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Progressivism Is the Problem

The federal Leviathan

James Madison, Federalist 51:
“In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates.”

One of the banal buzzwords in common usage about our Constitutional government is “coequal”, as in coequal branches. It’s drummed into the head of the kiddies and is trotted out ad nauseum by the over-exposed telegenic punditry. Part of the problem lies in other banalities like “checks and balances”, with emphasis on “balances”, that reinforces the mischaracterization of our government.

Think about it. In its simplest and correct form, our republic is composed of an executive to carry out the laws, a court system to adjudicate disputes according to the law, and a legislature to legislate, make the law. Look at it. The first two act on the law that is made elsewhere, in Congress. Constitutionally, they can do little unless there is a law made by . . . Congress. Sorry, that ain’t “coequal”. If the infantry is the queen of battle, the Congress is meant to be the queen of governance in a republic.

So, what has happened to Congress, it being the weak sister in the triumvirate? Nothing, except what Woodrow Wilson and FDR did to it. You might say that they ran at full speed with Hamilton’s “energy in the executive” (Federalist 70) toward progressivism’s dream of the big state, leaving the 535 squabbling inhabitants of the Capitol Building in the dust. What started with the Wilson/FDR imperial presidency, who then badgered Congress into effectively dispensing with a sensible reading of the Commerce Clause, made its way into an imperial judiciary who regularly legislates from the bench. Congress quickly became the footstool to a hyper-president and a non-entity to our uber-judges.

There’s more to the story. The “more” concerns the progressivism that’s in the head of all self-proclaimed liberals from the last couple of decades of the 19th century to the present. Deep in their cranium is IMPATIENCE to accomplish great and heroic deeds. They’re frustrated with the divided powers and checks and would like nothing better than to dispense with the whole racket by interpreting it out of existence, which they’ve done with the complicity of the Courts.

In that, they’ve got a lot in common with the communists. Communists are impatient socialists, and not at all receptive to the cautious instincts of their Fabian/Menshevik brethren. No need to wait for electoral success when a gun will do the trick right now.

As an aside, maybe this explains the socialist Bernie Sanders’s attraction to the Democratic Party, to caucus with them and seek their party’s presidential nomination. At an intuitive level, the Democratic Party’s progressivism and international socialism are kindred spirits. They are drawn like moths to the light bulb of the big state to accomplish great and good things. The quicker, the better.

One of the chief results of this turn of affairs is a Congress that can’t even pass a budget, their principal power of the purse. The presidency thrives in the Congressional chaos. The national government ends up running on continuing resolutions to avoid the stink of obvious Congressional impotence. These mega-bills carry forward the huge junkyard of federal spending, with a plus-up for inflation and some additional items heaped on the pile. Junk becomes a forever-thing. Also, buried in the all the junk are the many loopholes exploited by presidents.

The Courts are in their own progressive universe, not having to worry about legislative impediments to the agenda or impeachment, owing to Congress’s barrenness. Yet, reform of the Courts did happen despite Congress’s infirmity. It took some doing in the Senate and abnormal clear-sightedness by the normally bombastic Trump but the majority of black-robed potentates became a majority of Constitutionalists.

The same Trump who was instrumental in helping to herd the Courts back into their proper Constitutional sphere also exhibited many of the same power reflexes of his progressive forbearers. By fiat, for example, he shifted Pentagon money for bases to money for his wall. Not that we don’t need a wall. For heaven’s sake, we need something to manage the human tidal wave who’ve discovered the American minimum wage to be professional income in their homelands without air-conditioning.

Honduran migrants take part in a caravan heading to the US, on the road linking Ciudad Hidalgo and Tapachula, Chiapas state, Mexico, on October 21, 2018. (Photo by Pedro Pardo / AFP)

One’s view of potentates in the Oval Office spins on whether they’re your potentate or someone else’s. Caught up in the right’s frenzy for Trump, some conservative pundits became Trump pundits. To be clear, the terms “conservative” and “Trump” aren’t synonymous. Catching the “populist” wind in their sails, they turned on a dime on issues such as the Iraq War, free trade, and big-state entitlements for their audience-constituents. They became big-state activists like many Democrat caucus members. It’s just a big state for your side.

Thus, in lock-step defense of Trump, they expounded on how well “Trump ran the country” or how well “Trump ran the economy”. Right there, they fall into the progressive trap. A real conservative, not a Trumpkin, would cringe at such language. The president doesn’t run the country or economy. He’s elected to only run the executive branch. In our country, the people run the country and economy (a free market), not a histrionic huckster from Queens or a doddering fool beholden to the revolutionaries in his party.

We’d be well-served if that message made its way to the people. But, alas, that popular brain is taught to venerate Saint Woodrow and Archangel Franklin. We can’t get past the progressive hokum to appreciate the blessings of debate, dialogue, and compromise in a fractured society like ours, something a Congress is meant to channel. It can be slow and messy, but at least we’ll have our rights, religion, and property instead of losing them to “energy in the executive” or “energy in the judge’s chambers”.

To put it bluntly, progressivism is anti-democratic, anti-republic, and anti-Constitution. Progressives want to take the Elastic Clause and make every place that they control as elastic in power as possible. After all, it’s the ends that matter to them, not the means. Why worry about those bickering mouths at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue? It saves time and effort to simply saddle up the black robes and chief executive to build the new world. Get ‘er done is the operative principle.

None of this is explained to the kiddies or adults. Don’t expect it from the schools. We reason from unexamined progressive assumptions to . . . whatever dominates Twitter and our other screens. It’s easy to be tossed hither and yon if you’re not grounded in the basics of our Constitutional order.

Progressivism set the table for this distortion of our consensual mode of governance. Heck, for the progs, it doesn’t even have to be consensual. An all-powerful EPA, ATF, IRS, FEC, SEC, FTC, etc., works fine for them.

RogerG

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Should Biden Be Impeached?

The U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 3:
“. . . he [President] shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed . . . .”

The U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 4:
“The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Presidential Oath of Office:
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Drone photo of crowds of illegal immigrants at the International Bridge on the southern border in Texas, Sept. 16, 2021.
President Biden after signing a stack of executive orders shortly after taking office to reverse many of Trump’s actions.

Yes, but he won’t be.

How to rein in the President when occupants from both parties, but particularly the donkey party, have overstepped and shirked their legal responsibilities? Do we have to wait four years to correct the abuse?

Well, no. Impeachment stands at the ready. The Democrats tried it twice in Trump’s one term. They may have debased its utility by frivolous and failed overuse. Yet, it has become commonplace for federal officers throughout the three branches to egregiously overstep their powers while flagrantly ignoring their clear constitutional responsibilities. Most recently, President Biden refuses to enforce the immigration laws. He has, by execute order(s), simply repealed enforcement of the border. That’s a dereliction of a clear compulsory-in-law duty.

Could it qualify as a “high crime” when an elected officer grievously neglects his or her lawfully required responsibility? Biden’s executive orders are a clear violation of the oath of office to “faithfully execute” the constitutional position. You can’t “faithfully execute” if you refuse to do your job. You’re willfully derelict. Willful, persistent dereliction is a willful, persistent violation of the Constitution. “High crime” anyone?

The scenes at the southern border are gut-wrenching for all the people allured by illegal presidential promises to not enforce the law. The human tidal waves passing through without paying heed to legal strictures, while enabling passage throughout the country of said violators, is tantamount to presidential complicity in crimes. This isn’t an indictment based on a phone call or overheated rhetoric at a rally. It is a shredding of the oath and Constitution. What can be a more serious “high crime” than to blatantly violate the highest law?

The donkey party’s abettors of the behavior will try to hang their hat on “prosecutorial discretion”. Where’s the discretion? Is it “discretion” to take an entire class of law and pretend it doesn’t exist? Not only that, but to assist in the violation of the laws? Hardly. It’s the practice of euphemism to provide cover for criminal conduct. “Prosecutorial discretion” turns a bank robbery into an “unauthorized withdrawal”.

It’s time to rethink our obese federal Leviathan. The level of government headquartered in DC has been unhinged from Constitutional moorings for quite some time. Impeachment might be one useful tool to once again align the branches within the bounds of our charter – i.e., return them to legal status.

However, I’m under no illusion that anybody in either party has the stomach for such medicine. We’ll, as before, muddle along and be content with the results of an electorate equally as unhinged as the people they elect. And surveys will continue, as before, to show deep disenchantment with the people they choose.

Pogo in Walt Kelly’s comic strip famously said in 1970, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Kelly meant the statement for the plague of pollution. He’d probably be surprised to learn that Pogo’s quip has a much more robust application.

RogerG

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The Consequences of a Cosseted Population

Gov. Gavin Newsom at his victory bash after surviving the recall.
Gen Mark Milley at his June 2020 commencement address to the National Defense University.

Cosseted: adj.; cared for and protected in an overindulgent way; pampered.

David Mamet:

“We’ve often heard, ‘I’m a fiscal conservative but a social liberal’; but everyone is a ‘fiscal conservative.’ So the phrase can be most usefully translated: ‘I’m perfectly capable of controlling my own finances. Now I intend to control yours.’”

*From Mamet’s essay “The School Dream” in National Review, May 17, 2021, in a footnote.

Two events erupted recently: Governor Gavin Newsom survived a recall and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, was reported to have subverted the authority of the President in communications with subordinates in the chain of command, the military leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, and the President’s political opposition. Obviously, both are, or can be, deeply disturbing. Which is worse? You choose.

Yet, both instances are evidence of a troubling trend among the citizenry (and uncitizenry since certain places have effectively erased the distinction). In the one, California clung to its current class of baneful leaders. In the other, according to reports coming out of Bob Woodward/Robert Costa’s new book, a member of an elite class of administrators – these happen to be military – may have attempted to supplant the Constitutional authority of the duly-elected President with his own, even possibly going so far as to cooperate with an acknowledged and powerful foreign adversary. It’s what happens when an increasingly cosseted people surrender personal sovereignty to elected or unelected lords and oligarchs in an administrative state. It’s a horrible deal for rulers and ruled. It comes down to a people who longingly desire to be ruled and a group chomping at the bit to do it.

California has frequently asserted the mantle of being on the cutting edge. From Prop 13 to high tech to the counterculture, California expanded on its reputation by justifiably being the first to go from Ronald Reagan to the embrace of the Fabian socialist dream of a cradle-to-grave nanny state in the span of less than 20 years.

I suspect that demographics had a monumental role to play in the transition. It’s much more than immigration. The state changed social complexion by changing its economic complexion (and I don’t mean skin pigment) after the end of the Cold War. Defense industries and the kinds of people attracted them faded as their numbers were replaced by elements drawn to the burgeoning workplaces of entertainment, the college campus, unionized public-sector employment, and the pampered, climate-controlled world of computer screens on the elongated coastal plain west of the Coast Range – the denizens east electorally less consequential. The newly burgeoning cohort demand a different form of governance as opposed to those inspired by Chuck Yeager, and can be rightfully called subjects and not citizens. This new class of subjects is all-in for anything and anyone who’ll promise to build, extend, and maintain the public romper room. The state’s Democratic Party is the breeding ground for this claque of wet nurses and hall monitors.

That distinction between a subject and citizen is critical. A subject accepts a role of inferiority in the status ladder and looks to their “betters” for guidance and restraint. A society of citizens is a society of peers.

For the state’s segment still considering themselves citizens who find this state of affairs repugnant, you still have the right to travel . . . if Biden hasn’t repealed it for the unvaccinated. So, move, leave the place to the emotional midgets in desperate need of a helicopter-parent state.

The dependency demographic, or subjects, is always in search of a mommy or daddy who’ll protect them from the vagaries of life. When the real mommy and daddy go into chronic care or the rest home, the urgency for a cloying adult stand-in becomes paramount. Stepping into the breech is the vaunted, credentialed public-sector “expert” and administrative functionary. The subjects’ hopes and affections goes to the head of the those exalted with power. The laureled class morphs into a law unto themselves to rule over the subjects. Enter General Mark Milley, showing in a more martial manner the symmetry between the Pentagon and the nanny state.

In California, the elected leadership and the massive, unionized administrative state that they birthed are unsurprisingly on the same page. Nationally, the situation is quite different. Many states aren’t as affectionate of rule by credentialed autocrat. That’s where you find the greatest concentration of citizens. Since there is a whole other expanse to the country between the coasts, sometimes elected federal leadership doesn’t correspond to the wishes of the Google and Harvard campuses. Yet, the specific ethos of the minions of DC and its environs is more at home on those campuses than Texas-to-North Dakota.

The Pentagon is an administrative state par excellence. Think of it as a microcosm of Sacramento, and Sacramento is solely a microcosm of LA to San Francisco. Milley sounds like he stepped out of CRT/Faculty Lounge central casting, or the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, only in uniform. For instance, why was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff weighing in on an ongoing criminal matter – the Derek Chauvin case – imitating Rev. Al Sharpton? If your eyes were closed, you’d mistake his June 2020 National Defense University commencement address for a Jeremiah Wright sermon. Here’s a snippet:

“I am outraged by the senseless and brutal killing of George Floyd. His death amplified the pain, the frustration, and the fear that so many of our fellow Americans live with day in and day out. The protests that have ensued, not only speak to his killing, but also to the centuries of injustice towards African Americans. What we are seeing is the long shadow of original sin in Jamestown, 401 years ago.”

Mind you, Chauvin’s trial hadn’t begun but that didn’t stop Milley from declaring his guilt with as much caution and reserve as Maxine Waters at a BLM rally. Little did we know back then that we were experiencing our first woke, safe-space, four-star general who functions at the frontier between a racialist neo-Marxism and treason.

Who can forget his following year’s comments before Congress? He sounded less like a mature adult and more like the infantile statue topplers of the previous summer of manufactured “rage”. In response to a question on the teaching of CRT in the military academies, he said, “I want to understand white rage and I’m white, and I want to understand it.” The answer assumes the existence of “white rage” and is not a call for the academic study of its legitimacy.

Milley – and Austin – subsequently tried to backtrack on their “white rage” and “white supremacy” remarks. He later said, “I want America to know that the United States military is an apolitical institution.” It’s pure hokum. Of course Austin and Milley are politicizing the military in their ideologically-laced purges and neo-Marxist indoctrination.

Austin and Milley being questioned on CRT in the military in June 2021 testimony before Congress.

To better understand, let’s turn to an instructive hypothetical. Let’s say that the concern is about the teaching of Marxism in the academies. Suppose Milley had said, “I want to understand capitalist exploitation of the working class and I’m a capitalist, and I want to understand it.” Already he’s gone more than halfway to accepting the premises of communism. Marxism and CRT are claptrap. “Understanding” claptrap is a mealy-mouthed way of accepting many of its fundamentals. Who’s he trying to fool? The cadets are being indoctrinated in a form of ideological self-loathing.

And I haven’t gotten to the most disturbing charge against Milley. Most frightening is his alleged usurpation of civilian control of the military and his pre- and post-election cooperative assurances to the head of the CCP’s People’s Liberation Army. The latter behavior comes very close to the Article III, Section 3, clause 1’s definition of treason. A portion of which says, “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” Milley certainly may have given the Communist Chinese “aid and comfort”, even though technically and legally Red China isn’t a formally declared enemy. But Congress never declared war on the USSR and there is many rotting in prison for giving “aid and comfort” through espionage to the Kremlin.

That’s how Milley gets off: he didn’t commit espionage. He allegedly just picked up the phone to openly declare the “aid and comfort”. No sneaking around . . . apparently. But that puts him in the same category as O.J. Simpson. Everybody knows they’re guilty but the technicalities of jury nullification and legal jargon saved them from the chair and Leavenworth.

California is a sickening role model. Don’t expect citizens to emerge from the cosseting of perpetual adolescence in a nanny state. The best hope for citizen-Californians was made familiar by Cubans braving the waters of the Florida Strait on rickety rafts to flee Bernie’s workers’ paradise in the land of Castro. Just like them, Californios, rent yourself a box truck before the fee eats up your 401k and flee east across the border. To reformulate Horace Greeley, “Go east, young man.”

More tools are available to cage the federal Leviathan. At least the rest of the country can bring to heel the federal administrative state and prevent it from being a cheap imitation of the California nightmare.

RogerG

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America’s Soul-Destroying Time

If you have 59 minutes to spare, please watch the attached video on Professor Victor Davis Hanson’s lecture before a gathering at Hillsdale College on September 8, 2021. In many ways, he captures the perils of our time. It’s a wakeup call.

One important takeaway was his dissection of the effort to remorselessly wreck America, its identity, history, institutions, founding principles, and spirit. Its a truly revolutionary endeavor, like all revolutions since at least the French Revolution.

These revolutions are top/down affairs. They are germinated by people from middle and upper backgrounds who have the wealth and time to be schooled, and therefore the luxury to conjure ruinous fantasies. They are the product of a radicalized and detached claque of demagogic public intellectuals who, once in power, recognize no restraint except the achievement of their extremist ends. They hide away in tenured faculty positions, in ngo’s, among the insulated hyper-rich and cultural elites. Before we knew it, it descended on us like a plague of locusts.

All of sudden, the prior terms of justice were replaced by revolutionary slogans like “equity”, a word made devoid of all meaning and recast to advance an assault on the foundation of the nation. Now, we’re really in for it.

Please watch the video.

RogerG

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9/11/2021, An Eviscerated America

Eviscerate: verb; to deprive something of its essential content.

Well, here we are, 9/11 twenty years later. The event is a two-decade saga bookended by an aerial assault killing nearly 3,000 people and an ignominious August 2021 retreat from Afghanistan. 9/11 is more than just that horrible day at the start of the new millennium. The saga as it played out came to signify something far more disturbing. We are no longer a nation capable of great, heroic deeds. We are eviscerated of moral fortitude. There’s nothing left in the tank of courage in the face of pain and adversity. Yes, we might never forget the day, but we also don’t really care enough to deal with a messy world with thousands of killers running around in it. They, the killers, have the fortitude; we don’t seem to have much of it. How did we get to this point?

From this
To this

Of course, not all of us are so enfeebled. It’s just that it’s easier today to cobble together an electoral majority to cut and run. The 2020 election gave us two bugout enthusiasts at the top of the ballot.

What has drained us of that moral fortitude? Simply put, our brains have been crafted to not handle it. On the one hand, for most of us, the world beyond a person is the one presented by Hollywood. Honestly, people don’t read, really read and contemplate; movies, audio-visual is the talk of the town. In an earlier era of cinema, war is capture the flag. In addition, today, the prevalent story line is one of oppression. Combine the two and you have a debilitating impatience. And why defend a cruel nation with a cruel people anyway? After a few decades of nearly non-stop self-flagellation, who would want to come to its defense?

Hollywood, a main culprit in the slide, hasn’t been kind to adult reasoning. American cinema reached its apogee in the runup to World War II and its aftermath. WWII on the big screen and tv was implanted in a generation’s mind to such an extent that all subsequent wars were unfavorably compared to it. But what do you do in a world where your enemies have no uniforms and no borders and capital city to invade and seize? Religious, militant, and ideological movements aren’t defined by the attributes of a nation-state. Capture the flag seems hardly appropriate when a walk through a South Chicago neighborhood on a Saturday night is the more accurate metaphor.

On the international stage, organized murderous rage is more than a crime. It’s a national security threat, as we should well know. It’s an international crime wave demanding attention. Think of it as law enforcement without a Fifth Amendment and the Miranda warnings. Intelligence gathering, training up cadres in the neighborhoods, raids, and support for allies over the long haul shadow hunting down the mafia in drawn-out domestic law enforcement crusades. It’s a dirty business. We don’t have the stomach for it because we lack the persistence. Fighting organized international terrorism lacks the visual glory of victorious columns entering Germany.

Our entertainment industry certainly created false expectations about war, but it also worked to define us as a people in the most horrible way possible. As Christianity has receded, a racialist Marxism filled the vacuum. America as the oppressor of the “other” became settled doctrine throughout the culture. What started as the ramblings of Herbert Marcuse, C. Wright Mills, and others of the 1950’s, and continued into the 1960’s in the Port Huron Statement of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), eventually funneled its way into the faculty lounge. Tweed and tenure replaced long hair and jeans. The line of descent extended into all branches of the cultural commanding heights: business, education, entertainment, publishing, the press, fashion. The beautiful people had a neat set of fashionable views to foist on their fans; Big Sports, Big Soft Drinks, Big Airlines had a rationale for boycotting Georgia.

And the Democratic Party became the institutional focal point for the revolution. It’s one thing to organize conclaves to plan protests; it’s quite another to have the full force of one of the two great political parties to push the radical dogmas. The Biden campaign became the avatar for the neo-Marxist program. Once in power, radicalism became policy.

It permeates everywhere in DC. The normal bastions of American exceptionalism like the military showed signs of the corruption. Can anyone forget the comments of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, before Congress in June? He sounded like the academic half-wit Ibram X. Kendi or AOC when he confessed a desire to “understand white rage”. There can be nothing as dispiriting to the ranks as being called a mass of racists by their principal commander.

No, he can’t squirm out of it by saying that he was referring to the academic study of CRT. His comment assumed the factual presence of “white rage”, not the study of its hypothetical existence. Besides, it’s part of the heated political rhetoric of the radical left that has a home in the media and donkey party. Milley proved that he is a sellout to the radical program, and he may be proof of the radicalization in the command structure and the deep penetration of the radicalism in the Pentagon’s training academies. The crushing of national morale goes alongside the crushing of morale in the ranks of the people responsible for keeping the nation safe.

All of this has taken place in the span of the twenty years since 9/11. The bugout from Afghanistan was disgraceful. It’s hard to tell what Trump would have done if he had been the 2020 victor, despite the unconvincing after-the-fact denials by him and his apologists. There are too many Trump statements from his 2016 campaign, presidency, and the pre-August period to deny that Trump was anything but a loud devotee of withdrawal.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (C-L) meets with Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (C-R) in the Qatari capital Doha on November 21, 2020, (Photo by Patrick Semansky / POOL / AFP)

It’s hypothetical that he would have done it better. If anything, Trump and his people are proving the validity of Kennedy’s famous cliché after the Bay of Pigs disaster: “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” And nothing else.

The American people boxed themselves into a corner. Or more correctly, they allowed themselves to be boxed into the corner. A steady drumbeat to get out for over 5 years will have an effect on opinion polls.

But if you think about it, if it’s correct to assume that Trump would have done it better, it’s equally hypothetical to conclude that he would have left America in a better strategic position even if he won in 2020. A withdrawal is a withdrawal, and there’s nothing in the public record to indicate that he would have left a residual force. Everything coming out of his mouth and Twitter feed was a declaration to get everyone out. If anything, we hypothetically might have avoided the chaos at Kabul airport, but we still would have abandoned the country to the Taliban. Absent the steel of American logistics and air support, Afghan forces likely would have recapitulated their collapse under the guise of Trump. Afghanistan reverts back to 9/10, the Taliban and their movement’s deeply interconnected cousins – al-Qaeda and ISIS – rule the land, and America lost an important chess piece in the big game of national security.

So, here we are on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. The Taliban and their nest of jihadist allies are in charge. In a recent broadcast on Afghanistan’s national RTA television station, the Taliban celebrated our defeat with a honorific of the 9/11 attacks as “the result of the United States’ policy of aggression against the Muslim world.” They celebrate the “martyrs”. For us, we go into mourning for our dead, as all those who fought, bled, and died in that God-forsaken place must come to grips with personal sacrifices that were diminished by power-hungry politicos who have sold the country on the non-sequitur of retreat-as-victory.

We ran and all we have to show for it is mourning at memorials, the memory of a disgraceful exit, and graves and scars for our wonderful veterans. And the world after the retreat is a far more dangerous place for America and Americans.

RogerG

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Our Own 18 Brumaire, Year VIII?

Biden in his White House speech, 9/9/2021.
Napoleon’s overthrow of The Directorate, Nov. 9, 1799.

18 Brumaire, Year VIII? What’s this? It’s, first, a date in the French Revolution’s arid and rationally processed calendar – long since dead, thank God (literally, I mean that). To most sensible people, it corresponds to November 9, 1799, and the date of Napoleon’s coup d’état. He overthrew the French government, the Directorate, and had himself proclaimed First Consul, essentially a dictator. Yesterday, did President Joe Biden do the same?

A glum Joe Biden in his basement zooming his campaign, from 2020.
A glum Napoleon after his defeat at Waterloo. Compare with Biden.

Once big change occurs, things can seldom return to where they were before. Biden’s announcement yesterday is filled with portents, warnings of serious changes in how we are to be governed. Most worrisome, progressivism may have finally pealed away its democracy mask. All along, unbeknownst to a poorly educated population, they were and are died-in-the-wool, self-righteous autocrats. Biden stood before cameras and announced the coup, if you didn’t catch it.

Mark that date – September 9, 2021 – for Biden issued new ukases without any basis in law or tradition. Reminiscent of Stalin’s war on the “kulaks” in the 1930’s, Biden targeted the “unvaccinated”. Whole measures were proclaimed to go after them. The command was clear: get vaccinated or put finis to your work, travel, and social intercourse. The only thing missing was the mass deportations to camps. Is that next?

Russian farmers, branded as “kulaks”, await deportation to camps in the 1930’s.

His Excellency – no longer is “Mr. President” appropriate – declared that only His views, His claque of “experts”, and His measures were allowed in all policy, coast to coast and up and down the federal ladder. He implored the private, now not-so-private, sector to heel to His commands. Employers of 100 and over are to order all employees to get vaccinated or be punished with weekly screenings, and, of course, termination if resistant. It’s an imperial decree that will quickly intimidate anyone with a payroll. Our expansive business sector will become the whip to Biden’s jackboot.

We may have just crossed a threshold in our history. Progressives have always been on the lookout for a “moral equivalent of war” to expand their control over the unwashed and unenlightened. “Crises” fit the bill, as in Rahm Emmanuel’s “A crisis is too good to waste”.

Now, they’ve got one tailored to their wishes. What better weapon than a pandemic to smash the little people with their little brains in their little churches in their little houses in their little towns in their little businesses in their little civic associations, and in their little and not-so-little families? Once this Rubicon is crossed, can we ever turn back? History is not encouraging.

Lenin and his Council of People’s Commissars, then ruling Russia after his 1917 coup. His revolution was a threshold that forever changed Russia, never to return even after the fall of the Soviet Union.

RogerG

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Neurotic Nation

Neurotic (adj.), neurosis (noun): mental, emotional, or physical reactions that are drastic and irrational. At its root, a neurotic behavior is an automatic, unconscious effort to manage deep anxiety. (From WebMD)

We (wife, son, sister-in-law, myself) were in a Denny’s in Grand Junction, Colorado, and I couldn’t help but notice the greater prevalence of mask-wearing in the state. Sitting across from me while waiting for our table were two gentlemen in masks, one double-masked. At our table, looking out the window, I watched a solitary woman on her morning walk wearing a mask . . . outdoors! The scene struck me as odd since few, if any, wear masks in Idaho and Montana. Passing through my home state of Montana and Idaho on our way to Grand Junction, even at major venues like Walmart, I could count on one hand the number of people wearing masks. Not so in blue-state Colorado, at least as evident in Grand Junction. Could blue-state/red-state socio-political dynamics account for the behavior? After all, politics is downstream of culture.

Watch this scene from North Hollywood, California.

By all accounts, left-coast culture has come to dominate Denver and Aspen which has come to dominate Colorado. Blue culture equals blue state.

We were in Grand Junction for a wedding. To be honest, nobody at the night-before social, nor at the wedding and reception, could give a rip about Fauci’s pronouncements, and all were thankfully unmasked. Anyway, it wasn’t a crowd receptive to the dictates of the federal authoritarians. Beyond the perimeter of the festivities, however, life seemed to be more corseted.

Red states seem to want to get back to normal, and “normal” doesn’t mean getting used to soul-destroying mandates for us and our kids. Blue states push for the “new normal”. They follow in lock-step with blue-media, which happen to be headquartered in blue states. CNN, the flagship of blue-media, on Sunday and Monday went on a rant about maskless crowds at football stadiums after the first weekend of college football in 2021 (see below).

*PS: As an aside, take a look at this reaction to Pres. Biden by some in various stadium crowds.

Bigtime college football – the major D1A schools are in red states – is a “red” sport. The values of most folks in red states don’t coincide with government acting like our forever-helicopter parents. Perhaps those of us in the red states have had it with the micro-controls. Maybe we’ve noticed that all the masking, vaccines orders, social distancing, euthanizing the restaurant industry, and school closures didn’t make a lick of difference. The bug did what bugs do: they evolve! So, we’re back to authoritarianism – or totalitarianism if you will.

It’s not that the vaccines didn’t work. It’s that the bug became something different, and the jabs become less relevant since the bug changed the ground rules by changing. Our wannabe nannies now have the excuse to slide back into their preferred habit of authoritarianism. What was once “bend the curve” turned into COVID-forever. We’re going onto two years of ginned-up hysteria, almost to the point of generating a permanent social neurosis, particularly in blue states.

The obvious answer would be to get back to a real normal, not a “new” one. You know, life like it was before China foisted the bug on the world. Open the schools, open the restaurants, open the downtowns, open the stadiums, get back to work and church, and rely on therapeutics. Take the vaccine if you wish, but, regardless, have plenty of therapies on hand to treat the vast, vast majority of the infected who will have a bad case of the flu. Each year’s flu season doesn’t shut down society. Why should this?

We are twisting ourselves into knots to avoid what is clear as a bell. We’re going to have to gut our way through it. To me, it’s been clear for quite some time that the straitjacketing has only delayed the spread of the virus, thus leaving it to erupt again, again, and again.

We have plenty of therapeutics, something unavailable in 1918. It won’t be Fauci who’ll lead us out of this. It will be nature, and our own therapies that’ll allow us to weather the storm. It increasingly looks like natural immunity will have a bigger role to play than the jabs.

It’s better to recognize the obvious reality than to hang onto Fauci’s and Walensky’s feelings-of-the-moment. They’re only succeeding at making hordes of neurotics, and making blue the color of statewide neurosis. Is that what they mean by a “new normal”?

RogerG

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The Moron Vote, California Style

I forgot who said it – I think it was William F. Buckley – but I paraphrase, “It’s not that you vote. It’s that you take your vote seriously.” Seriously means to have acquaintance with the issues, nominally or otherwise. Today, the mantra is to vote, vote, vote; never mind that you might have the issue-awareness of a comatose patient on life support.

September 14 is decision day on Gavin Newsom’s political career, and California is scattering ballots to the wind like our Fed at Democrat insistence is papering the world in dollars. The dollar as the word’s reserve currency, with Weimar Germany integrity, isn’t likely to survive as such any more than California’s election integrity will. Out the window goes the secret ballot. What’s secret – meaning, one voter is alone with one ballot – when 4 ballots land in a mail box, go behind the door, and are “harvested” a week later? And, even more troubling, everyone alive, dead, sentient, vegetative, moved, unmoved, caring, and uncaring gets one (maybe two). The state has a vote system that can’t help but rope in a lot of morons.

Vote by mail in South Carolina

Nothing is expected of the human being, not even breathing. You don’t have to break away from the Cheetos and the Xbox. You’re registered automatically under motor-voter. A ballot will come with the junk mail. Don’t bother with getting presentable and hunting down the car keys. Somebody will come by and pick it up, and maybe offer a little advice on how to fill it out.

It’s a system designed for the likes of Stacy Abrams, the goddess-avatar against “voter suppression”. Never mind that the Georgia race hustler doesn’t make a lick of sense. In her latest published screed, Our Time Is Now, she doubles down on stupid, or stupefying self-negation (Is there a difference?). Take a look at this glaring insult to logic from her book: “I watched in real time as the conflicts in our evolving nation became fodder for racist commercials, horrific suppression — and the largest turnout of voters of color in Georgia’s history.” Large turnouts of “voters of color” aren’t evidence of racist voter suppression any more than victory is defined by the enemy holding the ground and your troops are wiped out.

Stacy Abrams

It boggles the mind for what passes for “elite” opinion, or willful malpractice on the part of Holt & Reinhart editors. The mind is also left spinning when examining the latest turnout numbers in places like Georgia. The normally low-turnout 2018 midterms surpassed the 2016 presidential election. And 2020 exceeded Obama’s 2008. And proof of some kind of voter-ID is Jim Crow 2.0, something on the books in 35 states? The fact is, nobody – alive or dead – is impeded, especially when you’ve got a pandemic excuse at your disposal. Our elections are open sieves for votes from God-knows-where.

With that great vote sucking sound at open throttle in California, Newsom’s prospects look brighter than what they should be in a state with most of the nation’s homeless, eco-crazed forest management policies that reduced the woods to an open-air match factory, public schools geared for failure, COVID-panic as routine government policy, a cost of living that strangles the middle class and forces mass out-migration (and the loss of one House seat), tax rates that make the Socialist International glow in envy, and a neglected and obsolete water storage and delivery system as the state pursues trains-to-nowhere and inter-urban transit boondoggles suitable for Tokyo. What’s there to complain about?

Here’s my pet theory: As the number of registered voters approaches the number of human beings above room temperature, the proportion of morons in the vote totals increases exponentially. Newsom and Abrams are on the same wave length. Stacy’s prattle provides cover for a California election system that promises one-party control into the foreseeable future, like the one in North Korea that keeps the Kims in power with 95% approvals. The other 5% won’t be around next year.

Advantage Newsom, unless the Republicans become as adept as the Dems at improving their standing among the growing moron demographic. Believe me when I say that there are rich veins to be mined left, right, and center.

RogerG

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Is Democracy a Ship of Fools?

Biden and his announced cabinet, January 2021.
“Ship of Fools”, A. N. Mironov

It’s August 31, September 1 in Afghanistan, and we’re gone, lock, stock and barrel. Biden, Trump, and the primetime lineup of Fox News got what they wanted.

The “Ship of Fools” allegory is from Plato’s “The Republic” in which a ship is run by a dysfunctional crew. Democracy can magnify the “fools” presence among the personnel. But so do the other forms of governance: the “fools” can be a subservient peasant class and their overseers born into privilege, or a group of belligerent oafs, fired up by half-witted utopian visions, and gaining power through the barrel of a gun. Such has been the lot of mankind. We should know this oft-repeated story well.

Look at what democracy gave us in November 2020. A majority rejected the man-of-many-mean-tweets and narcissistic demagogue (a tautology?), and chose a doddering old fool, obsequious to the ruling radical left of his party. The result is the ruination that the radical left has always given the people who sadly have to live under their edicts. Prime example: the Afgan bugout.

I turn to H.L. Mencken for sarcastic aphorisms on democracy. Here’s some for your edification (courtesy of Mark J. Perry of AEI). Enjoy.

H. L. Mencken. (Henry L. Mencken.), a writer for the Baltimore Sun from 1905 to 1948. (Baltimore Sun Staff File Photo by Robert F. Kniesche). (Baltimore Examiner and Washington Examiner OUT ORG XMIT: BAL0909101149453148)
  • The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
  • Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
  • Democracy, too, is a religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.
  • Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.
  • Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. (my personal favorite)
  • If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
  • As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
  • All government, of course, is against liberty.

That about sums it up. Elections are just as able to hand command of the rudder to fools as any other method.

RogerG

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Our Punditry Is Just as Bad as Our Ruling Class

CNN anchors with Brian Williams of MSNBC (l)
MSNBC anchors
Fox News anchors

Let me be clear, I’m not tarring everyone in our punditry and governing classes. Not everyone is this stone cold stupid. But much of the chatter is hooey, and the hooey is only getting worse.

First on the list of buffoons are the folks in legacy media and all those swirling in their social circles. You know, the people at CNN, MSNBC, the networks, and the big metro newspapers and magazines. They’re hooked on soiling themselves daily, and have for quite a few years. They are the PR department of the left-wing revolution.

Next, we’re confronted by the primetime lineup on Fox News who, along with certain elements in the Republican Party, have resuscitated the Charles Lindbergh wing of foreign policy. If you’ll recall, Lindbergh was the mouth of isolationism before the Fall of France and Pearl Harbor put the kibosh to the whole smear.

Charles Lindbergh speaking at America First Rally in 1941.

Tucker Carlson is an out-and-out isolationist. In a quip during one of his recent shows, he said, “Oceans matter”, or something to that effect. Yes, they do if you have to cross them. No, they aren’t if you want to kill Americans. Why do you think North Korea and Iran want ICBM’s? Why do you think the Russians and the CCP have them? Even if you can’t get your hands on one, box cutters at the throats of airline flight attendants and flight crews will suffice. Voilà, you’ve got a mammoth cruise missile that has the range of an ICBM. Bin-Laden showed the way. Oceans only become another geographic feature on the way to killing Americans.

If the fanatics are more interested in a hands-on approach to the mass killing of Americans – and since I don’t think Tucker is willing to drive the airlines, cruise lines, and shipping companies into the ether by cutting us off from the outside world – trying to keep out the goons at passport/visa checkpoints won’t guarantee anything. More overpaid TSA government workers aren’t reassuring. We’ve already experienced the government efficiency that resulted in flight training for foreign nationals not interested in landing.

A chilling final image of Mihdhar and fellow hijacker Majed Moqed, captured on a surveillance camera at Washington, D.C.’s Dulles Airport the morning of September 11th. (© 2009 WGBH Educational Foundation)

After Tucker, Sean Hannity jumps in with his program of Trump-love. Nearly everything Biden does – agreed, most of it is horrible – is condemned with the follow-up, “Trump wouldn’t have done that.” It’s not just that Biden is dreadfully wrong. He is! It’s that Trump is a god to Hannity. Biden bad, Trump good. It’s that simple to the man from New York City, and soon to be living in a Florida seaside estate maybe next to Trump.

Batting third is Laura Ingraham. She was once a Reaganite in foreign policy but now has enlisted in the Lindbergh brigade. In her on-air confessional, she’s on the Trump train to paint “forever war” on any foreign engagement that might get sticky.

All of this buffoonery came to light in the days since our screens were awash in the abominable scenes in Kabul. Yep, this disaster is 100% Biden’s. No doubt. He carried out a Buster Keaton pullout. But don’t forget, they all wanted a pullout: Biden, Trump, and the telegenic celebrities in primetime Fox News. The left was preconditioned to be a booster of the bugout from W’s Bush-lied-people-died wars. This is something for which there is kumbaya between Code Pink and the Lindbergh wing at Fox News.

Biden concocted a dastardly bugout. Trump and his Trumpkin brigades, aping Trump’s “forever wars” lingo, wanted a nicer bugout. Either way, the timetable and the smoothness of the bugout will end in the same place: mass-casualty events.

In the end, as we’ll soon learn, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are a revolving door. Regardless of Bush’s asinine and airy rhetoric about the universal aspirations of mankind and our efforts to export wokeness, we were in Afghanistan to kill terrorists, the kind that’ll cry “Allah Akbar” as they spray bullets in a night club.

Omar Mateen, the Orlando Pulse Nightclub killer.

The mission demands 10,000 troops on the ground, bases in-country and outside, roving special forces, Afghan allies, intelligence operations par excellence, and an Afghan government that won’t stand in the way. That indigenous government doesn’t have to be Switzerland, just functioning enough to stay out of the way.

Yes, kill ‘em before they get a ticket to the Iowa State Fair. That’s a real America First strategy.

If you’re worried about our sons and daughters in harm’s way, well, any place is in “harm’s way” if these fanatics get a haven to slaughter us. If we can tolerate 35,000 troops in Germany, we sure as hell can put up with 15,000 to kill those who would kill us, and have done so.

Taliban soldiers killed in a fire fight with US troops.

How’s that for speaking truth to power, media power?

RogerG