Steve Bannon and Megyn Kelly on FAFO

Here.

Megyn Kelly, being relatively young, may be forgiven for referring to Elliot Ness as Elliot Nest (ouch!), but Steve Bannon, whose superannuation shows, and who ought to know better, either missed her mistake or let it pass, being the gentleman that he is.  

In all other particulars, however, the short video is delightfully on target.

As for the man himself, what Kennedy said about Nixon could also be said about Trump: "The man has no class."

But what is more important, both domestically and internationally, class or the ability to kick ass?* We conservative quill-drivers do some good, I suppose, but none of us are positioned to bring about decisive, world-shaking, change. While we sit at our ink wells and drive our quills, great men stand at the ramparts and drive history.

But we the people must keep an eye on them. It is not that power corrupts; it does not. It is that we who are all morally defective and susceptible to the blandishments of power, abuse it.  Power itself, however, is good. If it were not, why would all-power count among the omni-attributes of deity?

The Founders understood how easily fallen natures are suborned by the possession of power. So they designed a constitution-based republic with built-in safeguards to check and balance the executive's power lest it issue in tyranny.

Long live the Republic, the republic our political enemies aim to tear down.  They will not succeed. The right man came along at the right time, whether or not by divine design.

But one thing troubles me. Government by executive orders cannot be what the Founders had in mind. Given our current predicament, however, such orders are a necessary evil. If Congress did its job, they would not be necessary.

An executive order is an edict. 'Edict' and 'dictator' share the PIE root, deik-. And so, true to his word, Donald Trump was a dictator on Day One, reversing the pernicious edicts of his corrupt predecessor, Joseph Biden who on his first day, playing the dictator, viciously and stupidly reversed Trump's  wise  2017  border policies.  Biden ought to have been impeached and removed from office on the grounds of dereliction of duty and failure to uphold the Constitution he swore to uphold and protect.  But so divided have we become, that Biden's removal could not be brought about.

And so here we are. If in the unlikely event that the Dems take back the White House in 2028, the cycle of reversing and promulgating edicts will begin again.  A suboptimal outcome, that.

One more thing. We need an opposition party as part of the system of checks and balances. The Dems would do just fine if they could be restored to sanity, the Camelot sanity of the early 'sixties, say.  But that is a big 'if.' Kamalot would be a disaster. If the Dems persist in their subversive ways, however, serious thought will have to be given to the question whether their party should be outlawed. 

I'm serious. The CPUSA was never outlawed, as far as I know.** There was no need to, because of their relative lack of political clout. Outlawing them would only have given them attention and brought them supporters. But the transmogrification over the last decades of the Dems into a hard-Left subversive outfit with real chances of winning puts a different complexion on the matter.

Toleration is the touchstone of classical liberalism.  But toleration has limits: it negates itself when extended unto political suicide. 

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*To put it politely and allusively, 'kick donkey.'

**I'm not an historian, so correct me if I am wrong or omitting pertinent facts.