politics

Red Wave Inbound

Mark Noonan23 Comments

This is how the MSM is covering the White House preparations for Tuesday:

Even before senility Biden was incapable of admitting error – his whole life has been the ceaseless crafting of Narratives where he’s always the hero. The fact that the Democrats are about to get wiped out as a direct result of his actions just won’t compute in that musty thing he uses for a brain.

Plus, Team Biden has to start looking over its shoulder – things are not likely to get better for the USA any time soon and no major legislative efforts will happen. There are already – because, likely, Team Obama and/or Team Clinton authorized it – MSM stories highlighting Biden’s obvious physical and mental decline. Pudding Brain’s people only keep their cushy positions as long as The Senile One occupies the Oval Office…as soon as he’s gone, they’re gone. And a lot of Democrats are going to want Joe gone come Wednesday.

Democrats are looking forward to 2024 with fear in their hearts…if Biden is the nominee and things haven’t 180 improved by then, they’ll get beaten in a 1932-style landslide. No matter who the GOP nominates. They probably don’t want Harris, but they also can’t get Joe out without her active cooperation…and if she’s in any way smart (debatable) she wouldn’t agree to it unless the power people agree to grease her skids for the 2024 nomination.

It is at long last even starting to dawn on the most ardent Democrats that things are going poorly – here in Nevada, they’re hoping a blizzard in Washoe County will save the day for them. In a way, I feel sympathy for them – the MSM (on orders from the DNC) has been playing them for suckers. Four months ago the MSM was all happy talk about Democrats winning Senate seats and maybe even holding the House. It was absurd from the get-go: the GOP only needs 5 House seats for a majority. They’d get that even if Joe was popular. As for the Senate, in 2021 there was some chance…but by late Spring of 2022, that had vanished and it never returned. Now they’re backs to the wall hoping they can save their seats in New Hampshire and Washington and so keep the GOP below 54 seats so that 2024 doesn’t award the Republicans a filibuster-proof majority. Rely on it Democrats, you were never going to do very well in 2022…and the messaging presented just made it all worse. They really thought that abortion and January 6th would trump concerns about shortages and high prices. I want to give the GOP mole who convinced the DNC to do that a medal.

Now, how big a wave? Don’t know. And there’s even the usual caveat that anything can happen. But my guess at the moment is a net 30 seat gain in the House and 3 in the Senate plus some really big gains at the State level. But, we’ll see. On Tuesday!

The War That is Politics

Mark Noonan26 Comments

That is, of course, a slight reformation of Clausewitz: war is a continuation of politics by other means. But you can also just as well say that politics is war. I think that our problem has been – aside from sheer cowardice and greed – that we’ve seen politics as debate. That is, we feel that politics is an argument and that if we can just argue the right way, we’ll eventually win.

How did that work out?

Well, 60 years ago we were arguing that Social Security had to go. After six decades of refining our arguments, Social Security is untouchable we’re now arguing about what a woman is.

Not too good, huh?

While we argued – and pretty much won every argument – we’ve lost just about everything. This is because the Left doesn’t argue: it states a Party Line and it doesn’t ever stop stating a Party Line unless, internally, they decide a different Party Line will work better. It doesn’t matter that we can prove conclusively by argument that the Party Line is drivel – they’ll just keep stating it and they will, even if only incrementally, enact their Party Line into law. We, until very recently, never understood this. But, now we do. At least, some of us do.

Over the last week or so, we who have a firm understanding of things have started to call opponents of Florida’s gender law, “groomers.” Meaning, of course, that those who want the law gone are attempting to groom kids into sexual degeneracy. Using this term has naturally infuriated the Left but it has also got some of our weak sister’s on the Right to call for the fainting couch. You know the type – and they’re all over the place deploring our use of the word “groomer”. Their argument is that since we are winning this debate, we shouldn’t use such a mean and loaded term. But what they leave out is that we’re winning the debate only because we’re using the mean word. In other words, we’re not trying to out-argue the Left (because the Left isn’t trying to argue), but we are out-fighting the Left. We’re hammering them. And it is working.

Other than their argument that it is mean to call the Left groomers, they also claim that it is inaccurate. That it is untrue. That when we call them “groomers” it is just as bad – and just as much a lie – as when the Left called the Florida law the “don’t say gay” bill. How can we consider ourselves to be decent if we’re lying just as much as the Left?

Well, mostly because we’re not lying. Nobody gets off the hook that easy.

Where the Nazis fully enacted their policy – and set the stage for WWII and the Holocaust – was at Nuremberg in 1935: the so-called “Nuremberg Laws”. Their official German titles were Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour and the Reich Citizenship Law. In 1945, when the Germans emerged from the Nazi world, they were dismayed. Shocked. Saddened. Angered. Lots of things. But only a very few, and often only years later, really figured it out. Here’s someone who did:

It is very important what she says at the end – essentially, “I could have known”. That it was only a lack of curiosity which lead her to work for a monster and see him as something other than what he was. The point I’m making: you’ve got no excuse. If you are of normal, human intelligence, you are on the hook. If you don’t know – if you don’t realize the consequences of your actions, it is because you are refusing to know them.

Naturally, if you ask your basic Leftist out there if he’s in favor of grooming children, he’ll say, “no”. And within the Leftist’s mind there might even be full sincerity in that. But the only reason there is that sincere belief is because the Leftist has refused to know. He’s not stupid – if he’s talking to you, he’s at least of normal human intelligence. He can reason. He’s got a situation where teachers are telling kindergartners about sexual preferences – often with the teacher using his/her/xir-self as the example. The only possible reasons someone would do that is stark insanity or they want some sort of sexual validation and/or gratification from the children. And neither insane people nor those who seek sexual validation/gratification from children should be teachers. And every Leftist knows this.

If the Nazis had called their law “The Law for Massacring Millions, Starting a World War and Having Russian Soldiers Take Revenge by Raping Every Kraut Woman 8 to 80 They Get Their Hands On”, even the Nazis would have some difficulty in getting that enacted, even in a police State. But that is what the Nuremberg Laws were for – and everyone could see from the first moment that war and massacre were going to be the result of such laws. That the Germans didn’t – and even years after the war – still didn’t see it that way doesn’t mean there was some impenetrable mystery, but that they just didn’t want to know. My change to the title of the law was a bit of an exaggeration, but make no mistake about it, everyone knew that making a law saying that a certain ethnic group has no civil rights was going to end up very badly, especially when it was enacted by a man who already told you that his goal was conquest of foreign lands populated by the people he just declared to have no rights.

They know! They all know. They just refuse to know – or admit they know. Because that gets them off the hook. “Hey, how was I supposed to know that the guy who calls Jews vermin was going to do something hideous to them?”. Yeah, right. “Hey, how was I supposed to know that the teacher telling the 5 year old about transgenderism turned out to be a perv?”. Uh huh.

They not only know, they approve. And that makes them groomers – and that is why it is right for us to call them that. And by our calling them what they are, they are forced on to defense, which means they’re losing. If you’re explaining rather than telling, you’re losing. We spent decades trying to explain that we’re not racists to people who simply told us we were racists. It is rather fun to have the shoe at least on the other foot. And the can stew in it – because there was never an ounce of evidence that we are racists, but, hey, if you’re teaching transgenderism to 5 year olds, there’s a high chance that you’ve got an ulterior motive…like, say, prepping them to be transgender 12 year olds you can diddle.

Prove me wrong – prove to me that it isn’t that.

And good luck with that.

This is the difference between argument and fighting. Between debate and war. We’re just now engaging in war. And as truth is on our side, we don’t have to lie. But it does take courage to fight – courage we have definitely lacked until just recently. And our engaging in battle is going to cause dismay among some. There will be those who will back off, even join the other side, because we decided to fight. So be it. If we want to win, we have to do it.

9/11 After 20 Years

Mark Noonan28 Comments

I couldn’t until now write about the 20th anniversary. I’ve been pondering it all day and only now, as we flip over to 9/12 on the Pacific Coast calendar has it started to clarify in my mind what I’m thinking about it.

The 9/11 attacks, whatever they meant to you and me, meant something entirely different for the Ruling Class – the Deep State, whatever you want to call it. To us, they were a horrible attack on our country and the perpetrators needed to be hunted down and killed, cost what it might. To them – to the bosses – it was merely an acceptable level of violence and their whole thought in the aftermath was how to control us. To prevent, that is, from the people of the United States in their righteous anger and national unity upsetting the global applecart.

On 9/10, everything was great for them – things were cruising along. They were making money and firmly in power and the world was at their command. They were busy de-industrializing the United States and ever more shackling us to the dictates and moods of the international Ruling Class. Along comes some yahoos who go just a little too far – and the American people wanted answers and justice.

But answers would expose the bosses, don’t you see? It was a very preventable attack. Just some simple diligence on checking up on those coming into the country would have kept the hijackers out. But if you start doing that, you’re also going to interfere with the drug runners and human traffickers and, dang, there’s a lot of money in that and if steps were taken to keep out undesirables from the United States, all that would come to an end. Not only that, but once the full level of gross negligence was exposed, there would be demands that ruling class heads roll. Can’t have people lose out decades-long careers just because a few thousand people were murdered!

And then, if we really went after the source of the problem – the State sponsors of terrorism – then just think of all the vast, money-making (for the Ruling Class) operations would be lost! The financial hit to people already sleeping on piles of money would be terrible. The last thing any of them wanted was us hick morons going, “hey, Iran is the main sponsor of this stuff: get rid of that government.” So, they cooked up campaigns in Afghanistan and then Iraq – placing ours in shooting galleries and then tying their hands so that there was no chance of a clear cut victory. They calculated – correctly – that over time and with mounting losses, we’d just want it over with. No need to look into who failed and certainly no desire to take on the actual problem.

They were ok with all this because what bin Laden did had no ill effect on them unless they had the ill luck to be at work early at the World Trade Center that day (and what really big boss gets in before ten?). To them, 9/11 was a matter of messaging and then appearing to do something in response. Didn’t matter how it came out – they’d still be rich and in charge and they’d award themselves medals and letters of commendation no matter what happened. And if some poor kid from Akron got his legs blown off or another who killed the wrong guy had to be brought up on war crimes charges, big deal. It didn’t harm them.

But there was a fly in the ointment. We really did want those who did it killed and we really expected our Rulers to present us with victory. And as lie and failure piled up on top of each other, the creeping realization that things were in bad shape started to grow in our minds. Things just weren’t right. We don’t lose to ragged bands of Islamists with IEDs. But, we were losing. And as things continued to drag out and no improvement was in sight we started to lose our faith in the institutions. And, so, Trump: and that crisis really got the Ruling Class’ attention but to get Trump out, they had to amp up the lies to absurd lengths. This did make many millions of people dutifully fall in line to hate Trump…but it also woke up millions to just how lousy and creepy the Ruling Class is.

They did, in the end, get Trump out. In a ridiculously rigged election. While students were chanting “f*** Biden” at football games, cops and firefighters were lining up to shake hands with Trump on 9/11. This man who supposedly got 81 million votes while Trump was increasing his 2016 vote total by more than 11 million votes got booed in the streets of New York. It is too late for them, now. Sure, they have their supporters: the most mindless of Americans are still watching MSNBC to learn what to think each day, but at least half the country – and I suspect far more – has tuned it all out.

So, the long term effect of 9/11 is going to be, I think, the end of the Ruling Class. They couldn’t defend us and their lies just went too far. People are starting to wake up from the daze that we’ve been in for decades. We know: trust nothing. They’re all liars until proven otherwise.

How this will shake out over the next few years is anyone’s guess: but I don’t think we’ll go back. Biden was the Ruling Class’ attempt to put the cat back into the bag. They’d prefer Joe stick for two terms or, failing that, Kamala takes over for him. And they wouldn’t mind if a tame Republican replaces Biden. That was the plan here: get Trump out and then get the GOP to put up Jeb II or Romney II so that we could all go back to 9/10/2001. But that won’t happen. We, on our side, simply won’t put up with it. We still feel anger at those who did 9/11. We are still willing to fight the Islamists if need be. But we also know that our immediate problem is at home, not abroad and no attempts and stifling us in the name of “national security” or “national unity” will ever get us back to our 9/10 world again. We go forward – and to a future where those who failed us on 9/11 no longer have a say in this country.

The End of the Age of Lies

Mark Noonan71 Comments

Loose Lips Sink Ships. I’ve talked about this before. The famous WWII injunction to keep quiet about all matters military is, I think, Lie One. The first in a string of lies which led us to where we are today.

They are called – by the liars, naturally – Noble Lies. Lies which are for the cause. But, no: lies are just lies. They never are anything but self serving. Loose Lips Sink Ships wasn’t about protecting Allied shipping – it was about keeping everyone quiet about the massacre of shipping right off the American coast in 1942.

It was absolutely horrible: starting with a mere 5 U Boats, and never involving more than a dozen at any given time, the Germans were able to pick off merchant ships pretty much at will. One fourth of all allied merchant ship losses in the Atlantic came between January and August 1942. So weak and unprepared were we for this that Americans along the coast routinely saw, day and night, ships burning and sinking right off the coast. And it wasn’t just a matter of not having enough escorts for the merchant ships…it was that the Navy didn’t take the steps which could have immediately lowered the risk of attack. It was months before the United States got its act together.

And the guy in charge of this debacle – Admiral King – was given a 5th star as a Fleet Admiral.

In our Civil War, there were lies told: but not many and those that were got exposed pretty quick. The reason for this was the American news media – and the American people – were unafraid to speak out. The various errors which repeatedly nearly sank the Union effort were rapidly exposed and the Lincoln Administration responded quickly to correct failings. Generally, after mid 1863, the Union made no grave errors in prosecuting the war. And those who had failed the test were cast aside in favor of those who could meet the challenge. That’s what must always happen if you are to have long term success.

In WWII, instead of addressing the failure, the government cooked up Loose Lips Sink Ships and the MSM went along with it. Why? I don’t know why. Love for FDR, I guess. The editor of the New York Times, after all, could see the massacre of shipping from his house practically. And, yes, reports were written but clearly not in a manner which exposed the complete incompetence of US Naval leadership. The only person who got the axe in the Navy was Admiral Kimmel in Hawaii. And, sure, he was caught with his pants down and the Navy is always supposed to be instantly ready for action…but in his defense, he was fed a line of double talk from DC about Japanese intentions. Nobody paid for that, either.

The worst part of it was that it got the American government into the habit of lying to the American people. Lies which were told because, allegedly, the American people couldn’t handle the truth. Expose King’s incapacity and people will lose faith! So the theory appears to have gone. So, cook up a lie so people can retain faith…in a guy who failed. Not sure I see the long term benefit of that.

After the war, the next series of lies were to cover up Communist penetration of the American government and obscure responsibility for losing China to the Communists. Prior to McCarthy it was known to the President and senior aids that the Soviets had installed spies all through the United States government starting in the 1930s. It wasn’t a mystery. The various people at the head of affairs, starting with FDR, had lazily turned a blind eye to Leftwing Democrats hiring their Communist buddies. It was these various hires who played a huge role in convincing the Truman Administration to give up on Chiang, thus ensuring Mao’s victory. Now, Truman and his people could have just leveled with the American people (the fault was mostly FDR’s at that point, anyway), cleared out the Commies and moved on. But to do that would require admission of error. Can’t do that! People will lose faith in their government if they knew the full story.

Terrified the heck out of them, make no mistake about it, when McCarthy picked up the gauntlet and started demanding answers. And the American people, by and large loved McCarthy. He was their champion: the fighter against entrenched interests. Even after McCarthy was destroyed in a sordid political hit involving the government and MSM, the people still supported him and especially his goal of removing disloyal people from the government. Well, McCarthy was forced out…and a couple overt Commies were ejected. But the real housecleaning never happened. Would have disturbed the American people, after all, if everyone compromised was forced out.

On and on it went. One lie piled on top of another and nobody daring to question the underlying assumptions and, after a while, everyone deeply invested in keeping the lies going. Vietnam was a welter of lying, of course, with the obvious way to win the war – take the port of Haiphong – rejected out of hand because the lie we used to get out of Korea was that our move into North Korea triggered Chinese intervention and it would happen again if we moved into North Vietnam. The real reason for Chinese intervention in Korea, of course, was because we essentially promised China that we wouldn’t allow Chiang to attack mainland China from Taiwan. Once our fleet was in the Taiwan straights, Mao moved his army to North Korea. Now, might Mao have intervened had we taken Haiphong in 1965? Anything is possible – but it wasn’t a for sure thing; in other words, the fear that if we physically invaded North Vietnam we’d get another war with China was just a guess and not based upon any known intention by China or desire by North Vietnam. We precluded ourselves from the one thing which would have won the Vietnam War because we had to sustain a lie that unless we held back, we’d immediately get WWIII and nuclear war.

I think that over the decades lying has become a habit. It isn’t even really thought about any longer. Whatever lie is needed to sustain whatever policy the government wants is just cooked up to order and then fed into the MSM by the intelligence agencies. Trump’s problem is that his policy wasn’t to lie and it wasn’t to go along with the established order. It terrified the liars…and so they worked over time to lie Trump out of office. Trouble was, they had so little actual dirt on Trump (honestly, we don’t even have any evidence that he was some great womanizing playboy, even when young: we have rumors and suppositions which may, in the event, have been planted by Trump, himself, to burnish his showman image). The trouble they had here is that when your bad guy isn’t evil, the lies you have to say against him are ridiculous. This didn’t deter them, of course, but they went so far in their lies that the whole edifice of lies started to expose itself.

To be sure, they had skirted the absurd before: the 9/11 Commission managing to exonerate Bill and the Benghazi hearings giving Hillary a pass were an amazing example of dishonesty. We all watched those and stood there, amazed, as one expert after another told us to ignore the evidence of our lying eyes and trust them. But it didn’t reach breaking point. There was still a fig leaf of plausibility to their story line. Until Trump – once we got to the Democrats saying Trump was a Russian agent installed by Putin via vote-switching in Michigan, the game was rather up. You either wised up to the lies, or became a functional idiot still believing what was obviously untrue.

And it is amazing the number of people who will idiotically believe obvious falsehoods. I know a man who will assert stoutly that he heard Trump, live on TV, say that all Mexicans are rapists. If you point him to the video and transcripts which show nothing of the sort, he will reject this. He knows what he heard. Of course, what he heard was a carefully served up bit in the MSM which made it seem like that…and then the accusation was merely repeated enough until, in his own mind, what he remembers is what he was told rather than what he saw. There are millions of people like this – and I think it is because the confront the truth is too terrible for them. They have believed the lies so long – and personally invested their own honor in them – that to reject them is a step too far. They just can’t do it.

But lies cannot be sustained. The USSR tried mightily to do so and for many decades it seemed to work. Not only did they lie about everything, but they made living impossible unless you subscribed to the lies. It seemed a perfect machine: Lie, and then instruct everyone to repeat the lie on pain of losing home, job, liberty and (if really necessary) life. And the people for the most part did go along, braying like assess whatever was spoon fed into them. But not all and not all the time. After all, it was hard to believe Soviet reports of bumper crops while you stood in line for two hours just to get a loaf of bread. Lies eventually commit suicide because they cannot forever sustain themselves: they always need a new lie to back up the previous lie and eventually the web of lies becomes so large and unruly that its contradictions tear it apart.

That is what is happening now in the United States, I think. And the enormously funny thing is that it looks like the web of lies might finally unravel because of Joe Biden: a senile old crook installed via a fantastic web of lies culminating in voter fraud so obvious that only Blue Check Experts could straight faced say it was legit. The withdrawal from Afghanistan might have pulled out the last support for the lies. It is simply stunning that Team Pudding Brain is seriously trying to blame Trump (they even floated on social media the idea that Trump set a trap for Biden in Afghanistan). Sure, the very stupid and the very venal can go along with the idea that the guy who last gave an order seven months ago is responsible for something ordered today, but most people see right through it. And also see that the whole pack of Ruling Class Experts is simply wrong, wrong, wrong. They don’t know what they’re doing. Sure, Trump might have gone off half cocked and certainly wasn’t deeply versed in the intricacies of government…but, on the other hand, people didn’t fall off planes in a panic when Trump was President.

We’ll see what happens. And it could still get very much worse before it gets better. But right now we are the functional equivalent of a Soviet waiting in the bread line in 1989 as the MSM tells him that all is well and the Leaders are doing just swell. We no longer believe them. And we’re just waiting to figure out how we get rid of them and their Age of Lies.

Tyranny is Our Future

Mark Noonan27 Comments

One way or another, the end of freedom as we’ve known it is coming – the only question before us is what sort of tyranny will replace the freedom we used to enjoy. And I mean “used to” in the sense that what you think of as freedom – what older folks, especially, grew up understanding as freedom – is already gone. You already can’t say or do quite a lot of things that you or our parents and grandparents used to do.

This is in the nature of things, after all: freedom always breeds license and license creates a chaos which begs an end to liberty. Human being are very bad at keeping an even keel over the long term. It isn’t that most of us tend to an extreme but that enough of us do that a corrective has to be applied to everyone. This time is a little different from the historical precedent, though, in that some of the chaos-generators are doing it precisely to make freedom intolerable as preparation for the imposition of the tyranny they prefer. These are the people of the Left.

And our choices will be a Left tyranny, or a Right tyranny. The possibility of returning to the level of freedom we had in, say, 1960, is extremely low. I actually believe it is impossible – mostly because that level of liberty was only possible because most people alive in 1960 were still keeping to the old moral code: they tolerated those pushing the boundaries in 1960. They shouldn’t have, as it turns out – but, there you go: it happened. Because in the 60 years since the old moral code has been discarded by nearly everyone (most especially those charged with maintaining it), we simply can’t get back to that level of liberty. There’s no basis for it: there is, that is, no stable, moral society as a base from which the experimenters can dare to stretch out.

Naturally, I prefer a Right tyranny. Not least because Right tyranny normally develops into ordered liberty. Left tyranny, especially now, looks to be both permanent and increasingly insane in it’s demands. We’ve seen the rapid trajectory these past ten years where what was completely out-there stuff is now being enforced in our institutions as the most ancient and settled dogma. They won’t stop: the whole thing of the Left is that it must always go further Left, mostly because the Left always fails and the Leftist cannot conceive of any reason for failure other than they didn’t go far enough. Attached to this – and sometimes dominating it – is the need for enemies. You have to go ever further Left so that you can have someone around who didn’t go there fast enough and so can now be built up as an enemy to be destroyed. So, I want a Right tyranny not because it is better than freedom, but because I can’t have freedom and so I’ll pick the least offensive poison.

And part of the reason we can’t have freedom (for a while: a right tyranny will eventually produce freedom, though it may take a while) is because we made one very crucial mistake, as a civilization: we presumed that liberty was an end. It isn’t. It is a means to an end: the end being a just society. Our trouble on the right has been our assumption that if we just defend liberty and give people an example of the happiness and prosperity that freedom generates, they would naturally drop their non-liberty ideologies and join us. It didn’t work out that way because we didn’t realize the most crucial aspect of human nature: we are Fallen. Rather astounding that those on the Right could forget this, but it was forgotten. I mostly put it down to those on the Right since, say, WWII, not being true Rightists. They were really Liberals who were in a rearguard defense of the 19th century. Be that as it may, the fact that humanity is Fallen was forgotten and left out of all calculations and so we weren’t prepared for people who can see, with their own eyes, the happiness and prosperity and reject it in favor of something else. Not because the something else was superior, but simply because it was something else…and most importantly, something else that they would be in charge of.

We always needed a corrective to unfettered liberty. We needed a way of stopping those with an evil idea from suckering the ill-informed into joining their evil idea. We needed, in the end, something like the Inquisition to root out heresy (in this case, political heresy) to simply make sure that when a Maoist came to town, he was run out of town on a rail before he could use slick marketing to convince the citizen of a free and prosperous Republic that what was needed was a bit of murderous Cultural Revolution. If we get a Right tyranny, this will be the main mark of it: a complete assault on all Left ideas to expunge them from the public square. That is what will actually justify the Right tyranny and what will cause it to cling to power beyond it’s time: the necessity of excising from the polity the idea that the ideas of a 19th century lunatic German are superior to 2,000 years of Western, Christian civilization.

We’ll see how this comes out. I will still work as if we can preserve freedom and maybe by some miracle we are able to do so…but the most likely outcome is one side or the other scoring a big victory, and then simply imposing itself on the other side. Both sides will be forced to this: because they cannot coexist. One or the other will eventually have to go.

Sick of This Schiff

Mark Noonan23 Comments

The Schiff-show is over – and, meh: a smart guy I follow on Twitter took the latest batch of “the walls are closing in on Trump” articles and simply linked them up with the zillion other “the walls are closing in on Trump” articles which have been put out since the day after he became President. I heard not one person outside social media talking about the hearings – and the ratings for them were low; I suspect that most Americans were only vaguely aware they were going on. At the end of the day, the Democrats had no actual witnesses to anything which could be construed as a crime…and that’s why most likely don’t care.

Where from here? Well, from what I can gather reading reports, Trump and McConnell seem to be double-dog daring the Democrats to actually vote articles of impeachment. Truth be told, I suspect both men would rather not have to go through that…but they seem ready. Even Romney came to the White House for a meeting with Trump; so, even their most likely GOP vote in favor of conviction is probably back on the GOP ranch (how? Well, Romney’s polling started to look just terrible and, well, favors were probably asked and granted…politics, you know?).

One side note that has come up is a wonder just how so many traitors managed to be working in high levels of the Trump Administration. Lots of theories have been offered up. My two are:

1. I don’t think Trump suspected just how disloyal people would be. All the hearings really showed is that the permanent bureaucracy thinks of the American government being them with a small suggestion box for the people. It is really bad: and the only cure I can think of is to revive the spoils system…ie, make all Executive positions “at the pleasure of the President”. Let the bureaucrats know that if they don’t toe the line, the President can toss them out.

2. Even those who might be technically loyal to Trump are probably more loyal to their careers. They know that, come what may, Trump will be out by 2025…and then they’ll need to get jobs and promotions in a system which despises Trump. Its a matter of helping Trump today or helping themselves later…and them selves took precedence.

The other big news is the coming IG report and the on-going investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia hoax. I’m thinking the IG report will be weak sauce…the IG is one of them, after all, and won’t really go after what happened. But even with that in mind, we’re seeing a lot of pre-spin by people targeted in the report. As it turns out, if you are the subject of an IG report, you get to read those parts relating to you before they are released…so you can ask for corrections and clarifications. Lots of stuff about the IG report started leaking in the last 24 hours and it all looks good for Comey, et al…but, remember, the only people who could leak such things are Comey, et al. You don’t worry about pre-spinning something if it makes you look good.

More important is the investigation into Trump-Russia; and the latest word there is that FBI agents are under investigation for altering documents…and gigantic no-no. It only takes one thread to break lose for the whole thing to unravel. And if someone altered a document and there is proof they did so, that person is looking at some serious jail time, even if he or she goes in front of the most Deep State-friendly jury (ie, one in DC). You can’t get around plain facts…and, so, such a person would have massive incentive to tattle on whomever gave the orders for the documents to be altered.

The whole pile of Schiff makes clear to me that we can’t just be about Trump – that we have to go Trump on steroids going forward. Our government has been hijacked by a corrupt Ruling Class and they are determined to keep themselves on the gravy train. It all has to go – agencies dismantled; military officers cashiered; bureaucrats fired; secrets declassified. In short, we need what amounts to a revolution. And let’s hope we can do it via ballots.

A Clean Break

Mark Noonan47 Comments

As the last few weeks have played out in politics, it has forced me to do a complete re-assessment of how I’ve looked at the world for my entire adult life. To be sure, this reconsideration has been ongoing for about a decade, or maybe a little more, but it has really crystalized out recently. It is time for a complete, clean break with what went before and to chart a new path forward.

What Hunter Biden did is nothing new; it isn’t in the least remarkable. He was merely the recipient of what people in his position routinely receive: a special deal which allows him to be very rich for little or no effort. This way his life can be devoted to what really matters: hanging around with other rich people, attending conferences and galas and generally having a swell time. And if he decided to follow in Daddy’s political footsteps, the way would be cleared for him in some safe seat. If you start looking into it – as Matt and I did in our 2007 book, Caucus of Corruption – you just see that it is everywhere. In that book, for political reasons, we concentrated on the Democrat side of the aisle (given that our goal was to show the absurdity of the Democrats 2006 campaign against a so-called “GOP culture of corruption”), but we could easily have written it about politics, in general.

What it really shows is that people who go into politics – with a few very rare exceptions – are in it for themselves. They want power and money and attention and fame and praise and so they go into politics – and almost invariably, if they are even modestly successful at winning office, wind up richer than they did when they started. And it has been going on for a long time, folks; throughout the Western democracies. Just a small quote from Chesterton about 1910 will suffice to show it:

There are, I believe, some who still deny that England is governed by an oligarchy. It is quite enough for me to know that a man might have gone to sleep some thirty years ago over the day’s newspaper and woke up last week over the later newspaper, and fancied he was reading about the same people. In one paper he would have found a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr. Gladstone, a Mr. Lyttleton, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan, an Acland. In the other paper he would find a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr. Gladstone, a Mr. Lyttleton, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan, an Acland. If this is not being governed by families I cannot imagine what it is. I suppose it is being governed by extraordinary democratic coincidences.

Funny, huh? How people from the same family can keep winding up on top. Either they are families of geniuses, or someone is making things happen. What are the odds that the son of an American Senator would be just the person an oil company needs to pay $50,000.00 a month to? That the daughter of a President would be just right for that $600,000.00 news gig? Or that another daughter of a different President would prove to be perfect to host the fourth hour of the Today show?

You know that is all bullsh**. I know it is, too. They know it as well. But, it just keeps happening and happening because, well, that’s just the way it is. And it wouldn’t be so bad if they were at least any good at being an oligarchy! Back in Chesterton’s day, there was the cold, hard reality that Winston Churchill was at least as talented as his father, Randolph. There was something there – there was, that is, a justification for Winston getting a leg up (and he did) to enter politics based on his father’s previous efforts. These days, you get to benefit even if the previous person in line was a complete, rotten failure. And rotten failure is all we’ve gotten – and I’m getting very ecumenical in that, by the way. I’m not excusing anyone on partisan grounds any longer.

To be sure, the Republicans I voted for in the past were at least better than the Democrats I voted against (with the exception of McCain: knowing that I’m the co-author of Worst President, please understand that I believe McCain would have been even worse than Obama proved to be). But they were only better in degree, not in kind. I mean, let’s face some cold, hard facts here: President Bush the Younger was re-elected with 51% of the vote in 2004 and came into his second term with high approval ratings and a Republican Congress. With all this, he couldn’t even manage to de-fund Planned Parenthood or NPR! It could have been done, easily, in a budget reconciliation between House and Senate and there would have been nothing the Democrats could have done about it. This was “better” than a President Kerry who probably would have increased PP funding, but not really better in that the taxes of pro-life Americans were still going to fund something they consider abhorrent…and which Bush and the entire GOP campaigned on getting rid of.

I know some will say that this is just our GOPe screwing it’s base and that the Democrats don’t do that. But, they do. Obama was elected in 2008 with 53% of the vote and came into office with a Democrat Congress and a filibuster-proof Senate majority…and he couldn’t even get the single payer health system Democrats say they want. It would have been easy. The GOP could have done nothing to stop it. Enact a 10% payroll tax to fund it and just start passing out the cash to people who need health care. That you and I know it would have been a disaster is neither here nor there – our side had lost the election and the Democrats won all the power they could possibly need to make all Democrat dreams come true…and they couldn’t do something like that. They instead wound up with the abomination known as Obamacare which even if it had worked as planned would still have left millions out in the cold and cost like the devil – but they couldn’t even write something that worked! Meanwhile, not only did Obama not end the wars they campaigned against in 2008, he started new one’s…droning the living sh** out of every poor, brown skinned person they could target (well, those they weren’t letting in as unvetted refugees, that is). A public works bonanza that didn’t create any public works. A slew of new spending which improved nothing. This is what the Democrat voters get for investing their time and effort? Yep – in other words, nothing: but lots and lots for whomever is the crony. Democrat cronies made out like bandits. But your average purple-haired Democrat wanting more safe spaces? Not much.

And as far as the social disintegration we’ve seen over the past 60 years – we’ve been blinded by the Democrats pushing the disintegration that we haven’t noticed the Republicans letting them do it. And when they have power to roll it back, doing nothing of the sort. And now we see in the Epstein case the reason why it might have all been allowed to happen: Lord only knows how many of the high and mighty are caught in that web…but what better way to get out from under that rock than by making the rock legal? By making you, a normal person, the bad guy if you point out some of the disgusting actions?

Illegal immigration to provide votes for Democrats and cheap labor for Republicans. Wars which don’t end in victory or defeat. Enforcing immorality against popular wishes. Providing government sinecures to anyone who will toe the line – and who won’t be got rid of no matter how corrupt or stupid they prove. Accepting money from foreign entities who want the United States destroyed. Both sides, all the time – and on top of being this stupidly destructive, raking it in for themselves, their families and their friends. It is time to bring an end to all that. By peaceful means if possible but, ultimately, by any means necessary. Our peaceful means are President Trump.

Trump isn’t part of the system, you see. Dimwits look at his billions and go, “he must be one of them”. But, the bottom line is that he’s not. He’ll hang out with them. Be friends with them. But he never was of them. He made his own way and got his pile of money…and then looked around and saw, from the 1980’s, what was happening to his country and started to wonder why, and if there were anything he could do about it? He essentially first let Bill Clinton have his chance. Then Bush the Younger. Then even Obama. But he found out something – it didn’t matter who was in charge, they were all in on it, together. That is, regardless of stated political philosophy, the primary goal of nearly everyone in politics was personal enrichment and making sure no outsider pushed his or her way in. Trump decided to push his way in.

And now he’s there – and outside of a precious few (Cruz, Paul…and, oddly, McConnell), he’s nearly alone fighting for one thing: us. The United States of America. We, the people. And everyone inside is furious and terrified and so are lashing back as much as they can hoping that something, anything will turn up to get rid of Trump. And, make no mistake about it, they are already planning on punishing us for electing Trump. They don’t propose to allow this sort of thing to happen again.

I’ve mostly stopped arguing with liberals these days – first off, it is pointless but, secondly, I’m starting to pity them; nearly as much as I pity that shrinking number on the right who still stand aloof from Trump: they simply can’t shake free from the line they’ve been fed. And none of us can get high and mighty about that: to one degree or another, all of us were suckered at one time or another. All of us believed in some aspect of the con being used to keep us confused, frightened and divided while the Ruling Class stays fat and happy. But for those of us who have awakened from the con, it is time for a clean break – a refusal to accept that anything over the past 60 years was any good…a desire, that is, to move forward in an entirely new way, unshackled to whatever we might have said or done in the past. We can see what happened; we can see what needs to be done – we can’t trip ourselves up (nor allow our opponents to slow us down) by fussing over what views we might have expressed previously. Our desire is a Constitutional Republic of free people – our means of getting there must be “whatever works”, not adherence to a dogma which might, upon review, only have been a means whereby the con artists kept us in line in the past. I, for one, will only defend what I find defensible and will attack whatever I see as wrong.

We still have a magnificent window to win this thing and fix our nation – naturally, the first requirement is protecting President Trump. But the next step is just as important: a complete review of everything and asking the question, “Is this good?”. We’ve already learned that so-called “Free Trade” wasn’t what many of us thought it was – take that as your template and ask yourself, “is this thing I’ve adhered to really in the interests of a free people? Or is it something which only serves the well-connected?”. As Lincoln once said, it is time to think anew and act anew: not to create something different (nothing can be more magnificent than the United States, as far as human effort allows), but to recreate what we had, but even better than before. And if that mission requires us to knock a few off their pedestals, then that’s just what will have to happen.

Is Trump About to Drain the Swamp?

Mark Noonan

This could be the biggest news in politics for the past 50 years:

Attorney General William Barr has reportedly tapped the U.S. attorney for Connecticut to investigate the origins of the Justice Department’s Russia investigation.

John Durham, the top federal prosecutor in Connecticut, will examine the FBI’s decision to open a counterintelligence investigation into the 2016 presidential election and its probe of possible links between the Kremlin’s efforts to interfere in the election and members of President Donald Trump’s campaign team.

Its not just investigating the coup attempt which is important – it is where such an investigation will lead, if the guy in charge of it has no fear and is seeking no favor. And Durham may be that guy – he’s been used by politicians of both parties to look into things and so has a bi-partisan reputation as a good guy and he’s clearly not ambitious – he’s at the tail end of his career and he never seems to have sought top jobs in DC (or, he was denied them because DC didn’t want an honest man). If we have an AG who is willing to let corruption investigations go forward no matter where they lead, then what we might be witnessing is the beginning of the end for our corrupt Ruling Class.

We’ll see what happens – but I’m encouraged.

National Divorce?

Mark Noonan51 Comments

We’ve all seen it around; heck, we’ve even talked about it a bit – but, more and more, I’m seeing people who say it is time for a national divorce. Not a Civil War, but an amicable divorce between Red and Blue. Kurt Schlichter has the latest entry in this. And, to be sure, just a quick review of recent events does lend weight to the idea. Think about it – in the space of a few weeks, the Blue people have manufactured two race-based events designed to support a Narrative of racist Trump supporters who must be stopped at all costs. The Covington Catholic kids were completely innocent, while Jussie Smollett’s “attackers” were paid by Smollett; and in both cases, without a shred of evidence and with the basic premise (ie, that we are violent racists) being absurd, the entirety of the Blue establishment (which, as Schlichter points out, includes the Never Trump Fredocons) rose up as one to support these slanders.

Don’t know about you, but I’m getting rather tired of being called racist, sexist and homophobic. Rather tired of my religion being held up, by turns, to ridicule and hatred. Tired of my national and historic heroes being made out as monsters (latest: Churchill was a genocidal racist). Tired of all the lies. Maybe it is time to leave?

Our Blue friends might think that a national divorce means they get all of California, but they’d be wrong about that. They’d get San Francisco and Los Angeles…San Diego if the people there opted for it (don’t think they would). They’d get NYC, Seattle, Chicago…and a few other isolated, big city spots around the nation. Hardly any place that produces any physical goods would wind up in Blue America. Perhaps the people of San Francisco can farm Nancy’s yard? They get to keep her, as well.

Because the truth of the matter is that a dozen big cities really represents all the on the ground power the left has – and I doubt they really have that power. I suspect they have rigged the election systems in those areas to ensure that they win, no matter what…and probably so well and for so long that only a tiny percentage actually vote in any given election (it would take investigation to determine the accuracy of my theory…but not as much as you might think: just have someone stand outside deep Blue precincts on election day to count the number of people who come in, and then compare it to the number of votes reported…my bet is there’d be massive discrepancies). Be that as it may: their power is very limited geographically. They seem more strong than they are because they also control popular culture and the news media.

And that is why, ultimately, I don’t think we’ll have to divorce. I think we can reconcile – if, by that, you mean “we flex the actual, real power we have and force them to bend to it”. Trump is showing the way. Will the lesson stick? Will, that is, the follow-on GOPers understand that to fight the left is to beat it? That the left has only ever won because non-left elements either surrendered to it, or helped it win? Never, not even once, has a fully leftwing entity won power solely on the support it garnered as a leftwing entity. Always, always, they have won by co-opting non-left forces and convincing other non-left forces to go easy on the left. The dirty, little secret of the last 100 years is that only a tiny minority ever wanted what the left wanted…all the left’s victories came via subversion.

If we can get a resolute GOP which will go toe to toe with the left, then eventually we’ll beat them into the ground. All it takes is a will to win – and a class of leaders who’s ultimate dream isn’t to have a spot on a MSM show, or a fat lobbying job in DC (or both). I think there are signs that we’re starting to get one…slowly, incrementally, more and more GOPers are starting to understand that Trump is winning. And, especially among the younger and more outsider GOPers, they are finding that winning is most of all fun. We’ll see how it comes out; but, for me, for now: no divorce. I want to have fun and win.

It is the Grifter’s World, We Just Live in It.

Mark Noonan4 Comments

Does everyone realize that the Palestinian leadership is merely running a grift? Think about it:

The Palestinian leadership says it wants to “liberate” all of Palestine but they know darned well they’ll never have sufficient military power to carry out this task. So, why keep telling your people that this is what you want to do?

Because you’re a pack of con artists.

And the Palestinian leadership lives pretty well – and its not like their main bank accounts are in Palestine. By keeping up the drumbeat they justify their continued (and legally invalid) control over their own people and keep money rolling in from governments, NGOs and private individuals who buy the grift. That the average Palestinian suffers badly from this, and the Israelis suffer a slow attrition, doesn’t matter: the money keeps coming in…and that is all a grifter ever cares about.

I bring this up because it has become stunningly obvious to me over the past few years that the reason why really stupid things keep going on is because con artists are making money off the stupidity. And the stupidity can go on for quite a long time as long as someone has a vested, financial interest in it going. You ever see that show “American Greed”? It really is one of the few good things on TV these days…but I love it when they try to cast the Narrative that we should feel sorry for the suckers. “I lost my life savings of $750,000.00″…oh, boo hoo hoo! I really feeling nothing but contempt for most of the victims. Yeah, and some con artist came along and said he’d make you 20% per year on that money, which was more than enough, and you, you greedy bastard, went in on it because being a greedy bastard, you wanted more than you needed. Sure, the con artist lied to you…but you deserved to lose that money because you were a greedy bastard. Insensitive? Maybe – but even if it is: seriously, don’t be a sucker. But, man, do we have a lot of suckers these days. And it is the suckers who are ultimately responsible for the grift.

We know the anti-fracking movement is awash in foreign oil money: grift. Global warming provides a high living for a host of people and groups who push the theory: grift. Foreign governments and American companies are making bank off the illegal immigrants: grift. A whole cottage industry now exists of people making a living off pushing the Trump/Russia story: grift. On and on it goes like that – pick your problem, and you’ll eventually come around to the people who are making money off of it and who would lose a stream of income if the problem came to a solution. To be sure, mixed into this are traditional, political ambitions (you know, if the Russia grift works and Trump is forced out: Democrats will take the money as well as the political victory…but, mostly, they’ll take the money). But the reason we find it so hard to just say “we have decided to do X, everyone fall in line” is because once an issue is settled, you can’t make money off it any longer. Or, more specifically, you can’t make un-earned money off it. In other words, you have to put up or shut up…an unresolved issue, though, can be talked about forever and there are always people you can sucker into paying for you to talk.

I don’t quite know what to do about this. I mean, other than a round of hangings. But we do have the problem of people who have a vested interest in everything being a permanent, unresolved mess. How to get around them to a solution (which would turn off their money supply) is a riddle I don’t have an answer to at the moment.