they literally met him on his front porch, from where he made his speeches. His campaign manager, Hanna, made sure those speeches got into all the newspapers, thereby reaching tens of millions of Americans.

His Democrat opponent, William Bryan, was a great stump speaker and he decided to hit the trains, covering 18,000 miles around the USA making speeches. This was also unusual in the day but it set the standard for Presidential campaigns for the next one hundred twenty four years despite Bryan losing the election badly.

Some years ago, G W Bush’s key political advisor, Karl Rove, wrote a great book on the subject, The Triumph of William McKinley. If you want to see him talk about it, and the parallels of that time with the modern era of US politics, hit this C-SPAN link, Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters.

It was completely unexpected when the 2020 Democrats ran a similar campaign to McKinley’s for their Presidential candidate, Joe Biden. The key difference was that he didn’t meet crowds even at his home, relying on the modern electronic aids of TV and the Internet to reach people. But it was a smart strategy given the constraints of the Chinese Lung Rot pandemic and Biden’s own physical and mental frailties. Let Trump do the flying and the rallies and the speeches. The Democrats would protect their aging, frail candidate and rely on the MSM, Trump hatred and their machines in key states to deliver election victory, which they did.

But now that he’s President that strategy cannot be used all the time. Sooner or later Biden has to step out and meet people. His staff has done pretty well in this regard, keeping Biden’s appearances limited to restricted gatherings and very controlled press conferences, aided by the knowledge that the MSM will baby him as they have done since he was nominated.

It seems to have been working well, so it’s a mystery as to why they decided to step out with a classic “Town Hall” event for Biden the other night.

They used CNN, about as friendly a forum as one can get for a Democrat, plus a very restricted audience…

Not even 1/3 full

… and a very carefully screened group of questioners from the audience, including several hilariously placed shills who claimed they were Republicans – who promptly asked softball questions that just happened to fit with Democrat talking points. Only one guy seemed to be a Republican, a restaurant owner and his question was to the point and not well-handled by Biden.

But even when Biden was being guided as gently as possible by the host, the oleaginous Don Lemon, he did not do well.

If anybody can understand what the hell he was saying there please comment with your explanation. Some poor, sad political tragic actually did try and transcribe it:

”And the question is whether or not we should be in a position where, you, er, um, are why can’t the, um, the experts say we know that this virus is in fact, er, er, um, uh, its this its going to be or, excuse me, we, we, we know why all the drugs approved are not temporary, temporarily approved, but permanently approved.”

That’s about what I thought; it makes no more comprehensible sense when written down than when spoken.

Nothing new there of course. The last word in the title of this post is actually from a desperate attempt to produce a transcript from something Joe Biden tried to say in a 2020 campaign speech.

Things got no better as he rambled on about “Whether or not there’s a man on the moon”: I assume he was trying to connect vax conspiracy theories with faked moon landing theories but screwed it up as usual because his old brain is broken. He also unveiled a new economic theory in which the tsunami of government spending will actually “reduce inflation, reduce inflation, reduce inflation”. Then there was his defence of the idea of raising the corporate income tax, where he boasted that his home state of Delaware has more registered corporations “than all the rest of America combined. Combined. Combined.”. That state, which he represented for almost forty years as a Senator, has no corporate income tax.

Extended comments like those are why his handlers give him note cards with detailed sentences he can read out (but which he still screws up) and keep his free-“thinking” repertoire simple with soundbites he can remember; they make sure that he mutters “Jim Crow” at least once every time he’s allowed out of the house. In this case the Senate filibuster standing in the way of all their fabulous legislation is “Jim Crow”, which I guess does make sense when you consider that the Democrats have used it hundreds of times in recent years. As one commentator noted:

The case could be made that this wasn’t that big of a train wreck because it happened on CNN and therefore had an audience only slightly larger than I do when my cat wanders in and watches me while I shave. Still, why can’t they just leave this guy in the White House with his coloring books and spare the country the embarrassment? Television appearances by Biden are probably the only American shows the ChiComs allow to air uncensored so their beleaguered citizens can finally have something to laugh at.

This is both hilarious and pathetic. The brain trust currently running the USA – mainly Co-President Jill Biden (wife) and Co-President Klain (Chief of Staff) – thinks that letting this senile old clown babble incoherently is going to eventually be what changes hearts and minds on issues of the Covid-19 vaccine, spending, taxes or anything. Whenever sane people who aren’t heartless hear Biden speak, they just want to wrap a blanket around him and help him to his chair. This guy isn’t going to be convincing anyone to do anything.

Ever.

Given the ages of President Biden (78) , House Speaker Pelosi (80), Senate Leader Schumer (71), and more than a few of their equally aged compadres, the USA is really start to look like the USSR in the 1980’s with Brezhnev and the rest of the Politburo.

Why I would have voted for Trump – Domestic Policy

The powers of a US President are quite restricted in the world of domestic policy compared to foreign policy.

That’s a delibrate design of the US system, where power is supposed to reside as close to the people as possible, starting with their local town, city and county governments, and rising up to State governments, where each of the fifty states is like a minature USA; little nations unto themselves, right down to the military (Amazingly the Hawaian National Guard fly F-22’s, the most advanced fighter plane in the world).

Even with real power in the domestic arena the House of Representatives, basically the Parliament of the USA and the engine room of domestic policy, does not control much of what goes on in the individual states. Nor does the Senate, which is designed to sit on the House and prevent any populist movement from running riot, as well as approving foreign treaties to make them law and approving judges. The Supreme Court only steps in when a case is filed arguing that a State’s laws are breaching the Federal Consitution, and even then SCOTUS usually acts reluctantly.

It’s been particularly sad to see how many Americans don’t understand all these focused and demarcated powers, somehow imagining that the Federal government, let alone the President, is the be-all and end-all in the USA, as central government is in most other nations.

Having said that, the US Presidency has accumulated too much power. First in foreign policy courtesy of the title Commander in Chief meaning a hell of a lot more now in the age of a huge permanent military and nuclear weapons than it did before 1941, and via the Senate yielding up too much control. Robert Caro explored much of the latter in Master of The Senate, and put it down to the obvious failure of Senate isolationism, which was strong right up to when the first bombs fell on Pearl Harbour. Similarly with domestic policy via executive control of the giant bureaucracies created by the House and handed over to the Presidency to run. Exceutive Orders become much more powerful in such a system.

Thus there are certain things that happened domestically under Trump for which he can niether take real credit nor be blamed – and vice versa. But here are the things he’s done in domestic policies that I approved of.

• Judges
  Starting with the Supreme Court. Scalia’s death in 2016 scared the hell out of Conservatives, especially considering that a SCOTUS which the Left already considered too Right-wing had strengthened abortion laws and approved gay marriage, and that with several GOP-appounted judges. What would a court tilting even more to the left do? Restrict religious liberties on the basis that they “hurt” transgenders and so forth?
  Trump has come through huge on this. He was lucky to get three, but his appointments of Gorsuch, Kavanugh and especially Barret were strong – although it should be noted that Gorsuch’s recent ruling on a transgender issue could open a can of worms. Perhaps Trump’s finest moment here was standing by Kavanaugh despite a disgusting attack that exceeded even the hit job on Bork thirty years ago in its Leninist-like savagery. I think any other GOP President, even Reagan, would have pulled the nomination after advice from the Wise Men of the GOP. Certainly McCain and Romney would have folded like cheap suits.
  As such the Supreme Court should be a barrier for the next twenty years to the anti-civil liberty, woke communism growing on the Left.
  The other aspect to judges has been the huge number appointed to lower courts. This has been more McConnell’s realm but having Trump at his back to not veto the selections has been key. It provides a solid base for future SCOTUS picks by GOP Presidents and badly weakens the Democrat pool of future nominees. Admittedly that doesn’t matter because Democrat SCOTUS picks are there merely to rubber-stamp Democrat policies and decisions and no great legal nous is required for that.
  Trump’s presidency was worth it for this alone.
  
  
• Borders and Illegal Immigrants
  In 1986 there was a huge debate about this subject. Democrats argued that GOP ideas for simply booting illegal immigrants out of the country was impossible because there were some three million of them. Instead an amnesty should be arranged and the Democrats – pinky swear – would allocate gobs of money to enforce the border so that the situation would never arise again. The GOP swallowed this hook, line and sinker and Reagan signed the bill. He later said it was his greatest regret.
  Thirty five years later there are anywhere between eleven and twenty million illegal immigrants in the nation and up until Trump the border control was not much better than in the 1980’s. The sagging economy of Obama reduced the flow somewhat but it was Trump that made the first real difference in forty years on this issue. And he’s not alone:

Bernie Sanders:
“Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal“.
Ezra Klein:
Really?
Bernie Sanders:
Of course. That’s a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States.
Ezra Klein:
It would make a lot of global poor richer, wouldn’t it?
Bernie Sanders:
It would make everybody in America poorer —you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.
You know what youth unemployment is in the United States of America today? If you’re a white high school graduate, it’s 33 percent, Hispanic 36 percent, African American 51 percent. You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids?
I think from a moral responsibility we’ve got to work with the rest of the industrialised world to address the problems of international poverty, but you don’t do that by making people in this country even poorer.

Of course, aside from Bernie, who is not really a Democrat, it’s entirely understandable why the Democrats push open borders even as they hide it in less inflammatory terms so they can deny, deny, deny that that’s what they want.

Obama beat Romney by less than 5 million votes in a presidential election in which about 125 million votes were cast. More than 30 million of Obama’s votes came from people who arrived under the Hart-Cellar act; fewer than 10 million of Romney’s did.

The Democrats think that this is the key towards the Californication of the rest of the USA, starting with the biggest prize, Texas. The idea is to legalise millions of illegal immigrants to turn the US into the same One-Party state shit hole that is California. And besides that, the Democrats are as tight as the GOP is with the big businesses that love having all these cheap and easily disposable workers at their beck and call.

• Regulations
  For all the right-wing blather about the effect of tax on the private sector the fact is that it is increasingly regulations, often petty, useless ones, that are stuffing the private sector around the world, especially when it comes to small and medium-size businesses. The Arab Spring of a decade ago was started in part when a Tunisian businessman publicaly killed himself because the local authorities had destroyed him via the policing of licences.
  Even in the service economy the demands for licencing has reached the stage of vindictive stupidity for things like hair-dressing, complete with the need to complete multiple, certified “courses”:
  
  Dentists lobby for rules that prevent dental hygienists from performing teeth-whitening; the lawyers’ guild sustains extortionate rates in part by making sure that less-credentialed workers are blocked from performing even basic administrative legal tasks; college administrators earn top-flight salaries while the federally-enforced accreditation system suppresses alternative education models; the American Medical Association strains to minimize the scope of work available to nurses and nurse practitioners; and hedge fund managers push finance regulations make sure they have a leg up on less-sophisticated investors…
  
  The Trump Administration made far better progress than I expected on its goal of eliminating two regulations for every new one created (part of an Executive Order). In fact something like twenty regulations vanished off the books for every one added and businesses across America grew in ways that benefited the sort of people who get screwed by regulations – low income and the poor. It also reduced crony capitalism, the sort of thing you see rearing its head again courtesy of Democrat Governors like Newsome of California, taking advantage of Chinese Lung Rot hysteria to punish small businesses in favour of politically favoured big businesses.

Watch this video, folks. Sound on. pic.twitter.com/Oo6LMdmE1p

— Klavan Squarebeard, tiny of head and great of soul (@SpencerKlavan) December 4, 2020

“I’m losing everything. Everything I own is being taken away from me and they set up a movie company right next to my outdoor patio, which is right over here. And people wonder why I’m protesting and why I have had enough.”

• Energy
  Fracking actually took off under the Bush Administration, which, to its credit, allowed it to. The technology is actually two systems, fracking to crack rocks far underground and horizontal drilling to access the released gas and oil. Both techniques had been slowly developing for years, unbeknown even to most CEO’s of the big oil companies, who continued to push the classic multi-billion dollar oil exploration “plays” of the past, often in lawless parts of the world. By contrast fracking plays took place almost entirely on private land in the USA. I first became aware of it when I saw LNG prices dropping like a stone in 2005: thinking it was a demand action caused by more efficient industry and/or AGW regulations I was surprised to find that it was a supply event, with regular announcements of newly discovered, gigantic recoverable deposits of natural gas, courtesy of fracking.
  In fact the prices dropped so low and were confirmed to extend out so far into the future that utility companies began to rapidly move their power plants from coal to gas, contributing greatly to US global leadership on reducing CO2 emissions. It also caused the US industry to take the giant LNG plants built on the coasts for importing the stuff and convert them so they could export it.
  Oil naturally came next and prices dropped at the pump. The Obama Adminsitration only realised late in the game the danger to their precious Paris Climate Accord and other AGW rules, and their response was to meekly prohibit fracking on Federal land, which had almost no impact. It should be noted that the same weak-ass response has been touted by Biden, courtesy of the fossil fuel people he’s hauled onboard (he’s not referred to as the Senator From MBNA for nothing you know).
  Trump’s contribution here was simply to get the hell out of the way, which he did knowingly. A huge side-benefit was the creation of hundreds of thousands of well-paid, Blue-Collar jobs.
  
• Taxes
  They may have failed at almost all other legislation when they held the Presidency, Senate and House, but the GOP was able to deliver on this because it is actually one of their core beliefs, and they’re aided in this by a US Left Wing that still praises high taxation but avoids it like the plague.
  The US Corporate tax rate had been a joke for years, exceeding the corporate tax rates of many other nations, including the Socialist Democracies of Europe. And it had not raised money; companies like Apple simply held billions of dollars off-shore. The change was long-coming and will not be reversed. It also had the desired effect as hundreds of billions of dollars were pulled back to the USA and invested, another contribution to the economic boom of mid-2017 to February 2020.
  Reducing the income tax rates for citizens was also a boon. It is basically a Keynesian stimulus except that the extra money placed in a person’s pocket is down to their efforts and skills rather than a government official. All of this was the reason the economy took off from mid-2017 until Chinese Sinus Rot turned up, with a GDP growth rate that Obama had claimed was possible only with a “magic wand”, after his years of 2% growth that he’d finally accepted as the new normal. And for once it was not just the richest part of the economy that grew. Under Trump the lowest income quartile found it’s wages growing for the first time in years and faster than any other group.
  Any GOP President would have signed off on tax cuts, but that does not take away the fact that Trump did and that he made better, more personal arguments for them than any other GOP President excepting Reagan.
  
• Education
  Not nearly enough was done here by Betsy DeVos but to be fair she ran into a department of Sir Humphrey’s. Still she did manage to stymie the worst excesses of the notorious Obama “Dear Colleague” letter of 2011 that resulted in many miscarriages of justice on university campuses across the USA where young men were basically destroyed in Star Chamber trials that would have embarrassed Stalin. In all such cases that eventually ended up in real courts the universities have suffered (though not enough) as the courts saw no due process used whatsoever. It took a while but Trump and DeVos put an end to at least Federal encouragement of such injustices.
  But given the open and hidden defiance shown by the D.C. bureaucrats I now think that nothing short of the prompt and utter destruction of the Federal Department of Education will suffice. If anybody finds that shocking, understand that public education is still almost entirely under the control of State Governments, that the Federal DOE has only existed since 1979 (meaning that the vast majority of America’s technical and scientific achievements, Nobel Prizes, patents and so forth occurred without the Federal DOE), and that it has had no measurable effect on improving American children’s education. If anything that’s gone backwards even as per-child spending has raced away over recent decades.
  Fortunately it is likely that the combined effects of Chinese Lung AIDS and the wooden-headed obstinacy of America’s Teachers Unions will do more to damage the Public Education System than Trump and DeVos could have dreamed of.
  The latter’s push on Charter Schools is already paying dividends as it provided the choices that parents so desperately needed recently as they found their kids once again being locked out of schools.

As a number of Right-Wingers began to point out by early 2018, Trump was actually doing many things that the Never-Trumpers had been demanding of GOP Presidents for years. At the end of the day it turned out that those people were willing to burn to the ground all their supposed “Right Wing” ideas because they were less important than having a President who “acted Presidential”. I say fuck that stuffed-shirt, aging-Aunty approach, and clearly more than 74 million Americans agreed.

Aside from those areas Trump found himself, like many Presidents before him, unable to effect change through the D.C. bureaucracy. Back in 1952, after Eisenhower was elected President, Harry Truman commented to some aides that:

“He’ll sit here, and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen. Poor Ike—it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.” 

It was one of the few times that Truman’s judgment was off and he really should have known better given how close he was to the situation in WWII. Ike was already a politician and had been for some time. Only political skills could have allowed him to succeed as the European Supreme Commander, juggling the egos and ambitions of men like Patton and Montgomery, as well as real politicians like Churchill and DeGaulle, who were hardly naifs at the game.

But Truman’s description applies accurately to Trump, who no doubt imagined that being President was like being a CEO and that people would just follow his orders. Whether it was pulling troops from Syria:

“We were always playing shell games [with the troop numbers]” said Ambassador Jim Jeffrey

… or ending the unconstitutional DACA program:

Ms. Duke’s (a “lifelong Republican” and “veteran of nearly 30 years at the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense.”) most lasting legacy is likely to be the memo she signed — under pressure — to end that program. Her decision not to cite any specific policy reasons was at the heart of the Supreme Court’s ruling, which said the Trump administration had failed to substantively consider the implications of terminating the program’s protections and benefits. Ms. Duke said she did not include policy reasons in the memo because she did not agree with the ideas being pushed by Mr. Miller and Mr. Sessions: that DACA amounted to an undeserved amnesty and that it would encourage new waves of illegal immigration.

… Trump found that the very bureaucrats who worked for him knew how to stymie him and do what they thought was best. Think about that the next time you hear Never-Trumpers and the Left complaining about how American institutions were being “shredded” by Trump.

Future GOP Presidents will now know better. Wholesale firings of perhaps the upper two or three layers of management across all Federal bureaucracies on day one of their Presidencies will be needed if any GOP policy has any chance of being implemented.

Why I would have voted for Trump – Foreign Policy

I’m not an American citizen so cannot vote in their elections.

But were I able to do so, and being an avid follower of their politics for the last forty years, this is how my voting for President would have gone:

• 1980 – Reagan
• 1984 – Reagan
• 1988 – GHW Bush (reluctantly but Dukakis was an awful candidate)
• 1992 – Clinton
• 1996 – Clinton
• 2000 – Gore (flip of the coin really, didn’t like Bush II either)
• 2004 – Bush
• 2008 – McCain (reluctantly, but Obama’s promise to fundmentally transform America did not sit well with me, even as I knew he wouldn’t be able to)
• 2012 – Romney (very reluctantly given he was a spineless squish)
• 2016 – Trump
• 2020 – Trump.

My reasons to vote for Trump in 2020 would have been much the same as in 2016, except that Biden is nowhere near as corrupt as Hillary Clinton which, considering what we now know about the Biden family business from the emails of his neer-do-well, drug-addled son, is saying something.

And in 2016 Trump was not trusted by many Republicans even as they voted for him. He had ripped into several supposedly sacrosanct aspects of the GOP: free trade agreements, military partnerships like NATO, wars involving America, the Bush/McCain/Romney groups. Moreover, Trump’s decades-long association with the Democrat Party raised the possibility that he’d simply agree with the likes of Pelosi on spending; a trillion dollar infrastructure bill was a distinct possibility.

But by 2020, much to the amazement of a lot of those Republican voters, Trump had turned out to be the real deal on the big promises he’d made. Perhaps this was aided by the Democrat’s almost insane rejection of him across the board. The idea of hugging him to death to kill off his GOP voter support never occurred to them, and their rejection – apparently coming as a surprise to Trump, who’d mingled with the Schumer’s, Pelosi’s and Clinton’s for years – made him realise very quickly that this was total war.

So for the 2020 election my reasons to vote for Trump were as follows in the area of foreign policy.

War

It’s quite incredible that so many Democrats screamed their brains out about how Trump would start wars; as if they’d never listened to him at all and never looked into his history on the subject. But then that’s TDS for you.

By contrast it has come as no surprise to me that Trump’s four year term will be the first in decades where an American President has not started a war, large or small. His attitude being “What’s in it for America” was and still is scorned by the architects of the Iran, Afghanistan and Libyan “interventions”, and many others, as a selfish, nationalistic attitude that tells the rest of the world to take a hike in constantly demanding the US solve its problems for them. No more Blackhawk Down’s.

I see no problem with that.

We’re all aware of what US Isolationism wrought in the 1930’s, but the simple fact is that when it comes to taking on the likes of China and Iran Trump has not been passive.

And the fact is that although I supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the former was opposed by the very people who cried through the 1990’s about how awful Saddam was and how the US was propping him up, while the latter is a Forever War. Clearly no US President can ever again rely on Leftists who proclaim their horror about dictators and their awful human rights abuses and threats to peace. It turns out that Saddam was just another stick to beat the US with, as will be such future dictators.

I’m hopeful that despite the resistance of the Pentagon and the Intelligence Community, Trump will still pull most US troops from Afghanistan before he leaves office, leaving Biden with a fait accompli. Sure, the Taliban will take over but that’s going to happen even if the USA stays there another twenty years. It’s incredible to think that there may well be US soldiers serving in Afghanistan now who are the sons of men who fought there in 2002.

China

Twenty years ago I agreed with the idea of China being in the WTO, experiencing Free Trade. By then they’d had twenty years of a steadily freeing-up economy and although still a One-Party State they were rotating their Secretary Generals through a regular schedule, preventing the usual Communist bullshit of a Cult of Personality. Until Xi arrived, at which point it became clear that the paranoia of 1989 was still strong. The CCP was not going to allow itself to go the way of the USSR, including being corrupted and weakened by opening up to the West. Worse, the CCP found how useful was modern IT in building the Great Firewall and co-opting the likes of Google and Facebook, who drooled at the thought of more than a billion new customers swelling their networks, not to mention Hollywood and the whores of the NBA.

When Trump began to question all this in 2015, large elements of the GOP and the Democrats were aghast. And certainly it was just a repeat of what he’d said about Japan in the late 1980’s, and now look where they are.

But China is not Japan. The latter may have been pleased to see it’s keiretsu clobbering the American competition, but that was as far as it went. The CCP is determined to weld together its private sector success with geo-political goals and those goals are a determination to dominate the 21st century as America dominated the 20th. They are now a threat to Western nations and a far worse one than the USSR. They will not wage war as there is no need when you’re successfully breaking down your opponents and making them your defenders and enablers: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

Trump has changed this dramatically. There are now large elements of both Democrats and Republicans who have a very skeptical take on China, especially in the wake of the Chinese Sinus Rot. It’s bipartisan but it needed to be pushed more. Perhaps it will be despite the corporate whoring of the Senator from MBNA.

Iran

Trump put an end to the pathetic appeasement of Iran by the Obama administration. The reason why Obama took that approach would be a book in itself but the best take on it that I’ve seen was that he had some strange Kissingerian concept of Iran as the big player in the Middle East and that enabling that would be a master stroke, whatever personal distaste he might have for the Mullahs.

By contrast Trump took the same attitude towards Iran that Reagan took towards the Soviet Union: “We win. They lose”. And in Iran losing, the Middle East would improve as Eastern Europe and the world improved when the USSR died. Pressure applied economically, militarily and diplomatically, with the vapourising of their paramilitary star, Soleimani, being the cherry on top.

And the result is that despite all the cries about Iran striking back they have actually gone into their shells. No more taking US sailors hostage to humilate the Great Satan as happened under Obama. And Iran has become much more isolated in the Middle East as it desperately tried to keep its terror groups Hezbollah and company alive with money it didn’t have.

Aa a result peace in the Middle Peace has progressed: exactly the opposite of what was predicted in taking on Iran.

NATO

At the end of the Cold War there were some serious discussions as to whether NATO should disband. But as is often the case with bureaucracies new reasons for their life are found, and NATO found theirs with the Baltic conflicts of the late 90’s.

But the outfit is more of a joke than ever. Germany’s reluctance to commit to the requirment for military spending to be pitched at 2% of GDP has had practical consequences with much of its tank, fighter aircraft, submarine and attack helicopter fleets grounded. And things have not improved since that 2018 BBC report. Other NATO members are not much better and only a NATO newbie, Poland, appears to be taking things seriously.

If these nations can’t be bothered committing then why should the USA carry the load? It’s not as if Russia’s broken-ass military is going to come sweeping across the plains. The US has bigger fish to fry in the Pacific. Trump’s rough-as-guts negotiation approach may have offended the usual stuffed-shirt brigade but it did get commitment for increased spending, although that’s not worth much nowadays. There has been much fashionable talk about “damaged relationships”.

And? What practical negative consequences have flowed from such? Nothing.

Free Trade Agreements

It will surprise many people to know that Trump is not anti-free trade. What he is against is the economic argument that it doesn’t matter if your free trade partners are cheating with export assistance and such like, since that still delivers cheaper goods to your people. Let the idiot taxpayers of other nations bankrupt themselves if they choose: you can use the money you save to invest in new services, products and entire industries. I accept that economically it’s a sound argument, but it ignores the reality that once industries are destroyed there’s a sunk cost that prevents them coming back even if those foreign taxpayers revolt against their masters. And the same goes for the domestic communities which depended on those domestic companies and industries.

An old high school friend of mine who went to the UK decades ago and never came back, ended up as a multi-millionaire with an engineering company he founded. But having dealt with them for years he is under no illusions about the Germans and other Europeans; they defend their industries, not just farming, with tarriffs and all manner of byzantine devices. To put it bluntly he said they don’t practice what they preach on Free Trade even having signed such agreements, but they expect others like the US to do so, to the cost of countless communities across the USA. And that’s just the Europeans: the CCP connect geopolitical designs to the economics.

And the reality was that Trump did get NAFTA re-designed, to the extent that Democrats in the House and Senate voted for changes that they had originally argued were not needed or could not be obtained. Somehow Trump did it.

Of course Bernie Sanders has also been hot on this topic for years and got traction on it from voters in both 2016 and 2020. Had it not been for the fear he created in the DNC and their resultant push of Biden when he looked to be dead in the water, Sanders could well have won the Democrat nomination and this topic would not have been disputed between the two men. The bipartisan consensus on blind support of free trade is fracturing fast, and the Democrats know it. Silicon Valley may not care, but the voters in Erie, Pennsylvania do, and they sent a message in 2016 by voting for Trump and again in 2020 even as they voted Biden by a slim margin.

Israel

Far back in the 1990’s the US Congress, by an overwhelming vote, decided to move the US Embassy to Jeruselem. And Clinton, Bush and Obama all found reasons not to do so, the first two after election pledges that they would. Those reasons supposedly being that the Palestinians would launch another intifada and that it was essential for Peace In The Middle East that an agreement be found between Israel and the Palestinians before anything else happened. Any other sequence would start a bonfire across the ME. The educated and cultured worthies of the US State Department, the Pentagon and the Intelligence Community made the same arguments to Trump that they’d made to previous Presidents.

Trump rejected their advice, transferred the embassy and …. nothing bad happened. There were a few protests for a couple of weeks and then they stopped. Similarly with Trump’s support for Israel, which has probably been the strongest of any US President. Which brings me to…

The Middle East

Trump’s actions on Israel and Iran were supposed to put the Arab world on edge, against the USA. Instead, it appears to have pulled them together with unprecedented connections springing up between Arab nations and Israel, guided by US negotiations.

In hindsight this should not have been a surprise. From the moment that Palestinians cheered Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 the Arab world had increasingly had a gutsful of supporting such backstabbers, resulting in a steady withdrawal of financial and diplomatic support. Moreover the idea that Iran would ever be a leader in the ME should have been considered a joke in light of two thousand years of Persian-Arab fighting. Crushing the Ayatollahs actually appealed to the ME states.

International Institutions: The UN, Paris Accord, WHO, etc

As with everything else, Trump’s approach to these things is not founded on some deep, intellectual level of analysis. It has simply been a gut feeling that these things, often created with great assistance from the USA, had now simply turned into bastions that constantly lambasted the USA for not “leading” – meaning doing what these institutions demanded – while constantly demanding funding from it, all while letting other nations, especially China, slide on almost any issue you care to think of. The WHO Director’s fellating of China over Covid-19 being merely the most obvious and disgusting recent example.

Stiffing such institutions was predicted to bring about failure and misery to the US – predictions by the same sort of credentialed experts who foresaw economic woes from trade fights and wars arising from Trump’s approaches and so forth.

Instead after almost four years of Trump we’re left with little but snivelling about hurt feelings, undiplomatic approaches and “damaged relationships”, with no explanation as to why these should matter when nothing bad of consequence has arisen from them.

Trump’s Foreign Policy In General

Trump is Jacksonian: There’s a good reason why Trump chose to prominently hang a painting of former President Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office. Jackson’s philosophy of  national security was focused on nationalistic concerns rather than global visions, while striking at any foreigner who attacked or killed Americans, but avoiding wars.

That is not isolationism.

And the fact that all the bad things predicted to happen as a result of Trump’s “ignorant”, “simple-minded”, “crude” foreign policy approach – economically, militarily, diplomatically – have not happened, is going to make things a lot tougher for any GOP or Democrat group that tries to resurrect the old order. At a minimum clear eyes are now being cast upon a host of credientialed “experts” whose Cassandra-like forecasts have not panned out.

Moreover Trump has actually strengthened relationships with countries like Poland, Israel, and various nations facing China, including the largest of all, India, to the extent that exercises are now being carried out between the navies of the US, India and other nations threatened by China. That is a significant advance in favour of the USA, and it is not going to go backwards now.

It will take some time but I fully expect that the likes of the NYT and other bastions of status quo thinking will, as the passions of the 2016 and 2020 elections recede, grudgingly come to admit that Trump was right on a great many foreign policy issues.

But more importantly, having seen that so many of these approaches worked, or at a minumum did not produce the disasters predicted, some future GOP President will follow in Trump’s footsteps, and without making themselves such a target as he did.

A world of fairness and unity beckons

I was amused at DPF’s little piece of unity propaganda the other day with the story of the young fighter pilot on 9/11.

Funny, but I don’t recall any such stories floating around after the 2016 US Presidential election.

In fact all I heard and saw was unhinged people screaming at the sky and #Resistance, as well as #NotMyPresident, and this has continued for four years.

The current wave of bullshit intended to help Biden is not going to work after four years of a hate-fest that went far beyond the activists of BushChimpHitler days. This was personal between ordinary people on Facebook and the like. Well, personal in one direction: Trump supporters kept quiet for the most part.

I don’t recall anything this bad even from the days of Reagan and Bush and to think it can be just switched off and forgotten is wish-casting. And I can attest that the above has been our experience from most of our old Chicago “friends”. They seem to have been very subdued since the election though, but some things cannot be erased.

Here’s the Arizona Secretary of State, Katie Hobbs, three years ago.

And yes, she will be the one that certifies the 2020 election results for the State.

Fills you with confidence about fairness, eh?

If she had any sense of shame she’d hand over the job to someone else. In judicial world it’s called recusing yourself. But I’m sure she has no shame.

Which all makes this Tweet from American veteran, Dan Crenshaw (who lost an eye in combat) something to watch in contrast to the appeal using that 9/11 fighter pilot.

And I’ll put this up again since people seemed to miss the news the first time around, which is that Ronald Klain is about to become Biden’s new Chief of Staff.

Unity? LOLGF.

ABUSE OF PROCESS

The Maori Party has requested a recount in the Tamaki Makaurau and Te Tai Hauauru electorates despite their President saying they had no dispute with the numbers but that the request was to highlight their concern over discrimination against Maori in the voting process.

A recount focuses entirely on the votes cast. Nothing more, nothing less. The District Court Judge presiding over the recount cannot address the concerns raised by the Maori Party. The forum for that is the formal review conducted by the Electoral Commission following each General Election as provided for in s 8(1) of the Electoral Act.

Grand-standing for grand-standing’s sake with the public purse picking up the tab. The $1,022.22 filing fee wouldn’t cover 1% of the cost.