What the left CAN do, what they CAN’T do, and what they WON’T do

We’re just about to go into midterm election season.  I expect that party primaries will quietly wrap up over the next six to eight weeks and after that the usual barrage of political haymaking will get underway.  Considering how the world of politics has been more active than usual during the Trump administration, I expect we’re going to see a very busy election season that starts noticeably earlier than usual.  As anticipated, the predictions of a blue wave in the midterms despite all evidence to the contrary are already flowing and the establishment GOP is already rehearsing its surrender speeches.  Obligatory reminder: don’t buy it.  Even if your candidate is not the biggest Trump backer ever, remember that a Democrat will be much worse.

Let’s acknowledge a few ugly truths here.  First, the Democrats quite possibly CAN win in November.  The electoral map (especially in the Senate) is not favorable to them, but the establishment GOP inexplicably is.  Many in the GOP seem like they would rather lose than win by getting on the Trump train and I’m sure both their constituents and their Democratic opponents will be happy to help them do that.  I’ve talked before about how the few Democratic wins in special elections don’t signify anything except that the Democrats have learned that their key to victory is to filibuster voters with enough salacious horsecrap that the Republicans just say the hell with it and walk away like they did in Alabama.  If Conor Lamb is any indication, the Democrats have also figured out that attacking President Trump directly is not the way to win and the old standby of pretending to be gun-friendly and worker-friendly is their best bet.  Also, if the Democrats’ incessant crying about “voter suppression” and the razor-thin margins they’ve managed to win by are any indication, the Democrats have upped their fraud game since the four million fake votes for Dr. Pantsuit failed to do the trick.  So yes, it’s entirely possible that we could be looking at losing one or both houses of Congress, whether due to fake news, cheating, or the Republicans continuing to run away from President Trump.  I would say that makes it imperative that we make the most of the next few months but really, the congressional GOP hasn’t had any sense of urgency so far.  I don’t look for them to get their act together now.

That all being said, there are some things the Democrats CAN’T do, in November or ever.  Love him or hate him, President Trump has done things that no other politician before him has been able to do and things none have even attempted.  Breaking the hegemony of the fake news remains his greatest accomplishment–and it’s ongoing.  Demonstrating that an outsider can run for and win national office (regardless of the money involved, it wasn’t supposed to be possible at all) has permanently changed the political landscape.  It doesn’t matter what happens from here on out.  The left can undo a lot of the good President Trump has done, but he has broken some things that cannot ever be unbroken, and try as they might, they cannot make it so he never existed.  They’ll be trying to de-legitimize him in every way they can for the next half century at least, but they can’t erase him from the history books.

Now let’s assume for the moment that the worst happens, the Democrats flip the House by enough of a margin to pass articles of impeachment, and even manage to flip enough Senate seats to remove President Trump.  I’m not going to say they can’t, but I am going to say they WON’T.  Oh sure, they MIGHT do the impeachment just to say they did, but then what happens?  Think this through.  On the one hand, they get impeachment through the House, and then nothing happens in the Senate.  La Resistance doesn’t understand that’s how it works.  How do they explain to their dimwitted goons that President Trump isn’t going to be led away in shackles?  But the second option is worse–they impeach, and then remove the President in the Senate.  Sure, this is what they claim they want…but then the result is they get Mike Pence.  How do they explain to La Resistance that they DON’T get Dr. Pantsuit now, nor do they get a do-over election?  How do they explain that this does not mean President Trump will be dragged into the public square to be pelted with rotten fruit and guillotined at high noon, like so many of these deranged people seem to expect?  Finally, and most importantly, how will they energize their lunatic base once the target of all their hatred is gone?  Not only would this deprive them of their best ever distraction/punching bag and let the air out of La Resistance, but it would also turbocharge and enrage the previously-sedate Trump base.  This is not a happy result for the Democrats.

If the worst does happen, pray they’re that stupid.  Pray we’re that lucky.

Democrats and leftists clinging to their hopes of a blue wave this fall might want to consider what happens if their dreams come true, and the fact that their rabid base will expect them to make good on the hyperbole.  If they did, it’s hard to say whether the establishment GOP or the Democrats would be trying harder to throw these midterms away.

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Compare and contrast

I am totally stealing this from John Hayward’s Twitter feed.  Also, due to the way it comes up on said feed, I am also posting it in what I presume to be the reverse order of how the thread was originally done.  Since it doesn’t appear to affect the message in any way, I’m just going to leave it as is.

Conservative wave elections are takeovers fueled by anger.  Every one of them is portrayed as the last gasp of the dying white male.  Liberal wave elections are realignments driven by passion.  Every one of them is portrayed as the last gasp of the dying white male. 

Large groups of mainstream conservatives are non-stories.  Small groups of fringe extremists are major national news events.  Violent leftists are non-stories.  Extremists are the vanguard of important new movements.  Large rallies are the beginning of a revolution.

When the Right is in power, dissent is the essence of patriotism and resistance is healthy civic engagement.  When the Left is in power, dissent is hatred and resistance is treason. 

People on the Right get rich by stealing money from the poor.  People on the Left are rich because they are popular and virtuous.  Every dollar in their accounts is a fan letter someone wrote to them.  They give so much back to society that their financial status is irrelevant. 

Conservatives who change their positions are hypocrites and flip-floppers.  Liberals don’t change their positions.  Their old positions are erased from history.  The new position becomes the one they always held deep in their hearts. 

When conservative policies have unintended consequences, the ideas are flawed and politicians should be punished for implementing them.  When liberal policies fail, the people are flawed and should be punished for disappointing their brilliant central planners. 

If the conservative party has more money, there’s too much money in politics and election laws must be rewritten to weaken special interests at once.  If the liberals have more money, anyone who criticizes their fundraising obviously hates the people they claim to represent. 

When conservatives lose an election, it’s a clear sign their party is too conservative and must change to survive.  When liberals lose, it’s a clear sign the electorate is too conservative and must be changed, beginning with their children. 

When conservative politicians are accused of wrongdoing, they’re guilty until proven innocent, and only marginally less guilty if they CAN prove their innocence.  When liberals are accused, the accusers are guilty until proven innocent. 

When conservatives object to speech, they’re humorless, sexless Bible freaks who must be subjected to the speech they dislike until they loosen up.  When liberals do it, they’re sensitive social justice warriors working to create safe spaces for marginalized people.

When conservatives increase the deficit, they’re irresponsible spendthrifts looting the Treasury to give tax cuts to their rich friends.  When liberals do it, they’re compassionate saints making wise investments in the future by spending its money in advance. 

When conservatives stake out a bold position that currently lacks majority support, they’re out-of-touch or filled with hatred for those who disagree.  When liberals do it, they’re visionaries and the people are Neanderthals.  The people will be changed by force until they agree. 

Under the political rules of engagement in both US and UK, the fight is over when the Right loses a vote or court decision.  For the Left, that means the fight is just beginning, and the issue will be re-voted or re-litigated endlessly until they win.

No bridges left to burn

Former FBI director and incompetent partisan hack James Comey has been making the media rounds over the past several days, doing an interview with George “Pay No Attention To My Time in the Clinton Administration” Stephanopoulos and making an appearance on The View to promote his new book.  I will not mention the title here (it’s not like anyone doesn’t know about it) save to remark that it oozes irony.  In the process Comey is succeeding in demonstrating that he’s pretty much exactly the slobberingly biased Democratic sycophant we figured him for back when he laid out a flawless indictment of Dr. Pantsuit only to not indict her.  Or when he re-opened the case against her only to close it a day and a half later in an obvious play to remind voters “hey, she’s really totally innocent you guys!” less than two weeks out from election day (a move which he admits was engineered to prevent the Trump team from taking full advantage of it).  Or when it came out that he had written Dr. Pantsuit’s exoneration before she was even interviewed and her closest confidants declared “attorneys” for some reason and granted immunity on top of that.

No, recently we’ve also learned that the untarnishable James Comey, the man whose impartiality was second only to Robert Mueller’s, was moved to the point of tears by the weakest of praise from Whatshisname.  Tears.  Add to that all the juvenile playground taunts and insults he references in his own goddamned book (remarking about the President’s hair, his “small hands,” his being “orange”) and whatever was left of the facade is long gone.  Claiming he “left the Republican party because it left him” and because “character matters” is beyond hysterical given his not-even-tacit-at-this-point support of Dr. Pantsuit.  And for what it’s worth, I hope the GOP leaves people like him far behind them.  We don’t need or want them.

Despite the media blitz, it appears that Comey’s book is not exactly flying off the shelves.  In part this is probably due to the last “tell-all bombshell” turning out to be a steaming pile of crap even according to lefty reviewers (I’m looking at you, Michael Wolff), but at the same time, I can’t help thinking of the night on Stephen Colbert’s show where he announced to his audience that James Comey had been canned and the audience erupted in applause…until Colbert told them this was a bad thing.  You see folks, in the list of people who are responsible for “What Happened” in November of 2016 (according to the more-delusional-by-the-day Dr. Pantsuit and her ever-more-deranged followers), James Comey still ranks at or near the top.  Despite all of his efforts to derail and dismiss any of the allegations against Dr. Pantsuit, despite his clear and plain pronouncements of eternal penitence and sorrow for whatever part he played in “her loss” and his swearing of fealty to his Democratic overlords, they just can’t get past the idea that Comey’s the guy who made it all go south.  Of course I have discussed at length that no one is “to blame” when nothing went wrong, but the left and the Pantsuit drones won’t ever let go of the idea and narrative that President Trump’s election was a disaster, and in their minds they need a scapegoat.  And the one they keep coming back to is Jim Comey.  No matter how much he tries to make himself out to be one of the tribe and a proud member and servant of La Resistance, that disconnect is still there.

The sad truth for Mr. Comey (and sweet schadenfreude for those of us who believe in truth and justice) is that the left is merciless and unforgiving, and does not have a shred of loyalty to anything but the progressive cause itself.  He can try to ingratiate himself with their side all he wants from here to the end of his days, but they already have him pegged as the man who denied them their feminist utopia.  His penance must be eternal.  Oh sure, they’ll cite him as authority and trot him out for conveniently deep-thought-esque remarks about “character” and “integrity” and “tsk tsk what has the Republican party come to?” but forgiveness?  Acceptance?  Absolution?  Sorry Jim, you’d best get to pushing that rock up the hill.

The real fact of the matter is character does indeed matter, but principles matter more.  If you could turn on your principles because you find the character of the messenger distasteful, that tells me you weren’t really serious about what you claimed to believe in the first place.  Or to spell it out, Comey was never a Republican.  Nevermind that stacking Donald Trump’s character up against Dr. Pantsuit’s isn’t even a contest.  Nevermind that it was Dr. Pantsuit’s husband who blithely told America character didn’t matter.  Despite all of this, we saw and heard repeatedly that conservatives and Republicans desperately wanted to believe in James Comey, we wanted to hope he had a master plan at work, we’d forgive his transgressions and failures if only he did his damn job just once.  But Comey made a different choice, and has elected to burn whatever bridges he might have with the right, while failing to realize the left already burned them from the other end.

I’d say I feel sorry for him, but I’d be lying.  You could have been a hero, Mr. Comey.  I hope groveling at the feet of Whatshisname and Dr. Pantsuit was worth it.

 

Stop trying to make Nikki Haley happen

First of all, I have said on numerous occasions that I think picking former South Carolina governor and rising GOP starlet Nikki Haley for UN Ambassador was one of the most brilliant moves and best appointments President Trump made.  Seriously, no sarcasm at all.  The reason for this, however, is because the UN is useless and ought to be held in utter contempt.  Picking an intellectual powerhouse like John Bolton or Ted Cruz for this position would be like swatting mosquitoes with a Hellfire missile.  Putting Haley (whose support for the President was lukewarm at best) into this role, on the other hand, is as much flipping the UN off as it is promoting and simultaneously sidelining Haley.  Put another way, with a strong and fiercely patriotic president behind him, returning Bolton to his old job would have been like having a college English professor play Scrabble against a six-year-old.  By contrast, watching Nikki Haley own the place is like watching the six-year-old take on and own an entire room full of equally empty suits, with the added bonus of her sweet southern “li’l ol’ me” charm.

In other words, her lack of competence is showcasing just how incompetent the UN really is.  And of course, having a woman there to tell off all these Islamic patriarchies is just a bonus.  People need to remember, Nikki Haley can only talk tough because of the policies of the president and administration for whom she speaks.  She is not setting policy.  She’s merely a mouthpiece, just like every other ambassador in that room.  When she talks tough, it’s because she was given the authority to do so by President Trump.  When she talks about our foreign policy, the words may be hers but the direction comes from higher up.  Yet some people seem to think (in their haste to “pick a woman, any woman with an R next to her name”) that because she can bat the nimrods at the UN around like a cat playing with stuffed mice that she is somehow presidential material herself.

Uh, no.  Let’s look back at pre-UN Nikki Haley and see what she’s done under her own power.  Two things stand out.  The first would be the whole Confederate flag on the South Carolina capital grounds controversy from a couple years back.  As I have stated many times before, I am no fan of the Confederacy or the Stars and Bars, but neither am I under the delusion that the only thing that Confederate symbology stands for is horrible hateful racism.  It’s not.  South Carolina in particular remains staunchly proud of its history and at the same time has elected a black senator (who also happens to be a Republican).  Yet when the statue-topplers (who at this point had not gone knocking down statues yet) came for South Carolina’s flag, Nikki Haley folded.  Some have said “oh what’s the big deal, it’s just a flag,” and that’s exactly it.  Haley capitulated on a silly issue pushed by a very loud but very tiny fringe.  That’s not the kind of spinelessness I want to see in ANY politician, much less a President.  Without the fire and resolve of President Trump backing her up, Haley’s track record points to her cowering in the corner, not speaking up knowing there’s a bodyguard with a big stick watching her back.

The second item that I would bring up was when Haley was asked to do the 2016 Republican response to Whatshisname’s last State of the Union address.  This was a big deal.  Primary season was winding down–I don’t remember how many candidates were left on our side but I do know the fake news, the establishment GOP, and the NeverTrumpers had already come up with their initial litany of reasons why Donald Trump was pretty much the worst thing ever (and the fake news was giddy with the thought that the more “electable” Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz were losing).  Nikki Haley was tapped to basically rebut every bogus bragging point Whatshisname would come up with, and essentially to sell the Republicans’ fall platform to voters, particularly whoever our Presidential candidate turned out to be.  Of course, at this point, we knew the Democrats would be nominating Dr. Pantsuit–let’s face it, Bernie was never even meant to have a chance.  We also saw there was a substantial likelihood that Donald Trump was going to be our nominee.  What did Nikki Haley do?  She bragged about taking down the Confederate flag, she claimed Republicans were also to blame for the erosion of leadership, and she railed against “angry” and “loud” voices.

“Angry” and “loud” voices of course being words frequently if not exclusively used to describe Donald Trump.  In short, she delivered a weak, conciliatory address full of SJW platitudes and backhanded attacks on the guy who was probably going to be our nominee.  What should have been a rallying cry to the faithful was instead a poorly disguised dig at the guy who had energized a base that establishment types like Nikki Haley had put to sleep and sent wandering off in disgust.

Over the past few days there was a minor dustup as Haley asserted that following our missile strike on Syria there would be new sanctions imposed against Russia.  This turned out to be incorrect–sanctions were merely considered and ultimately not imposed.  When pressed about this contradiction, White House spokesman Larry Kudlow praised Nikki and her work, said she was “ahead of the curve,” and asserted that “there may have been some confusion somewhere.”  To any honest observer, his statement was plainly meant to try to cover for Haley (as this was a fairly major goof-up on her part) and at the same time re-emphasize the administration’s confidence in her.  But apparently that wasn’t good enough for Nikki, who spat back “With all due respect, I don’t get confused.”

First of all, it’s common knowledge that the phrase “with all due respect” almost always actually means “with no respect whatsoever.”  Never say it to a judge, just sayin’.  Second, Kudlow didn’t say Haley got confused.  He may have strongly implied it but he also wrapped it in about six layers of effusive praise and “attagirl”s.  Third and most importantly, yes Nikki, you’re definitely confused.  You apparently didn’t get the right message, or perhaps you actually got it into your head that you’re driving this train.  You’re not, and you’re starting to sound like you’re getting a little too big for your pencil skirts.  You’ve got a good gig, kid, don’t screw it up with delusions of adequacy.

Nikki Haley is a puppet.  She’s a good puppet, but she is not out there staring down America’s enemies with a death laser glare nor is she leading the charge like General Patton in peep-toe heels.  She speaks bold words because she represents a bold president.  That’s it.  The only reason she’s taken seriously and has the power to speak as powerfully as she does is because a committed nationalist patriot is standing behind her with his arms crossed and nodding with approval.  The world respects him and the nation he leads, not her.  Frankly, I think Sarah Huckabee Sanders is far more capable and powerful than Nikki Haley–the idiots at the UN are nothing compared to the piranha in the fake news, and so far Sarah’s stuck to the script flawlessly.

Look people, I literally posted like a day or two after the 2016 election that I think it’s important that we find a capable Republican woman to run in 2024, not because I like the idea of a woman president (and I definitely don’t like the idea of “make her president because woman”), but because we need to steal this thunder from the Democrats before they come up with a viable way to try again.  But there are people out there fawning over Nikki Haley and actually talking about her challenging President Trump in 2020, nevermind running in 2024.  I won’t say something stupid like “If you idiots nominate her I won’t vote for her!  #NeverNikki!”  I AM saying, for the love of all that is holy, not this woman.  This is not the candidate you’re looking for.  Stop trying to make Nikki Haley happen.

EDIT: CNN’s Dana Bash apparently had a slow news day and did a callback to Haley’s stupid and arrogant remark like it was some kind of “iconic line for a female leader.”  Look people, you can call it “sassy” all you want because she’s a woman, it’s still petulant, insubordinate, and not really a smart thing to do.  But if Nikki Haley would prefer to be considered incompetent rather than confused, I’m more than happy to oblige.

Getting up with fleas

I get that I don’t agree with everything some of the commenters I watch have to say.  As I have said before, the voices on the right are not an echo chamber, and especially lately there has been far more dissonance than harmony in our chorus.  I’m not even going to start on the zombie NeverTrumpers here–today I’m looking right over at two guys whose work I have appreciated and linked here many times, who are up in arms and full of misguided righteous fury over President Trump’s ordering of action in Syria, Stefan Molyneux and Paul Joseph Watson.

I understand both of their positions.  Molyneux is a committed adherent to the idea of the “nonaggression principle,” which I have discussed before and concluded that it is founded on the same fantasy as socialism, that being “everyone will just be nice.”  He has massive blinders on regarding the subject of Middle Eastern intervention and the War on Terror despite having a very clear view of the threat posed to Western civilization by radical Islam, and for a guy who usually thinks very clearly and backs up his arguments with logic and data he just seems perenially mired in this jargon of “American imperialism” and “military-industrial complex” and “George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and John Bolton are war criminals.”  I get it, really.  He’s wrong, but we’re all allowed to have our hangups.

PJW (and the rest of the InfoWars guys) tend to be more anti-interventionist because they see American world policing as “globalist” as well as being wasteful and ineffective.  In some ways they’re not wrong.  In others they’re as deluded as Molyneux and your garden variety “war is not the answer” peaceniks.  But Watson did something on his Twitter feed the other day that struck me as a “this should give you pause” moment.  He retweeted a video from Democratic congresswoman and well-known blabbermouth (as well as nascent future national Democratic star) Tulsi Gabbard that was captioned with nonsense about how we “owe it to our service members to send them on missions worthy of their great sacrifice, missions that are in the interests of the American people.”  This would be from the same Tulsi Gabbard who was on ABC freaking news a few months back saying how North Korea needed nukes to protect themselves against American imperialism.  Yes, that’s right children, the same Democratic congresswoman crying about what we owe to the men in uniform now was making excuses for the Norks having access to nukes because America’s a big mean bully who’ll just waltz in and take over given the chance.

I get the irony in Watson posting supportive tweets from longtime warhawk and unprincipled Trump hater John McCain while he backs up his position with a video from an America-hating Democrat.  The difference between the two is the core principle.  John McCain is going to support military action no matter what, it’s just what he does.  Tulsi Gabbard, on the other hand, is going to fuss about military action and the advancement of American interests on the international stage, again no matter what, it’s just what the Democrats do.  Gabbard’s one of the few Democrats arrogant enough to show her true colors on this issue and Paul Joseph Watson damned well knows what she really stands for even if her easily-led constituents don’t.  To be blunt, the praise from John McCain and the lukewarm support of a number of party-line Democrats doesn’t concern me, but citing someone who justified an insane dictatorship having nuclear weapons to protect themselves from US ought to be setting off alarm bells for PJW.

The old saying goes, you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas.  We know McCain’s NeverTrumpers and the rank-and-file Dems aren’t getting cozy.  Folks on our side who oppose this action ought to be wary of who they’re cuddling up with.  Make your points, state your disagreements, talk about why you think this is a bad idea, defend your objections, sure.  But don’t go getting friendly with people like Tulsi Gabbard for pity’s sake.

Words that NeverTrumpers should not use–special zombie edition

It’s been a while since I wrapped up the “Words that leftists should not use” weekly series.  I said when I did the final post that I might have addendums to the series from time to time.  I’m not sure this should count as one but it can definitely be argued that zombie NeverTrumpers often are leftists.  Not always, definitely not always–some of them are just trying to protect their angle, others are so ingrained into the system that they’re responding viscerally to what they perceive as a threat to their bread and butter.  But even this far into the Trump presidency, when we’ve accomplished more in a year and some change than even President Reagan did, whenever I defend or just urge people not to rush to judgment on a perceived error of the President’s I still get accused of being a “duped cultist” and a “Trumphumper” with no shortage of insults and mockery.  This comes even from centrists like Steven Crowder who have the nerve to get defensive about their unwarranted and constant criticisms of President Trump and choose to blame it not on the fact that they don’t like the guy, but rather it must be that everyone defending the president is some kind of mind-numbed robot.  So in that sense I’m going to take a few of the more popular terms they like to throw at us Trump supporters and dissect them similarly to the left’s favorite words in WTLSNU.

“4D Chess.”  I’m not sure whether this term originated as a compliment or an insult, though I’m inclined to think it started as a positive.  It of course implies that there’s a complicated game going on that many observers might not understand, but that the President is playing with the media, the Democrats, and the establishment GOP and is outsmarting them.  Now it is generally thrown out as a slur anytime someone defends the President making a controversial or “stupid” move, including but not limited to the President’s statements regarding DACA (which had the Democrats giggling until he yanked the rug out from under them) and his comments about guns (which so far have resulted in nothing except the GOP and the NRA seeing a surge in support).  If the President’s moves had been backfiring in a big way this might actually be an insult, but seeing as how President Trump has thwarted his opponents at every turn so far (to the extent that they have to raid his lawyer’s offices in an attempt to find something to keep Bob Mueller going) it becomes clear that he didn’t need to play “4D Chess” to outwit these bozos who don’t even understand checkers.

“Principled conservative.”  This snide backhand came out a lot during the election and still surfaces as a claim that “real” conservatives stuck to their “principles” and wouldn’t vote for a former celebrity Democrat…completely ignoring that President Reagan himself was a former celebrity Democrat.  But you know, a “principled conservative” would be like Evan McMullin, the wannabe spoiler who claimed that GOP tax policy was rooted in racism.  Yeah, that was a thing that happened.  Don’t even get me started on guys like Bill Kristol, Ana Navarro, or anyone over at NeverTrump Online (f/k/a National Review Online).  Meanwhile, those of us who actually believe in our beliefs and not a system and party that is more concerned with preserving the status quo can see that everything President Trump has done is fiercely conservative and his biggest opposition has been from the GOP itself.  He’s not a gamble anymore.  The best part is that President Trump is not a doctrinaire conservative, he’s just doing conservative things because they’re popular and they work.  I don’t think any of these “principled conservatives” realize how significant that is.

“Binary choice.”  This is a term and concept that NeverTrumpers like to dismiss and ridicule.  It essentially means “if you’re not with us you’re against us,” and that’s essentially correct, but it sounds worse than it is.  In a world where adults have moral agency, your failure to oppose what you know is evil is just as unpardonable as supporting it outright, especially if opposing costs you nothing but a little time to go vote.  “Protest votes” for Evan McMullin or Gary “I’ll Cry If You Call Illegals Illegals” Johnson don’t help a damn thing.  Whether you like it or not, when election time rolls around, you have two choices.  Maybe you see it as the lesser of two evils, and that’s fine.  You still have the choice to support the lesser or the greater, and your choice NOT to support the lesser means you are, in fact, indirectly supporting the greater.  We all had our chance to make a better choice, and some of us did.  I was a Ted Cruz supporter to the very end in a state that went for Cruz in the primaries.  But when November came, Evan McMullin was not going to win.  Gary Johnson was not going to win.  Jill Stein and Bernie Sanders and John Kasich and whoever else, they were not going to win.  You had a choice to stop Dr. Pantsuit, or not.  Sorry children, you don’t get to opt out of that one by not playing.  Spare me the bulls**t about “earning your vote” and wrap your head around the idea that a Dr. Pantsuit presidency would have been the end of America as we knew it.  You don’t get to sit that out because you didn’t want to vote for a guy who said “p***y.”

“Personality cult.”  Right, sure.  The guy whose slogan is “Make America Great Again” is totally comparable to the dude who used his own initial as his campaign emblem.  I think I and millions of others have been clear we couldn’t care less about President Trump’s personality other than the fact that it makes the lefty snowflakes so very angry.  But apparently acknowledging observable reality and being positive about the person who is taking all this heat and losing all this money and receiving all these constant threats of imprisonment and death from the rabid left means we are the irrational and cultlike ones.

Seriously, spare me the lectures on “principles” when all you care about is naughty language and for some reason it bothers you that the President tweets.  We’ve wanted a leader who will fight rather than capitulate ever since Reagan left office and now we have one, and anytime someone dares to suggest you’re being unfair in your deranged and unfair criticisms you NeverTrumpers have the chutzpah to claim you are being attacked unfairly.  Stop fighting against everything you ever wanted.  We have the opportunity of a generation here and you people are helping to blow it.

Today’s “blue wave” narrative reminder

Ben Shapiro’s offhand comment about how chalking up Paul Ryan’s retirement announcement to President Trump rather than the “impending blue wave” was about as subtle as (I think) Frank Luntz predicting Virginia would need to hold a special Senate election to replace Tim Kaine.  Of course, Ben wasn’t quite so dorktastic as to follow that up with “…because Dr. Pantsuit will be elected president” a tweet later, but the implication is still there.

Look folks, I warned a while back that the left and the media and the NeverTrumpers alike were all going to be claiming a “blue wave” going into the midterms, and I only regret not posting it as soon as it hit me (which was about a week after the 2016 election).  It’s not happening, not yet, but guys like Shapiro (who went against the grain and predicted that none of the GOP field could ever hope to defeat Dr. Pantsuit in 2016, which was a bold move that didn’t work out for him, Cotton) seem determined to make it so.  It’s really sad and sickening, especially when I realize how many folks on our team really, really want to believe that Ben isn’t a fanatical NeverTrumper in the same vein as Bill “I’m Bob Mueller’s Biggest Fan AND a Republican!” Kristol.  It’s bad enough that the fake news is out there trying to undercut the GOP and President Trump at every turn.  What’s really frightening about this mindset is not only the depressing effect this can potentially have on GOP voters (which as a couple of special elections have shown us is far more deadly to Republican candidates than the supposedly-energized Democrats), but the fact that this ongoing narrative will give plenty of cover and provide lots of harrumphing apologists for if the Democrats’ voter fraud machine manages to put them over the top in November.

The “wave” is still not happening despite Shapiro and others writing off 2018 and the foreseeable future as a done deal.  But there’s plenty of time for it to happen between now and then, and with our own prominent voices already pledging allegiance to their new Democrat overlords it’s going to make a difficult election season that much harder.  It’s hard to say where Paul Ryan’s decision to announce his retirement NOW rather than winning re-election (as he easily would) and then being replaced would work into that, but given all the NeverTrump swan songs being written for Ryan I wouldn’t guess he engineered this in any way to help President Trump or the agenda Ryan supposedly once stood for.

No waves yet, folks.  Don’t believe it, not even from Ben Shapiro.

Populism, chemical weapons, and Syria

I have honestly asked people many times to explain to me why exactly chemical weapons are so extra-special awful as to merit a worldwide backlash against their use.  Make no mistake, chemical weapons are indeed horrible things and I do not question that for a fraction of a second.  What I am asking is what makes them quantifiably worse than conventional weapons such as bullets, bombs, and fire?  Honestly, I think people in the modern world have a very skewed idea of what war is actually like and what “conventional” weapons are capable of, and it’s largely due to the sanitization of such things in popular media.  How many cop dramas and war movies have you ever seen where someone gets shot and the result is a little red spot on their clothing, and they fall over?  Or where someone gets blown up by a grenade and instead of being shredded into hamburger they just fly up into the air and fall like a rag doll?  In the real world, bullets inflict actual damage and not just clean puncture wounds–you can get blasted clear in half by a shotgun or have limbs taken off by even moderate-caliber firearms, to say nothing of the actual effects of explosives on living flesh.  Fire is a little harder to clean up but then what we usually see is an immolated body running screaming off camera and nothing of the aftermath.  It takes a hardcore movie like “We Were Soldiers” to show the actual wounds (or a special-effects approximation thereof) inflicted by a napalm burn.  Network television hasn’t desensitized anyone to violence but it has given us all a warped idea of what weapons can do.

By contrast, whenever a supervillain deploys a chemical or biological agent, it seems to be the makeup and effects departments’ job to play THAT angle up as far as it’ll go.  Maybe because you can get the same shock value out of oozing slime and discolored skin without the attendant blood that would necessarily be accompanying such injuries in the real world, I don’t know.  Chemicals can also be exotic and outright fictional along with fanciful biological agents, although it’s hard to beat what nasty viruses nature comes up with in a world where ebola is a thing.  My point is, dying to a bomb or a bullet or a fire or a collapsing building is not some merciful or clean death.  Being killed by mustard gas or sarin or some other chemical is unimaginably horrible, but so is bleeding to death after having your legs blown off, or having your skin charred black by incendiary bombs and waiting for the shock to take you, or having only part of your head blasted away by a gunshot, or having your entire body crushed by your own home and breathing in short, quick, excruciating gasps until the internal bleeding ends it.  Sorry for the graphic imagery, but I’m sure my meaning is clear.

Some people have said the difference rests in that chemical weapons can kill while leaving buildings and structures intact.  With all due respect, bulls**t.  If that were even true then it might be a positive for the use of chemical weapons, but it’s not.  Most if not all chemical and biological agents contaminate the killzone, some for a short time, some for far longer than anyone who deploys them could ever hope to outlive.  It’s hard to believe that a force using chemical weapons would not ALSO be using some form of conventional warfare as well, to soften targets and expose more of the enemy to the chemical attack, unless of course such weapons were used by terrorists.  In that case, what’s preferable, a sarin gas attack on a subway, or a conventional C4 explosive that collapses the subway tunnel entirely?  Once again, to be crystal clear, I’m not saying that chemical weapons are wonderful and fine and humane, I’m saying that bombs and shrapnel are not any better.  If you can give me a good reason to think otherwise then I’m more than willing to discuss it, but thinkers and commenters whom I respect have so far been unable to convince me.

Putting that topic aside for the moment, the fact is that most people DO see chemical weapons as horribly worse than other types of war instruments.  In light of that the “why” is much less important.  As I discussed months ago when President Trump made the last airstrike against Syria, it was pretty clear from the circumstances that either the rebels bombed their own people in order to provoke a response from the rest of the world (the USA in particular), or Bashar Assad was just that kind of madman that he’d do something this crazy with no good reason.  That’s pretty much the situation we’re in now.  And once again, the situation is that Syria is not a threat to us, the United States has no interest there to speak of, and that’s exactly why we’re probably going to pummel them over this.  President Trump is a populist and it’s not just Ivanka weeping in her Cristal over chemical attacks in Syria, it’s a huge number of the easily-led normals not just in the USA but worldwide.  We’re still getting through being the laughingstock that Whatshisname made us on the world stage, though already we’re seeing things like China coming to the table on trade and North Korea at least claiming to be willing to discuss nuclear de-escalation due to having adults back in charge.  ISIS has been falling apart and the world has been getting safer.  Now’s not the time to back down.  It may be unjustified, it may be unfair, but let’s be real, Syria’s a s**thole of the left’s making, and the situation there is not going to get a whole lot worse.  Stop pretending like we’re gonna break something.  We’re not.  This is what the state of nature looks like, folks, and we’re the biggest guy with the biggest stick out there.  Using it to pound Bashar Assad is going to get cheers from the right people, is going to make the right people sit up and take notice, and is only going to anger the folks who have plenty of other reasons to back up President Trump.

Of course there is another elephant in the room, or more accurately, a bear.  To President Trump and his populist mindset, that’s just icing on the cake.  Again, let’s be real: Vladimir Putin is not going to start a world war with the United States over Syria.  He’s going to talk tough, he’s going to bluster and rattle his saber, but when the time comes to call or fold, he’ll fold.  Syria’s just not worth it.  Putin isn’t stupid, he knows he can’t win a stand-up fight with the United States and he’s not a crazy jihadist who figures he’ll go down fighting and get his 72 virgins.  Russia’s got to talk tough and look strong and then work something out whereby they stand aside.  That’s the only way Putin wins and hangs on to his influence in the region.  He knows damned well the United States is not presently looking to encroach on his satellites in the Middle East and he also knows that President Trump has to take a tough stance here, and while Russia has plenty to lose as the United States retakes its position in the international community, Russia also has a lot to gain.  ISIS isn’t exactly pals with Vlad either and Vlad would much rather American lives and resources went towards dealing with them than Russian.

So to recap and summarize, chances are good President Trump’s gonna kick Bashar Assad in the teeth again, Putin will bluster and threaten and ultimately find a way to back down gracefully and save face, and the normals around the world will cheer because they think chemical weapons are super ultra bad awful.  Oh, and the whole “Russian collusion” thing still won’t go away.  What, you weren’t expecting a reasonable response based on logic and facts out of La Resistance, were you?

Achieving equilibrium

I know I have been quiet for a few days so I wanted to pop in briefly and leave some sign of life.  The fact is that recently things have reached a sort of calm and manageable level of mild chaos that I think we can consider the baseline for the duration of the Trump administration.  The Parkland thing has largely blown over and even Disco Fuhrer is slowly fading from public view.  Stormy Daniels has gotten boring and repetitive when she and her pushers don’t look pathetic and desperate.  The Mueller thing results in his ugly mug making the front page of AOL News on a fairly regular basis but it’s still the same breathless anticipation and absolute zero substance that we’ve been seeing since day one.  The normals have moved on.  The left may be outraged that John Bolton has officially joined Team Trump (which I am very happy about), but the normals don’t even notice or care.

A few Trump supporters like Paul Joseph Watson and Stefan Molyneux are up in arms about the President’s comments on Syria and the likelihood of actual military intervention following a pretty obviously staged chemical weapon attack, and while I agree with them in basic principle, I’ve already talked about the interest served by responding to “atrocities” (real or false flag) in Syria.  TL:DR version: we spent way too long bowing and hashtagging and drawing red lines.  I still don’t know which side in Syria is the “good guys” but at this point and in this context I don’t care anymore.  Our other enemies could hurt us, or at least make it hard for us to deal with them, but Syria can’t.  So Syria gets to be the world’s whipping boy so we can show Iran and North Korea and Russia that we’re not screwing around anymore.  Sucks to be them.  You want to blame someone for that, try looking at the administration that made us a laughingstock to every tinpot in the world.

Otherwise, the President’s approval numbers are booming just like the economy, ISIS is on the ropes and the Norks are coming to the table to talk about their nukes.  I’m sure the next source of ongoing outrage is warming up in the wings but this is probably the zero-state we can expect for the next few years.  La Resistance will be screaming into the sky as usual but the world will go on and feel like they’re watching reruns.  It’s times like this the temptation to assume that the situation is in good hands and go dark will be strong.  I’m going to work hard not to do that and I urge the readers I have to do the same.  The midterms are getting closer every day (along with the same-old same-old prophecies of doom and defeat for the GOP that I said ever since November of 2016 would be coming) and it’s important to stay engaged.  I may be shifting gears around here to more general philosophy than current events, and I can’t say when the slowdown in content is going to abate, but I don’t plan to go anywhere soon.

Enjoy the quiet while it lasts my friends.  It never lasts long.

The power of thoughts and prayers

Right now, there are approximately 325 million people living in the United States.  Every morning, the sun rises for all of them.  Every day, for all but an infinitesimally tiny fraction of a percentage of those people, life goes on more or less how they expect it to.  Yes, many thousands of people deal with ongoing troubles like diseases or disabilities, but again, in an overwhelming majority of those instances those problems are dealt with and lived around and compensated for and even in some cases fixed, thanks in large part to the wonders and miraculous advances of the world we live in.  Every day, almost every one of those hearts continues to beat, and the great majority of the ones that do stop beating, it’s an expected end to a long life.  Every day, millions of homes do not collapse or burn down, millions of cars start and do not run into trees or telephone poles, millions of breakfasts and lunches and dinners and desserts are eaten that do not choke or poison their eaters, millions of children have good days at school and millions of pets are waiting happily for their people to come home.  Billions of lights turn on without electrocuting the person at the switch, millions of people cross the road without being hit by a car or mugged, and millions of people leave their jobs at 5:00 just as secure in their employment as they were at 9:00 that morning.  Life goes on normally, uneventfully, peacefully, and untouched by tragedy for all but a very select few each and every day.

Whether you realize it or not, this is nothing short of an ongoing and sorely underappreciated miracle.  Death and what we consider tragedy have been constant parts of human life for all of human history prior to the very last couple of centuries.  As I have stated before, in the world as we know it today, the old question of theodicy (otherwise known as “the problem of evil”) stands on a very important misunderstanding.  The question is not why do bad things happen to good people.  The real question is, in a world where evil exists, why do good things happen at all?

Many folks, especially in politics and the public eye, respond when something tragic happens and express their condolences by saying “our thoughts and prayers are with the victims.”  Only recently has the left decided that it would be a good angle to take to defiantly sneer “your thoughts and prayers aren’t enough!” or “your thoughts and prayers didn’t do anything!” in response to these expressions of sympathy.  Usually this petulant declaration is followed up with a demand for some useless piece of leftist policy enactment, whether it’s envirofascist regulation in the wake of a hurricane that the left claims was the fault of “climate change” or more gun laws in the face of yet another shooting in a gun-free zone.  The left does this for multiple reasons, the first of which is obviously to not let a crisis go to waste and to jump on top of the bodies of hurt people to push their agenda.  They often outright assert that calling for “action” (inevitably the wrong action) gives them a sort of moral superiority over the folks just sending their sympathies to the grieving, which is how they justify exploiting these events without even missing a beat.

There’s also a more fundamental reason why the left has made this their go-to autistic screech, not quite as obvious but lurking just below the surface.  Remember that the left neither loves nor and hates anything nearly as much as it hates God and Christians.  Crying out that “your thoughts and prayers aren’t enough!” is a thinly veiled way of saying “your God did nothing to stop this!”  Often, there’ll be no shortage of militant atheists who will come right out and say it in so many words.  So not only do they get to take advantage of a tragedy and the irrational emotional thinking that follows an upsetting event, but they get to take a dig at God and religion and laugh about how “your God let children die” or some such ignorance.

The only way this can even begin to make sense is if you deny (as the left does) that objective evil exists, whether in the hearts of man or in the form of supernatural beings or both.  Given the Pope’s recent statements about how “hell doesn’t exist” it’s easy to see that this is a popular sentiment.  It’s also wrong.  Why it’s wrong is a discussion for another time but it’s almost funny to hear people who claim there is no objective good or evil proclaim that President Trump, the NRA, the GOP, or just white Americans in general are in fact “evil.”  But then, self-contradiction never seems to bother the left.

The fact is there is not only evil in the world, but the amount of havoc it could wreak if left unchecked is staggering.  People in today’s world have lost their sense of how precarious and fragile life and comfort truly are.  A blockage in an artery the size of a pinhead could mean the difference between life and death.  A millimeter’s worth of rain or a two-degree drop in temperature can be what turns an ordinary morning commute into a fatal car accident.  Hell, a couple of degree tilt of the Earth’s axis could rearrange the entire face of the planet, while just a slight nudge of a few thousand miles in either direction could mean we all fry or we all freeze.  We’re still walking a tightrope, following a very thin thread of light through the cold darkness, and it’s frankly beyond astonishing that we lose so few along the path.  So much of every person’s life is perpetually a hairsbreadth away from catastrophic malfunction and yet when something bad happens like a shooting incident people have the shortsighted gall to declare that “your thoughts and prayers did nothing?”  About 320 million people (give or take a few thousand) had a nice uneventful day thanks to the power of prayer and the forces behind it, and as for the handful of folks for whom today was a day they’ll never forget no matter how hard they try, the thoughts and sympathies of caring people mean a lot more than an activist’s opportunistic screeching.

I mean in no way to denigrate anyone’s suffering–a tragedy for one is no less a tragedy.  What I am saying is that if a higher power is responsible when a handful of people are shot, that power is also responsible when over three hundred million other people are NOT shot.  I’d stand on thoughts and prayers’ record any day.