Archive for the ‘GOP Establishment’ Category

Attention ALL Republicans: Support Trump Forcefully or Lose Our Votes Forever

Saturday, April 1st, 2023

The Storm Must Come to Them

I don’t care if you’re my County Commissioner, Justice of the Peace in my Precinct, Constable, State Representative , Governor, Senator, or Federal officeholder in whose election I have a say, this is an ultimatum. I’ve been told you don’t like ultimatums.  I don’t care.  If you’re silently standing-by as Donald Trump is taken out at the knees, or worse, you’re in on the cabal within the Republican party smirking about all of this, I want you to know: My wife and I have vowed to never support any of you with our votes, and more, we intend to hound you from office.  I’ve been voting solidly Republican for a long time.  My wife, a new citizen and voter, was finally moved to become a citizen because of Donald Trump.  She remains proud that she was naturalized during his presidency.  She and I have discussed this issue for quite a while, and in light of what is now going on, we are prepared to let EVERY Republican office-holder lose and watch it all collapse.  We view this as the only way to save America for our granddaughter.  You should understand that if you do not immediately and forcefully condemn the actions of the Democrats and their skewed, rigged system of justice, and stand in support not only of Donald Trump’s legal case, but also his political case, YOU WILL NEVER GET OUR VOTES AGAIN.  Ever.  We will fend for ourselves, much as we did before Trump, and have been forced to do since Trump, since you Republicans, most of you, have either winked and nodded as the Democrats stole the 2020 election and carried out their fraudulent insurrection, and now pursue the only man who can be said to have stood for the American people since at least Ronald Reagan. We are now at a crossroads, and cowards need not apply.

You who are District Attorneys and Attorneys General have a special responsibility.  We entrust you with the law.  Now that the law has been turned into a weapon against particularly conservatives and Donald Trump, you are expected now to use every avenue of the legal system at your disposal to use the law as a weapon in precisely the same way.  If not, we will see you ushered from power, because Republicans who will not fight are useless, and we will not settle for this any longer.  Stand and support Trump, and join the legal warfare now being made against he and us, or we will let you fall.

I urge every conservative to finally realize that this game has gone on too long, where we hold our noses for some deliberately play-acting moderate or other stealth Democrat to abscond with our elections, and spend their terms in office doing nothing on our behalf, nor even effectively holding back the villains who now make open legal warfare against us, and who rally their shock-troops in the streets.  It is time to simply discard all of them if they will not fight on our behalf.  There are fewer than two hands-full in Congress to which it’s worth giving a second thought, and not many more at the state level.  If this country is to be saved for our children and grandchildren, it is high time that we recognize and name the evil confronting us, and that we use every lever available to us first as citizens and voters, and then, should it come to it as it did four our founders two-and-one-half centuries ago, as patriots and warriors.  My message here is as much to my fellow Americans who recognize the nature of the evil now in play. This is beyond anything we’ve known since at least the Civil War, and indeed, a Civil War is in the making.  If you wish to avoid that war, there is no time left but now to act to prevent it, but neither will surrender forestall it.  There is no candidate you can elect but Trump who can stand any chance of saving this nation.  None of the others, announced or unannounced, are even remotely capable, and it’s time we come to grapple with this simple fact.  If the Republican party for which we’ve voted all these years will not immediately and forcefully come to unanimous support of Donald Trump, you can be certain they will not come to ours.  It is time.

Over the next several days, I will be communicating this pledge and vow to all of the Republicans who either do, or who seek to represent us, and I will let them know where they stand:

  • All elected officials must forcefully support and defend Trump
  • All elected legal professionals must undertake to engage in the lawfare now openly commenced in the USA
  • All other Republicans seeking the Presidency in 2024, other than Trump, must suspend their campaigns. In 2024, my wife and I will entertain no other Republican candidate but the man who was legitimately elected in 2016 and 2020, and any others who run will be permanently stricken from our list of candidates, not just for 2024, but in perpetuity.  This is not a request.  We don’t make requests of people who wish to work for us: These are preconditions for any future election.  We don’t care if the Democrats assassinate Donald Trump: If you’re a Republican and your name isn’t Trump, do not run for President in 2024 if you wish ever to receive our support.

Whether one percent or one-hundred percent of our fellow conservatives, Republicans and moderates join us, or not, we no longer care.  You will either stand now for justice or we will withdraw any hint of support from you, now and forever.  This is a litmus test for our votes.  You either pass or fail. We may be too small in number to matter to you, but time will tell how many of our fellow Americans share our stance.  It won’t take many to banish you to electoral Hell for generations.  It is time to stand and be counted, not merely for our elected officials, but also for we who elected them.

If Republican elected officials think we’re deplorable now, they “ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

 

 

 

 

Governed By the Mafia

Wednesday, May 11th, 2022

Plotting Your Demise

Imagine living in Chicago at the peak of Mob violence during prohibition. All of the judges were corrupt. All of the politicians were corrupt. All of the institutions were corrupt. Half the police were on the take to look the other way. The media knew there were stories they could not run, lest they wind up in the hospital or the morgue. Anybody who said anything publicly was quickly “rubbed-out.” If you got in the way of the machine of corruption, you were going to pay, often with your life.  We’ve come a long way since then, but in truth, the mob may have changed its tactics slightly along with its technology, but the corruption is no less severe.  It’s not merely nation-wide; now, it’s global.  Just as the politicians of the late 1920s and early 1930s in Chicago, most of our modern politicians carefully play both sides of the street. On the one hand, they put on a show for the voters, while on the other, they’re just stinking thieves in collusion or conspiracy with the gangsters.  Whether you know it or not, you’re being governed by a mafia, and the first rule is that you’re not permitted to notice. The media is the first line of the mafia’s defenses, and law enforcement is the second.  Beyond that, the judiciary lines up to keep you down and keep you in line. They’re somewhat less likely to rope you to a concrete block and toss you in the Calumet River, but they have other means nearly as severe. The first is to attack your ability to live peaceably in society. The next is to attack your livelihood.  Most crumble by the time they face the prospect of losing their job, but if not, they’ll next go after your family.  It’s how it’s done.  What they all conspire to conceal is a vast criminal enterprise, more dangerous to more people than Alphonse Capone ever dreamed of being.  If you’re ever to wrest control from their grip, the first thing you must do is to become more adept at identifying them.  If you’re governed by a mafia, it’s best that you at least learn who they are. The key to that is learning their methods so you can spot them.  It’s like a calling-card.  This global mafia, and its DC-based US branch is every bit as lethal as the old-school mafia, and in many ways more, because they now command armies and naval forces and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

They rig elections. It’s been a tactic of organized crime for as long as there’s been an organized criminal element and so-called “elections” in which those to be placed into power are ostensibly selected. It’s true that the cheating in 2020 was unprecedented in its scale and extent, but what shows you the vastness of the mafia has been their ability to suppress any information about the cheat, and to prevent any court from examining any evidence. In the old day, they either bought off judges and courts on the cheap, or they made threats the victim of which was sure would be credible. In either case, the result was ever the same: Judges tossed out cases on imaginary technicalities and matters of standing in very creative ways. The media wouldn’t discuss the cheating, because this risked upsetting the populace, who needed to be maintained in a perpetual state of apathy, indifference, frustration, or terror.  Dinesh D’Souza’s recent release, 2000 Mules, explains the mechanics of the low-tech cheating quite well.  When you control the “law enforcement,” such as it is, it’s easy to silence people, or get people to change their minds.  In light of 2000 Mules, why hasn’t a single law enforcement official anywhere in any of the obviously affected states taken even preliminary investigative steps?  What do you think is the actual meaning of the US DOJ going after people like Roger Stone, or Steve Bannon? It’s intended to silence them, and failing that, to confound them with a situation of frustration wherein they’re frozen in place, and unable to act. This use of lawfare is a serious matter, because it makes it difficult for anyone to oppose them. The media covers up for their government brethren, and none of it comes to light except in case of some giant bungling of the operation.

If you’re part of the mafia, perhaps a senior player, you’ll be protected until you become a liability. Ask Jeffrey Epstein. The only reason Ghislaine Maxwell remains alive today is because she’s holding information that threatens to wreck them all. They know it, and she knows it. You may remember that before Epstein’s death in custody, many had proposed, only half in jest, that his life was in severe danger given the people involved. People immediately wondered if it was even possible for the mob to be so bold as to actually carry out such a hit. I remarked at the time that they have no fear of exposure, even if the plot were to be obvious. They can operate in the open, because there’s nobody who’d dare oppose them. It seems that Maxwell must have had more “insurance” socked-away somewhere, because they actually stacked the jury with somebody who will likely cause an appeals court to overturn her conviction.  Scotty David, the juror in question, works for the Carlyle Group.  The fact that his conflict as a former sexual abuse victim only came to light as a matter of his own disclosures to the press indicates to me that he’s a set-up.

Remember, James Comey’s daughter, Maurene, was a lead prosecutor in the case. If you had any doubt that the fix was in, you can abandon it now. If you doubt the media’s role in the expansive cover-up for their patrons in this mafia, ask yourself why it is that USAToday’s Life department was busy explaining away the guilt of pedophiles in their actions. After coming under extensive fire on Twitter, they deleted the posting.  Independent journalist Andy Ngo saw that coming, and captured it for posterity. This same media is determined to downplay pedophilia, because they’re operating on behalf of people who practice it, and use its disclosure as the means of extortion and blackmail.  It’s their job to normalize the most debauched behaviors in order to lessen the shock if/when the elite are exposed.  They know what kind of people they are supporting, because they are their kind of people.

Bill Clinton is in the middle of this. Prince Andrew is deep in this, even though he’s managed to settle with some of his accusers.  A whole laundry-list of the who’s-who in Washington DC, Hollywood, and New York are in this crowd. Make no mistake about it: This is an organized criminal enterprise.  It’s worse than you might guess.  They’re willing to collude and conspire with America’s enemies, because America is their enemy.  They use you as milch-cows for whatever purposes they imagine will benefit them.  Even today, if you look closely, you can see more evidence of their intentions and plot in plain sight.

One of the side-effects of the vaccines they’ve been pushing is heart damage in the form of myocarditis, particularly in young males.  At the same time, they’re importing young, fighting-age males at our Southern border who have not been vaccinated.  Why would they do this?  If, as I now believe, they are planning to hit us with a series of riots, with the pretext of the bare shelves and skyrocketing gas prices they’ve been carefully engineering as the impetus for the rioting they intend, how will you defend your country if some significant number of formerly healthy fighting-age males are no longer able to fight?  If your armed forces have been decimated by vaccine mandates, or the vaccines themselves, how will you fend off an external attacker, never mind a determined, well-organized internal coup against the United States Constitution? For one thing, you’ll be too hungry to defend yourselves, and due to these vaccines, you’ll be too weakened to fend-off the radical insurrection they’re planning.

Do you have any doubt? Why then is Canada openly contemplating the idea that they might have to “intervene” in the US if things here turn ugly? Why does Canada simultaneously permit China to conduct training on their soil?  We’re being worked both from the inside and the outside, and too few are noticing.  The global mafia now has its fangs and claws deep into the United States.

Even Biden’s press conference on Wednesday showed the mafia-like approach.  Biden essentially threw the Ukraine under a bus.  Do you think this was accidental? No. It was all about extorting the government of the Ukraine to look away from the deep Democrat corrupt activities in that country.  It’s not the first time Biden has extorted the Ukrainians, and the Democrats have been working that side of the street for a long time.  It’s simple: Look away and let us get away with murder in your country, or we’ll clear a path and let Putin’s forces march right through.  In the run-up to Biden’s coup de grace of Wednesday, the entirety of DC was abuzz with the looming danger of Russia to the Ukrainians. They were setting the table.  Now, they’ll feast.

Our courts are thoroughly corrupt now, particularly state courts in the blue states, but also in a few otherwise red states.  In the District of Columbia, there isn’t a federal court that isn’t controlled by this mafia.  There may be one or two judges who aren’t corrupt, but whether appointed by Democrat or Republican, almost all of them are creatures of this Deep State Mafia.

On Twitter, somebody asked the question about what the Warren Commission, the 9/11 Commission, and the January 6th Committee all have in common.  It’s blatantly obvious in all three cases that they’re purely political operations intended to obscure the culpability of the parties who were failures, or who actually participated in the events under “examination.”  None of this is serious.  The Warren Commission was never going to tell the American people all it discovered, or intentionally overlooked, in the murder of John F. Kennedy.  The 9/11 Commission was never going to tell you about the involvement of the Saudis, or the degree to which we had some foreknowledge about the events of 9/11.  The January 6th Committee is constructed to hide the involvement of the Deep State Mafia in setting-up the January 6th “Insurrection.”  It’s always the same.  Do you really think there was any chance Jeffrey Epstein would be permitted to go to trial? Neither he nor Brunel would ever be afforded the opportunity to get on the witness stand, so they both “killed themselves in jail.”

Now we’ve learned that they have engaged the Russians to negotiate with Iran on behalf of the United States.  Why on Earth would this be permitted?  Perhaps worst of all, undoubtedly as payment, the Russians are being included in the deal.  Even if we’re foolish enough to believe Putin and his flunkies could be some sort of “honest broker,” is that any longer possible if Russia is now a party to the deal? This is how I know it has nothing to do with the best interests of the American people: They’ve carefully removed any semblance of your interests and your advocacy from the furtherance of the negotiations.  In short, there are three parties engaged in a multilateral deal, the Iranians, the Russians, and the Americans, but none of them are your advocate.  Instead, you’ll be called upon to be responsible for the debt that will be issued for the next round of billions of dollars and pallets of cash that winds up in Iran.

All of this resembles precisely a ghastly global mafia gang.  In Chicago, it had been confined mostly to a single city, though the tentacles spread to places like New York and Philadelphia and Las Vegas.  This new gang is global, the tentacles of the beast spreading from Washington DC like an octopus, implanting babies in cities from Honolulu to Kiev. They’ve infected virtually every place, including states’ capitals in the US.  It seems most institutions are captive too.  We must find a way to starve this beast.  We must kill it. It’s killing us.

Now they’ve become aware that they’re close to being unmasked and discovered for all the world to see.  Everywhere, they suppress the actual news while pushing distractions and fake narratives to defame those who would expose them.  This very moment, they have prepared a series of amendments to the Treaty that created the World Health Organization, to cede and surrender US sovereignty to global governance.  It’s shocking, but it’s happening mostly under the radar of most Americans.  The bulk of media will never mention it, while it is the most egregious attack on the United States since the Civil War.  Here, not ironically, the same party that conducted its civil war against our constitution has come up with a way to moot our constitution. It’s the holy grail of the leftist horde:

First, they will amend the treaty to empower the WHO to take control of public health policy. The aim is to negate the individual states. No longer will a Governor DeSantis or Noem be able to push policies that blunt federal mandates and lockdowns.  Instead, they will create drop boxes and all the rest, complete with mail-in ballots, all so they can steal the elections of 2022 so that they can rule forever.  Do you understand?  If you haven’t seen 2000 Mules, you may be missing the plot.  They need to be able to deliver massive numbers of illegitimate ballots again. To do this, they need to lock you down.  They know that even if the courts would eventually catch up to all this, that will take time, many months or even years, and we already know the courts are afraid and/or corrupt.  Even now, they’re warning that this Fall or Winter, there could be 100 million CoVID infected-Americans. The scam will continue.  It worked once, and they’re going to push it again. Amazingly, if these Amendments to the WHO treaty change, they’ll take affect in November.  When are the elections?  Folks, you don’t need to be rocket-scientists to see what’s being done.

You are being governed by a mafia that is global in reach.  It colludes with Mexican drug cartels, Ukrainian oligarchs, Russian oligarchs, the Party of Davos, including the World Economic Forum, and everywhere, they control your government.  This is not hyperbole, and we’re long past the claims of “conspiracy theory.” You must raise your voices now. You must contact your Senators, because the amendments to the treaty in question rightly must be ratified as a new treaty by the US Senate and a two-thirds vote.  This is why Biden is pushing these amendments as a substitute for the old treaty, trying to sneak this in as part of an already-ratified treaty.  That’s preposterous.  The problem is that by the time courts (might) act, the sovereignty of the United States will be gone.  This is far worse than any of the obvious things wrong with this power-grab.  It’s perpetual rule for the #DCMafia which is just one branch of the #GlobalMafia.  They’re getting ready to wipe most of us out. Food shortages, energy shortages, monetary crises, and generally unsustainable inflation are the keys to it.  Their intention is to cause us to war with one another.  Food riots are an ugly thing, but food riots across a continental nation will simply result in open warfare. Reducing a people to the state of utter destitution is a prerequisite for the kind of takeover they imagine.  Sadly, with the diminution of morality in our country, far too many will participate in this monstrosity with glee.  We are in the wind-up.  Be prepared to defend yourselves, and to subsist as long as you can manage with the most meager means.  As the financial system collapses entirely, expect and prepare to be made homeless.  Remember, “you will own nothing and be happy.”

Naturally, we must stop this from happening.  We must resist all of it.  We must go unafraid, eyes open, into this gathering darkness.  We are being governed by a Global Mafia.  Of this, there is no more doubt.  Prepare to defend yourselves.

Editor’s Note:  Last night, the 10th of May 2022, Congress voted to send $40 Billion to Ukraine. 149 Republicans joined all the Democrats to pass this bill.  57 Republicans voted against. I cannot guarantee to you that all 57 of those voting against this bill are not members of the DC Mafia, but I can absolutely promise you that virtually all of the 149 voting with the Democrats are active members of the DC Mafia.

You must go out and vote in primaries for the best candidates we have. A perfect example is the Pennsylvania Senate seat. The two candidates who you should ignore most are Dave McCormick and Mehmet Oz. BOTH are members of the Global Mafia. Both are members of Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum.  Instead, vote for a real, authentic America First candidate, for instance, Kathy Barnette.  If you want to beat the global Mafia, you can’t do it while putting them in power.

Mark Levin and the Establishment

Thursday, March 10th, 2022

Why does Levin sound like the establishment on Ukraine?

I really didn’t see this coming. I was on my way home from another day of work on Wednesday as Levin’s show began.  As he began talking about the events in Ukraine, it came to that moment when he said that he’d be having Lindsey Graham on in his third hour to discuss the Senator’s notion that Putin needs to be taken out, an idea with which Levin heartily agrees.  As I listened to him go on about his disdain for “nationalist-populists” and so on, before too much time had passed, a thought formed in my mind that I simply couldn’t escape.  At first, I thought, and may even have said aloud in answer to the radio: “Mark, you sound just like the establishment against which you always rail.” A commercial came on as I pondered that thought a little longer, and then it struck me.  It’s not that Mark Levin merely sounds like the establishment.  He is the establishment, or at least its errand-boy, perhaps unwittingly.

Do I think Mark Levin is deep within the DC establishment?  No.  On the other hand, he’s in their circle, perhaps loosely, and he’s put himself in a position through which they will attempt to exploit him, and thereby, his audience.  When he speaks, millions listen attentively.  They listen because he offers a view from inside politics, as a former chief of staff to an Attorney General of the United States.  Though his connections into the mechanisms of state are dated and most will have long since retired, that doesn’t mean the existing establishment hasn’t cultivated a connection to him through which they hope to propagandized and manipulate his audience.

Do you need proof?  Every time the Republican establishment needs something from him, he gives it, with few exceptions.  They know there will be some times and some areas of policy on which he will be unapproachable, but they know when election time rolls around, for the most part, they can count on him to carry their water.  He helped give us a whole string of Senators under the vague umbrella of the Tea Party movement, but most of them went on to betray us in varying degrees.  In 2020, he brought his audience Lindsey freaking Graham.  He pushed Lindsey for re-election.  He should have given him a strong kick in the ass and run him off.  Instead, Levin played the good soldier and brought Graham on his show, and while you could almost hear part of Levin holding his nose, he did it nevertheless.  In 2016, when Ted Cruz needed a “constitutional expert” to vouch for his eligibility to run for President, he went immediately to Levin.  In what I regard to be the biggest single betrayal of his audience in the whole of his career on the radio, he cobbled together some nonsensical explanation that “Natural Born Citizen” was “just a citizen.”  It was embarrassingly infantile and nonsensical, and it took a long time for me to get over it.  I had been researching the issue(and continued to for some time before publishing my article) when Levin made this pronouncement, and knew him to be full of piss and wind on the issue that day.

I knew then that Levin would bend things to support his own agenda, and that while it wasn’t perfectly aligned with the establishment, it was nevertheless amenable to them in some instances.  What happens to Levin seems to be that he’s so invested in winning that he’ll make friends with alleged enemies if he thinks it will help him advance his cause, but the problem with this approach is that often, it’s self-defeating, not only to Levin, but also to his audience. As another example, he’s friends with Senator Mike Lee, (R-UT,) a guy who makes many good arguments, but unfortunately also is the Senator from Google.  He’s thoroughly compromised by the funds and lobbying that rolls in the door from that company.  Levin won’t tell you about that. He’s protective of Lee on that issue. It’s as though it doesn’t exist.

Another good example is House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, (R-CA,) another establishment stooge and first-rate swampster. Levin brought this stooge to you in 2020 also, just as he did Speaker Paul Ryan(R-WI) in previous election years. On Wednesday evening, Levin bashed McCarthy, after mentioning he was seemingly interested in coming on the show an longer.  Of course not, Mark, he got what he needed from you in 2020, pre-election. Check back in with him this coming Fall!  Ryan is the definition of a swampster, a Republican who’s married into a thoroughgoing Democrat family(and his sister-in-law is the Biden SCOTUS-pick, Ketanji Brown Jackson,) and who spent as little time in Wisconsin as was humanly possible.  In that respect, Ryan was a good deal like another swampster Levin brought you on his show when she was seeking election to the house: Elizabeth “Liz” Cheney(R-WY) spends even less time in Wyoming than Ryan spent in Wisconsin.  Do you see how the Republican establishment exploits him?  How is this possible for an alleged Tea Party guy, a constitutionalist?

I don’t believe Mark Levin is a part of the DC UniParty, but his orbit crosses theirs, whether he’ll admit it or not.  He makes mention from time to time on-air about how they reach out to him, and want to come on the show, but most of the time, if an election is tight, and he thinks he can help a little, he’ll bring them on.  It’s what it is.  Is he an evil guy?  No. Absolutely not.  The problem is that when you get into bed with these people, it’s hard to get away.  I also wouldn’t say he provides strictly establishmentarian propaganda.  He does provide much very good content, but I’m afraid that very often, too many of the wrong people have his ear.  He gets “insider” information from some people who are truly swampy.  How do I know?  I hear it on air.  I can tell what sorts of people within the bureaucracy or in the Congress have his ear. For Pete’s sake, he brought John Bolton(!) to Donald Trump.  He admitted on-air that Bolton had lobbied him strongly to get in on the NSA job with Trump.  Bolton was a catastrophe who spent his whole time in that job undermining Trump’s foreign policy agenda.  Levin admits it now, belatedly.  If I were Trump, I’d never listen seriously to another recommendation from Levin on personnel.  Ever.  Thinking about it, maybe neither should you.

Now Levin is taking information from the same crowd with respect to Ukraine.  He can see the Democrats are a catastrophe, but he can’t see that the information he’s being passed comes from the same sort of corrupt sources that brought Trump a recommendation of John Bolton via Mark Levin.  He remarked the other day that some fan had asked him in public whether he believed anything about it, because the media is so corrupt.  Levin explained to his audience that he’d told the man that the whole of the International Press isn’t corrupt too.  You see, he doesn’t see it.  The politicization of media hasn’t stopped at the water’s edge, any more than politics itself has stopped there.  Levin seems to be having a weird kind of “bromance” with Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, but the problem is that much of that upon which Levin bases his admiration for Zelenskiy has been debunked.  It turns out that Zelenskiy may be just as corrupt as his predecessor, if not quite as wealthy. He’s tied-in with Ihor Kolomoisky, another corrupt Ukrainian oligarch. Somehow, these facts escape Levin, or he’s not mentioning them because of his admiration for the Ukrainian president.  Either way, it’s a dangerous lack of perspective.

Levin has always had his strawmen and his foils.  Lately, he’s been concentrating on the “nationalist-populists,” decrying them as Putinophiles, or something in that vein.  I actually hate when he does this.  Name names, for Heaven’s sake!  In the case of “nationalist-populist,” I’m pretty certain he means Steve Bannon of WarRoom fame.  There seems to be real heartburn there, and Bannon, for his part, doesn’t help when he tosses out phrases like “Neocon” because it seems to trigger Levin’s antisemitism alarms.  Levin needs to get a grip.  Virtually nobody who uses the term “Neocon” means anything to do with Jews, and most of them won’t even know the relationship between “Neocons” and Jews in the purely historical sense.  It’s much like “establishment” in the sense that you might not be able to name an actual “neocon,” but you can identify their policies in action and advocacy when you see them, and while the original description “neocon” may have applied specifically to a particular group of Jews, it’s been clear for some time that their basic set of military and foreign policy issues have been adopted by a wider group of interventionist Republicans, many of whom are clearly not Jews.

It’s maddening. Levin is so close to the truth about Ukraine, but he’s being strung-along by his emotions, his admiration for Zelenskiy, and his cold-war-hardened hatred for all things Russia, particularly Putin. When you add to it what’s being pumped-out in the mainstream narratives, even by Republicans, especially swampsters, he just can’t shake it loose.  I’m afraid that until Levin overcomes these demons, he’s simply incapable of bringing you full and sensible information on Ukraine, and that’s simply the most disappointing development in media in a long, long while.

At the end of his show, in the last hour, Levin had Graham on his show to talk about taking out Putin.  If you listen, you can hear Lindsey Graham ingratiate himself to Levin with the slobbering remarks near the end of his appearance.  One could almost hear Levin’s heart melt.  I could vomit.

Here’s the full podcast(The Graham interview begins at the 1:28:55 mark):


Oh, and Mark? Ronald Reagan never once called for taking-out Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko or Gorbachev. He knew that the last thing a nuclear-armed country run by a totalitarian government needs is any sort of instability of that sort.  Do you think the people who would take out Putin would be any more stable or less dangerous to the United States?  No.  Reagan knew better than nonsensical ideas like that. You should be ashamed of yourself for associating such a foolish idea with the temperament and wisdom of Ronald Reagan.

 

Dirty Politics in Texas and Jeb’s Revenge on Trump

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2022

Will Jeb have the last laugh At Texans’ Expense?

Texas is a state with Open Primaries. The rules are that we don’t register by party, and despite some efforts to change it, in election after election, RINOs exploit it to their benefit. Tuesday was the Texas Primary, and one race in particular raised my eyebrows. Incumbent Attorney General Ken Paxton received forty-two percent of the vote, with George P. Bush finishing second. This means there will be a run-off in May, the winner of which will move on to the General Election in November.  There’s been one candidate that Democrats and RINOs alike have been attacking like crazy, for years, since he started in office as Attorney General. It’s been non-stop with Democrats and their RINO henchmen cooking up charges and phony scandals to attack Ken Paxton since he first ran.  He wasn’t supposed to get in to begin with, but when he managed to get into the office, he actually did some very good things, and has been a fairly conservative AG.  The establishment RINOs have other plans, and his name is George P. Bush. Yes, son of Governor Bush. No, not the Texas Governor, Bush, who went on to be President, but the other Governor Bush, JEB, who was governor of Florida and failed miserably in his campaign for the presidency in 2016.  Somebody needs to tell President Trump, and somebody needs to get him the message: George P. Bush is the plant the RINOs will use to at least temporarily turn Texas “Blue” as they tried to do in 2020. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, what we’ve seen executed in the Texas Primary is the first big step in Jeb’s Revenge.

They knew they wouldn’t beat Paxton in a primary-day head-to-head race with George P. Bush.  Ken Paxton is far too well-liked among conservatives in Texas, and he’s actually taken a number of steps none of the Bush-o-philes in Austin would ever have done.  His filing of one suit after the next against the Federal government on issues of immigration, and his post-election attempted suit against Pennsylvania, joined by more than twenty other states, was a daring and bold move if John Roberts hadn’t owed his manhood to the DC establishment.  No, if they were going to defeat Paxton, they’d need to use a well-tested strategy that works well and best in an Open Primary state like Texas.  They would try to split the Paxton vote by entering a couple of people who’ve circled the establishment drain, stealthily, who they could use to attack and weaken Paxton while clearing the way for Bush.

Eva Guzman, part of the Abbott wing of the Texas Bush-o-phile establishment, was the first to be injected, in June of 2021. She resigned her seat on the Texas Supreme Court in order to do so, offering no explanation for her sudden resignation at the time.  Within a week, she had filed paperwork with the Texas Ethics Commission signifying her intent to seek the office of Texas Attorney General.  Louie Gohmert’s last minute entry(November 2021) into the race was the tip that polling had shown insiders that Eva Guzman would not, on her own, be enough to force the run-off. Gohmert is thought by many to be a solid conservative, but the former judge owed favors. Certain people needed Paxton removed as an obstacle to George P. Bush’s expected ascension to governor.

This gave George P. Bush a couple of advantages. In the first place, he could let the other two challengers play hammer, pounding on Paxton, particularly Louie Gohmert, who falsely showed himself on his campaign page with President Trump, indicating to the uninitiated and uninformed that he had the support of the former President.  That’s dirty, because of course, Paxton had secured President Trump’s endorsement months before.  Here’s Gohmert’s deceptive, corrupt use of President Trump’s image in likeness overlaid with “Louie Gohmert for Texas Attorney General” logos:

This is the video you would be greeted with upon surfing over to Gohmert’s website.  This is disgusting. I wonder if the former President is aware of how unscrupulous Gohmert has been in misrepresenting himself in this way.  This was frankly the thing that has caused me to lose all respect for Gohmert. He’s clearly portraying himself on this website as though he had Trump’s endorsement for the office of AG, which is a deception. Gohmert also ran nasty attack ads against Paxton, while accusing Paxton of running attack ads I’ve never seen.

I feel terribly for the Texans who were cheated of their votes by Guzman, Gohmert and Bush by this strategy, but it’s not over.  You see, despite receiving the most votes in the Primary, Attorney General Ken Paxton will now face a run-off with George P. Bush, and it’s a clean slate. Now it’s a winner-take-all affair. Bush, who didn’t need to spend too much campaign cash, since he had the two fakers doing his dirty work, will be flush with cash, and of course, the Bush machine can generate more cash in Texas than anybody else.  This will now become the political version of a smash-and-grab, and they will now use all available dirty tricks to overcome Paxton.  This is how the establishment RINOs play their dirty smash-mouth politics.  They used two also-rans to bloody-up Paxton with the sole purpose of making it easier for George P.

This is CRITICAL for Donald Trump, however, because if George P. Bush becomes Texas Attorney General, who will next face re-election in 2026 along with all the top state-wide offices, guess who he will be in a position, along with Abbott, to sabotage in 2024?  Yes, that’s right.  For the Trump Train, this is a five-alarm fire. In 2020, Abbott could afford to sabotage Trump because he wasn’t up that year. None of the state-wide office holders were. So it would be easy to help rig the election for Democrat Joe Biden because for Abbott, he had nothing at stake. People like to talk about Trump’s four-dimensional chess and all that nonsense, but he’d better master the board in Texas quickly, or they’re going to submarine his ass in 2024. Why wouldn’t they?  Wouldn’t Jeb’s son delight in betraying Trump?  You bet.

In the longer run, it’s setting the stage for George P. Bush to become Abbott’s replacement before he goes off to run for President in 2028 or 2032. That’s the game, and if my fellow Texans want to be drilled in this way, stick around. The Bush family will lay a pipeline for you again, and it won’t involve any kind of lubricant Texans might have thought to expect.  This is the beginning of the next Bush Bum’s Rush to power. Paxton is to be their first victim, but he won’t be their last.  Donald Trump is the next target, should he run as many now expect in 2024. From the AG’s seat, Bush will be able to create havoc for Trump in the Presidential race.  Texans need to wake up before the Bush wing of the establishment runs over them again, just as they did in 1988 and afterward, tossing aside all the Reagan folk who’d been so strong in Texas, to be replaced by BushCo folk who will sing by the family hymnal.

I also expect some interference from Washington DC. Don’t be surprised when the crime family’s influence is used to wave around some cobbled-together BS story about Paxton come a week or two before the run-off, just in time to take hold, but too late to be debunked. They have friends everywhere, as they’ve shown, and while they got clobbered by Trump in 2016, they’ve learned now, and they know how to rig things.  Texans had better wake up and smell the coffee, or soon, they’ll be smelling Bush family BS again, maybe for decades to come. If George P. were to run for President in 2032, you won’t be rid of them until 2040! How long are you willing to let one family of sell-outs dominate your state and your country?

For my part, if George P. Bush manages to beat Paxton in the run-off, I will work my back-side off to defeat him in November, even if I have to get out and spend my evenings planting lawn-signs for the Democrats. It’s time for the Bush family dynasty to end, for good this time. We’re America, not Britain, and we don’t do royalty by birth.

As a related side-note, there are a few steps Republicans can take to stop these shenanigans. For one, we need a state constitutional amendment prohibiting any candidate in Texas from appearing in the same election cycle for more than one office. The more important measure is that we must convert Texas to a closed-primary state.  People should be required to choose a party and register as such to vote in a party primary. It’s like having a private club, but letting the public choose its officers. It’s preposterous, and nobody in their right mind would accept these terms in any other circumstance.  In Texas, once you’ve voted in the primary, you’re bound to that party’s ballot for any subsequent run-off.  Therefore, if you vote as a Democrat in the primary, you can’t go vote in a Republican run-off two months later.  The trick, however, is this: If YOU DIDN’T vote in the general primary for either party, you’re still eligible to vote in the run-off.

Does a voter have to vote in the general primary election in order to vote in a primary runoff election?

No. Section 11.001 of the Texas Election Code prescribes the specific qualifications necessary in order to vote in a Texas election. There is no requirement to have previously voted in the general primary election in order to participate in the subsequent primary runoff election. Therefore, if a qualified voter did not vote in the general primary election, they are still eligible to vote in the primary runoff election.

In this way, any number of actual Democrats who did not vote in Tuesday’s primary can show up and vote in the May run-off as Republicans. What this means is obvious, and it’s the reason Texas Republican voters had better wake up to how they’ve been played.  You must get this system under control, because it’s rigged for RINOs to defeat your conservative candidates every time if they have the resources to play the game. As long as they can manage to finish in the top two, the RINO can make it a one-on-one race letting the also-rans do damage to the chief opponent. That’s how the establishment has rigged this game in Texas, and if you don’t get with the program, in May, they’re going to steamroll you with another Bush, putting the Bush clan in the position to stymie Trump again in 2024.  Politics is a dirty, dirty, long game. The Bush family knows how to play it well. When he ran for Land Commissioner four years ago, I could see this coming.  I knew AG would be his next play. George P. Bush hasn’t even been practicing law. He wants to be your AG, so he can step up, and up.  That’s the Bush family plan. You’re the pawns. Ken Paxton is to be their first check-box on their hit parade.

Trump is next. They’re going to hit him in 2024 like you’ve never seen. They want to prevent him from having any influence over the future of the Republican Party.  What if he picks a VP with future prospects?  Wouldn’t that foul their plans? It just might, and so to avoid that possibility, they’re going to strike first with a well-positioned Texas AG who’s going to exact his low-energy father’s revenge. Hell, Jeb might run himself, in 2024. He’s just that arrogant, and if his son controls the AG’s office in Texas, imagine if Trump finds himself denied ballot access in the Lone Star State? The script almost writes itself.

Whistling Past the Political Graveyard

Tuesday, March 30th, 2021

Fighting Wars Already Lost

None of you will be surprised at today’s thesis.  This has been the regular theme in American politics for a long while, and it’s ever more disheartening to see. Last night, I attended a meeting of my local county Republican Party. A State Representative had been invited to speak on the current legislative agenda, and the things he is doing to advance Republican issues. After the first ten minutes, it became clear to me that he needs to go.  He’s a long-time “good ole boys” network guy, involved for decades in local, regional, and state politics, but it’s clear he has no stomach for the fight ahead.  I’m sure he’s a nice enough fellow, but right now, we don’t need “nice guys” but instead, we need fire-breathing dragons. Nothing is so disappointing as to see a lively crowd of local activists address questions to such a politician, and have him walk out of the room with the questions unanswered. More, and I think this was the more terrifying part, most of the questions were addressed to things he’s specifically raised during his talk, but left unaddressed were all the more critical issues now facing the country.  I’m glad he’s interested in cutting taxes and slowing the growth of government, but none of that matters right now.  Just like DC Republicans, this guy doesn’t see the crisis, in part because it doesn’t affect him, but in larger measure due to a sort of intrinsic cowardice built into his view of Republicanism. Here is a man who served honorably in the military both on active and inactive duty for decades, a helicopter pilot, but he’s closed his eyes to the battle raging all around him.  These are the people we must respectfully ask to step down, and then insist if necessary. They’re doing us no good, and in fact, by yielding the battlefield to the adversary, are effectively taking part in mass surrender.

The Texas State Representative seemed to avoid all cultural issues. Whatever his particular views on them, it was clear that he didn’t want to talk about immigration, abortion, cancel culture, or any of the non-economic issues confronting the people of Texas and more broadly, the American people.  It seemed to me that those issues were such that he either had contrary feelings on some of them, or that he thought those battles were not his to fight.  Ladies and gentlemen, those issues need our attention, but more generally, we need not cede any portion of the battlefield to the hard left that is now operating without restriction in our nation. He gave a lengthy, detailed talk about the upcoming redistricting, that will be tackled in special session later this year.  What he did not wish to address are any of the cultural issues that will underpin and drive the process.  It’s all well and good to explain what’s likely to happen given the political and demographic realities of the moment, but it would also be instructive to understand how we got to this place.  He seemed reluctant to comment, because once again, this would cross into areas of culture about which he is uncomfortable discussing.  We have no time for such people.  In a time of stability and relative calm, a party can tolerate some number of practical people who are concerned primarily with dollars and cents, to the exclusion of all other matters, but we are in a deepening political crisis that will call upon us all to step up or watch our nation perish.  Yes, it’s as bad as that.  No, the State Representative in question did not seem to perceive it, or if he did, he seemed content to fight to defend his tiny slice of the overall pie.  There was nothing new here.  Here we had another status quo politician trying to slow the growth of government, but also advocating for his own pet program (Rural broadband, in this case,) but in all ways that are important, entirely missing the plot.

The Republican Party must focus on just a handful of things at present, particularly in the legislative venues at our disposal.

  • Election Integrity
  • Limiting the authority of governments/officials during so-called “pandemics”
  • Breaking up the Social Media and Broadcast media ideological oligopoly
  • Throttling the education bureaucracy that is intentionally mis/dis-educating our children
  • Preserving our rights to defend ourselves and our communities, including our sovereignty as a nation

Listening to our State Representative last evening, I realized that he had no interest in any of these issues. None. These are the issues that will decide whether it’s even possible to have a Republican State Representative in this legislative district in the near-term future.  This man, and those like him, are whistling past the political graveyard.  There can be no future for Republicans, or specifically, conservatism, if we continue to pretend that we can still wave our hands around talking about tax cuts and making government more efficient even while the left is demolishing our ability to do anything whatever about it. Worse, it is laughable to talk about controlling the growth of government while essentially advocating for more government programs and dollars. The left is actively purging Republicans from polite society at an increasing rate, and while well-meaning fools run about talking about economic and financial issues, the left is undermining the whole of the economy on which any such notions are based. It does no good to tackle taxing issues when the left is printing money at record pace, creating the cruelest tax of them all: Inflation, as a precursor to economic collapse.

The Republican Party has many smart, dedicated people in it, but I think far too many are stuck in a paradigm that’s been dead and buried for some years. Our nation is being destroyed, and while it happened slowly at first, it has now accelerated to a state requiring a day-to-day assessment of our condition.  While I’m sure the State Representative to whom I listened last night probably means well, he’s not going to be very effective. If he’s not willing to pursue the handful of issues I’ve outlined above, we’re not going to make much headway on the basis of his efforts, irrespective of his sincerity.  Instead, this is a time for activism of another sort. To date, Republicans and conservatives have satisfied themselves with a vaguely contentious discussion about the size of government, but the left is only too happy to entertain that discussion since all the while, they’re cutting out the foundation on which such discussions are based. More, they’re growing government at such a colossal rate that there will soon be no room for the private sector. They’re intentionally crowding us out, while we leave the battleground on which that is occurring unguarded and largely uncontested.

Make no mistake: This is warfare still being conducted in the political sphere, but that will not persist indefinitely. We are rapidly coming to a point at which they will simply demand our outright, explicit surrender, and attached to the demand will be an unavoidable “Or else.” Now is not the time for retrenchment, and retreat. This is the time for bold political activism, because the flaws and fallacies in their arguments are obvious.  What we need is the will to fight.

At the end of last night’s meeting, after the guest speakers had departed, new Precinct Chairs were being inducted among other routine business. The party Chairman asked each of them, in turn, why they were seeking these positions. An elderly gentleman, seated not far behind me, explained in two words why he wanted to be a Precinct Chair:

“I’m scared…”

He went on to say that he is scared for the country. He’s scared for his children and grandchildren. He’s scared.  He didn’t shriek his words. He didn’t shout them, but neither did he whimper.  It was a matter-of-fact pronouncement of what every sensible person seated in that room already feels, and knows, in the pit of their stomachs each time they turn on the news. If you’re not scared, you’re a damned fool.  That State Representative, unwilling to address the elephants in that room, listed above, is a damned fool. He’s scared too, but for a different reason: He fears having to enter a battlefield on which he knows nothing about the combatants, the contested issues, and the cause of the fear expressed later by the new Precinct Chair.  It’s a battle he doesn’t know how to fight, and since he doesn’t, his practice has been to retreat into issues where he has better understanding and firmer footing for his advocacy.  The problem is that his fear, for whatever reasons, prohibit him from engaging in the battle we now have before us.  He might be a great warrior in a battle over economic and fiscal policy, but he clearly has a lacking of either the stomach or the standing for the all-out political and cultural war we now face.  They aren’t here to make peace with us. They’re here to wipe us out.

I would ask my fellow conservatives to attend meetings of their local Republican Party, learn the players, learn the mechanics of it all, and then seek a seat as a Precinct Chair/Committeeman (whatever they call it in your state.)  Dan Shultz of ThePrecinctProject Blog offers some insight here. Here’s a video of an interview by Steven K Bannon from his show “War Room:”

 

MAGA 2021: Choosing the Road Ahead

Thursday, January 21st, 2021

Victory is the only choice

There is a time for choosing, and I’m going to lay it all out. The Republican party has done, as my friend and long time commenter “The Unit” asserts: Hit the eject button, rather than squeeze the trigger. This is why we nominated Trump to begin with: Spineless, ineffective, weaselly Republicans who would rather assume the position and take it rather than fight. Ladies and gentlemen, that’s what we have in our Republican Party, and like so many of you, I am inclined to simply wash my hands of them and let the Republican Party burn. It would be so satisfying. It would be wonderful to spit in their eyes and walk the Hell away. Who among us would not love to give Mitch McConnell the old double-barreled middle finger and tell him to shove off? While that would all be very satisfying, the satisfaction wouldn’t last as we will see the disaster these people will make of our country. That’s unacceptable, and while a third party is very enticing, there are problems with that approach. Let’s think very carefully about what we do next, make our decisions in the full knowledge of the costs, and then go do it. Talk is cheap, but the time for action has come. Let us choose our course knowing what offers any hope of success, and what is doomed to failure or worse. It’s our country, and it’s our party, so let us decide its disposition.  The 2022 primaries begin today.

The first option is the easiest of all: We can do nothing, but simply walk away in frustration and despair. That is the road to serfdom of a sort for which fools like AOC and Ilhan Omar only dare to dream. That road is littered with the wreckage of our lives, and the lives of our children and grandchildren. It will end with our country in squalor and destitute slavery to the Chinese Communist Party and their “elite” pet American politicians.  I find that to be a grotesquely unacceptable course. I will not be driven from politics. I will not be driven from the public square. I will not let these psychopathic lunatics turn my country into grist for their communist mill of death. I will not become another conforming slave, unwilling to state my opinions and principles to the knowing of the world. I can’t do that. I won’t do that. Neither should you.

The second option is to cast off the Republican Party, abandoning it to the losers and RINOs and NeverTrumpers. The idea would be to start a new party, a patriot party, a MAGA party, or some such thing that we could decide. That sounds great, but it’s been tried, and it never works. Why not? The answer is simple, and most of you already know it: The system is thoroughly rigged to make sure a third party will fail. First, the laws are established to favor the existing two parties. At the local, state, and federal levels, obstacles are placed in the way of new parties and non-party independent candidates that make it very difficult, in some cases virtually impossible, to circumvent the existing two-party oligopoly. While I would love to see that changed, the truth is that it will never be changed from outside the two-party system. They have it all stitched-up quite tightly, and they know it. That’s why they don’t mind when we get angry and go off in search of a third party. They know we can’t get around them in any significant way. Ross Perot discovered this with his ill-fated Reform Party. This is why Trump ran as a Republican, and not as a third-party candidate. His successes should be our guide, but so should his failures, and there were several. Dan Bongino did a great job explaining this in his reference to the ill-fated but much-recalled Bull Moose Party of Teddy Roosevelt. Here it is, from Rumble(Fast-forward to the 57:00 mark to get to the point directly):

The third option is perhaps the most difficult, but it’s also the only plausible way to accomplish what we actually want. It will require something to which many of us are not accustomed, and I am going to tell you the truth about it whether or not you wish to know it. The most probable method to achieve our desire is to create a new party within the Republican Party, but in a way that permits us to take over the machinery of the party from top to bottom. This is going to be difficult, butd if you actually want to do it, we’re going to have to get off our asses and do more than go to rallies. It’s going to require that we do what the Tea Party did, times ten. We’re going to need to start at the bottom, develop candidates, and take control of the party from the bottom, moving upward. What Trump did was a decapitation attack on the party, and it worked, but the problem is that he didn’t build the organization he needed to take it over from the bottom up. Getting people to rallies is great, because it get voters to polls, but that doesn’t give you control of the party at the local and state levels, which is where elections are won and lost.

Let me explain: Why did Trump lose* in 2020? They stole it. How did they steal it? Well, they used all the ordinary methods, but they got away with it. How did they get away with it? In the seven to ten locations most critical to their steal, they took control of the election law and machinery. They exploited weak, weaselly Republicans, like the Speaker of the House in Pennsylvania, the Governors and Secretaries of State in Arizona and Georgia, and a whole string of weak-kneed Republicans in the affected states. They also owned the States’ courts, either with outright leftists, or with a combination of leftists and  RINO Republicans. The biggest key to this election theft was not just pallets of ballots, and suitcases of ballots, but the legal chicanery that permitted them to occur. The mail-in fraud was the biggest part of their theft, using the lack of signature verification, the curing of ballots, and all the rest of the rigged laws and dicta. This permitted them to simply rubber-stamp fraudulent ballots in a massive way. Having a few well-placed dirtbags in Republican drag was indispensable. Mitch McConnell assisted the steal, as did any number of other establishment Republicans. They wanted Trump gone. Without loyal Trumpists at the local-level and state-level providing a safeguard of the law, there was no backstop. Yes, he got more legitimate votes than Joe Biden, but as you know too well by now, the issue comes down to Stalin’s line about who counts the vote rather than who casts them. In this case, however, it came down to the more fundamental question about under which conditions ballots could be cast and subsequently counted and validated. Yes, of course they stole this election, and it’s as plain as the nose on your face, but left without the ability to prove it, the audit trail having been effectively(or in some cases literally) erased, there is no remaining way to prove it in a timeframe that won’t make the argument all but moot. It was almost the perfect crime, inasmuch as while it might be able to be proven in some substantial instances at this late date, do you think there’s any way to reverse the election after the new President is inaugurated?

The only way this is ever fixed, if ever, is to seize control of one of the parties and reform it from the bottom up. Part of me, the vengeful part, wants almost to go after the Democrat Party, take it over, and wreck it, and turn it into our party. Can you imagine a Democrat party in which AOC is an outcast? Can you imagine a Democrat Party in which the likes of Chuck Schumer is a marginalized nutjob who can’t win a primary? Wouldn’t that be glorious? Okay, enough of the fantasy. Time to get back to work. Let’s start this way, if you’re serious. I want you to find out who runs the Republican Party in your county. I want you to find out who is on their committees. I want you to show up at the next meeting. Sit quietly and watch what goes on. Learn how they operate. Get together with others. Wear some item of significance to show others of like mind who you are. Become insurgents at the local level, and take over the local party. To do this is not easy, but it’s also not impossible. Once you do this, begin cultivating local candidates, and start working toward putting forward State Representatives and Senators. Take over city councils and school boards. Take over the State Party. Take over the legislature. Rid yourselves of RINO governors. While you’re at it, work to reform laws so that third parties can get a start, so that if your progeny ever find themselves in a similar situation, they have a path to a viable third party. I want you to notice that in just four years, the Tea Party was able to field candidates and drive the agenda of the Republican Party. The problem is that they permitted themselves to be isolated and ultimately marginalized. If you tackle this, in order to avoid that kind of separation, you’ll need to avoid the labels the establishment folk and media will try to assign you. You need to insist, since it’s true, that you represent the mainstream of the Republican Party. In fact, that ought to be your label, if you take one at all: We are the mainstream Republicans. Full stop. It’s our party, and we own it, fund it, and supply the vast majority of the votes for its candidates. It’s time for us to run it.

The problem we face is that the existing two parties are thoroughly corrupt. They’ve formed a sort of oligopoly in which you can do business with one, or the other, but you must pick one or suffer the consequences. While you’re working to wrest control of local and state party organs, keep an eye on the Federal stooges. They’ll be up to no good, looking to consort with the left any chance they get. Why? Because that’s how they maintain their power in DC. That’s how they get along. That’s how they keep getting re-elected. We need to purge these RINOs from the party. We need to impel these people to fight to the degree we can, because we’re in for one Hell of a couple of terms. We’re going to need to start now. The primaries will already be going for Congressional and State elections this time next year. We need to be thinking now about the primaries in 2021. This is a good first opportunity to test our mettle.  You can walk away in dejection and despair, or you can stand to fight.  If you stand to fight, you must decide whether you will vest your efforts in an almost hopelessly implausible effort to create a third political party, or whether you will simply take over the machinery that already exists. I’ve given this a great deal of thought, and although part of me screams that we’ve been here before, and it’s hard, the truth is that forming another party and making it electorally viable on the Presidential stage is not something likely to be achieved in my lifetime.  I have always voted Republican, and I’ve always funded its causes and candidates. That makes me an owner in this enterprise, and I fully intend to exercise my rightful control. I fervently hope you will join me. It’s time for you non-party independents to join in too. The truth is that you voted with us for the same reasons, and that means you tend to share our values. It’s time now to stand for them, before we lose it all.

MAGA!

 

The Present Death of the Republican Party

Thursday, January 7th, 2021

The Dagger of Brutus Comes Out

They couldn’t wait to withdraw their objections.  In the Senate, they fell over one another to find microphones to declare their separation from President Trump and his supporters.  They claimed to be doing so in the name of the Republican Party, but the truth, yet to be fully revealed, is likely to be something quite different.  One by one, they came forward to stick knives in the President’s back, and it started with Vice President Pence.  From there, the opportunity presented by the chaos in the Capitol became their excuse.  It provided a convenient escape-chute for the bulk of Republican senators, and a number of lackluster Republicans in the House.  Most disgustingly, Kelly Loeffler(R-GA) who lost re-election only the morning before, and who had pledged her objection to Georgia voters only the weekend before, stood in the well of the Senate to say that she could not pursue her objection despite all that had been done in her own state to corrupt this election, including her own.  The idea that the brief outbreak of violence by unidentified instigators at the Capitol justifies the withdrawal of the objection is preposterous: One had nothing to do with the other, and to create such linkage reveals more about the dubious motives of the Senators and Representatives who did so. The truth lies not so much in the fact that they betrayed Donald Trump, but that they betrayed us. This act of cowardice among Republicans is evidence that rather than fight, the majority of Republicans decided to commit political murder-suicide, and with extreme prejudice, dealing a death-blow to the Republican Party in early morning hours of January 7th, 2021.

Here’s Loeffler knifing Georgians, Donald Trump, and indeed, all Americans in the back:

Naturally, Lindsey Graham(R-SC) couldn’t wait for his moment to swoop in from circling the carcass:

Most of us have known that the Senate, particularly, is full of RINOs.  The House too, is polluted with them. They never wanted Trump to be president, and they were only too happy to toss him overboard at the first rolling wave. Over the past four years, or even five, the Republican Party has done its best to placate its grass roots with tepid, halting support of Donald Trump. Only a relative few in the party have ever embraced the president chosen by the “deplorables,” a characterization of Trump supporters first offered by Hillary Clinton, but also expressed in the equivalent words and attitudes of such Republican turncoats as John McCain(deceased) and Mitt Romney(R-UT.)  Overnight, Kelly Loeffler spoke of her good conscience. This from a woman who promised the electorate of Georgia literally hours before that she would object, and who, with a classified briefing last year about the exploding pandemic, engaged in clear insider trading on that information to the tune of millions of dollars. What conscience has she demonstrated? This is the sort of Republican Mitch McConnell and his ilk have given us, and she’s exactly the sort of Republican who has killed the party.

I don’t know whether the remedy can any longer be to attempt to take over the GOP. I say this because the Tea Party attempted that, and while there had been some early success, particularly in 2010, the truth is that they came under harsh attack from the Republicans in the Senate, who conspired with Obama to undermine them, abuse them, and otherwise subvert their cause.  I think the Republican Party is so thoroughly filled with these DC insiders that we cannot rely upon them in any measure any longer.  I think the better alternative may finally be to form a new party, make its platform known, and carefully select and vet its candidates. This will not be easy, but none of the option we face are easy, but for surrender and subjugation. Demoralized though I may be, I have no interest in simply throwing-up my hands in submission to this monstrosity. To the degree these RINOs have committed electoral suicide, I assert that we must walk away from them with fervent resolve. There is no future in a Republican Party that treats its voters in this fashion, or abandons its toughest political fighters when the going gets tough. I am no longer willing to spend even one thin dime to support these people, and I think it’s important that we make a stand by abandoning them.

Vice President Mike “Pontius” Pence was the most cowardly and despicable of all.  He actually contended that he was being asked to set aside electoral votes, but that is not what he had been asked to do.  Instead, he was asked to send the matter back to the six or seven state legislatures in question, and indeed, a number of those legislatures had asked that he do so.  This is not so extreme a proposition as he pretended, but more, I believe he never had Donald Trump’s back.  From my perspective, I think in the eyes of many, he may have been the real “insurance policy” Strzok and Page discussed in their chain of treasonous texts. It’s been clear for a long while that Pence was never really fully aboard the Trump train, and his connections in Washington DC are all of the BushCo/RINO strain.

Now, at this late hour, Chuck Schumer(D-NY) is calling for the use of the 25th amendment to remove President Trump, and impeachment if that effort fails.

These people are despicable. They no longer wish to simply see him out of office, but to destroy him forever more.

We must get beyond these people, and I no longer believe the Republican Party can serve as the conduit for our dissatisfaction. In point of fact, they’ve too often obstructed the will of the people. I don’t know how to build a new political party and movement, but I’m willing to begin. I’d enjoy reading comments from readers who might offer suggestions. In some form or fashion, this must be an America First party, and it’s clear that the Republican party cannot serve as its home.

 

Supine GOP Sabotaging President

Friday, February 8th, 2019

Who’s Watching His Back?

One of the things I have learned to hold in utter contempt is the slack-jawed, sycophantic, preternatural losers in the Republican Party.  In the main, they populate Washington DC, whether in government, media, or the political consultancy, although one can find them in state capitals around the country too.  These people don’t seek victory so much as extensions to their hold on influence and power.  In one sense, they’re part of the deep state, or at least functionally serve as an extension of it, but what one learns about them by careful observation is that they don’t care to win, at least not in the way their outside-the-beltway Republican brethren would understand victory.  When Trump talks about “winning,” all they see is danger, and wherever they see controversy, they are sure to seek cover elsewhere.  They’re not of us.  They’re weak.  They’re spineless.  They’re sneaky and vindictive.  They see President Trump’s State of the Union address as further evidence that the man is un-presidential.  Like the Democrats, they believe that Donald J. Trump must go.  From their perspective, flat on their backs and looking up at the world of real humans, there’s no reason to fight.  They think it’s nice down there on the ground, slithering around on their bellies while begging for crumbs from the globalist left.  To maintain their positions as deep-state bottom-feeders, they’re only to happy to participate in the sabotage of this President.

I was listening to the excellent but unusual opening to the most recent segment published by my friend Mr. L, of Mr. L’s Tavern.(You really should listen, as it’s a hoot).  I laughed heartily at the depiction.  What he portrayed in his opening is something I know all too well.  It’s almost precisely the same interaction I’ve had when I receive calls from the NRCC or Senator Cornyn’s campaign, or the campaign of my own House representative, or other political fund-raising efforts of the GOP and its political affiliates. These days, some of them use robo-call recordings that are fairly sophisticated, and it’s easy to be fooled by the best of them.  Occasionally, they’re still using actual human callers, for whom I always feel pity.  Imagine having to call to beg for contributions for my own Senator, John Cornyn(R-TX.) Imagine having to read a script laden with boilerplate schlock that is designed to offend as few people as possible, while saying precisely nothing of worth, and simultaneously promising to do everything and nothing for everyone and no-one all in three or four sentences.  They don’t have any but canned responses, and they can’t really answer for the party machine that pays for their service, but they’re obliged to listen to almost anything you might say so long as you refrain from terroristic threats or outright verbal abuse.  Whether anything you say is ever passed back to their masters remains doubtful, because I have been unable to convince them to cease.

Yes, yes, I strongly tend to vote for Republicans, and yes, I show up on election days.  Yes, I regularly give to political campaigns and politically-aligned causes in small sums that I can afford, (which isn’t much,) but none of this implies that I’m going to accept the GOP sing-song blindly, or that I’m going to donate to a party that undermines me, or the agenda items of our President when I happen to support them.  Mr. L’s point is not lost on me, because that’s what these jerks in Washington DC actually expect: I should remain supine as they walk over me just as they do for the Democrats!  Like Mr. L, I have no interest in funding a party that does not share my values.  These DC Republicans actually oppose a wall, and they oppose immigration enforcement, so that anything they say to the contrary is just part of the show they perform as the means by which they intend to bilk you and me of our cash.

It’s precisely as though when we expressed that we want Trump, and we want him because he promised to secure our border and build a wall, even if it means declaring an emergency, they preferred to believe that we hadn’t meant it.  Their beltway bubble gas-lighters have told them that we, you and I, out in “flyover country” are just having a temper tantrum, just like back in 2010.  Certainly, you remember the Tea Party.  Just as in those days, they don’t believe we’re serious, and don’t believe we can’t be steered onto some other course.  They belittle us and bully us, but still expect us to pay for it all.  Can you imagine the unmitigated chutzpah it must take to believe such a thing?  In their view, we should pay for the party and volunteer for the role of the butt of all the jokes at the party besides.  All this they expect, so that perhaps their DC masters will occasionally grant the favor of letting them to rise to their knees.

Meanwhile, our president is fighting like Hell to uphold his promises.  Some have said “well, he’s only trying to uphold his promises for the naked politics of the matter, but he doesn’t really care about a wall.”  When people make statements like this, do they believe they’re going to obtain some sort of Kreskin-like command of their audience’s attention?  Do they believe they’re saying something unknown to their audiences?  Of course it’s politics.  Whether Donald J. Trump believes in a wall himself or not, even if it’s “only naked politics” that drives him to keep his promise, I say “GOOD! GREAT! FINALLY!

One of the biggest scams in politics is the presupposition that the best and most mature politicians are those who will disregard the will of the electorate, ignoring the people who elected them in order to carry out the policy preferences of… who, exactly?  The wizards of smart?  The brilliance of lobbyists?  The interests of the global corporatists, or the corporate globalists?  Media moguls or their sock-puppets?  You see, it’s always portrayed as the evidence of wisdom, and a sign of maturity, and we, who elected the politician, we are supposed to simply nod in affirmation and agree: “Yes, we voted for this politician to do something completely different, but now that you’ve shown us the error of our preferences, we will continue to support this politician.”  Really?  When people try to convince you of this thesis, you’re right to reject them as con-artists.

In Washington DC now, they’re back on their heels for a few moments.  President Trump’s State of the Union address was well-received throughout the country with as many as eight in ten viewers approving his address, and as many as three of four approving of his immigration ideas.  That’s a stunningly good performance, but the media mavens were quick to remind that these were only “flash polls” taken in the immediate reaction to the speech, (and therefore will not represent the longer-term view of the people after the media has had a week or two in which to propagandize them into a different impression.)

This is an unpleasant circumstance for the DC-beltway crowd and their globalist masters.  They aren’t accustomed to being told “no,” and particularly not by the voters, for Heaven’s sake.  They are out to wreck Trump, and this is why as Mr. L pointed out, some forty-odd Republicans quit the House last Fall: They don’t support his presidency, and they’re not going to be participants in furthering his(meaning our) agenda.  Why would a relatively young man like Paul Ryan give up the House Speaker-ship so easily?  Why would the collection of them, nearly all of them RINOs, simply retire?  They also announced their retirements relatively late in the cycle, with the clear intent of making it more difficult on Republicans who might seek to fill their vacant seats.

In the Senate, the sabotage will be more direct.  This chamber-full of gargantuan egos is populated by people who think the sun rises and sets at their bidding.  People like Mitt Romney(R-UT,) embittered over his 2012 defeat, seems intent on replacing John McCain as a perpetual thorn in Donald Trump’s side, and just like the deceased Arizona senator, a constant pain in our asses to boot.  When you add the list of usual suspects in the GOP to the Democrat Caucus of Doom, it’s easy to see how Majority Leader Mitch McConnell(R-KY-the state, not the lubricant) will be able to torment the President any time he wishes.

As Mr. L also pointed out, since the State of the Union, suddenly, there has erupted talk of a “deal.” In the deal there will exist numerous poison pills that the surrender caucus of the GOP in both Houses will happily accept, knowing that they will damage President Trump with his base.  There will be DACA extensions, and Amnesty, and and every conceivable manner of betrayal of his base, desperately hoping to tempt the president to accept the deal, while simultaneously wishing to bash him over the head with it if he signs.  What they cannot permit is that he would declare an emergency, fully unleashing the power of Article II of our Constitution and securing our border with guards and barriers(or walls) and electronics and soldiers and alligator-infested moats along with the Army and the Border Patrol and ICE carrying out interior enforcement.  They’re most terrified that he’ll actually secure the border and then follow up with a deportation binge.  That won’t be permitted, if the supine GOP saboteurs have anything at all to do with it.

I’m afraid that Mr. L’s over-arching point is quite correct: These corrupt bastards who run the GOP in Washington DC don’t want Trump(or us) to win. They’re sick of him winning, and the reaction to his State of the Union address suggests that he’s made his case to the American people.  This is why suddenly, they’re talking deal, but stubbornly, they are going to insist on poisoning it.  The President should not accept such a deal, because it’s precisely the sort of failure we’ll understand as a betrayal.  I think President Trump understands this, and if my suspicion is correct, they’re going to offer some ridiculous deal, knowing that it will wreck him.  If they do, he must remain resolved, explain to the American people why the deal is worthless, and then declare the emergency to build the wall and secure our nation. At that point, he should take on the chore with a ruthless zeal, too.  It’s the only thing the weasels in Washington DC understand, and it’s the only way our interests, that three in four people who agreed on Tuesday with his immigration prescriptions are ever going to get it done their way.

I can only offer the following unsolicited advice for our Commander-in-Chief:  Mr. President, let them make their phony offer, and then shove it up their… noses with an emergency declaration of your own.  You have the power for extraordinary circumstances, but if the ongoing and perpetual reordering of our nation by invasion isn’t an emergency, I can’t conceive of what is.  Do it.  Declare that emergency to build the wall and virtually grab those saboteurs by their…whatevers.  It’s the reason we elected you.

Repeal, Replace, or Regurgitate?

Thursday, June 22nd, 2017

mega_vomit_ft

With the slim details that are thus far available of the Senate’s Obamacare replacement legislation, I must say that I am both saddened and disgusted with the state of the Republican party in Congress, and highly annoyed with Donald Trump’s insistence on Wednesday night that more tax-payer money equals heart. That’s what he said, and it makes me ill. If Mr. Trump wishes to have more “heart” in healthcare, let him donate his billions. Most of us don’t have billions to give, or even hundreds, and the government doesn’t exactly “solicit donations.” It aims a gun at our heads, making demands for payment. What may disappoint me most about this is that from his base of support, a loud groan did not erupt when he made that statement before the audience in Iowa.  Conservatism is dying because to a large extent, so many Americans, so fatigued by Obama’s war against them, would accept two smiling lashes per day from another President if it meant escaping Obama’s ten, delivered across their backs with full leftist fury. So happy are they to be removed from Obama’s ever more weighty iron jack-boot, that they’re willing to have Donald Trump’s wingtip on their neck.  The stark truth of this whole situation is very simple, and it comes down to this: You cannot repeal a despicable law like Obamacare and then replace it with something very nearly as egregious, while hoping Americans won’t notice.

Apparently, most of a handful of Senators today noticed too: Senators Cruz(R-TX,) Johnson(R-WI,) Lee(R-UT,) and Paul(R-KY) signed a joint statement to the effect that they cannot support the Senate bill. I want to know where the other 48 Republican Senators are hiding.  This bill is a scandal, promising to saddle our children and grandchildren with a mountain of debt that reaches out to infinity.  President Trump should be ashamed.  Vice President Pence should join him in guilt for this bill. Over in the House, Paul Ryan should be breathing at least a momentary sigh of relief as the worst Republican bill to come out of Congress in memory is no longer his pet, now reduced instead to a close second in the standings.

I realize President Trump is not a conservative, but leans somewhat conservative on a few issues.  At present, however, he’s flirting with losing conservatives’ support because of this bill.  The Republicans in both houses of Congress have failed to provide a true repeal of Obamacare, and I cannot possibly express how thoroughly disappointing this development has been.  Rather than scrap the whole damnable thing, they are nearly all of the spending, and merely trimming some of the tax burdens Obamacare imposes.  That’s not “repeal.” It’s scarcely “replace.”

The sad truth is that our country is headed into the toilet of world history, and this bill will do nothing to arrest its fall.  We cannot have a system in which half the citizens are the beneficiaries of the lashes across the other half’s backs. I had hoped Trump would fight the left, rather than encouraging them, but this sort of thing provides fresh evidence that he’s just another big-government Republican, little different in this respect from the parade of so-called “moderates” who have repeatedly disappointed us.

President Trump’s supporters had better get in touch with Mr. “Big heart” and let him know that money doesn’t equal compassion when it is extracted at gunpoint, or affixed like a ball and chain to generations yet unborn. I could vomit.

 

GOP Says “FU”

Friday, March 18th, 2016

its-our-party-we-can-do-do-what-we-want_ftThe GOP establishment isn’t going quietly. In fact, they’re building their booby trap for those who would oust them from dominance in the upcoming elections, and those who have to date deprived them of viable candidates in the Republican primary season.  I have here stated that I’m not a big fan of Donald Trump, and that I have serious misgivings about all of the Republican candidates.  What you should know is that as much as I may not like Donald Trump’s behavior and antics, I vastly prefer him to the crooked DC UniParty that includes both Democrat and Republican establishments.  What we’ve learned today is that in order to interrupt the natural, normal primary process as the GOP establishment had already rigged it, they will use the continuing candidacy of a mail carrier’s son to foist on the party a nominee like Paul Ryan, or another establishment Republican, through the contested convention process, should neither Trump nor Cruz obtain the necessary 1,237 delegates.  If that doesn’t disgust you quite enough, and it isn’t clear enough to you how, as a voter for any candidate in the GOP primary, you’re being screwed, there’s this bit of news:  Orin Hatch(R-UT) is already aboard with the Obama nomination of  leftist radical Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court of the United States.   Perpetual sell-outs Jeff Flake, Kelly Ayotte, and Susan Collins have already expressed interest in meeting with Garland.  You need to understand how you’re being betrayed by the GOP establishment.

This is their parting gift.  If they can’t win in the regular primary process, they’re going to make your votes meaningless.  If that still doesn’t permit them to maintain power, and if they’re unable to stop Trump directly, they will support Hillary.  Assuming somehow that doesn’t materialize, and Trump has such a groundswell of support in the Fall that they’re unable to sufficiently damage him in order to elect Hillary, they are setting up their parting gift: If they believe they’re about to be ousted anyway, they are going to shove a leftist Supreme Court justice down our throats to wreck the country for decades, if not forever.  One way or another, they’re going to have their revenge, like the petulant children of Bill Clinton’s administration who stole all the “W” keys from keyboards throughout the executive departments of our government, the difference being that this will be substantially more damaging, and it will be done with far more malice.  Speaking of malice for Republican voters, watch the following video (H/T Sundance @ the ConservativeTreehouse), and listen closely just beyond the three minute mark:

That’s right, it’s THEIR party, and they’ll nominate who they damned well please.  For those who don’t quite understand this, let me explain it this way: Delegates select the nominee. Voters participate in a process by which delegates are selected, but this is where the voter’s legal say in the process ends. As a practical matter, it is true that the party selects the nominee through its delegates.  If no candidate obtains 1,237 delegates(one more than half) then the delegates who are required to support the candidate to whom they were originally allocated in the first vote become unbound in any successive votes, meaning they can cross over and vote for another candidate.  This is essentially a “contested convention” by party rules, and at present, unless something shifts wildly, it’s going to be very difficult for any of the candidates to get to the 1,237 delegates required.  What Curly Haugland is explaining in this video is that which we already know: It’s THEIR party.  They make the rules, and they determine the process, which means that they alone really possess the ability to select the party’s nominee.  They can make changes to the rules almost at will.

Haugland isn’t lying. Haugland is simply stating the facts. What voters must now realize is what many people have been explaining for decades, but that nobody seems willing to acknowledge: The whole primary process is a farce.  In the Democrat party, it is dominated by “Super Delegates” who basically are able to obviate the will of the voters at their whim.  Witness how Bernie Sanders can win the popular vote in a given state, but always loses in the delegate count. In the 1970s, the Democrats created the “Super Delegates” in the wake of George McGovern’s candidacy, because they never wanted such an apparent leftist to be the nominee of their party again. It’s the Democrat establishment’s version of “Screw-the-vote,” and it’s in clear evidence in 2016 in the race between Clinton and Sanders.

On the Republican side, a different methodology is used to obtain the same kind of result.  A myriad of candidates are inserted into the campaign to split and shape the results.  As they lose their utility in shaping the race, they’re withdrawn from the process.  This is why John Kasich remains in this race today, because he’s going to effectively siphon-off just enough delegates to make sure neither of the other two can obtain 1,237 delegates.  This will put the GOP establishment in the position of being able to negotiate with the candidates at the convention, probably even throughout the period between the last primary in early June, and the convention’s start in July.  By then, the delegate counts will be firmly known, and the deal-making will begin in earnest.  We will eventually discover who had been the better deal-maker, or if a deal had been reached at all, once the voting begins at the convention.  I would not be surprised to see a Trump-Kasich ticket emerge, with Kasich being the establishment’s lever in the supposed presidency of Donald Trump.

Whatever the case, you can bet that the GOP establishment will use a “contested convention” to set their hooks deeply into Donald Trump’s backside if he is to become the nominee.  The same is true if they were to instead broker a deal with Ted Cruz.  The basic idea here is that they will obtain certain policy concessions for the DC UniParty that will undermine whomever they ultimately decide to support in this process.  You can bet that this is where some form of “amnesty” will sneak in over the threshold, and you can expect to be thoroughly betrayed on this issue.  Whether it’s some sort of “touch-back amnesty” as Trump has previously suggested, or a “legalize-in-place-without-path-to-citizenship” as Cruz has previously advocated, you can bet the hooks will be set firmly.

The party establishments are firmly in control of their parties, and I detest the misleading comments of those who will tell you now that the “GOP establishment is dead.”  Nothing could be further from the truth, and they will never yield power in their party.  At best, they’re in hiding.  Should voters become so incensed at the process that they decide to form a new party, abandoning the GOP altogether, the GOP establishment will simply switch and work to co-opt the new party.  There is a vast political class of consultants, analysts, propagandists, public-relations pushers, and pollsters who cannot live without this process.  They’d be out of a job.  They are the folks most threatened by the two remaining Republican candidates, because either is likely to wipe out a good deal of this nonsense if they are able to obtain the nomination and win the presidency.

The Republican Party’s establishment is able to say “FU” to the voters and make it stick, certainly for now, and probably for as long as the Republican Party remains in existence. They control far too much of the process to ever be truly defeated on their own home turf.  Even Ronald Reagan discovered this as he found through the course of his presidency that he was being consistently opposed and undermined not just by Democrats like Ted Kennedy, but also from within his own administration through the establishment cronies tied to his Vice President.  If either Trump or Cruz manages to make a deal to get the nomination at a “contested convention,” you should know that exactly the same sort of thing will be in the offing, because the establishment isn’t giving up their power without a serious knock-down, drag-out fight.  We should be realistic about the betrayals that will attend any deal-making, and it’s why we must never forget that when they assert that it’s THEIR party, they aren’t lying.  It’s just that in most cases, they’re just as soon not point it out.  We should be prepared to exert our influence, to the degree we have any, with the candidate who they ultimately nominate, because the deal-making of the DC establishment is never in our favor. Never.

The Marginalization of American Conservatism

Wednesday, March 16th, 2016

conservatism_the_real_thing_ftThis is an issue that should concern all those who are fervent conservatives, and it’s one we must now confront as we near the end of the primary season of 2016.  In this election cycle, the predictable outcome seems more inevitable than ever, but one can’t ignore how the current GOP front-runner has at times scorned conservatism.  Much like the long-established practice of the blue-blood Republicans, what has happened in this election is that conservatism has become increasingly isolated from the remainder of the Republican party, and from the electorate at large.  This isn’t a pleasant reality for conservatives, but it is nevertheless true.  So long as we permit this to occur, we will never see the sort of electoral outcomes we would prefer, never mind the the realization of  substantive policy results for which we’ve been fierce advocates.  We have some terrible choices before us, but in advance of us making them, we must come to understand how we’ve arrived in our current predicament.  If we’re ever to return this nation to a constitutional path, we must do first by adhering to it ourselves, and we must be willing to accept our own role in our political misfortunes.  The truth is somewhat difficult to accept, but there it lies, nevertheless, awaiting the summoning our courage to confront it.  Conservatism is increasingly marginalized precisely because we have permitted its dilution and diminution through the acceptance of too many compromises of principles, and too many instances in which we were willing to form an ideological “big tent.”  There’s nothing wrong with building temporary alliances with others, but if conservatism doesn’t stake out its ideological limits, and defend its ideological boundaries, it will continue to be marginalized within the broader general electorate.

When George W. Bush ran for the office of President of the United States in 2000, not a few Texans had significant concerns.  Many who had observed his performance here in Texas took the time to try to warn the party at large that he was not really a conservative.  Bush tried to ply conservatives with a new formulation, calling himself a “compassionate conservative.”  There were a few problems with this that some of us at the time recognized, and one of them was in the implicit denigration of conservatism generally:  Conservatism is compassionate.  We need no such adjectives.  We need no such descriptors.  We need no such modifiers on what conservatism offers to its adherents.  Conservatism is the most compassionate ideology in existence, but by accepting the adjective offered by George W. Bush, we made what was tantamount to an admission that conservatism wasn’t inherently compassionate.

What conservatives across the nation soon discovered was the fact that “compassionate conservatism” meant “big-government Republican.” On issue after issue, from defense, to security, to education, to Medicare, or bank bail-outs, there was no issue in which the answer of George W. Bush would be anything other than the expansion of government and the increase of our national debt at the expense of generations as yet unborn.  It is true that Obama has essentially doubled the national debt, but we must in all honesty admit that the same can be said of George W. Bush.  The Bush “compassion” came at the expense of conservatism, and at the expense of our generations of Americans as yet unborn.  Nevertheless, we permitted Bush to fly the flag of a highly adulterated “conservatism” without respect to what the long-run affects on our movement would be.  Most of the conservative media spent much of the eight years of the Bush presidency, and much time well beyond their end, defending the ludicrous policies and positions of a conservative who wasn’t.

We’re seeing some of the same thing in the current election year.  Donald Trump talks about “common-sense” conservatism. I have exactly as many problems with this adjective tacked as a prefix to conservatism as I did to the term “compassionate.”  In fact, over time, there are or have been “Tea Party conservatives,” “reform conservatives,” “constitutional conservatives,” and “moderate conservatives,” but I think all these adjectives placed in series with “conservatism” simply dilute the meaning.  These modifiers also act as a disguise for that which is not conservatism.  Herein lies the problem for we conservatives, because I believe conservatism is inherently compassionate, wholly common-sense in its construction, and entirely committed to constitutional principles.  In other words, to attach any prefix to “conservatism” is to dilute and pollute the concept, or strictly to permit the purveyor to pose as a conservative while not adhering to all or part of the broader concept of conservatism.

The other effect of these bastardized versions of “conservatism” is that when people traveling under those phony banners continue to assert their hyphenated-conservatism, the natural result is that conservatism takes the blame for all the failures of those folk who are not conservative. For an example, consider again the “compassionate conservatism” of George W. Bush, this time in the context of the creation of the Transportation Security Administration(TSA,) and how he created a huge bureaucracy that increased the costs of government, but now, one-and-one-half decades later, we have another costly bureaucracy that fails to meet the security testing thrown at it just as badly or in many cases in worse fashion than the airlines-owned or airport-owned security that the TSA replaced. Again, another big-government solution that has failed, cost untold billions of dollars, and conservatives and conservatism are now permanently saddled with the blame, in large measure because a putative “conservative” enacted it.

This is the problem with letting others define “conservatism,” or letting non-conservatives decide who is or who isn’t a conservative.  “Conservatism” has become so generic and muddied at this point that it’s nearly impossible for us to in the first instance, exclude those who are not actual conservatives, and in the second instance, disclaim ownership of statist programs and policies enacted in the name of conservatism.  This is a gargantuan problem we face, and it helps explain why Donald Trump can make the point that “conservatives haven’t accomplished anything,” or that “conservatives are part of the problem.”  I think it’s time to heed the warning made explicit by this entire fiasco: We must make distinct our principles from the tawdry mix of self-contradictory, expediency-based lack of principle in the broader Republican party.

I don’t pretend to know the solution in this matter, but it’s one we conservatives must address. We’re being marginalized by virtue of a popular media meme, one that gains through our own passive associations with big-government Republicans, permitting them to shelter among us, gain our support, or in some cases, enjoy our defense of conservatism when they undertake less-than-conservative policies and programs.  This happens at all levels of government, but nowhere is it more damning and punishing than at the federal level.  Let us review briefly: In the aftermath of the 1998 mid-terms, the anti-Newt forces prevailed and essentially pushed him out of leadership.  Since that date, the Republican party, in various times controlling the House, the Senate, or the Presidency(and for some period, all three) have accomplished virtually nothing, but have frequently contributed to the statist cause.  The litany of issues and instances in which the Republican party has effectively aided and abetted Democrats in ruining our republic is gargantuan both in number and in consequence. We can no longer, not even once more, permit this to happen in the name of, or under the cover of another misappropriation of the title “conservatism.”

We Know Who Staged Chicago

Saturday, March 12th, 2016

lefty_thug_ftThe problem isn’t knowing who staged the “riot” at Trump’s UIC rally that was canceled.  That’s easy. The harder part would be to prove it.  What Americans need now to do is to put on their thinking caps.  It’s time to consider the real demons at work here, and what it is that they wished to accomplish with this debacle of Friday night.  Honestly, we all should have seen this coming.  Like seeing the foreshadowing in a movie or novel, but not quite recognizing it as a “tell,” we watched the whole week long as the media led us around by the nose, increasingly pushing the meme about Trump and the violence at his rallies.  We should have realized, in light of other inconvenient truths, that something big was coming.  When the GOP establishment cronies met at Sea Island last weekend to talk about how to stop Trump, we should have known it’s because they’ve become desperate.  Where did their desperation lead them?  What was the result?  Last night’s episode was a manufactured spectacle intended to push you, and you shouldn’t permit them to do this to you.  It’s your country, and you should be offended, and incensed, when the people running Washington DC try to manipulate you, your feelings, and your votes. We should ask, all of us, what Tammy Bruce asked in the wake of the events of last night, in a tweet:

Tammy has been a Cruz supporter throughout this campaign. For her to say this is not so odd, however, because she has experience as part of the leftist mobs.  She knows how these things work, because for a large part of her life, she was part of all of that. Later, she had an awakening, and it looks like she’s now recognized what so many of the rest of us have noticed: The GOP is behind this set-up, and there’s no way to un-notice it once you’ve seen it. Try this:

Re-play the last week of media coverage in your mind.  Looking back, wasn’t it obvious where this would go?  By the time we arrived at Thursday’s debate on CNN, with the moderators pushing the theme that Trump was inciting violence, shouldn’t we have known what to expect Friday evening?  The question remains: Who is behind this?  On the first level, it’s obvious as the day is long that this was a rent-a-mob cobbled together by the likes of Moveon.org and affiliated Occu-pests, Black Lives Matter, and all the other ugly little anarchistic groups of the rabid left, but that part is easy.  You don’t need to be a mystic to understand that much.  What’s more important is reading the signs of a coordinated attack that was contrived not by some organic left-wing movement, but one that was generated deep within the bowels of the DC UniParty, for a specific purpose.  What was the purpose?  I think I’ve covered that much, but if you’re not tracking just yet, think about how you were driven this week, “played” if you will, and coaxed and prodded in the direction of a singular impression: Trump incites violence.  Even if he says no word, his mere presence incites violence.  His simple existence promotes and provokes violence.  This is the seed they spent the whole week planting.  They wanted an impression created in your mind, a linkage if you prefer, that where Trump goes, trouble of the worst sort soon follows.

Who did this?  That’s easy too.  Look at the GOP establishment.  Admit what you’ve always known about the GOP establishment, when you’ve watched them coalesce with the Democrat establishment and the media organs that support one or the other, and frequently both.  They are a UniParty, and they’ve always been.  They’re the same globalist dirtbags, whether they happen to wear a “D” or an “R,” proudly displaying their Donkeys and Elephants for your deception.  Moveon.org is closely tied to George Soros and Hillary Clinton, but you already knew that.  What you may not have realized is that Hillary and those in the Democrat establishment are kissing cousins with the Republican establishment.  Yes, go find the stories on Jeb Bush and his awarding Hillary Clinton, and go find all the dirt that ties these people together.  Remember how curious it was what fast friends George HW Bush and Bill Clinton had become?  These people aren’t two distinct groups.  They’re one.  They are the DC UniParty that rules over us, and commits crimes against we, the American people.  Neither is this a “conspiracy theory.” It’s right out in the open, and if you will merely look, you can see it. You can know.

We are so thoroughly conditioned to see a “left” and a “right” and to think of them as warring parties that we assume the Democrat and Republican establishments are at war too.  Are they?  They agree on every policy. They form “GangsOf” six or eight or whatever might be needed to get their legislative agenda pushed through.  They use exactly the same tactics, and they espouse the same putrid ideas.  One wears the mask of the donkey in public, to control the grass-roots of the Democrat party, while the other wears the mask of the elephant in the open, to control the conservative base of the Republican party.  Cast aside everything you thought you knew about American politics for a moment, and re-order it all under this structure in your thinking about political machinations, past and present, and the scale of it all becomes quite clear.  With that clarity, apply it now to what you’ve seen recently, and suddenly, there isn’t a doubt in your mind about who is the establishment, or who comprises the DC UniParty.

With that new view of things in mind, and mindful of the meeting about stopping Trump in Sea Island, and the Thursday meetings between Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich, you should realize the scale of the coordination of all you’ve seen since.  That’s right, folks, they’re all in on it. Did you notice in the coverage of last night’s events, that one right after the next, Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich along with the UniParty’s media organs all said exactly the same thing?  They wanted you to know: If you choose Trump, this is what it’s going to be like, permanently.  They are driving you with your fear of chaos.  They’re using the chaos of last night in Chicago to drive you like bleating sheep, if only you will let them.

Every one of the three establishment candidates, and that’s what they are, if you hadn’t known it already, were in various ways trotted out before the viewers to express their sadness at the events in Chicago, but also to blame the victim, Donald Trump and his supporters, for creating an “atmosphere” or “environment” of violence.  If you can’t see this, please, please, if you’ve never considered seriously another thing I have written, realize that their manipulation of media was designed to create a singular impression, and that they may have at least temporarily succeeded with you.  Again, step back from what you think you have known, and look at it again in light of the idea of a DC UniParty with two heads but only one body.  Then consider again the events of Friday night, and know what it is you are facing.  Apply it.  Look at the events of even the last dozen years, things that had made no sense to you in the traditional left-right, Democrat-Republican, liberal-conservative paradigm you had accepted, and look again.

Do you wonder why they’re in favor of immigration reform that permits amnesty and legalization of the millions of illegals?  The Donkey-face tells the leftists “Hey, this is new voters for us.”  The Elephant-face says to its uncertain folk: “Hey, this is cheap labor.” Both implore their followers: “We’re a nation of immigrants…”  On social issues, isn’t it curious how the Elephant-face sells out conservatism?  On almost any issue, the Donkey-face urges its followers to accept “incrementalism.” Hasn’t it bothered you that a party that claims to be on the side “of the little guy” is every bit as much in bed, and in some cases more, with the powerful interests of Wall Street and K Street?  Both are willing to use our military as a force for the good they advocate, but not for the good of our country.  Is it odd to you that the Establishment Republicans on Capitol Hill have seemed less than fully serious in getting to the bottom of Benghazi, or the IRS’ Tea Party abuses?  Does it seem strange to you that both McCain and Romney virtually handed their respective elections to Obama, both with acts of despicable self-sabotage?  The truth is that they weren’t opponents to Obama at all.  These people are all on the same team.  Once you see that, there’s no unseeing it.  You can’t ignore it.  Spend a week or a month viewing things through this adjusted lens, and you will never again look at the world in the same way.

In truth, that’s been part of my own struggle.  I fall easily into the comfortable, well-worn path of the false dichotomy between the Democrats and Republicans.  After all, for all of my life, that’s the impression they’ve built, and quite successfully.  I have to stop myself on occasion, because I find myself wishing it weren’t true.  I find myself longing for a political environment that was in some way genuine.  It’s not. You should know why.  Our Federal Government spends over $4 Trillion annually now, and that’s a motive for any sort of murder and mayhem you might wish to imagine.  If you think that the control of such spoils couldn’t possibly lead to the establishment of such a cabal, ask yourself how many thugs are only too happy to kill you for your wallet.  What happens when more “civilized” thugs are presented with the temptations of billions or trillions of dollars?  What more motivation is needed?  Do you really believe these people are involved for love of country?  Do you think Mitch McConnell gives a damn about you or your liberty?  Do you think Harry Reid is doing what he does out of an abundance of concern for the future of the country? Do you think any of that is true?

Don’t look away in terror.  Confront it.  Know it.  If ever we are going to take our country back, it is from the DC UniParty’s grip that we must wrest it.  Friday night’s events in Chicago had been their doing, and for once, we ought to recognize it and finally disclaim it.

 

A Moment of Pause Regarding Trump’s Supporters

Monday, March 7th, 2016

trump_crowd_ftOne of the things that’s become increasingly annoying to me throughout the course of this campaign, and a thing to which I may have inadvertently contributed on an occasion or two, is the meme that’s been spread like a virus through the DC Beltway echo-chamber: “Trump’s supporters are…angry…stupid…racist…thoughtless…mean…ignorant…Kool-Aid-drinkers…” After watching the race unfold on the battlegrounds of Twitter, Facebook, and in the media at large, and having watched their portrayal in the establishment media, I am prepared to state unequivocally that this is nonsense.  The vast majority of his supporters are no more than one of those things, but more, I’d urge conservatives to ignore these media portrayals for one very important reason they may not have considered: Until recently, it had been we conservatives who had been attacked with these same portrayals.  I want you to stop and think about all the election campaigns in which the media, and the GOP establishment portrayed conservatives and Tea Party folk in the very same light.  We conservatives have a responsibility first to the truth, and the truth is that whatever we may think about Donald Trump, his supporters are now being painted with the same broad brush of infamy, and in the same broad strokes, by exactly the same people.

I know a fair number of Trump supporters, both in my circle of friends and associates, and also in my extended on-line family.  None of them fit the meme described above, except in one dimension, but it is the same dimension that has aptly described conservatives for most of a generation: They, as we, are angry with Washington and the seeming one-party establishment that is comprised of an elite media, elite Democrats, and elite Republicans who all hold any opposition in complete contempt.  I think this explains another phenomenon that is genuine, though less visible due to the media’s one-sided coverage: There are a number of Bernie Sanders’ supporters whose second choice is not Hillary Clinton, but amazingly, Donald Trump.  Why would this be?  Most of us have become so jaded about the dirty tricks in campaigns these days that it would be easy to dismiss this as more Democrat trickery.  Oddly, I don’t believe that’s actually the case here.  I believe it represents something much more fundamental, and infinitely more organic: Those who support Bernie Sanders are being undercut by the same Washington DC establishment uni-party, and they see in Trump somebody who has joined the fight against a common enemy.  When I talk to the rare Sanders supporter in my broadened local circle, what I find is that Sanders’ supporter share every bit as much of the same contempt for Hillary as conservatives feel for Mitt Romney, for instance.  This common ground with Trump supporters is an interesting, but I believe wholly organic outgrowth of an overwhelming sense of disgust in the nation with Washington DC and the two parties that together rule over us.

We conservatives have been led to believe by popular media that Trump’s support is a wholly-contrived exposition of Democrat tinkering, but while I’ve seen some evidence that this has been the case in pockets, the truth is that most Trump supporters I’ve had the chance to meet are perfectly sane, rational people who have decided something more compelling than the argument that their conservative principles ought to drive their choice.  It is their general argument that Trump represents a true outsider movement, in terms of the DC Beltway uni-party establishment.  They are prepared to temporarily lay aside their deeper convictions about the particulars of various issues in order to oust the uni-party crowd.  Despite my attachment to conservative principles, I know they have a very powerful point, and in truth, we might consider it thoroughly before rejecting it outright.

Here, I think they make an argument that is difficult to contest: As long as the DC-beltway crowd remains in singular, oligopolistic control of the narrative, the law, and the whole of our national machinery of governance, we will never reverse the direction of the country, and no conservative principles will ever be adopted in the halls of power in our nation’s capital.  Their argument is that in an emergency, you might well temporarily suspend your strictest adherence to your long-held principles in order that your principles be preserved at all.  In essence, they’re applying the legal concept of the “rule of necessity” to popular politics and political philosophy. Their argument therefore rests on the plausibility of the claim that we are in some sort of national emergency.  The question we must ask is “Are we?”

Our country is now twenty trillion dollars in operating debt.  We have unfunded liabilities of two-hundred trillion dollars.  We have a monetary system that has been corrupted to fund big government and big money on Wall Street with a cheap-money bubble that cannot and will not be sustained much longer.  Our borders are porous and present no serious impediment to criminals, terrorists, or any illegal entrants.  Our national security infrastructure is in a severe state of disrepair and neglect.  Our political elites continue to enjoy fabulous wealth largely on the basis of cronyism.  Average Americans are out of work, underemployed, or simply destitute as the people who run the DC uni-party continue to enjoy record profits on the backs of the rest of the country.  The crisis is surely real, and it is clear that their position is justified.

If their position is justified, so is their inflexible support of Donald Trump.  Their basic argument is that nobody who has been a part of the Beltway Bubble ought to be trusted in this critical moment for the Republic.  You might point to Ted Cruz as an outsider, as I have done, but let’s be blunt: Ted Cruz was a part of the team that argued on behalf of George W. Bush in the 2000 election.  Ted Cruz was a clerk for Chief Justice Rehnquist. Ted Cruz may be disliked by parts or even the entire parcel of the uni-party establishment, but the case can certainly be made in earnest that he is one of them, or has long operated among them.  The argument of Trump supporters is that none who have been a part of the DC Bubble ought to be president now, and that it’s too great an emergency in terms of our national future to permit any chance that we will, at this late date, be betrayed once again.

That’s a highly patriotic position to take, among people who are quite diverse in an ideological sense, and many of them have adopted it as the basis of a movement’s justification for accepting a candidate who many of them will readily admit is an imperfect vessel for their particular views.  One of the things that Trump’s supporters fervently believe is something that is quite attractive to many voters, including this conservative: Donald Trump is the only candidate on the ballot who can explode the DC establishment. He’s the only person among all the candidates with a clear-cut motive to unmask the uni-party establishment, to expose their serial crimes, and to prosecute them.  I think this is where much of the pro-Trump fervor originates, and I also believe it is where the GOP establishment’s shrill denouncements of Trump originate.  They are terrified of him, not merely because he would wrest control from them, but that he would be in a position to unmask their deals and extensive profiteering from government operations, and then prosecute them.

That’s a powerful motivation I would concede makes a very strong argument in favor of their position.  We conservatives have known for many years that the GOP’s establishment operates in general coordination with establishment Democrats and the media, and they’ve used that coordination against us in a myriad of situations over the last three decades.  Rather than joining the DC uni-party in decrying Trump’s supporters, we might reconsider and try to see them as allies, even if we believe their chosen candidate is less than perfect as the platform for our ideas, because many of them come from among our own number, but have merely decided that defeating the DC establishment is the only way we can ever win.  On that basis, if I’ve been dismissive of Trump supporters, I’d offer an earnest apology. I had believed the general meme of the DC establishment about your character, but having come to know some of your number, or having discovered some of your number among my friends, I’ve come to understand your earnest motives.

The problem with 2016’s primary season is that it has threatened to splinter the GOP’s broadest coalition forevermore, but in truth, if I am asked whether I would prefer that conservatives keep company with Trump’s supporters or those who cleave to the GOP’s establishment in Washington DC, it’s really a no-brainer: I prefer the broad coalition of Trumpsters to the snooty, elitist Bill Kristols of the world, and I make no bones about my own enmity for the uni-party establishment in Washington DC.  The Trumpsters make a compelling argument about the importance of truly rooting out cronyism and corruption in both parties in Washington DC, long before we can ever actually implement our principled stance on any particular issue. It’s true. We conservatives should pay first respect to the truth, and we should note that the same people who have defamed conservatives in one election after the other, or masqueraded as conservatives in one election after another, are the people who are now defaming Trump’s supporters, and it should give us pause.

Donald Trump’s “Nuclear Option”

Friday, March 4th, 2016

trump_nuke_gop_ftI would warn the stupid, vile Republican Party establishment to be careful about fooling around with the convention in Cleveland this Summer as the means by which to substitute one of their own for Donald Trump, should he remain the front-runner, and should he fail to obtain 1237 delegates or the eight-state majority-delegate needed to win the nomination.  I cannot deny that whatever else I may think about this race or Mr. Trump’s candidacy, I am enjoying the fact that the Republican establishment is now trotting-out, in full-on panic mode, failed presidential candidate Mitt Romney in the desperate hope that they can derail Mr. Trump.  The GOP establishment ought to take care in trying to rig a “contested convention” that includes tricks and deceit that will not only wreck the GOP’s presidential aspirations, but also will leave Donald Trump in the motivated position to deploy his nuclear option.

What could Trump do?  I urge Republicans on Capitol Hill to be wary of playing games with the nomination process. All four-hundred-thirty-five House seats are up for re-election in November, as are one-third of the one-hundred Senate seats.  While Trump certainly couldn’t possibly deploy a field of opponents for all the Republicans, particularly at that late date, there is something he could easily accomplishment that would rapidly wreck the GOP establishment’s day.

Mr. Trump’s supporters are very loyal, and while they may not be quite large enough to gain him all 1237 delegates needed to secure the nomination outright, they are more than large enough to swing Congressional elections by fifteen or twenty percent.  His supporters are angry, and they are right to be, as are all who have become disgusted by the feckless GOP.  If the GOP establishment tampers or tinkers with this nomination process, his coalition of independents, conservative blue-collar Democrats, and not a few fed-up conservative-to-moderate Republicans may make a complete wreckage of the Fall’s Congressional elections, and will easily help defeat the Republican’s Presidential nominee.

The Republican Party would deserve  it.  Trump is playing by the rules, at least to date, and those elected/former officials in the GOP who have said they won’t support Trump if he’s nominated have already provoked that response.  If they try to manipulate the nomination process in Cleveland, dismissing a Trump nomination if he obtains more delegates than any other candidate, but not the whole 1237 needed, his supporters may rage against the GOP machine, but if Trump joined the campaign trail against the GOP in September, October, and November, the GOP stands a strong chance of losing both Houses of Congress along with the White House and the Supreme Court.

This is Trump’s “nuclear option.” If the party tries to cheat him, I think he might rightly attempt to blow the party to tiny pieces, and at that point, I must admit that my sense of justice would convince me to help him.  One way or another, the GOP establishment needs to die.  If they arm Trump with the righteous sword of a vengeful  justice, they will have earned it.

Unequivocal Decision Point – No Advice Needed or Solicited from GOP Establishment

Thursday, March 3rd, 2016

romney_ug_ftI recognize that for many, 2016 has been the most confusing, confounding primary season in memory.  One of the things that I’ve always and forever detested is the Republican Establishment. Long time readers will know this has been the case.  In my most recent previous post, Stupor Tuesday, I explained why this race is now down to two men.  Ted Cruz and Donald Trump are the only viable campaigns remaining in 2016.  I have often stated in various places, both here and on Facebook and Twitter, that I don’t feel entirely comfortable with either of these candidates.  Let me state this clearly, and let me make it clear to all my readers, because whatever my issue-wise sympathies, the moment either of these candidates links up with the GOP establishment, or I am able to discern that either has linked-up with the party bosses, I will immediately support the other candidate in a all-out way.  I said yesterday on Twitter, half jokingly, the following:

You know how we conservatives are always miffed at GOPe for expecting us to join them, while they never join us? How stubborn are they?

In truth, I hope they’re stubborn as Hell. I hope they stubbornly stick to their guns and completely and utterly destroy the GOP as we’ve known it.  Their decades of intransigence, selling out the country with horrible trade deals to increase their personal treasuries and to extend their political influence while simultaneously ruining the country by giving away our sovereign power and our right to national self-determination has been a process that is absolutely despicable to me, and ought to be anathema to all Americans.  I don’t hate much in this world, in the true sense of the word, but the GOP establishment is one entity on this planet that collectively deserves all the contempt I can muster.  The fact of the matter is that the GOP establishment with all its gamesmanship aimed at subverting genuine, conscientious, sincere conservative activists to their purposes is simply an abomination.  I am not willing to side with the GOP establishment for the sake of one more election, under any circumstance. I am not willing to have them join with me because I know that will simply be their key to the front door through which they will slowly smuggle their agenda.

Today, Mitt Romney presented his statement on this election.  Let me make this clear: I don’t care what Romney says. Romney was a loser, and he was no friend to conservatives, and honestly, I don’t think he was a friend to our country’s future.  Trump says “he choked,” but I think it was worse than that. I think the GOP establishment wanted Obama to stay in office for a second term, so they could blame Obama and the Democrats for all of the statism and cronyism they’ve been perpetrating against us these last four years. Truly.  I think the GOP establishment in Washington DC has been sand-bagging the last four years and doing Obama’s bidding because it is what they and their wealthy donors, like the US Chamber of [Crony]Commerce have demanded. They tried to put the GangOf8 “Screw America Amnesty Bill” over on us, and they used Democrats to anchor a voting majority, and factually did so in the Senate.  In the House, under Boehner and Ryan, the party bosses have used a voting bloc comprised of a majority of Democrats and the RINO contingent to pass continuing resolutions, and other legislation that simply perpetuates the problem, with McConnell backing that effort in the Senate with the same strategy.  It’s disgusting. The GOP establishment is reprehensible, but now they want to pervert and twist the 2016 primary season more than they’ve already done. To the degree this is now a two-man race comprised of two “outsider” candidates, it is wholly due to the mismanagement and sedition of the Republican Party bosses, and an intractable DC establishment that hates conservatives, generally governing with contempt for them.

Let me explain something to you, my loyal readers who have hung in there over the years, particularly the last couple, when you had every reason to suspect I might never return: I love my country, as do you. As a young man, I spent much of my youth manning the defense of Europe from the Soviet Bloc when the matter was still very much in doubt, and our national security was very much at risk. I returned home when George H.W. Bush was taking the reins and making massive cuts to our defense infrastructure as part of a supposed “peace dividend,” a policy continued by his successor, Bill Clinton. What I discovered upon my return was that in my half-decade absence from my country, while serving as its instrument abroad, Ronald Reagan’s hopeful, courageous America was being replaced by a shrinking, tepid, but allegedly “kinder and gentler” America, suffering in the aftermath of a recession brought about in part by a broken “read my lips” promise.

Conservatism had seemed to be on the ascendancy throughout Reagan’s time in office, and many of us assumed, wrongly, that George Bush the elder would merely continue Reagan’s programs and policies. It was not the case.  It was he who caused the loss to Clinton in 1992, and it was in the same way that his son’s mismanagement of the government early in this century led to Barack Obama. I view the era from January 1989 through present as one unbroken string of Bush governance. Neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney put up much of a fight, the difference between them being that John McCain at least had a running mate in the person of Sarah Palin who did not want to stand down, and who did not want to yield. That’s the truth.

Over the last seven years, since Obama’s first term commenced in 2009, when Republicans had the power to fight, they laid down. We sent them help in 2010. In 2011, they failed us, and if you go back to the older posts on this site, you will see detailed in those posts the budget battles of 2011, and how the Republicans in the House under the leadership of John Boehner repeatedly failed us.  In 2012, we sent more help. There were some efforts, but then there were also those we had sent who betrayed us, such as Marco Rubio, among lesser lights.  In 2014, again, we sent more help, and no longer could Boehner claim “one-half of one-third of the government” as his excuse. Instead, in vote after vote, they engineered Obama legislative victories using a few hands-full of safe Republican RINOs in combination with almost all of the Democrats to give Obama whatever in Hell’s name he demanded.

Betrayed! That’s where we’ve been, and with few exceptions, that’s where we are. Now we sit in 2016 in the middle of the primary season, and again, the GOP establishment is trying to rig things, but failing that, if they don’t get a nominee acceptable to them, they are going to spike this election. Bill Kristol of WeeklyStandard fame has said he’d consider Hillary rather than voting for Trump. He’s an establishment hack, and if he wants to support Hillary, so be it, let him, but then let him leave also the Republican party, never to return. If the Republican party establishment does anything other than to support the nominee of the party to its fullest capacity, the Republican party will be killed-off in the aftermath.  Millions upon millions of long-time Republicans, conservatives, and undoubtedly, others in the broader Republican coalition will see to it.  We’ve had it with the GOP establishment.  It’s not their party any longer, and if we need to pry it from their [politically]”cold dead hands,” we will. The time of the DC Democrat/Republican uni-party is at an end, one way or another, and if it means the GOP must die to be reborn, so be it. If we must kill the GOP to rid ourselves of the DC establishment virus that infects the body of the Republican party, I stand ready to assist. If this election is lost due to the DC establishment malingering or sabotage, woe will become their constant companion, because we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt where the lines are drawn, and who is screwing whom.

In media, FoxNews is in trouble, and they know it. Ailes is reportedly apoplectic at the disclosure of his secret meeting with Rubio and other GangOf8 shills. The network’s ratings are in full-scale collapse, because they’ve been so pro-establishment for so long that given their wholesale marketing of Rubio, their audience has had enough.  They’re turning off FoxNews.  They’re fleeing the establishment mouthpieces.  It had gotten so bad that it’s become a running joke on Twitter, Facebook, and in the blogosphere that “No matter where Rubio finishes, He won, HE WON!”  Even Hannity is being openly mocked on Twitter. It’s been brutal for the semi-conservatives who have been carrying Rubio’s water on-air on FoxNews.

Based on all we now know, let me offer some advice to the two remaining viable candidates:

To both men, run from Mitt Romney. He’s a plague. Defeat is his constant companion, because his base of support is a uni-party establishment that many of the people in the Republican party have grown to hate. Run away from entanglements with the DC establishment. Such associations label a candidate as a doomed loser and a probable sell-out.  Flee like Lott, and don’t look back, lest you turn to a pillar of salt. We, the sane and patriotic people in the Republican party wish only to burn the establishment down. Don’t get caught in the flames. Others will.

To Donald Trump: Expand on the manner in which you presented yourself on the evening of your Super Tuesday wins. You will earn more credibility in the eyes of voters if you remain calm, cool, and Presidential. Stop scaring people with your rhetoric that seems even mildly threatening, specifically with respect to Americans(criminals notwithstanding.) Don’t threaten our constitutional protections, and please do more to explain the details of your programs and proposals. You terrify conservatives in many respects, because we don’t see many signs that you’re rooted in principle. The rank-and-file conservatives in the Republican party try very hard to live by principles as the guiding lights for their mortal lives. If you want to gain our support, particularly if you win the nomination, and wish not to have us sit out this election, you’ve got to begin engaging the issues from a principled position more frequently.  The whole discussion of healthcare is a good example of how you’ve horrified conservatives, many of whom believe you are in favor of something akin to single-payer healthcare.  That’s a euphemism for socialized medicine, and it’s a terrible failure providing rationing of even diagnostic and preventative care that leads to greater mortality rates for diseases that have much higher survival rates here in the US. I use this as an example, but the point is clear: Principles move conservatives; vague banter and platitudes will not. Take the US Constitution to heart, and conservatives may listen. Your press conference Tuesday was a good start in the right direction. Expand on that.

To Ted Cruz: You must run, in fact, flee in great haste, from all things establishment, and all things globalist in intent or origin.  Many conservatives fear that your history provides evidence of a too-close coziness with the Bush family, and while we understand that nobody in Republican politics in Texas over the last four decades can go far without knowing and relating in some manner to the Bush family, your connections to them could easily serve as an albatross around your neck in this election. Jealously guard American sovereignty, and prevent its usurpation by foreign powers and interests who do not hold the interests of the American people at heart. You have taken the position of reversing yourself on the TPP, but you must extend that opposition. The truth is that their can be no such thing as “free trade” with a people who are virtually enslaved.  We did not trade with the Soviet Union. We refused them, as we were right to do because we should never give the moral sanction of the veil of “free trade” to their human rights abuses.  China is no different, as their tanks in Tiananmen Square demonstrated, and their program of compulsory abortions proves.  Mexico is a cesspool run by an oligarchy that keeps its people in destitution. The American people are quite beyond tired of having a government represent interests other than those of the whole body of the American people in these deals, and no longer have confidence in our elected officials to do right by the American people. We need your unambiguous statement that you will pursue the interests of the American people, as the American people see them, but not as the establishment in DC decides they must be.

To both men, you must be faithful to your pledge to support the nominee of the Republican Party, and you must avoid entanglements with the GOP establishment at all costs. You must be and remain your own men, subservient to no hidden interests.  This, the American people can trust.  This, the American people will appreciate and respect.  If you do these things, the American people will be able to decide between you in earnest, without excessive rancor or discontent.  Unifying the party at the conclusion of this contest will be infinitely easier if the two of you set this example for those who are your supporters.  The Republican Party establishment will undoubtedly undertake tricks. Trotting out Mitt Romney is their desperate appeal for relevance and control.  They may even line up to endorse one or the other of you.  You must avoid connection with the party establishment at all cost.  We, the broad base of conservatism, view the establishment as the source of so many of our laments, losses, and general discontent over these last three decades, starting with the amnesty deal of 1986.

May the best man win, and win without the assistance, cooperation or coordination of the GOP establishment.

 

 

Stupor Tuesday

Tuesday, March 1st, 2016

cruz_v_trump_ftHere we are on another Super Tuesday election, and once again, there’s no clear answer to our troubles. Some things, however, do seem clear and unambiguous to me. Marco Rubio is unacceptable by any measure. His support of amnesty with the “GangOf8” immigration reform bill disqualifies in my view. There is no circumstance under which I could support Rubio.  Dr. Carson is finished, no matter how long he remains in the race. From here to the convention, I don’t think there’s any chance for his numbers to improve, and I don’t believe he’s a serious candidate.  Governor Kasich is running a pointless candidacy also, perhaps in some ways worse than Carson’s. Kasich should run for the exit, but he’s stubbornly remaining in the race so that he can be beaten in his home state of Ohio, perhaps slightly less thoroughly than Rubio will be flogged in his home state of Florida.  This leaves us with two remaining, plausible candidates.  At this point, considering any of the others is an exercise in futility.  I guess it comes down to what you believe, who you believe, and what it is that you think the election of 2016 will actually mean for the country.  This is where conservatives must wear their thinking caps and consider the whole of the race, and not just the immediate gratification of the primary vote.  It’s enough to make one consider intoxication as a potential antidote.  Myself, I’m in a bit of a stupor over it all.

Ted Cruz appears to be the most solidly conservative in the field.  He is not, however, without problems.  His support for increasing H1-B visas is very troubling to me, as is his support for fast-track authority(TPA) for the TPP for whomever may be sitting in the Oval Office.  There is no doubt that the TPP is a terrible deal for the American people, transferring wealth and sovereignty out of the country and essentially locking the US into a perpetual disadvantageous trade contract that imposes severe restrictions on our own economic independence.  I oppose the TPP for this and many more reasons, and I don’t understand why Senator Cruz, a self-professed “constitutional conservative,” would go along with such a deal.   I also don’t believe he’s been entirely honest with us about his role on the spiking of the “GangOf8” legislation.  It’s clear from video available that he wanted to do something (other than deportation) with the eleven or twelve million illegals(and I suspect many more) who “live in the shadows.”  All of these things are bothersome and worrisome to me.

Donald Trump has ever been a liberal, and in many respects, this makes him worse.  He’s also made a career of marketing himself like a carnival barker.  His failures over the course of his whole career are legion, but that in and of itself isn’t necessarily damning: At least he was willing to take risks.  The problem is that in so many of these cases, he took risks with other peoples’ money, and squandered it.  One might argue that this is the nature of business, just as one might argue that paying off politicians is just a part of doing business, but I don’t see how we’re any better off having the briber rather than the bribed running the country.  His position on social and moral issues certainly seems less than solid too.  His continued support for Planned Parenthood is quite troubling to me.  I also find his mouth to be a volcano of bilge, with cursing o’plenty, although it seems in the last week or so that he’s cleaned some of this up, perhaps in recognition that it hurts him. That makes me wonder if a victorious Trump would return to form soon after.  He has a long history of saying things that are despicable in any context in which I’d care to be included.  His talk about his sex-life and his descriptions of women, and all the rest of his endless, lifelong debauchery seems to me a disqualifying problem.  The New York Times, certainly not the most reliable source, implies that it has in its possession “off-the-record” taped conversations with Trump that may indicate that he’s a good deal more flexible on immigration than his campaign rhetoric indicates. As he explained to Hannity on Monday night, “everything is negotiable.” Many of his larger problems won’t be revealed, conveniently, until the Republican Party is saddled with him as their nominee, by which time he may be embroiled in court over a lawsuit against him and “Trump University.” Mostly, the problem with Donald Trump is that he hasn’t done or said anything to relieve me of the fear that he’s completely untrustworthy, not just on social issues, but primarily with respect to his signature issues on which he has provided little specific detail.

Let us conservatives accept from the outset that there are no perfect candidates.  Still, we should be able to discern who is more perfect.  We should be able to rely on their records. Others rely to some extent on the character of those who have endorsed these candidates, although I think in many cases, this has led to a wholly unsatisfactory outcome in many instances.  I can think of a dozen or more candidates the Tea Partys have been urged to support who upon election, turned out to be more of the same, and often pro-amnesty jerks.  Marco Rubio is a grand example of the type, but he is hardly the only one.  The truth is that conservatives have been betrayed in one form or fashion in election after election, to the extent that many of us feel shell-shocked by it.  On the one hand, we have a Republican establishment that is clearly a syndicate of global elitists, who will side with their cohorts in the Democrat Party to ruin and wreck conservatives any time we can manage to get a leg up, but on the other hand, we have a situation in which it seems that the mathematics give us just two plausible outcomes.

If Rubio, Kasich, and Carson remain in this race, it helps Trump. If they get out, it helps Cruz.  Rubio cannot and will not be the nominee. The math in no way supports him.  This leads one to question: “Why are these guys staying in, when none of the three have won a state, or even seriously threatened to win a state?” Now we get to the nub of the issue.  We have had it told to us all through this primary season debacle that Cruz and Trump(along with Carson) are the outsiders.  Is this really the case?  We’re told that Rubio is an establishment stooge, and it makes plenty of sense, right until you ask: “Why is Rubio still in this race?” No Republican who hasn’t won Iowa, New Hampshire, or South Carolina(first three contests) has ever gone on to win the nomination. History isn’t lying, so why is Rubio staying in?  It must be for another purpose, and I think we can take a reasonable guess at it.  Who is hurt by Rubio enduring in this race, and who is helped?  Based on the available polling data, there is a strong dislike of Trump in the Rubio camp. Cruz would likely capture something on the order of ninety percent or more of Rubio’s support, depending upon whose numbers you believe. In the Cruz camp, Rubio enjoys no such advantage. If Cruz were to exit, roughly half of his support would go to Trump and half to Rubio, with a few here and there for Kasich or Carson. What this means, in fact, is that the only two people presently having any chance at the Republican nomination are Trump, and Cruz.  This means that with every passing day in which Rubio, Kasich and Carson stay in this race, Trump becomes all the more inevitable.

With all of this in mind, we must ask reasonably once more: “Why is Rubio staying in?” It is the presumption of many that he is the “establishment track” candidate, but the GOP establishment isn’t going to back a guy they know has no chance of winning unless they’re using him to split the vote on behalf of a candidate they believe can win. Who would that be?  Cruz? Kasich? Carson? Or Trump?  Even if his financial backing flees, I suspect Rubio will stay around in order to secure a VP slot on somebody’s ticket.  I wonder who that might be.

Let’s look at that again: Trump has a long and storied history of supporting liberal Republicans and a whole host of Democrats.  If Rubio’s candidacy was genuinely anti-Trump, as he now pretends is the case, why would he stay in? In a head-to-head in Florida, Rubio loses to Trump, and Trump walks away with all ninety-nine delegates because it’s a winner-take-all state. Cruz, by contrast, could actually beat Trump in a head-to-head absent Rubio. That would give Cruz all the Florida delegates, and place him on the fast-track to the nomination.  What you can learn from all of this is that the people who are still bank-rolling Rubio via the SuperPACs aren’t doing so because they think Marco can win, but because they actually want Trump, and will use Rubio’s continuing presence to split up the vote that would otherwise go almost entirely to Cruz.

Do you see the point here? Given the nature of Donald Trump’s support from the endorser-class, one might have concluded he was the only genuine outsider, but the question we must now ask, as Rubio is being used as a lever to depress Cruz is: “Who is spoofing whom?”  I believe the real establishment candidate is he who benefits from the continued presence of somebody other than himself in the race. Who is that? Does Cruz benefit from Rubio, Kasich, or Carson remaining?  No.  Does Rubio benefit from Cruz, Carson, or Kasich remaining? No. Does Trump benefit from Cruz remaining in? No.  Does Trump benefit from Rubio, Kasich and Carson’s remaining in, so long as Cruz is an active candidate? YES!

There are only two viable candidates remaining in this race. I will not tell you how you ought to vote.  You’re all grown folk, and you hardly need me to offer you advice.  What I will tell you is that what I see implicit in the numbers is that Rubio, Kasich, and Carson are remaining solely to be spoilers.  The question must be only: “For whom?” Only Trump and Cruz have a shot at winning this race.  The question before you is whether you will a.)support Cruz, b.)support Trump, or c.)support one of the spoilers who gives/helps give it to Trump. Of course, you can also sit home. As I said, this has been a disturbing primary season, and any conservative would probably be somewhat justified if they wanted to just drink their frustrations away, but escape into an inebriated stupor won’t solve the problem.  Conservatives must now think, and think carefully, in order to choose.  Wait until the day after the general election in November to imbibe. By then, we may all need a drink.

 

Editor: This column was supposed to auto-post at 7am this morning, but for some reason failed. My apologies to readers. I usually vote on the way in to work, didn’t this morning, after work, my precinct ran out of ballots while in line, still waited 20 minutes after polls closed, fairly certain my precinct was strongly pro-Cruz.

Trump Hammers Cruz as “Maniac” But Looks The Part Himself

Tuesday, December 15th, 2015
Angry or Manic?

Angry or Manic?

Donald Trump had one heck of a weekend. First, he questioned Ted Cruz’s “evangelical” credentials, and went to great lengths to attack him on ethanol subsidies, pandering to Iowa voters.  As if this wasn’t enough, he actually asserted that Cruz was a maniac in the Senate, firmly ceding his own “outsider” credentials. Is this attack by Trump going to succeed, or is it, as Mark Levin said on the air Monday evening, a foolish move?  FoxNews is eating it up, because they hate both men.  To them, Trump is a maniac, but so is Ted Cruz.  They are considered “maniacs” by the FoxNews establishment crowd for different specific reasons, and I think it’s instructive to understand why this difference matters.  He even went on to join in a leftist attack on Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the few justices fighting to uphold the constitution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ahQ-BPFOiY

When Trump goes to great lengths to say “Cuba isn’t known for its evangelicals,” he’s taking a rather bigoted view of Cuba. Many Cuban exiles resumed their faith in full fervor after successfully leaving Cuba, and in fact, it was their faith, at least in part, that caused them to flee.  More, Trump has never been a friend to evangelicals, so what’s with the petty attack on Cruz on this basis?  Score one for Trump’s religious and ethnic bigotry.  Not only did he make [faulty] assumptions about Cubans and evangelicals, but he also made an assumption that this would play to Iowans.

Trump went on to point out to Iowans that Cruz opposed the ethanol subsidy.  I have news for you: Virtually everybody outside the corn-growing states oppose the ethanol subsidies, because frankly, it’s driving up the cost of food and fuel, as well as making a wreck of gasoline-burning power equipment, from automobiles to lawn-mowers to outboard motors. Even many within corn-growing states oppose the subsidies, because they have to pour this diluted gasoline in their cars and shop at grocery stores where every item that has corn as an input, from corn chips to corn-fed beef is inflating in price due to the use of corn in the production of ethanol.  This was a purely cynical attack intended to take advantage of Iowans by pandering to something peculiarly interesting to them.

What’s most disconcerting about Trump’s little rampage this past weekend is that the attacks he launched on Cruz were launched squarely from a leftward point of view.  I even observed Brit Hume, a notorious establishment shill, going on to attack Cruz on this basis, intimating that Iowans have a short time to discover the reason so many in the Senate don’t like Ted Cruz.  I don’t need Brit Hume to tell me, because I already know. It’s the same reason I supported Cruz in his Senate run against Texas RINO David Dewhurst, and also why people like Senators Lindsey Graham(R-NC) and John McCain(R-AZ) can’t stand Cruz: He’s willing to fight. They’re not.

The odd thing is that this may well backfire on Donald Trump, because up until now, he’s been running as an “outsider.” This series of attacks plays directly into the hands of the GOP establishment. Cruz has been no friend to the GOP establishment, and Iowans know it.  I’m not sure that Trump hasn’t sabotaged himself here, because his attacks on Cruz sound suspiciously similar to the attacks launch against Cruz by the DC insiders.  In so doing, Trump is eating into one of his few distinct virtues: He’s been the quintessential outsider,  at least until now, but with the latest series of attacks on Cruz from the left, he may be unintentionally ceding that ground to Cruz.  If so, Trump may come to lament this last weekend.  His attack on Antonin Scalia is perhaps the worst outlier of the weekend, because while one might rationalize his attacks on Cruz as just part of the political fight, but the attack on Scalia by going along with Jake Tapper was pure folly.  Scalia has been a leading light for constitutional conservatives for years, and this scurrilous attack on him by Trump is perhaps a bridge too far.  This speaks more to Trump’s own maniacal nature than to anything one might say about either Antonin Scalia or Ted Cruz.

As a purely political matter, Cruz ought to avoid being drawn into a knock-down, drag-out with Trump, because that’s where Trump excels.  Cruz is best in well-reasoned, well-controlled discourses when the tempo of the exchange supports close examination.  If Trump has any inkling of the misstep he may have taken over the weekend, he’ll reverse course on some of this as quick as he can.  Discerning conservatives and independents will notice that Trump really yielded some of his claim to being an outsider this weekend, and this may well cost Trump mightily.  If one considers that among the ‘outsiders,’ (Trump, Cruz, Carson, Fiorina) constitute nearly seventy percent of the support from Republican primary voters, Trump ought to think and think hard about yielding his position as outsider so easily.   The notion that Cruz is looked upon in a negative light by most of his Senate colleagues is not a bad thing, particularly in the vast expanse of the electorate between the coasts.  From the point of view of most Americans, most of the Senate is comprised of detestable Washington DC insiders who hold the American people in contempt.

The Republican candidates are scheduled to debate Tuesday night in Las Vegas.  It will be interesting to see whether Trump squanders his lead by continuing this line of attack, or whether he thinks better of it and resorts to more rational arguments that might appeal to conservatives.  To date, his one peculiar virtue had been his take-no-prisoners style of assault on the GOP establishment, but if he isn’t careful, he may well blow it.  The GOP establishment is only too happy to see Trump going after Cruz, and this could well be his undoing with the Republican base.

 

 

 

Why I Like Donald Trump

Saturday, December 12th, 2015
Hamming it up

Hamming it up

I like the mockery Donald Trump has been making of a goodly portion of the establishment of the Republican Party.  They deserve it.  I love the fact that he’s driving the media berserk.  After ten minutes of watching almost any news network on TV, one is left with the impression that Donald Trump is somewhere between evil genius and outright loon.  Trump is a shrewd media manipulator, but I still don’t know anything concrete about what he believes.  I can’t identify a consistent ideology much beyond “what will get me the most press right now.”  Still, despite all his philosophical and ideological shortcomings, one can’t help but love to watch the way he drives the Washington DC, insider cartel absolutely crazy. Despite the gnashing of teeth from within the Beltway, the American people are eating it up, with each episode gaining him ground.  I understand it.  America is looking for a leader like George C. Scott’s portrayal of General George S. Patton: No nonsense, a bit of bravado, and an unambiguous statement of the goal, without worrying about who may be offended.  How many times have conservatives lamented the lack of bluntness?  Still, this cannot be the sole criteria by which we choose our president, any more than a sunny disposition can be the sole criteria for choosing one’s doctor.  We need much more.

Trump’s entire campaign seems to hang on the catch-phrase “making America great again.” That’s all well and good, and I very much enjoy that process, like most conservatives, but I’m not sure I understand what Donald Trump thinks made America great in the first place.  Listening to him, there’s no evidence that he’s for any reduction in the size and cost of government, yet I believe part of what made America great was economic freedom, and it has been only in the progressive, statist era that America’s true greatness reached its apogee and began again to wane.   I’m not sure Mr. Trump sees it quite that way.  The problem is that by reducing everything to a slogan about “making America great again,” I’ve not heard too many specific details, and the few I’ve heard thus far are less than inspiring.  For instance, Mr. Trump is for a single-payer healthcare system!  If there is anything that has helped America to begin losing its standing and financial stability in the world, it is the increasing socialization of our medical care and insurance schemes since the late 1960s.  More. the dependency-creating welfare-state of which a single-payer system would be an integral unit is part of what is destroying America’s greatness, so I don’t understand Trump’s logical [in]consistency.

In point of fact, Trump is not conservative, but then most Republicans claiming that label don’t really deserve to wear it.  Jeb Bush said famously “I used to be a conservative,” but Rubio, Christie, Kasich and a lengthy list of the others are not conservatives either.  In fact, I think the closest things to genuine conservatives we have in this race for the nomination are senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul.  Huckaby and Santorum might make legitimate claims to a fair piece of social conservatism, but in terms of economics and finance, I don’t believe either of them is overwhelmingly conservative by accounting of their actual political records.  Dr. Ben Carson is a brilliant, amiable man, who I like very much, but who also probably isn’t ready to be President of the United States.  The point is that we can’t throw out Trump for his lack of conservatism unless we’re also willing to discard Rubio, Christie, Kasich, Huckaby, Santorum, Lindsey Graham(who I would not support for dog catcher in Tumbleweed, Arizona,)  or Carly Fiorina, none of whom are particularly conservative, or worse, are simply establishment hacks. For my part, I’m willing to discard them, and indeed, I’m will also to discard Trump because what I’ve discovered is that Mr. Trump simply hasn’t formulated what I would consider to be a self-consistent plan that exhibits any detailed understanding of how to “make America great again.”  Of course, that doesn’t make him any worse than the laundry-list of folks noted above, but it should give pause to those who are rushing off to support him.

I like Trump’s energy.  I wish it were more focused.  I like his general notion about “making America great again,” because I believe it’s something that could be accomplished, but I haven’t seen any evidence that he has a plan to accomplish it in any plausible manner.  I like that he comes up with short-run, topical slogans, because that’s always easy for voters to digest and understand, but I detest the fact that he seems to stop at the slogan-formulation stage, and never brings any substantive plans along by which these slogans are to be realized.  In short, he’s a lot of huff and puff, but no stuff.  There’s no there there.

On the other hand, Trump has staked out a number of positions I consider to be abominable.  The single-payer healthcare business he supported through the 90s is among them, but I’ve also noted with chagrin that Trump supports the Supreme Court decision in Kelo, in which eminent domain was used to condemn homes and property for use in commercial developments.  His general disrespect for private property rights and his use of government to take what he wants ought to serve as a cautionary note to anyone who considers supporting him for President. Remember this:

These are just two highlights among a lengthy list of deficiencies.  Still, it is entertaining to watch the Republican establishment and its slate of candidates from Jeb to Marco lose their minds over Trump.  Trump may entertain me, and I truly enjoy watching the likes of Jeb Bush lose his cool, and to watch the entire Democrat Party membership go crazy, calling him “Hitler” and so on.  Perhaps they should call him “FDR” instead. Franklin Roosevelt interred Japanese for the duration of the war, most of them US citizens!  Watching the media, especially FoxNews, obsessing over Trump makes me laugh.  Megyn Kelly’s semi-pseudo-exasperation over the media’s obsession(and eye-rolling, on-air confessions of the same at her own network) tickle me pink.  Her assault on Trump:

Megyn asks Donald about his Republican credentials:

The GOP establishment’s media harpy is hilarious when she loses her mind over Trump.  Trump apparently agrees:

Of course, FoxNews acts as a megaphone for the establishment wing of the GOP:

My point, lost in the haze of Donald Trump’s bombast, is that while he is highly entertaining to watch, and while I heartily enjoy seeing the DC beltway cartel lose their minds over his politically-incorrect remarks and comments, I don’t believe he has the philosophical consistency for which I’m looking in a President, and I also don’t believe his overall record on areas of significance are in any way in accord with conservative thought. His views on eminent domain are in accord with the Supreme Court, but in the current context, that means they’re anathema to traditional Americans principles and values.

Still, a conservative must take a certain amount of pleasure in the GOP establishment having been driven to plotting over measures to stave off a Trump nomination by setting aside any Trump electoral success through the use of a brokered convention.  That anybody drives the party “blue-bloods” to this level of terror is absolutely a fascinating occasion I wholly endorse…but I still can’t vote for him.

Governor Palin: “Stop Electing Republicans who Act Like Democrats”

Wednesday, June 25th, 2014

We must break up the GOP establishment

Governor Palin is right, and I’m inclined to act on the principle that there is nothing to be gained by compromise with the GOP establishment.  I am to the point where I’d rather have an open leftist elected to office than to see one more of these despicable, snake-in-the-grass RINOs who act like Democrats when they get to Washington DC anyway.  Here’s Governor Palin from Hannity on FNC last night:

GOP Mafia Produces Cochran Win in Mississippi

Wednesday, June 25th, 2014

Haley’s Helot

There really is something deeply wrong with the GOP establishment, and as nearly all conservatives have always suspected, it’s this: Despite all of the GOP establishment’s haughty talk about moderation, they are willing to do anything, no matter how repulsive, to achieve their political ends in order to maintain power.  In Mississippi, Thad Cochran held onto his seat by the slimmest of margins over conservative Chris McDaniels.  Had there not been a laundry list of out-of-state, center-left interests pouring money in on Cochran’s behalf, this race would have come out differently, but what I want dispirited conservatives to know is that despite the loss, you won.  It might be hard to see at the moment, but there’s really something to be said for your accomplishments in this race.  The truth is now plain to see, and for those who doubted it before, the veil should now be thoroughly lifted:  The GOP establishment is comprised of a mafia-like element that will use any tactic necessary to keep its scumbags in office, and in this election, it was revealed in full, but this was only possible because conservatives pushed them to the brink.

Thad Cochran has been in political office nearly all of my life.  Now he faces an election for a seventh term, and if he succeeds, he will have served in the US Senate for forty-two years by the time the new term expires.  This is despicable.  What makes it all the more disgusting is the manner of his primary victory.  He did not win on the strength of his record, which is sorely lacking.  He did not win on the merits of his legislative proposals.  He did not win because Republicans in his state favor him.  He did not win even because Republican voters though McDaniels was an inferior candidate.  No, he won on the strength of contributions from his center-left connections, shady endorsements, and because his campaign’s proxies illegally urged Democrats to cross over and vote for him in the Republican primary.  They gave “walking-around money” to would-be Democrat voters, and they basically called McDaniels and the TEA Party “racists” who were out to get Barack Obama. Take a look at this flier, circulated prior to the primary run-off(H/T John Fund at NRO):

Despicable Cochran flier that circulated days before the run-off

Let me say this clearly.  Thad Cochran is a scumbag, and that he would employ such an outrageous tactic merely speaks to his unfitness for office.  Were I a Mississippi conservative, there is no way I would vote to re-elect this dirtball.  Instead, I would vote for the Democrat.  You might ask: “But Mark, if the Democrat is elected, we might not retake the Senate,” to which I must respond with a question: “We?”  Who comprises any “we” in any of this?  It is not Republicans and conservatives.  It is not TEA Party and constitutionalists.  The only “we” who will run the Senate, even if the Republicans win a majority in 2014 is the GOP establishment mafia.  I’d like Mississippi conservatives to think about that.

Haley Barbour and his extended gang, including Michael Bloomberg, Karl Rove, the Chamber of Commerce, a Facebook executive, and a legion of GOP establishment thugs were willing to use ginned-up Democrat support to steal this seat away from Mississippi conservatives.  Mississippi conservatives and TEA Party activists should know that there can be no restoration of the constitutional government they hope to promote so long as a gang of criminal cronies own their Senator.  The worst of it may have been the last-minute use of a sickening tactic of soliciting Democrats to support Cochran even if they would not vote for him in the Fall.

Listen to the following recording for a sample of what establishment Republicans(!) did to secure victory:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpp6cYZrrcs]

This call went out to black Democrats to get them to vote in the Republican primary.

This is the establishment of the Republican Party.  They’re every bit the statist, mafia-like dirtbags the Democrats are, and as you can see, they will work with Democrats whenever necessary to maintain their grip on power.   What is my suggestion to the conservatives and TEA Party folk in Mississippi?  Either run McDaniels as an independent in November, or simply go out to support the Democrat.  Yes, I actually suggest supporting the Democrat, because since Cochran is willing to invite Democrats into the primary campaign, Mississippi conservatives should turn the table on him and give him a dose of his own medicine.  Yes, this means the Democrat will sit in office for six years, but to quote Hillary Clinton, “what difference does it make?”  You now have a six-term RINO running for a seventh term who is firmly in Haley Barbour’s and Karl Rove’s pocket.  This November, for much the same reasons, I am voting for anybody but the RINO liar John Cornyn(R-TX.)  If we’re going to take our country back, we’ll first need to surrender a few things, and in this case, it means giving up the illusion of a Republican-led Senate that wouldn’t be the least bit conservative anyway.

IRS Scandal Follow-up: The Show Must Go On

Sunday, June 22nd, 2014

…But nobody actually asked Koskinen about the Sonasoft contract. Wonder why?

On Saturday, it was revealed that the IRS has been contracting with Sonasoft for the back-up of emails since 2005, and indeed, looking at Sonasoft’s clients list, listed there is the Internal Revenue Service.  Adding to my list of things about which the Republicans should seek testimony (if they’re serious,) the specific details of the performance requirements of this contract must now be considered.  Undoubtedly, in soliciting bids for back-ups, there must have been a policy for back-ups the bidder must have been prepared to fulfill.  These details would have been dominated by a records retention schedule that would have been designed to comply with statutory minimums. In any event, such a contract would have been carefully vetted for specific performance requirements, the methodology by which performance could be verified, and the chain of responsibility for those on the government side of the contract to make sure performance was fulfilled, or to seek remediation if the requirements were not met.  There would be a schedule of audits of the performance, and there should be no excuse for pretending somebody hadn’t known their specific duties, on either side of the contract. Here’s the point: We very likely have an organized criminal conspiracy, and if the Republicans don’t begin to immediately turn over rocks to find the culprits, the evidence will be destroyed, but that may be precisely what the GOP leadership wants.

People continue to question whether I’ve entered the realm of “tinfoil-hat-wearing” conspiracy kooks, because I doubt the seriousness of the intent of the House Republican leadership in pursuing this scandal.  After all, they ask, why would the Republicans seek to cover the scandal?  Let’s be blunt, shall we?  As long as this scandal has been going on without serious investigation, how much evidence has been destroyed in the interim?  It is true that if there is a cover-up, there will always be some evidence of that, because it’s impossible to completely cover the tracks of what has been done.  Permitting a delay of the investigation would allow the culprits to destroy the evidence so that any crimes perpetrated in the original scandal would be hard to substantiate to the satisfaction of a jury, or an impeachment proceeding, even if the evidence of a cover-up would be harder to conceal.  In the end, however, let us imagine that there had been a few Republicans who had wanted to hammer the TEA Party, like John Boehner, or Mitch McConnell.  They’ve said as much in open contempt for the TEA Party.  By permitting the administration and its lackeys to destroy evidence, the evidence of their own complicity would be hidden too, and all that would remain are the allegations and evidence of a cover-up of something, in which the Republican leadership would not be implicated.  After all, they’ve been conducting an investigation, right?

If this sounds too conspiratorial to you, consider that these are the same people who invented voting for a thing before voting against it.  John Cornyn had no problem voting for cloture on the Senate Amnesty bill last year before coming home to Texas to tell voters he had voted against the final bill, which he had.  He repeated the procedure at the time of the government shutdown last October, again voting to bring the bill for a vote, so that he could vote against it thereby claiming “conservative credentials” all the while have enabled the bill to see the light of day in the first place.  They bank on we voters remaining largely ignorant of their scandalous manipulations, so that a less-than-vigorous investigation wouldn’t provide much of a surprise. By the way, and by way of evidence of the establishment’s thesis in operation, John Cornyn won his primary by pretending to be a conservative while relying on the longterm detachment and ignorance of voters.  Still, roughly forty percent of the Republican electorate in Texas was able to see through his nonsense, but not enough to replace him as our Senator.

My point to you is this: It may be too late to salvage the data, because this has been left withering on the vine for much too long.  The list of particulars I provided yesterday should have been exercised more than two years ago, and it should have been done with vigor.  If there is no active complicity by Republican leadership, there is at least gross incompetence verging on the criminally negligent.  Are we to believe that none of the people in leadership had any idea, and that none of their staff had any idea how to approach such a scandal?  Are we to believe they had no access to any person with sufficient technical understanding who would have apprised them of the sort of things that would need to have been done to “disappear” such data?  Are we to believe that those who were conducting the preliminary investigations on behalf of House committees could not imagine to immediately contact people specializing in data recovery?  Why has it taken until yesterday to discover that the IRS had contracted with Sonasoft?  What were these investigators investigating?  Didn’t they look at the IT expenditures and contracts of the IRS for clues?  You see, once you consider all of this, it’s easier to understand how an observer could reasonably conclude that the Republicans didn’t want to investigate, and having been forced into it by public pressure, have done a half-hearted job of it.

How can we be nearly three years into this investigation, and we’re only now finding there had been a back-up company contracted?  I will not be surprised to learn that the IRS contract with Sonasoft required them to hold emails for a period of only three years, so that by now, Lois Lerner’s emails have fallen off the archive due to age.  A serious investigation would have immediately discovered the existence of a contract with Sonasoft, and those records could have been pulled three years ago.  What will we get as a result?  At best, some underlings who were a part of the cover-up will be burned, but the chain of command to the top will be obfuscated, and then we will get some dog-and-pony IRS Reform bill that will require the agency from this date forward to maintain all emails for ten years, or some such thing.  Then it will all go away, and the original participants in the scandal of targeting TEA Party groups and their members will be forgotten, and life will go on in Washington DC, with we being the only victims, now poorer and less free, and deprived of justice.

The questions I’ve posed over the last thirty-six hours are the sort I would expect of a serious investigation.  To date, we’ve had a lot of finger-waggling by Republicans asking questions of witnesses, but we’ve gotten no meat from these bones.  Certainly, it does not help that we have a Department of Justice that is led by a crook and crony, and it does not help that the media covers everything up on behalf of this administration, but if the Republicans had been serious about getting to the bottom of this scandal, they would have taken significantly more exhaustive steps by now, but to date, all they’ve done is generate ominous soundbites that tend to feed the red-meat aspects of politics, yet have resulted in no arrests, no indictments, and no justice.  In three years?  This scandal is well on its way to becoming a cold case, and that’s just how Washington DC likes it.

Update: The Daily Caller reports that the IRS cancelled its Sonasoft contract only weeks after Lois Lerner’s hard-drive “crash.”

John Boehner’s Dog and Pony Show

Saturday, June 21st, 2014

On Friday, the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives continued its wholly political, and ultimately theatrical investigation of the IRS Tea Party-targeting scandal.  Chairman Dave Camp’s(R-MI) committee brought current IRS Commissioner John Koskinen before the committee to testify as to the loss of Lois Lerner’s emails, among other misdeeds.  You may argue that Paul Ryan(R-WI) was very aggressive in his examination of the witness, but that entire exchange was mere political theater that will evince nothing at the end of the investigation.  Had the Republicans in Congress the first inclination to get to the bottom of this scandal, they would begin by taking the following series of steps:

  1.  Bring before the committee the entire IT staff that supports the IRS, particularly its executives.
  2. Audit the purchase records and replacement schedule of equipment used to support Lois Lerner’s computer usage. Congress should want to know how old her computer had been when the hard disk “died.”
  3. Require IT staff managers to testify as to the method of email archiving, email storage, email backups, and the entire email system used by the IRS.
  4. Seek a federal court order requiring the production of all existing equipment that is currently, or has ever been in use by the IRS in storing email,over the period of the last six years, including particularly SAN devices and servers.
  5. Seek a federal court order requiring the immediate production of all backup media on which IRS files and email may have been copied.
  6. Form a select committee with broad investigatory powers to pursue the entirety of this affair, particularly with an eye toward fraud, destruction of government records and data, as well as political influences brought to bear on the IRS from any branch of government or outside interest groups.
  7. Bring in experts to audit access records for servers and storage devices to discover when anybody interacted with the equipment in question. These devices and servers maintain extensive logs of the commands issued from administrators. Knowing who did what will be a key to cracking this case. The government may well have logging servers to which all events are reported.

For those of you who are less than technically inclined, I will be glad to explain to you why this whole “lost hard drive” claim is a dodge, and for those who may have less than a strong understanding of the politics, I’ll be glad to explain to you how I know the Republicans are playing a game for show, but do not want the truth to come out.

As an information systems professional, who works with storage systems, backup systems, networks, servers, and workstations every day, and who works with the applications and databases which is the purpose of all of that lovely, grotesquely expensive equipment, let me tell you a few things you won’t read in the media.  You might even take a moment to learn a bit more about your own computer.

First, the email system the IRS uses is almost certainly an IMAP or MAPI variant.  This means that on the most basic level, emails are not stored on the client, except as a temporarily cached copy.  Deleting it may cause the email to appear deleted for that user, but the mail archiving functionality will maintain a copy for a period as prescribed by policy, usually determined in applicable statutes and regulations. Most corporate and government environments will not even permit users to store mail in local folders(email folders solely on your local computer) unless they are first archived in the email archiving system, which is generally part of the same overall system. Nevertheless, examining the event viewer in Windows will offer some insight into what may or may not have been done on a given workstation or server. Linux and other operating systems have similar logging facilities.  (If you have Windows, you can get an idea by going to your Control Panel, then to Administrative Tools, and Event Viewer. You will be surprised what you can learn about your computer’s routine operations.)

In the second place, the number of servers used for an email system to support an organization the size of the IRS must be quite large.  It undoubtedly consists of multiple servers, at multiple server farms, in a redundant scheme of some sort intended to prevent the loss of data.  You, the taxpayer, has spent billions upon billions since the advent of email to provide these facilities for our federal bureaucracy.

Third, since email storage in such an environment is bound to be monumental in scale, there are undoubtedly many storage blades of some form, probably Storage Area Networks(SANs) to handle the storage needs of the mail system servers.  These are also geographically dispersed for reasons of data security, and what you should know about these technologies is that if your Storage Administrators are doing their jobs, there is virtually no credible fashion in which data of this sort could be lost simply because somebody’s office computer’s hard disk died.

To put it in context, consider one of the leading manufacturer’s systems.  Called an ISE2, it’s made by X-IO and it can contain two datapacs that contain what are essentially a stack of hard disks that are effectively “self-healing,” and in common usage, contain more than fourteen terabytes of data in each datapac.  By design, such a device already creates a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks(RAID) by virtue of its design, permitting the administrator to choose either RAID 1(mirroring) or RAID 5(a form of quasi-mirroring).  The way these devices are used is to create storage volumes in the datapacs and attach those volumes to servers.  They can be swapped in and out, and they can be mirrored as individual entities across other devices.  The servers in question see these volumes as hard-drives, and in effect, they function in precisely that manner.    I would be stunned to find that the US Federal government is not using such an arrangement, whomever the vendor, and there are many.  Chances are high that wherever the server farm is that operates the IRS email system, there are likely to be many SAN units, or other storage containers that have similar functionality.

Putting of all of this into simplest terms, the series of failures that would be required to disappear Lois Lerner’s emails, along with those of six other IRS executives, is an astonishing string of virtual impossibilities and displays of incompetence and malfeasance that should result in the ouster of every IT manager supporting the IRS.  It’s not that I don’t believe there are incompetents working in government, or that I don’t believe there are some slothful folk administering systems for the IRS, but that the totality of this loss of data represents a complete failure at virtually every level and every step of the organization.  Even in a clunky, bureaucratic, top-heavy organization like the IRS, there are still some competent people who keep it working despite all the obstacles placed in their way. The manner in which their storage systems and server farms are designed tends to preclude the chance that something so seemingly innocuous as the loss of one person’s email(or seven) is even a remote possibility.

Knowing how such systems work, and knowing that the government spends more money on the core computing technology than any entity on the planet, their claim to have lost the email due to a hard drive failure on a client machine is an absolute farce.  To claim even that no data was recoverable on that hard drive is pretty hard to believe too, since I’ve seen data recovered from hard disks that have been in computers essentially destroyed by fires.  In fact, given the nature of the data I have handled over the course of my computing career, it is common that when a computer reaches the end of its service life, organizations resell the computers but strip the hard drives out of them for mechanical destruction so that no data may be recovered from them. (In many cases, this involves drilling holes through the platters, using a cutting torch, or other methodology designed to destroy the actual storage media in the drive, which is generally very hard metal platters.)

All of that doesn’t matter in the least, however, as the servers and archive servers and storage devices in the systems are apt to have contained one or more(probably many more) copies of the target emails. Then there are backup tapes or other backup devices. No, ladies and gentlemen, if the administration’s hacks like Mr. Koskinen come forward to tell you in smug tones that the data was irretrievably lost, they are lying.  It may have been irretrievably destroyed, but that would require a conspiracy because no one computer technician could possibly have access to all the relevant systems in an organization so large.

The technician who was responsible for maintaining and repairing Lois Lerner’s computer is not the same technician who administers the email system.  That administrator is not the same person who operates and maintains the bulk data storage containers, nor is that the same person who operates all backups and certainly not the same person who maintains and administers the network on which all of this computing takes place.  It’s not plausible in an organization the size of the IRS.  In many cases, data is duplicated and moved off-site for disaster recovery purposes.  No, if this data is unrecoverable, it is because it was ordered to be placed in that state.  Knowing this, and knowing what would be entailed in literally destroying any trace of these emails, I can only conclude that this administration is lying, and is an active participant in a criminal conspiracy and cover-up of crimes that would tend to place Lerner and her superiors in jeopardy of long jail terms, and this president in the direct path of impeachment proceedings.

At the beginning of this article, I explained to you that I believed that the claim about the emails being “lost” is nonsense, and a lie.  I hope I’ve managed to illuminate a few of the reasons why you should not believe such claims, but I also contended that you should not believe that the Republicans are very serious about uncovering the truth, despite their harrumphing to the contrary.   You see, if the Republicans in Congress were serious about all of this, they would issue subpoenas to the entire IT staff.  They would drag them in, one at a time, starting at the top, and working their way down to the lowest technician.  They would have questions, specific technical questions, prepared for them by people like me, or actually those rare birds who designed such systems, and they would begin the grilling.  Under oath.  Somebody would crack.  A lie of this sort cannot be hidden if there is a consistent and tireless effort to uncover it.

The problem may be that to uncover Lois Lerner’s email would reveal something no Representative in that committee hearing room wants you to know:  Lerner may have been receiving emails from both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill urging audits and investigations into Tea Party groups.  The IRS was used in this instance to quell a peaceful, political uprising by making the formation of a group so painful and problematic as to frustrate into capitulation all but the most insistent and persistent persons.  The Republicans tried first to co-opt the Tea Party phenomenon, making it their own, but when they found they were unable to control the myriad of organizations springing to life around the country, their next motive was to destroy it because they posed a serious challenge to the orthodoxy of establishment power in Washington DC.  Most Republicans in Washington DC want the Tea Party buried, some of them more fervently even than the Democrats.

If the Republicans in the House cannot muster a select committee to look into this and other matters of extreme government corruption, it is only because they do no want the truth discovered.  If they will not bring an endless string of witnesses to testify as to their role in the email “losses” and the system design of the email and data facilities of the IRS, then they don’t want an answer.  Paul Ryan and others can put on one Hell of a show in the committee room, but the truth is that saying “I don’t believe you” in an exchange with an IRS commissioner isn’t going to turn over many stones.  If you want the truth, you bring in the subject matter experts and responsible parties, and you grill them and continue to remind them of their oaths.  At some point, some junior flunky intern who was told to ditch a hard disk in the Potomac is going to squeal, because he doesn’t want to go to prison.  Then you bring back the person who gave him that order, and then the person who issued that order from higher on the food chain.   Work your way down to get them on the record, until somebody cracks, and then work your way back up, exposing lies until the scheme is revealed in full.

If the Congress won’t do this, they’re not serious about the matter.  It suggests strongly that they don’t want the truth revealed any more than the administration.  There are plenty of smart people on Capitol Hill, and they have plenty of contacts who understand such systems and could provide technical advice both in the formation of questions and in the manner by which to challenge the credibility of the answers.  Those behind this atrocious abuse of government power must be held accountable and jailed for their crimes.  Make no mistake about it: Grievous crimes were committed both as a part of the targeting, as well as during this extended cover-up.  If the Republicans now fail to uncover those crimes and see this investigatory process through to a just ending, you can be sure that they hadn’t wanted the truth to be discovered, because their fingerprints are all over this too.

 

 

 

House Leadership Plotting GOP Defeat

Sunday, April 27th, 2014

Welcome Aboard!

They intend to shove an immigration bill through the House this summer.  They’re aiming for August, with the intention of pushing this through while the nation is busy with summer vacations and the return of  its children to school. It’s diabolical to the degree that I now believe John Boehner and Eric Cantor are simply wolves wearing wool. Years ago, I asked my readers to consider whether Obama was merely incompetent, or instead a malevolent actor who was following a script of purposeful destruction.  Now I ask you to consider: Can this be coincidental?  Can the efforts of House Republican leadership to shove amnesty down our throats be the result of simple incompetence, or is it the result of a malevolent takeover of the Republican Party in Washington DC by people who are effectively in league with the Democrats and their nonstop neo-socio-fascist push?  Now, even a Washington Post article questions the foolishness of an immigration bill from a Republican perspective, so that we must ask ourselves: How do we defeat the Republican leadership without removing the majority conservative caucus from power?

According to the article, precisely what I have suspected is likely to come true: With a vast number of new citizens who will mostly be Democrats, Texas (and several others) may well turn from “red states” to “blue states. From the article:

“If many of the Hispanic non-citizens across the country became voting eligible citizens through immigration reform, some of those states become much more interesting politically. Take Texas, where only 22 percent of voters were Hispanic, but they make up 37 percent of the total population of the state. The pattern is similar in Arizona, where 17 percent of voters were Hispanic but they accounted for 29 percent of the total population. “

This shouldn’t be difficult to translate into political ramifications: Republicans won’t be able to win in Texas, Arizona, and any number of border states, no longer being Republican strongholds, and instead at best becoming slightly purple-tinted blue states.

Under that regime, it will be impossible to elect a Republican, never mind a conservative, to the presidency, and it will become increasingly impossible to elect a conservative House, much less a Senate.  This will be the end of any and all hope to stop the growth of the Federal Government, and it will mean diminishing liberty and prosperity for all Americans.

We’re taught by polite society not to question peoples’ motives, and to avoid guessing at them, but one can scarcely look at the current Republican leadership without asking this question repeatedly: “Why?”

It would be easy enough to believe that they’re merely incompetent simpletons, reacting precipitously to what they see as a demographic inevitability, but as the Washington Post article reveals, they will simply speed up the process, making no ground against the actual problem.  Indeed, they will almost certainly seal their own fate.  One thing we must acknowledge from the outset is that they are not conservatives.  Neither Boehner nor Cantor; McCarthy nor McMorris Rodgers; McConnell nor Cornyn; none of these Republicans in leadership in Congress are conservatives in any measurable sense.  They are all party hacks, and they are all leading actual conservatives to utter disaster.  I do not believe it is possible to conclude that they are accidental actors who simply don’t know any better.  Indeed, the coordination of their efforts on other matters, like the debt ceiling, and like the budget negotiations suggests to me that rather than being a “loyal opposition,” they are indeed colluding with Democrats to advance the neo-socio-fascist agenda.

After all, when Democrats in the house in 2010 “deemed the bill passed,” enacting Obama-care, a law with vast new taxing authority, who among the “Republican leadership” protested the fact that all bills levying taxes must originate in the House?  Where were they?  Boehner put on a show of choked-up, crying  but resolute resistance, yet that “resistance” has turned out to be all howl but no fangs, expressed in pointless show-votes of repeal, but never implemented in an actual showdown with the Senate and White House.  Is this leadership committed to turning aside rampant statism?

No, ladies and gentlemen, this leadership is worse than any Neville Chamberlain.  These are Quislings, all of them, and the singular question that falls to us is how to defeat them without yielding the republic.  How can we topple these sell-outs without discharging the actual conservatives from a functioning majority in the House?  We are at a crossroads, when we can neither suffer the treacherous leadership of this bunch any longer, nor can we permit ourselves to lose the House.  Both circumstances are disasters, and yet we know that left in charge, these people(and several others, including Ryan in the House and McCain in the Senate) will happily march the Republican Party off an electoral cliff, while simultaneously wrecking the country at large.

I do not hold with others who believe we can make a difference by quietly going about the job of voting.  I think the time is coming when we will need to be in their faces, all day, every day.  Whether it is driven by old-fashioned corruption, or instead by actual ideological concordance with the left, we can no longer tolerate a leadership that is clearly marching us over a cliff.  We can ask why it is that House chairmen, all Republicans, will not demand a select committee to investigate Benghazi, or the IRS scandal, or any other corrupt and criminal action of this administration, but I think the answer is clear: Those now in leadership in the House are captured-by-extortion, bought-and-paid, or deep-cover operatives for the progressive left. If we do not throw off the yoke they’re placing across our shoulders, and soon, we will be forced to bear it until the death of our once-thriving civilization.

Let’s Be Blunt: Lindsey Graham is a Liar

Monday, September 30th, 2013

Just a Little Lie

Let’s just get this out in the open: Senator Lindsey Graham(R-SC) is a liar. On Friday, when the Senate voted on whether to end debate on the House continuing resolution, that was the ball-game.  Once the number of Senators needed to amend the bill had been reduced from sixty-one to fifty-one, Reid was free to strip the de-funding language from the bill.  Senator Lindsey Graham(R-SC) was among the twenty-five Republican sell-outs who voted to permit Harry Reid to do so.  In tweets and in an official news release, Senator Graham subsequently claimed to have voted against funding for Obama-care, when that can be true only if you ignore the first vote for cloture.  The simple truth is that Lindsey Graham enabled Harry Reid to modify the bill.  Now he claims to be for de-funding Obama-care.  This half-truth is really a whole lie, but he will seek cover behind the latter vote.  He’s busily telling his constituents that he’s opposed to Obama-care, and that he voted to de-fund it, but he’s lying through his teeth, using the procedural nuances of the United States Senate as political camouflage.  Graham’s constituents need only ask him one direct question:

“Would Harry Reid have been able to amend the House continuing resolution without the support of Republicans, like you, Senator Graham?”

The true answer, indeed the only answer to this question is “no.”  Anything else is an attempt to obfuscate, evade, and otherwise obscure the truth.

Here had been his tweet, just moments after the vote:

 

Lindsey Graham is a despicable liar.  He’s hoping that the old formulation of being “for it before he was against it” will be enough to get him past his next re-election campaign, but voters of South Carolina should know that he’s lying to them, and that they now have an option.  Graham is being challenged in the primaries, and it’s about time somebody holds his feet to the fire.  What he’s done in the US Senate has been despicable.  His lies, misrepresentations, and his unflagging support of statism have earned him an involuntary early retirement from the US Senate.  It’s now up to the people of South Carolina to deliver it.

Lindsey Graham had hoped to do what twenty-four of his fellow Senate Republicans had hoped to do: Deceive voters with a shell-game.  Vote for cloture, permitting the bill to be amended, followed by a vote against the amendment, as the means by which to pretend he had voted to de-fund Obama-care.  The simple fact is what it is, and lying, duplicitous, back-stabbing politicians hope to trick voters with this sort of thing.  It’s really just a slightly different formulation of John Kerry’s infamous “for it before I was against it” nonsense of the 2004 campaign.  It’s always the same.  Graham isn’t listening to the people of South Carolina, and he’s gambling that most of them aren’t paying much attention, or will be fooled by this procedural dodge.

He may get away with it if the people of South Carolina don’t take the time to examine what he’s done, but he won’t get away with it here: Senator Lindsey Graham is lying when he claims to have voted to de-fund Obama-care as his previous vote enabled Harry Reid to remove the de-funding language.  This sort of behavior has become increasingly common from Senator Graham, who has supported going to war in Libya, and who has remained one of the key drivers in the Senate for the amnesty bill, leading many to refer to him simply as “Grahamnesty.” Whatever else he is, he’s neither honest, nor conservative, and it’s time he was sent home for good.  Most politicians can be found to have told a whopper or two during their careers, but Graham along with the others who are pretending to have voted against funding Obama-care after enabling it to go forward are simply liars.
Editor’s note: Senator Graham is being challenged in the GOP Senate primary by Nancy Mace, who is trying to overcome the Senator in a bid to replace him in the Senate. She may represent exactly what South Carolina needs in order to get beyond Graham’s duplicitous career in which he says one thing before voters in South Carolina, and another thing while in Washington DC. As you might guess, she has a few thoughts on Senator Graham, here.