The Democrats spent the last 4 years chasing the Great Orange Whale

I've been a bit startled by the unhinged reaction by so many Democrats to Trump's rather resounding victory.  Probably I shouldn't be - after all the lesson of Facebook (and most social media) proves the old adage that it's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than it is to open it and remove all doubt.

Sure, I've been wrong all the time in the past (click on the tag for polls - often wrong but at least I showed my work).  But when things didn't go my way it was a shrug and get on to what's next.  That's not what we see at all.

Sure, the Democrats never really talked much about issues that most people care about - are you better off than you were four years ago, that sort of thing.  Instead, for the last four years it's been OrangeManBad, and nothing but OrangeManBad.  Now they are standing amidst the destruction of their hopes as the Great Orange Whale swims off to the White House.

And it clicked about why they are losing their minds.  Herman Melville wrote about this 175 years ago, and Ricardo Montalban immortalized the greatest lines from the book.

Maybe it's time to reread that novel, and an exercise in understanding the broken political philosophy of the Democrats.  But then again, I don't think that *I* need to reread it.

They do.

Absurdum est ut alios regat, qui seipsum regere nescit.

It is absurd that a man should rule over others, who cannot rule himself.

- Latin proverb

This is what a Preference Cascade looks like

Three months ago I wrote about how Joe Biden was on the receiving end of a Preference Cascade:

A Preference Cascade is when a large portion of the population begins to realize - despite relentless government and/or media propaganda - that a lot of other folks think like they do and that the propaganda is, well propaganda. This is almost always catastrophic for The Powers That Be, because Preference Cascades tend to accelerate. As this progresses, formerly reliable underlings begin to think that TPTB are going to lose, and start to refuse to stick their necks out to protect the current order.

It's one thing to stuff ballot boxes when you think that everyone on your side is on board and your guy is going to win - and any potential investigation will be done in the most slipshod manner. It's quite a different thing when you wonder just how many of the guys on your side are actually going to go through with this, and if the other guy wins will you be facing 20 years in Club Fed.

At the extreme, the security services join the preference cascade. They smell an emerging winner and want to be on side when that happens. At this point, things get pretty grim for TPTB.

And so it turned out to be, with a Palace Coup that forced Slow Joe from the race and handed the nomination to Kamala Harris.  She rode a carefully orchestrated media campaign to some level of acceptance for a while, but the last couple of weeks have been a disaster for her, and the next two look to be worse.

It's a Preference Cascade in action, with each day adding new evidence to the fact that the country is in the process of rejecting her.  Consider:

Via Lawrence, Trump is on track to take every battleground state.  Lawrence also discusses Harris' disastrous Fox News interview and how 60 Minutes had to (deceptively) edit her interview with them.  It's hard to come to a conclusion other than that she's a dope, and the country seems to be coming to that conclusion.  The average of the polls show Trump winning each of these:

All she knows is to play the race and gender card.  It isn't working at all.  Obama even came out lecturing Black men on how they were all misogynistic or something - and he got scorched for his trouble.  Even The View disagreed with Obama on this.

Blogger Ann Althouse looks at the cries of misogyny from the New York Times and doesn't buy it:

If Kamala Harris were a man, she would not have been chosen for Joe Biden's Vice President, and if she were not Vice President, she would not have been the one that the nomination that was stolen from him got handed to. She wouldn't be anywhere near the presidency.

Harris knows this and her people know this. The finger pointing in the campaign has begun.  Democratic Senators are campaigning on their support for Trump.

Everything is breaking Trump's way as the majority of the undecided voters decide that she's a Dimwit.  This is a Preference Cascade in action - despite the media gaslighting, despite Google and Facebook pushing Harris and shadow banning Trump, despite deceptively edited TV interviews, people are deciding that their gut feeling is the same as millions of other people's.  They're realizing that they're not alone - and in fact are in the obvious majority - and are now no longer afraid to say this.

And potential political allies are slowly moving away from her.  If we can see high profile ones like Senators, there are a whole lot more in the party doing it too.  The number of Democrats who will put their necks on the chopping blocks is dropping like a rock.

My sense is that the whole thing is over, and this will be a landslide as the country shows that you can't beat something with nothing.  Sure there will be a cheat, but it won't be as big or as blatant as in 2020 because the people you need to pull that off are already second guessing their support for her.  How many will be willing to go to jail to cheat for someone that literally nobody has ever voted for?  Each day, that list gets shorter.

How the Working Man got stabbed in the back

It's Labor Day, which means "It's the end of summer".  It used to mean a lot more than that - a celebration of labor in general and the working man in particular.  Just in my lifetime, this has been stood on it's head - literally, politics of labor is upside down from when I was a kid.

It used to be that the Democrats stood for the working guy, and the Republicans were the party of Wall Street and the Country Club.  Man is that different now.  I wrote almost a decade ago about the rise of Donald Trump is basically explicit Class terms.

Which seems weird, because it was the Democrats and their buddies the Socialists and Communists (and the University professors, but I repeat myself) who were always bringing up Marx' class theory about politics.  You don't hear that anymore, either, which is really interesting - it's the Dog who Didn't Bark.  An old post from Eric Raymond explains this completely:

Marx believed, and taught, that increasing exploitation of the proletariat would immiserate it, building up a counterpressure of rage that would bring on socialist revolution in a process as automatic as a steam engine.

Inconveniently, the only place this ever actually happened was in a Communist country – Poland – in 1981. I’m not going to get into the complicated historiography of how the Soviet Revolution itself failed to fit the causal sequence Marx expected; consult any decent history. What’s interesting for our purposes is that capitalism accidentally solved the immiseration problem well before then, by abolishing Marx’s proletariat through rising standards of living – reverse immiseration.

I wrote about that here. Even in the 19thm Century - maybe even during Marx' own lifetime - this was a realy problem for Marxist theorists.

The most forward-thinking Marxists had already figured out this was going to be a problem by around 1910. This began a century-long struggle to find a theoretical basis for socialism decoupled from Marxian class analysis.

Early, on, Lenin developed the theory of the revolutionary vanguard. In this telling, the proletariat was incapable of spontaneously respond to immiseration with socialist revolution but needed to be led to it by a vanguard of intellectuals and men of action which would, naturally, take a leading role in crafting the post-revolutionary paradise.

Hey Vladimir, maybe the proletariat was incapable of spontaneously responding to their immiseration because they were undergoing the most remarkable increase in their standard of living that the world had ever seen?  No?  Better to kill 10 million of them?  Oooooh kaaay.

Only a few years later came one of the most virulent discoveries in this quest – Fascism. It is not simplifying much to say that Communists invented Fascism as an escape from the failure of class-warfare theory, then had to both fight their malignant offspring to death and gaslight everyone else into thinking that the second word in “National Socialism” meant anything but what it said.

And the walls of the US House of Representatives are adorned with fasces.

During its short lifetime, Fascism did exert quite a fascination on the emerging managerial-statist elite. Before WWII much of that elite viewed Mussolini and Hitler as super-managers who Got Things Done, models to be emulated rather than blood-soaked tyrants. But Fascism’s appeal did not long survive its defeat.

Hey, none of OUR Representatives are fascists!  Don't look at the wall decorations!  I mean, fascism is for losers - HEY, stop looking at the wall decorations!

Marxists had more success through replacing the Marxian economic class hierarchy with other ontologies of power in which some new victim group could be substituted for the vanished proletariat and plugged into the same drama of immiseration leading to inevitable revolution.

So the working class stiffs that the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats all used to stand for were doing decently well, and might just start voting for the other guys.  What to do, what to do?

Outsource all the good high paying hourly jobs.  Use Environmentalism to justify this - I mean, you don't want your kid to drink dirty water or breathe dirty air, right?  Better for them to grow up to be methheads because there's no jobs and no hope for the future.

Meanwhile, the government and associated white collar employment exploded, pretty much at the public's expense.  These people voted in great numbers - and always for the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats, and big business found that they could really enhance their profits by getting in bed with the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats.  Some new regulations to kill new upstart competitors is just what the doctor ordered.

I wrote about that at length here.

And now people are mystified about the rise of Brexit/Donald Trump/Les gilots jaunes/Alternative fur Deutschland.  And remember how the UK Labour party got wiped out five years ago?  How voters in their heartland of formerly industrial Britain voted for Tory politicians for the first time in a century?  Sure, Labour just won (in a very low turn out election); does anyone think that their voters from Sheffield will ever be back in the way they used to be?

Raymond discusses at length this inversion of politics around Labor, using the UK as an example:

This is the Great Inversion – in Great Britain, Marxist-derived Left politics has become the signature of the overclass even as the working class has abandoned it. Indeed, an increasingly important feature of Left politics in Britain is a visceral and loudly expressed loathing of the working class.

To today’s British leftist, the worst thing you can be is a “gammon”. The word literally means “ham”, but is metaphorically an older white male with a choleric complexion. A working-class white male, vulgar and uneducated – the term is never used to refer to men in upper socio-economic strata. And, of course, all gammons are presumed to be reactionary bigots; that’s the payload of the insult.

Catch any Labor talking head on video in the first days after the election and what you’d see is either tearful, disbelieving shock or a venomous rant about gammons and how racist, sexist, homophobic, and fascist they are. They haven’t recovered yet as I write, eleven days later.

Observe what has occurred: the working class are now reactionaries. New Labor is entirely composed of what an old Leninist would have called “the revolutionary vanguard” and their immigrant clients. Is it any wonder that some Laborites now speak openly of demographic replacement, of swamping the gammons with brown immigrants?

Is it any wonder that the Progressives/Liberals/Labour/Social Democrats are bleeding support and desperately trying to import a whole new voting class of unassimilated immigrants?  Interestingly, Donald Trump is doing very well here among Latino Americans - and so Biden/Harris opened the border and Nancy Pelosi is pushing amnesty.  Parliament is dissolving the People and electing another one.

This is all very weird for me, because this has all happened in my lifetime.  I used to be a Democrat - a real one, a strong supporter of the party - because they stood for the Little Guy against Wall Street.  Now Wall Street is the party of Bill Clinton and Hunter Biden, not of Youngstown or Akron or Toledo or Fitchburg.  Those places are all going to vote for Donald Trump (yes, even Fitchburg in deep blue Massachusetts).

It's all upside down.  And it's upside down all over the Western World, for exactly the same reason.  On this Labor Day, ponder what it would take to get a bunch of political parties to sell out their strongest supporters - to stab them in the back, really.  They sure must have had some powerful motivation.

I do so wonder what that motivation might have been.

So it's Price Controls now, eh?

So Kamala doesn't know much about history, it seems.  Or economics.

Enjoy the Democratic infighting

There seemed to be a lot less attention to my recent post about fighting between various Democratic coalitions than to the one about Preference Cascades. That's too bad because we are seeing that fighting right out in the open, and it explains a lot about why things are happening.

Exhibit A: the firing of Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle.  Sure, it was the Right Thing to do, but when has anyone in Washington DC done the Right Thing?  Instead, let's look at coalitions and their current dynamics.

Cheatle was firmly in Biden's coalition, seemingly close to "Doctor" Jill herself.  But now Sleepy Joe is gone and doesn't have the stroke to protect his coalition members.  It seems that Kamala was key in pressuring Cheatle to resign - Kamala is constructing her own coalition and needs to show the world that she's the one with stroke.  Also, she needs the assassination story off the front pages, so this kills two birds with one stone.  Plus, it opens up a position in the bureaucracy that she can dangle in front of people she wants to join her coalition.  It's a threefer.

Exhibit B: The Far Left coalition is throwing its weight around, rioting in Washington's Union Station and the Capitol, and tearing down and burning American flags:

Sansour was direct. She warned the Democratic Party might lose the Muslim and Far Left votes in November. “Let us be clear. Our votes are still to be earned.”

The dynamic here will be familiar to Europeans, looking at smallish but influential parties like the Greens. Sarsour is looking after her own coalition, trying to maintain the money and plum positions she can offer to supporters in return for their support.

I think I need to update my list of the coalitions in the Democratic Party's ongoing civil war:

• The Bidens (fading fast)
• The Clintons
• Nancy Pelosi/Gavin Newsom
• The Obamas
• The Far Left 

All of these are jockeying for power right now.  We will see a lot of seemingly random events transpiring between now and at least the Democratic Convention that are anything but random.  They are about power and coalition building - and tearing down an opponent's coalition.

Quite frankly, that last is the Democrat's biggest problem - none of these factions really like each other very much.  The best that you can say is that they see the other factions as useful to their goal to get and keep power.  As more and more backstabbing occurs (as it must, there's only a month to the Convention and the time to strike is now or never), there will be less and less loyalty that they can count on from other factions after the convention.  90 days from then to the election doesn't give a lot of time to rig the results.  

That will take a deep level of commitment, which will be really, really hard for them to achieve. So enjoy the infighting. It will be going on for a while yet.

UPDATE 25 JULY 2024 11:53: This would be inexplicable without thinking about rival factions jockeying for position inside the Democratic Party: 

House Republicans and six Democrats voted on a resolution condemning President Joe Biden and his border czar, Vice President Kamala Harris, for failing to secure the border.

Which faction(s) do they support? Well, not Biden's or Harris'.

Why the Democrats can't put Humpty-Dumpty back together

Well, they can't in time for the election, anyway.  There's an old saying in politics that "personnel is policy" which refers to a lot more than just having someone competent in the job.  It's a reflection that politics is about coalitions - building them and maintaining them.  The coalition members get their cut of the government largess, and pay for it with loyalty to the guy at the top.  If they're not loyal, he gives them their pick slip and they lose the largess.

This was actually Trump's biggest mistake when he was president, not filling the Federal Government with his coalition.  In his defense, he was in the middle of a Republican civil war, where there were multiple factions and multiple coalitions.

That's exactly what the Democrats face now, and why they can't put Humpty-Dumpty back together.  Because there are multiple coalitions, whoever emerges on top won't know if he (she?) can trust these coalitions because they aren't his coalitions.  They might be able to be integrated into his coalition, given time, but time is exactly what the Democrats do not have right now.

It takes time to forge a governing coalition - just look at any parliamentary system: when the government is stable it is because the governing coalition is solid.  Ministers can issue policy with a reasonable expectation that it will be supported and carried out by the coalition members.  When the governing coalition is unstable, chaos results.  Orders get ignored or slow walked or subverted because the Minister no longer has the loyalty of the coalition members.

Eventually a leader emerges who can attract key talent from outside coalitions and integrate it into his.  This will involve rewards like positions in the bureaucracy or some such - featherbedding is the name of this game.  But until this all gets sorted out and the new coalition is filled with people who think they're better off with the new leader than without, nothing is going anywhere.

Even worse, there will always be serious back stabbing between different coalitions.  Trust is not a virtue most politicians hew to, and quite frankly until they are in a position to remove perks as well as give them, they would be a fool to trust just about anybody.

Some day a leader will emerge to stitch together the various coalitions that make up the Democratic party.  It won't happen in the next 100 days, sure as God made little green apples.

The biggest implication of this is that it will be much more difficult for the Democrats to "fortify" the upcoming election via 2020-style shenanigans.  Sure, the party bosses will want to, but how much do they trust the other coalitions to support them?  Would other coalitions even go so far as to rat them out (with plausible deniability, of course) - leading to various party elders behind bars.  That certainly would make it easier for other party elders to construct a winning coalition once they've taken out some of the competition.

Like I said, these people would have to be fools to trust very many people, and an election cheating scheme requires a lot of people to pull off.  When everyone is on-side you get the 2020 election.  When lots of people are very much not on-side you get, well, the Italian government which has had something like 60 Prime Ministers in 80 years.

The best analogy I can think of is the scene from The Godfather where all the families get together to divide things up.  Nobody trusts anybody.  That's where the Democrats are right now.

I repeat: you can't put a coalition together overnight - heck, it's taken almost a decade for Donald Trump to put together a serious coalition and a lot of his party still hates him.  I think that the Democrats will come more apart before they start to come together as the various factions start putting out mob hit style rumor whispers about their Democratic competitors.  We will hear a lot about this in the next few weeks.

And this is why the only choice at all for them to to fall in behind Kamala and hope for the best in the down ticket races.  But remember, while Kamala might have inherited Slow Joe's campaign cash, she was never really part of this coalition.  It's not loyal to her at all.  It may be that she's been so ineffective in office because Joe's coalition kept sabotaging her.  She has to build a coalition, and right quick.  The cash will help her there but coalition building takes time.

She doesn't have that.  What she does have is a whole boatload of enemies in the Democratic party.  Some of these think that their best bet to get to the top of the greasy pole is for her not to get there.  They'd rather have Trump in the Oval Office because they will have 4 years to build a coalition.  If Kamala is there, things are a lot trickier for them.

I almost feel sorry for the Democrats in general and Kamala in particular.  Almost.  It's ironic that all their short term tactical maneuvering has led them to this very spot.  Couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of Mob Bosses.

The preference cascade has begun

A Preference Cascade is when a large portion of the population begins to realize - despite relentless government and/or media propaganda - that a lot of other folks think like they do and that the propaganda is, well propaganda.  This is almost always catastrophic for The Powers That Be, because Preference Cascades tend to accelerate.  As this progresses, formerly reliable underlings begin to think that TPTB are going to lose, and start to refuse to stick their necks out to protect the current order.

It's one thing to stuff ballot boxes when you think that everyone on your side is on board and your guy is going to win - and any potential investigation will be done in the most slipshod manner.  It's quite a different thing when you wonder just how many of the guys on your side are actually going to go through with this, and if the other guy wins will you be facing 20 years in Club Fed.

At the extreme, the security services join the preference cascade.  They smell an emerging winner and want to be on side when that happens.  At this point, things get pretty grim for TPTB.

I think we're at that stage now - well, not the up against the wall shooting stage - but a cascading loss of confidence and loyalty in the Democratic Party itself for Joe Biden.  This will shrink the Margin of Cheat except in the most blue of blue states, and given that it looks like New York and New Jersey may be in play, there may not really be a lot of blue left.

In other words, everyone is starting to realize that the propaganda was just that - propaganda.

Add in the drop in contributions to the Democratic Party (the preference cascade is hitting the donor class, who are realizing that this "investment" may not have a return, and hedge their bets by contributing to Trump).

Now add in the media, who start to see that they are better off trying to help the Democratic Party, rather than mean old Joe Biden.

The question is not whether Trump will win, but whether the Preference Cascade will give him coattails, and how long they will be.

My guess is that the Preference Cascade is in full swing in the Secret Service, as competent and dedicated agents there start to wonder when (not if) to throw their corrupt bosses under the bus.  There's a lot coming out about this Charlie Foxtrot in the SS, so that suggests that the lack of loyalty to Joe Biden is advancing nicely there.

Once the Preference Cascade begins, TPTB have precious few tools to counter it.  For example, cracking down on leaking from within the Secret Service will do nothing but convince the undecided there that TPTB are untrustworthy and have to go.

Which will make Donald Trump only the second President to serve non-consecutive terms.

Endorsed

BREAKING: Donald Trump calls for Robert F. Kennedy Jr to receive Secret Service pic.twitter.com/vRvxTzghvX

— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) July 15, 2024

 

Well, duh. Kind of makes you wonder why they haven't so far.

In which I (kind of) disagree with Divemedic

Divemedic posts a complaint about squishy RINOs.  I actually don't have any disagreement on this.

Where my opinion diverges from his is that the old "left" vs. "right" paradigm is kind of ending.  I haven't seen a good name for hte new emerging paradigm, so let's just call it "populists" vs. "business as usual".  Lousy name, but this is where the political action is, both here and all over the place (Argentina, El Salvador, France, Germany, the UK).

The Press is hyperventilating about the emergence of the "far right" in Europe, which entirely misses what's happening.  I've posted endlessly about this, but this is maybe what comes the closest to a (non-Borepatchian length) summary.

Populism is regularly trashed by the Great and the Good, but the inroads that Trump is making with the Black community doesn't seem to be typical pandering, but rather tapping into a real sense of dissatisfaction with Business As Usual.  Kind of like what the rest of us feel.

It also seems that RFK's support comes from the same well spring of dissatisfaction.  If that's true, it implies that RFK's candidacy will hurt Trump more than Biden.  And I still have the feeling that there's a non-trivial chance that the Deep State will try to assassinate Trump, and maybe succeed.  The Great and the Good keep complaining that Trump has "overturned norms" but it sure looks to me that they're the ones that are doing that.

Your mileage may vary, void where prohibited, do not remove tag under penalty of law. 

Rubicon

The Democratic Party has crossed the Rubicon.  What's strange is that they're in a fairly weak position, which implies that we will see a ratcheting up of more of their actions to protect "our Democracy".  I don't see any possibility that they will ratchet any of this down; on the contrary, Trump's chances of being Epsteined in jail are getting a lot of discussion these days.

But Rubicon isn't quite the proper analogy.  I posted what I thought was the right analogy back on January 6, 2020.  It's sad to see that it reads every bit as true today as it did then, including an ancient Roman Epsteining.

Dura lex, sed lex.

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood."

- Enoch Powell MP, quoting Virgil in "The Rivers of Blood" speech

Enoch Powell was one of the first politicians to be de-platformed.  As with most of these sorts of innovations, this happened in the Old World in the 1960s.  I posted about this seven years ago, although Google can no longer find this; DuckDuckGo can, though (and that tells you everything you need to know about search engines):

45 years ago last month, British MP Enoch Powell gave a stunning speech.  In it, he looked on the immigration of foreign peoples into the Kingdom and the way that this was changing the UK's culture.  It was widely criticized by all Right Thinking People® but at the same time was wildly popular with working class Britons.  Indeed, a thousand dockworkers marched on Parliament in protest when Powell was sacked from his positions of leadership.

Dockworkers marching in support of a Tory politician.

The most famous line in his speech is where he quoted Virgil:

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood'.

He was roundly damned for his "inflammatory" and "racist" remarks.  And so the British Political Class went back to sleep - indeed, the last Labour government intentionally accelerated immigration to make the UK "less British".

Today we saw the occupation of the Capitol building by people "annoyed" by what they (and many others) see as the theft of a Presidential election.  The protesters chased off first the Capitol Hill police and then the Congress itself.  It looks like one women lost her life, shot by a cop.  We'll have to see - early news is notoriously unreliable.

But looking at this, I thought of Virgil.  He of course, did not make up the Aeneid out of whole cloth; Virgil wrote propaganda for the first Roman Emperor, Augustus.  The Aeneid was propaganda, but what propaganda.  It made Caesar Augustus' family history into legend.  Because it was propaganda, it was exaggeration, but it was useful exaggeration to Augustus who while not related to the Great Leaders of the previous century was able to deftly exploit those leaders' exploits to his own advantage.

The most important leader at the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic was Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus,  He was the guy who noticed that while the Roman Republic had swept all foreign enemies before it, the working class had suffered despite the great riches of empire.  Tiberius Gracchus decided to run for public office despite his great family wealth, and to put forth his formidable political skills to benefit the Roman Working Joe.  He failed, because the Roman political establishment buried their traditional political differences in the face of Gracchus' challenge, and in fact had him killed.    

In short, the Roman Deep State closed ranks to block needed reform.  It was the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic as long cherished political norms (Mos Maiorum) were cast aside.  And so two generations of the Roman political elite were exterminated in a civil war so profound that what was left of the exhausted Republican Elite welcomed the first Imperator with open arms because he ended the civil wars.

Throughout this whole period in Roman History, the Law was supreme.  Of course, the Law bent to the prevailing political winds.  As the Roman said, "The Law is harsh, but it is the Law".  Dura Lex, sed Lex.

Donald Trump is the Tiberius Gracchus of our day.  He is the guy who noticed that while the American Republic had swept all foreign enemies before it, the working class had suffered despite the great riches of empire.  Donald Trump decided to run for public office despite his great family wealth, and to put forth his formidable political skills to benefit the American Working Joe.  He failed, because the American political establishment buried their traditional political differences in the face of Trump's challenge, and in fact had him [well, we'll have to see if they let him live free, or jail him, or kill him].

But Tiberius Gracchus had many supporters, who didn't let the Roman political elite rest easy.  Likewise with Donald Trump, as we saw today:

Some of Gracchus' supporters were killed, as we saw today.  Looking forward, I am filled with foreboding.  Like the Roman, I seem to see the river Potomac foaming with much blood.  We're already started, it seems.  The only questions really remaining is who is to play the part of Augustus Caesar, and how many of the elite families (and, it must be said, other families) must die before a grateful Republic reaches for their savior Emperor?

But the Founding Fathers knew about the failings of the Roman Republic.  They strived to avoid them in their Republic.  As a student of history I must say that they avoided the Roman pitfalls for 200 years.  Not bad at all.

Never mind that the Romans avoided these for almost 500 years.  God Save this Honorable Republic.

Tom Lehrer - So Long Mom (A Song For WWIII)

Seemingly everything old is new again.  Apocalypse Nostalgia, anyone? 

Johnny Cash - Don't Take Your Guns To Town

So Dark Brandon gave a speech:

People are scratching their heads as to what motivated what is without doubt the most divisive Presidential speech of my lifetime.  One suspicion is that he is trying to incite some of the 75 million Trump voters to start shooting.  Likely the FBI is working overtime to entrap some "ultra MAGA semi-fascists" like like they ginned up the plot to kidnap the Governor of Michigan.

Remember, kids - they guy who says it's time to start shooting Federales is the Fed.  So don't take your guns to town.

Don't Take Your Guns To Town (Songwriter: Johnny Cash)

A young MAGA named Billy Joe
Grew restless waitin' to vote
A good patriotic boy 
Didn't like being made a goat
He changed his clothes and shined his boots
And combed his dark hair down

And his mother cried as he walked out
"Don't take your guns to town son
Leave your guns at home Bill
Don't take your guns to town"

He laughed and kissed his mom
And said, "Your Billy Joe's a man
And I can shoot as quick and straight
As anybody can
But I wouldn't shoot without a cause
I'd gun nobody down"

But she cried again as he rode away
"Don't take your guns to town son
Leave your guns at home Bill
Don't take your guns to town"

He sang a song as he rode along
His guns hung at his hips
He rode into Joe Biden's town
A smile upon his lips
He stopped and walked into a bar
And laid his money down

But his mother's words echoed again
"Don't take your guns to town son
Leave your guns at home Bill
Don't take your guns to town"

He drank his first strong liquor then
To calm his shakin' hand
He tried to tell himself at last
Democrats won't push him around
A dusty FBI  at his side
Began to laugh him down

And he heard again his mother's words
"Don't take your guns to town son
Leave your guns at home Bill
Don't take your guns to town"

And in his rage
Billy Joe reached for his gun to draw
But the Fed drew his gun and fired
Before he even saw
As Billy Joe fell to the floor
The crowd all gathered 'round

And they wondered at his final words
"Don't take your guns to town son
Leave your guns at home Bill
Don't take your guns to town"

A hundred and twenty years have passed
And nothin's really changed
A young man on the city streets
He has to make his name
He's still too young to know
A gun can't make a boy a man

And his mama cries as he walks out
"Don't take your guns to town son
Leave your guns at home Bill
Don't take your guns to town"

The lyrics have been updated a bit for the new Age of Brandon.

We know what Red Flag enforcement looks like

I've seen how this movie ends:

I've linked several times to posts over at the blog Dispatches from TJICistan.  TJIC is an outspoken (some might say extremely so) advocate of smaller government.  He's also a firearms owner in the People's Republic of Massachusetts.  While he owns guns, it appears that he's no longer allowed to possess any:

ARLINGTON (CBS) – A blog threatening members of Congress in the wake of the Tucson, Arizona shooting has prompted Arlington police to temporarily suspend the firearms license of an Arlington man. 

It was the headline “1 down and 534 to go” that caught the attention. “One” refers to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head in the rampage, while 534 refers to the other members of the U.S. House and Senate.

Police are investigating the “suitability” of 39-year-old Travis Corcoran to have a firearms license

Let's ignore for the moment how many people were investigated for making similar comments about George W. Bush.  Let's look at the "logic" being exercised by the Arlington Po-Po, shall we?

They claim that Corcoran is so dangerous that, while he has done nothing more than put up a blog post, he must be restrained from possessing firearms.  However, it appears that it's not worth it for the police to follow him, or stake out his place, or arrest him.

Huh?

Look, guys, if you think that his speech rises to the level of an actual threat of specific harm to specific persons, he should be in jail.  If you're not sure, then do the leg work to establish whether it is or not.

Ah, I was so young and optimistic, 11 years ago.  After all, we had ferocious conservative Republicans ferociously conserving things.  But even then it was clear where this would go:

It would be one thing if the law were applied equally to all.  It's not, and it will be applied disproportionately to us, because we hold views considered by some in power to be Double Plus Ungood.

Divemedic says the same, in fewer words.  He also has some suggestions on a strategy you can use.

Thanks to the GOP, we're all TJIC now.

There's a reason that they're called the "Stupid Party".  And there's a reason that the Democrats are called the "Evil Party".

Well bless her heart

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp has a new ad out, highlighting opponent Stacy Abrams' remark that Georgia was the "worst State to live [in]."  After playing Abrams' statement, the narrator says "Bless her heart."

For folks up in Yankeeland, this is taking the gloves off.

Now I'm not a big Brian Kemp fan (the best Governor of Goergia in all the years I lived there was the late, great Zell Miller).  I guess we'll see how the Georgia voters react to this very southern mockery.  I mean, just because you're insulting someone doesn't mean you can't be polite.

And so, a Southern parable on politeness:

Two Southern Belles see each other at a School reunion.  While they had been friends Back In The Day, they had lost track of each other in the years since.  Here's the conversation as they catch up on what's been happening.

Belle #1: I married the most wonderful man.  On our first wedding anniversary be bought me this fur coat.

Belle #2: Oh, how nice!

Belle #1: And on our second wedding anniversary he bought me this diamond ring.

Belle #2: Oh, how nice!

Belle #1: And on our third anniversary he bought me a Merceded-Benz.

Belle #2: Oh, how nice!

Belle #1: So are you married?

Belle #2: Oh yes.

Belle #1: Does he buy you things?

Belle #2: Yes, he bought me etiquette lessons.

Belle #1: Etiquette lessons??!?

Belle #2: Oh yes.  Before the lessons I used to tell people "Fuck you."  Now I say "How nice!'

The Queen Of The World tells this in a sweet, syrupy southern accent which makes it even funnier.

The Democratic Party loses the signal

Electronic communications rely on the concept of a Carrier Wave.  Basically, this is a well-defined electronic signal that all devices can "tune" into, and upon which the actual message is transmitted.  If you lose the carrier, you lose your connection and you can't communicate with anybody.

You Old Farts will remember the old dial-up modem days.  You see, most houses back in the paleolithic age (say, the 1990s) only had one phone line.  Hen Junior wanted to jump on Compuserve (or, Lord forbid, America Online), his biggest worry was often that Mom would pick up the phone to call a friend.  When the phone went off-hook, the carrier signal went all skew-wumpus* and the modem connection dropped.  There was even a long running BBS joke Hey! Wait! Don't pick up the ph{#`%${%&`+'${`%&NO CARRIER

Good times, good times.

Well, the Democratic Party has had control of the carrier wave to the American people for a long, long time.  The first post I tagged Biased Media was way back in 2008, and it was obvious even back then.  They've been used to jamming the Republicans access to the Carrier for a long time.  This has given the Democrat's a big advantage for a long, long time.

That's been going away for a long, long time.  Reagan beat Carter, and then whats-his-name from Minnesota.  The Republicans swept control of Congress in the 1990s.  The whole "Bush lied" (about Iraq) dates back to Hillary Clinton who needed Media air cover for her vote to authorize the Iraq invasion in 2003.  Sure, Obama won in 2008 but the 2010 elections decimated the Democratic Party, as the country reacted in revulsion to the far left-wing policies of his administration.

In my counting, that's 40 years of increasing rejection of the Democratic Party's narrative pushed by an increasingly weak and irrelevant media.

And so here we are at today.  We've had two mass shootings in as many weeks, and three or four in the last couple of months.  It's so perfectly set up to support the Democratic narrative that people are wondering if this is yet more FBI instigation**.  And yet, it's not moving the needle in the Democrat's favor.  Consider:

• Senate Majority Leader (Democrat) Chuck Schumer has refused to move forward with a gun control bill.  This is despite all the recent mass shootings.  Schumer may be a jerk but he knows how to count votes, and he knows how to look at what the polls say about issues.  The American people are entirely uninterested in more gun control, and forcing his party to put their necks on that chopping block is something that he (wisely) will not do.
• Covid is over, and every time a (Democrat) politician or bureaucrat suggests further lock downs or restrictions this "news" disappears from the media in a day.  It's political suicide, any why the Democrats would love to ride that crisis further, they know they'd just ride it into the ditch.
• Russia! Russia! Russia! is over.  Polls are starting to show that people want sanctions to end so we can import oil from them to drop gas prices.  The joke is I can't believe that it's MonkeyPox season!  I still have my Ukraine decorations up!
  

• Oh, yeah - I forgot all about the riots.  And MonkeyPox?  Bitch, please.

Each of these has had a shelf life measured between 2 months and 2 days, but the lifetime is shortening.  And as this has played out, Joe Biden's approval ratings have continued sinking.  He's now the least popular "President" since Harry Truman.  That's 70 years.  If you actually remember Harry Truman, you're really, really old.  Polls repeatedly show that people would prefer Republican candidates over Democrat ones by 5, or 8, or 10 points.

My point is that the media and the Democrat Party (but I repeat myself) is that crisis after crisis after crisis, all blamed on the Republicans, or Vladimir Putin, or White People have had precisely zero effect.  Nada. Nichto.  ничто.  无.

So to my point - The Democrats are very unpopular, and are getting increasingly unpopular.  The Media has lost all ability to change this trajectory.  We will leave for another day the question of whether the Republicans will be any better, but in all honesty - could they possibly be worse?***

We will also leave for another day the question of how legitimacy is established in a "Western Democracy" when elections are repeatedly stolen.  There's no question that both the Democratic and Republican Parties are up to this, and since "free and fair elections" are the bedrock of the American sense of political legitimacy, what happens when this is under minded needs to be explored in more detail.****

I shall endeavor to address these open items this weekend.  But I maintain what I said ten years ago after another notorious mass shooting: no new gun control laws are on offer.  And if Republican s are smart, after the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade they should counter all gun control proposals with "Common Sense" abortion control proposals.  You'd have to pop popcorn to enjoy the meltdown that would induce.

* Technical term in computer networking, I was told.

** Remember the jury that refused to convict the people who were "plotting to kidnap" the Michigan Governor because almost all of the folks who were involved were FBI? 

*** Spoiler alert: maybe.

**** Spoiler alert: nothing good.

Quote of the Day, American Civil War 2 edition

I think this from Divemedic makes a lot of sense:

Let the court decide that Americans actually have gun rights, let them actually decide that women don’t have a Constitutional right to kill their children, then follow that with their inability to pack SCOTUS to change it, and you will see a left that becomes insanely violent. Remember how they scream like petulant children when Trump defeated HRC? Remember that it was then that the left began systematically trying to destroy Trump by using the power of the swamp?

I used to think that CW2 would be triggered when the left pushed the right too far. I feel that I may have been wrong. It will be the left that kicks off CW2, and SCOTUS just might be the catalyst.

It will be interesting to see how the Democratic Party handles the Lefty Rage this summer.  It will no doubt poll very badly for them, and add to the many issues polling badly for them.  How they act will tell us much about how they view the November elections.  A "we don't care about the polls" attitude will strongly suggest a "we don't care how you vote because we're going to cheat like nobody's business" attitude.

And honorable mention to Toastrider in the comments over at that post:

My sole response to the left’s rhetoric:

“Say when.”

Yup.

 

Man, a lot of people sure hate Ron DeSantis

He's making the right enemies.  He has cleverly aligned himself with 80% of the voters in his battles against Covid lockdowns, pedophile teachers, and now Disney.  He had and has massive support in all of these.

It helps that he comes across as trying to protect children in each of these areas.  It also helps that his opponents are just so creepy and weird.  Both of those things will help him with the Minivan Mom voter demographic.

The Democratic Party has been intellectually out of gas for a long time now.  They've basically defined themselves by what they are not - not George W. Bush, not Donald Trump - rather than what they are.  They've had a lot of success doing this over the last 20 years.

But DeSantis is now shining the spotlight on what they are, like being the party that wants to teach weird sex fetishes to kindergartners.  This is exposing just how, well, weird the party is.  So weird that people don't want to be associated with it.

I guess we'll see how this plays out, but until the Democrats stop coming up with more creepy nonsense aimed at kittle kids, I expect that DeSantis will keep doing what he's been doing.

About "Ghost Guns"

I'm struggling to understand what the Administration is trying to accomplish (other than a Press Conference).  If they ban 80% lowers, people will just 3D print them.  Heck, I've been posting about this for almost a decade, and the technology is way more advanced now.  What are they going to do, criminalize 3D printers?

It seems that it's all a tale told by and for idiots, full of sound and fury but ultimately signifying nothing. 

We've known the cut of Mitt Romney's jib for a long time

Mitt is in the news beating the drum for war in Ukraine.  Lots of tough talk, including accusing people of treason.  Looks like quite the fighter, right?

Except we've known what he is for a long, long time.  Ten years ago I called out what he is and the past decade has not given me cause to rethink anything.  I took some heat on this back then but believe that the intervening years has proven that he would have been a disaster as President.

In which I endorse Barack Obama for President

Stick with me on this, because I am motivated by hope and change.

The race essentially is between Obama and Romney - Ron Paul is interesting but whatever impact he has had is over.  Likewise, the Libertarian (whatzisname?) will get the typical Libertarian 2%.  As adults, we need to face reality that this is President Composite Girlfriend vs. Mittens.  OK then, which way will make us better off?

Let me start my cheerfully admitting that a second Obama term - unfettered by the need for re-election and likely facing a Congress entirely controlled by the GOP - will be a disaster of faculty lounge inspired radicalism.  It will be EPA killing oil production and the ATF arming the Iranian Mullahs.  He will moot card carrying communists for the Supreme Court, as well as for every open Federal Bench seat.  Nobody can constrain his radicalism now, and it will be much, much worse come January.

So what about Romney?  He's an Establishment Fixer to the core, as his record as Governor of Massachusetts shows.  While he might not support new gun control laws today, he was happy to in the past when he felt the need to "reach across the aisle" to "make an impact" (build a political career).  While he may not support huge State-sponsored intrusion into your private business today (RomneyCare), he was happy to in the past - again, when he felt the need to "reach across the aisle" to "make an impact".  Romney is easy to figure - just ask yourself what's most beneficial for Mitt Romney right now, and that's what he'll support.

He has an exquisitely refined sense of sniffing out tactical personal gain, and does not suffer from a surfeit of political philosophy like those boring old Founding Fathers did, with all their tiresome talk of liberty.

He's Gov.Party the Lesser.

And so we must vote for Obama.  He's the only hope for real change.

The GOP in general, and Mitt Romney in particular are big-government, big-spending, big-intrusion-into-our-business.  The Republic is facing a fiscal crisis - the nation's credit has been downgraded, the Entitlement programs are just now tipping into a bottomless sea of red ink, the middle class has been hammered with collapsing housing valuations, persistent unemployment, and a higher education bubble that is ensuring that our children graduate with so much student debt that they will never be able to marry.

And where are the bold reforms from the GOP?  The best on offer is Paul Ryan's plan which won't balance the budget for three decades.

And dig this: the Media will savage a President Romney mercilessly in hopes that he will falter, lose heart and supporters at the savage attacks, and think it will be in his best interest to reach across the aisle to preserve his re-election chances.  The media will think this because Romney has shown repeatedly that he'll cave if it builds his personal political chances.

So what about change?  We're actually seeing change today, before our eyes.  Just ask Orin Hatch, in the fight of his political life against a Tea Party candidate.  Or ask (former) Senator Bennett, or (former) Congressman Castle.  A Million people were energized to take to the streets to protest, two years ago.  That's change.  And you know what they were protesting?

Barack Obama and his vision for a remade America.

That's what you give up by voting Mitt Romney into the White House.  In six months, Romney will be a sad sack, pummeled by the media into losing his "conservative" veneer (and let's be honest, no one believes he's actually a conservative).

A RINO President will demoralize the one significant spark of change that we've seen, the onlyreaction to an out of control Fed.Gov, our only hope of putting the brakes on before we're as wrecked as Greece.  And quite frankly, a withering of the Tea Party reform movement will be a delight to a GOP Establishment every bit as corrupt and venal - and power mad - as Nancy Pelosi.

And so, it is our civic duty to take a hit for our Country.  Put Obama back in office, unfettered.  The orgy of Progressive overreach by Regulation will be sporadically (and mostly ineffectively) resisted by a corrupt Big Government GOP.  The Agencies will rule the land, and the economy will remain seized up.

And rather than a million Tea Partiers taking to the streets, it will be two million, or three.  Rather than five or ten corrupt GOP Establishment corrks turned out of office, it will be thirty, or fifty.

And that will be the time when the calculators like Mitt Romney will get the idea that they will most likely advance their career by striking down the Progressive beast, again and again.

Because if that message doesn't come across loud and clear, and repeatedly, then the game is over.  It simply won't matter who's in office, because they're both the Establishment Party.

So vote Obama this November.  I do not say this from anger, or frustration, or peevishness, but from cold, rational calculation.  Sure it will be painful, but we got into this mess because like Bluto in Animal House, we f***ed up: we trusted the GOP.

We screwed up, and believed all this, and the government never got smaller under the GOP.  It got bigger, and more intrusive, and more remote from the people, yea even under St. Ron.  Maybe it's too late for us, but if it's not then the only way forward is to burn the GOP to the waterline.  The most expedient way is to keep the Tea Party energized, and a President Romney will cause many to fall away from that movement under the eleventh commandment (another Reagan philosophy).

Well screw that noise.  We f***ed up once, trusting him and the rest of the GOP team.  How's that working out?  Rebuilding a party that Reagan might actually recognize is what this country needs - and right now, damn it - and Mitt Romney isn't the man to do it.

Barack Obama is.

Hope and Change.  Your country depends on you.  Your children and grandchildren will wonder what you did at the Republic's darkest hour.  Don't let them down.  Vote Obama.

Inflation impoverishes the poor

So says The World Bank:

Using polling data for 31,869 households in 38 countries and allowing for country effects, Easterly and Fischer show that the poor are more likely than the rich to mention inflation as a top national concern. This result survives several robustness checks.

Also, direct measures of improvements in well-being for the poor - the change in their share of national

income, the percentage decline in poverty, and the percentage change in the real minimum wage - are negatively correlated with inflation in pooled cross- country samples.

High inflation tends to lower the share of the bottom quintile and the real minimum wage - and tends to increase poverty.

So record inflation (remember that the Fed.Gov changed the way that inflation is measured so that food and energy prices are no longer counted - meaning that the "Highest inflation in 40 years" actually means "Highest inflation ever") is driving people into poverty at a record rate.  Because the resident of the Oval Office has a "D" after his name I don't expect this to be reported in the Media, but keep this in mind when anyone tells you nonsense like "the Democrats are the only ones to do anything for the poor."

Yeah, they do something, all right.  Good and hard.