Category: Politics

Are We Getting What We Deserve?

It is only fitting that a fiscally irresponsible people should get a fiscally irresponsible government.  And that a people without virtue should be ruled by the vicious. And that a nation that has lost its collective marbles should be presided over by a decrepit specimen who has long since lost his.

The people can't think but they can gawk over endless  views of a sad old man tripping over a sandbag. And then the pundits wonder whether he is physically fit for office. But his physical decrepitude and age are not what primarily disqualify him. What does so are his being non compos mentis, his being morally corrupt, and his being the empty vessel of destructive leftist ideas. So no, Hillary dear, he is not "doing a good job." Joey is not doing jack.

Dershowitz on Durham

Forbes:

The basic conclusions reached by the Durham report mirror the thesis of my book Get Trump: namely that good people have been willing to do bad things in order to prevent Donald Trump from being elected (or reelected) as president. These good people honestly believe that the noble (at least in their view) end in “getting” Trump and preventing him from being president justifies ignoble means, including mendacity and violation of long-established principles.

There can be no doubt that the Durham report is correct in having concluded that government officials – from the top down – viewed the evidence (or lack thereof) through the prism of resolving all doubts against Trump and in favor of his opponents. This was not so much a partisan bias, favoring Democrats over Republicans, because some of the worst offenders are Republicans who honestly believe that the Trump presidency endangered the national security of the United States.

One Dem who is not a Demented Puppet, a Brazen Liar, A Cackling Clown, etc.

The RFK [Jr.] Potential for Political Disruption

His main target was the corrupt relationship between large corporations and captured administrative bureaucracies. He has spent his career battling such corruption in the realm of environmental regulation and wants to use his knowledge and experience to expand that battle to the whole of the administrative state. In what might have been the biggest applause line of the night, he said as president he would never be muscled or manipulated by any bureaucrat or lobbyist.

[. . .]

To be sure, he has been on record in being among the climate-change alarmists in even recent history. Have his views on this topic shifted in light of the fake COVID science of the last three years and the lockdown experience? Perhaps so. Many people on the left have begun to rethink this topic and perhaps RFK is among them. He certainly seems to have zero interest in anything like a “great reset” and he is not a member of the World Economic Forum.

[. . .]

His next area was the most satisfying to me personally. He broke the public silence on the critical issue of COVID lockdowns. He chronicled the astonishing expense for which we gained nothing, and blasted companies like Amazon that censored contrary views while driving the competition out of business. He spoke with fire about the shutting down of small business and the violation of people’s property rights and religious liberties and illustrated a profound command of the facts, being how the lockdowns created an even worst public-health crisis.

[. . . ]

Finally, he called for a national conversation about this proxy war that is developing with Russia. The first excuse for U.S. involvement was purely humanitarian but it is mutating into yet another disaster along lines of the Iraq war. He demanded an immediate end to U.S. funding and a push for a diplomatic solution before it is too late. He further called for closing military bases around the world and bringing the troops home, plus a revival of U.S. economic strength. In the course of this discussion, he explained with great competence the threat to the U.S. dollar from the recent moves by BRICS to abandon trade in the dollar.

UPDATE (4/24) RFK, Jr. on why Tucker got the boot.

 

Political Polarization

Polarization in a physical body has to have a limit lest the polarized body break apart. (Imagine the distance between Earth's North and South poles — 8595.35 miles — increasing indefinitely.) It is no different with the body politic.  We will eventually break apart or be broken apart by an external force (how about the ChiComs in cahoots with the Russkis?) if our political polarization continues.  United we stand, divided we fall; come on now people, let's get on the ball.  We won't of course.

Time was, when I read Mona Charen and George F. Will with quite a bit of approval. But then Trump came along and both lost their minds.  Here is Will over at The Washington [Com]Post. Take a gander at the comments to gauge the level of present political polarization.

Dear old Mona's latest outburst anent Trump is such that I cannot bring myself to sully my site by linking to it.

Do you want to hear some sane and characteristically brilliant commentary by a lion of the law?  Here is Alan Dershowitz on the Trump indictment. (HT: Vito Caiati)

Are There Any Decent Democrats?

There is at least one. His name is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. I recommend his A Letter to Liberals: Censorship and COVID: An Attack on Science and American Ideals (Skyhorse Publishing, 2022). It is mercifully short,  x + 110 pages long, and well worth your time. It is extremely well-documented. The text itself runs to x + 87 pp. with 239 endnotes, most of them with hyperlink info.  Here is something I didn't know:

At the outset of the pandemic, most of the world's leading news organizations — BBC, Reuters, AP, AFD, CBC, CNN, CBS, ABC, Washington Post, Financial Times, Facebook, Google/YouTube, Microsoft, Twitter, and others — organized themselves into a collusive antidemocratic and anticompetitive cartel known as the Trusted News Initiative (TNI) — pledged to squelch and censor all reports about government COVID countermeasures that challenged official proclamations. (p. 52 f; endnote 153 points us to the BBC, December 10, 2020.)

I don't believe that there is any chance that  RFK Jr. will 'pull a Tulsi' and quit the Democrat Party, although he should. He won't because he's  a Kennedy, and I am guessing that he  already has enough trouble with his extended family.  (See here.) Like many old-time Dems, he fancies he will wrest the leadership of his party away from the 'woke'-left totalitarians who now control it. If that's what he thinks, he's fooling himself.  

The irony is that RFK fils, despite his speech impediment and lack of charisma, has a better chance of beating either Trump or DeSantis in 2024 than any other Dem I can think of.

Is it Still Tweedledum and Tweedledee?

The good Baron proffers a depressing Yes.  Gates of Vienna and MavPhil have been sphere-mates for a good long time, going on 20 years. The Baron's wife Dymphna was a regular reader of MavPhil back in the early days and an e-mail correspondent of mine. It has been some years since she quit the sublunary. My very belated condolences to the Baron.

The American Kakistocracy

A kakistocracy is a government run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens. (Wikipedia) This is what we have under the current bunch of Dems.  The worst have risen to the top. 'President' Joe Biden should come to mind as leader of the pack. But can a puppet preside over anything? The question answers itself.

Biden is surely one of the worst in point of truthfulness. I used to say that Barack Obama was a master of the multiple modes of mendacity, but it appears that Joey B. has him beat. Here is a (partial) catalog of his sins against truth.  HT: Tony Flood.

And here is a stab at a typology of untruthfulness.

On the bright side, Speaker McCarthy here demonstrates the fine art of political demolition as he shuts down a PBS wonkette politely, but decisively. The C-SPAN video runs for 3:33.

Tulsi Gabbard Exposes George Santos

Would that Tulsi would and could lay  bare the brazen bullshit of every single swamp critter in the District of Columbia from the life-long liar Joey B. on down and not leaving out Alejandro Mayorkas, 'Director of Homeland Security' — how is that for an Orwellian title! — and Elizabeth 'Fauxcahontas' Warren, and do it with the style, grace, and integrity she demonstrates in this amazing video. 

Please watch it and propagate it. 

Who Killed JFK?

Here: 

In a remarkable television broadcast on December 15, 2022, Tucker Carlson made an explosive charge. He pointed out that, contrary to law, the White House was refusing to release thousands of pages of documents about the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Carlson said that these documents proved CIA involvement in the assassination and that someone within the government who had looked at these documents made a direct statement to this effect.

Here is what Carlson said: “Not long after Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald on camera in the basement of Dallas police headquarters, a lot of Americans started to have some questions about the Kennedy assassination. It was, you’d have to admit, a pretty extraordinary sequence of events. A lone gunman murders the president of the United States. And then, less than 48 hours later, that lone gunman is himself murdered by another lone gunman.

What are the odds of that?

And here is the Tucker Carlson broadcast that RFK, Jr. called "the most courageous newscast in 60 years."