Monthly Archives: July 2024

Does “accepting” gays mean we have to pay them to mock our religion?

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Twenty-six years ago, the media reported that a young man named Matthew Shepard was beaten and strung up on a Wyoming barbed wire fence to die. The beating and murder were because Shepard was gay.

The perps were quickly found, tried for murder, convicted, and sentenced to prison. They’re still there.

It was a good news story about bad news and was widely reported. But it wasn’t true.

It has since been shown that Shepard and one of the perps were in the drug business together. Shepard was due to receive a $10,000 shipment of meth. The perp himself was gay and had been in a gay relationship with Shepard. 

So, it wasn’t a hate crime by a straight Wyoming redneck against an innocent 21-year-old gay guy. It was a drug deal gone bad between two gay lovers.

But never mind that. Gay advocates seized on Shepard’s death as evidence of hatred in the heartland toward gays. His death spurred new federal hate crime laws, where criminally attacking someone becomes even more criminal if the someone is gay. (A friend in the law professor business is fond of saying that it’s impossible to commit just one federal crime.)

The flip side of that, of course, is that criminally attacking someone is now a little less criminal if the person is not gay.

Notably, the hate crime law passed in response to Shepard’s murder was, of course, not in effect at the time of his murder. The perps were nonetheless arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced – a sentence they’re still serving – for committing a crime.

It’s called murder, and the penalties are severe. Regardless of whether you hate the victim.

I’m guessing that you remember the Matthew Shepard story, but never saw the debunking of it. The debunking never got much coverage. Gee, I wonder why.

Fast forward four decades. Now we have the quadrennial spectacle called the Olympics. It’s become a little like the Superbowl. It’s infused with media money that wants to juice it up to sell you stuff.

In the Superbowl, that means a half-time show with celebrities who “accidentally” expose themselves and expensive television commercials that compete for edgy obscurity.

In the Olympics, we of course have doping scandals, but they’re not nearly as interesting ever since East Germany joined the Dark Force of capitalism. We do still have the mini-scandal of men winning women’s events on the pretense that they’re feeling feminine, that day, but that will sort itself out as the real women keep losing to them.

Today’s scandal is that the opening ceremonies included a bit where gay men dressed in drag mockingly imitated Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper.

For those of you who were raised in the Church of No-religion and went to the College of No-education, the Last Supper is a large mural painted at the end of the fifteenth century on a convent wall in Milan by an Italian who was the quintessential Renaissance Man – a creative genius of art, engineering, science and architecture. It depicts the artist’s imagination of the supper between Jesus and his disciples the night before his crucifixion. It’s considered a masterpiece of art and a treasure of Christianity. It’s worth seeing.

I’m sure the gay Parisian in charge of the opening ceremonies of the Olympics thought the mocking of an icon of Christianity and western culture was very edgy and, therefore, artistic. I’m surprised there wasn’t someone more sophisticated to say “Oh, the mocking of Christianity thing? Hasn’t that been done?”

Because yes, it has. About a thousand times. I suppose it was edgy when an “artist” made a jar of urine with a submerged crucifix and called it “Piss Christ.” But that was nearly forty years ago, for Chrissake. The latest “edginess” is fake nuns in drag at baseball games.

Yawn.

There’s a reason I bring up these stories of Matthew Shepard and this week’s opening ceremonies of the Olympics. (BTW, women’s beach volleyball is more entertaining than most other women’s sports. Superbowl wardrobe malfunctions have nothing on these gals.)

It’s because they raise a question in my mind.

I’ve never had an issue with gays, mind you. A few of my friends and family are gays. I admire the struggle it must have been and the courage it must have entailed.

Anyway, I have enough stuff in my bedroom and my past to avoid judging people for what’s in theirs. (I say these sorts of things just to ensure that I’ll never succumb to pressure to run for political office or even – especially! – to serve on my HOA.)

All that said, there’s something amiss about publicly mocking people’s religion, especially when the mockery is just for publicity, faux edginess, and to sell stuff.

I don’t mock gay people for being gay. Now that would be edgy in today’s culture. Gay people don’t mock Islam or the Prophet. That would be edgy in today’s culture. Nobody mocks transsexuals. That would be edgy.

Why is it OK to dig up the most overused trope of political correctness by mocking Christians and Christianity?

There’s nothing edgy about mocking Christians. It happens all the time now. In fact, it always has. The first mocking of a Christian was of Christ who died a humiliating death after an excruciating torture. Almost all his disciples were later mockingly tortured to death as well.

This mockery of Christianity continued unabated up to the present with fake nuns in drag at baseball games.  

That said, I object to renewed mockery of my Lord and Savior by attention-seeking queers who are being paid to do so with public funds.

I understand that mocking Christians is part of your gig. It apparently gets your rocks off. You insult Christians to the point that they’re angry and hurt, and then you go home (I hope) to get your jollies about it in your bedroom.

I suggest that you masturbate to something else. I remind you that when it comes to mockery, you live in glass houses.

Does JD’s wife know he’s a racist?

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President Trump’s pick for his running mate, JD Vance, is a little hard to criticize. His mom in hillbilly Kentucky was a drug addict. He was saved, and raised, by his grandmother.

JD returned the favor in a way; he later saved his mom. He announced at the Republican National Convention that she’d been sober for many years (though he failed to mention that it was with his help). She beamed, and the crowd cheered.

JD joined the Marines, got a degree from Ohio State, and went to Yale Law School where he was an editor of the Yale Law Review. He became a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. He wrote an account of growing up called “Hillbilly Elegy” which became a best seller. He was elected to the United States Senate at age 37.

The left hates achievers. Especially when they do it on merit rather than skin color or sexual preference. If they’re conservative, they get dubbed “racists” for that.

To support the “racist” smear, the left will spin and even invent stories. In JD’s case, they’ve focused on his venture capital work.

After working for two venture firms, JD started his own. He named it after a power in the J.R.R. Tolkien books – Narya, which was a power to resist tyranny and despair.  

Rachel Maddow sees something ominous in this. She notes that if you take the “N” at the start of “Narya” and reposition it to the end, you have . . . [drum roll] . . . “Aryan.”

So, there you have it. Irrefutable proof that JD is a secretly self-identifying “Aryan.” As in the Hitlerian kind.

As for Tolkien, the left has long hated his depiction of a world with good and evil. The left doesn’t believe in evil, you see.

Pause to consider the reasons that a group of people would deny the existence of evil. And then consider the consequences of that denial.

Maybe I’m a little too hard on them. They do believe in one type of evil. They believe that conservative people are evil – like JD. They believe that such people deserve to be smeared with the “racist” label, as Maddow has smeared JD, and any other vile label.

Speaking of racism, some of the real thing was on display this week. In what the media dubbed “an antiwar protest,” the left marched in DC during Bibi Netanyahu’s speech to Congress. Half the Democrats boycotted the speech. This “antiwar protest” was an appalling antisemitic march depicting Netanyahu as a horned monster with bloody fangs. Numerous signs called for a “final solution” to the Jewish “problem.”

One other thing about JD. He met a woman in Yale Law School and married her. She happens to be a Asian-American who practices Hinduism. Both her parents immigrated legally from India.

JD and Usha have been married ten years and have three half-Asian children. During their marriage, he converted from Protestantism to Catholicism.

I wonder if Usha and the kids know JD is a racist. Count on Rachel Maddow to break the news.

Is Joe Biden dying?

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I’ll just give the facts:

He’s 81-years old.

He’s shown a distinct decline in his physical and mental state.

The White House announced last week that he has COVID.

He was pushed out of the presidential election by people who are familiar with his physical and mental state.

He has essentially disappeared since then – for over 48 hours.

He apparently traveled to the vicinity of Las Vegas. There are reports that he suffered a medical emergency there, and emergency assistance was called.

His handlers refused the assistance, and instead flew him back east, according to local authorities.  

My prayers for him and his family.

And the winner of the pool to predict the date of Joe’s dropout is . . .

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Readers will recall that a couple of weeks ago, I started a pool to predict Joe’s dropout date. First prize was a day or evening of hiking and drinking with me around, or in, Aspen. (There’s no truth to the rumor that second prize was two days, and third prize was three.)

The pool filled and flooded, the dam burst, and I was deluged with more predictions than I can shake a Speedo at, through my two websites and by direct email correspondence.

My own prediction was too early by over a week, so at least I won’t be drinking alone.

The winning prediction was within about four hours. The winner predicted 10 a.m. on July 21.

As you know unless you’re as somnolent as Joe, you know he quit not with a bang, but a whimper. No press conference, no Oval Office teleprompter speech, not even a hug or a handshake. Just a tweet. To my knowledge, the guy is still holed up in his basement in Delaware; there’s been no public appearance.

Much of the White House staff learned of his walkaway not from Joe or any other private announcement, but from the tweet.

It’s inconceivable that Joe himself wrote the tweet, so at this point it’s still just hearsay. It’s possible that Joe will wake up tomorrow and tell us that his Twitter account was hacked, Anthony Weiner style.

But the contest panel of judges – er, judge – has convened, reached a quorum, and unanimously decided that we’ll go with July 21 as the quitting date, at least for now.  

I would love to give you the name of the winner, so that he can enjoy not just the prize but also the adulation of millions and perhaps an interview with Andrew Breitbart. But I won’t reveal his name until he permits me to.

You see, not all my readers want to be identified as such. Go figure.

But the winner knows who he is. I invite him in a comment to give me permission to let everyone else know who he is as well.

Meanwhile, congratulations to this intrepid prognosticator. What’s your prediction for the stock market tomorrow?

Joe, did you just break up with us – by text?

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One of three things happened this afternoon. Either (1) the Lord Almighty told Joe to quit the race, or (2) the polls said there was “no way” he could win, or (3) he got hit by a train.

Because he assured us over the last weeks – most recently the last few days – that those were the only things that would cause him to quit.

I suppose there’s one other possibility that he neglected to mention. Barack might have told his butt boy to get the hell out, else Barack would spill the beans on Joe’s family business.

So . . . Joe did what Joe had to do.

But by text??? What kind of chickensh*t scoundrel breaks up by text? No press conference? No teleprompter speech from the Oval Office? Not even one from his Delaware basement?

It’s bad enough to be Starbucked. We’ve been texted.

Oh, I know there’s the story that he has a bout of COVID, which is why he’s retreated to the basement again (though we were also told the symptoms were mild).

But wait? Wasn’t he vaccinated with that stuff that makes it impossible to get COVID?

It’s we the people who’ve been dumped, but somehow I’m not feeling particularly humiliated. But since the relationship is over, Joe, would you, Lady McBiden and Hunty please get out of our damn house?

Right now – before I get a restraining order!

P.S. I owe one of you discerning readers a prize for coming closest to picking the date on which Joe would announce his quitting. I have a boatload of entries to sort through to figure out which of you is the winner. But stay tuned!

Is “cheap stuff” the right goal for our trade policy?

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Economists – who have predicted seven of the last four recessions – will tell you that trade tariffs are bad. The reason tariffs are bad is that they make imported goods more expensive. The money for the tariff has to come from somewhere, so it gets built into the price of the product.

So, the effect of an American tariff on, say, televisions made in China is to raise the prices to the American consumer.

OK, I buy that. But what does that mean in real life?

It means that a family in Peoria that would like to buy a 60” TV might have to settle for a 52” screen.

That strikes me a something less than catastrophic. If that’s a “global trade war” then these economists never studied the lead-up to World War Two.

But still, I admit that settling for a 52” TV rather than a 60” TV is not a positive. It’s a negative. Especially if you combine it with settling for a phone with a camera having 2X zoom rather than 3x zoom, and settling for a car that goes 0-60 in 5.9 seconds rather than 5.6 (both of which are way faster than the muscle cars of yesteryear, by the way), and settling for a dishwasher that you can turn on and off easily but not from France.

So, I do acknowledge that tariffs entail some cost to people who like to buy stuff – and we all do like to buy stuff. But that’s not the whole story. Credit Donald Trump and J.D. Vance for starting a discussion on this.

There are several legitimate reasons for tariffs. One is to protect a strategic American interest. Steel is used throughout industry, from buildings to tanks. Sure, we could import all our steel from China, for now, but what happens when we close our steel mills and then have a conflict with China and they cut off our supply?  

A second reason for tariffs is to use them as a bargaining chip. Foreign countries sometimes unfairly protect their industries from American goods, whether it’s the vineyards in France or the chip-makers in Taiwan. We can unilaterally remove our own trade barriers while they retain theirs, but a smarter approach is to threaten a tit-for-tat where we impose barriers unless they remove theirs. This typically works.

Everyone admits both of these reasons. Weighing and applying them can be complicated, but there’s no doubt about their legitimacy.

A third reason for tariffs is more subtle. It’s to protect American culture – and French and Italian and Korean culture.

Economists will tell you that the best economy is the one that’s the most efficient. That sounds logical. It means that if wine can be produced most efficiently in Italy, then that’s where is should be produced. If steel can be produced most efficiently in China, then that’s where it should be produced. If AI software can be produced most efficiently in America, then that’s where it should be produced.

The reason that efficiency trumps everything else, the economists will say, is that the efficient production of goods leads to the lowest prices for those goods. Low prices mean greater availability to poor people. What could be more important than globalized trade that results in cheap goods for poor people?

Culture, that’s what. And the best culture is not necessarily the most efficient one.

Maybe good wine can indeed be produced more efficiently in Italy than in France (my own judgment notwithstanding). Does that mean the French vineyards should be put out of business?

Maybe cars can be produced more efficiently in Korea than in Italy (which is surely the case). Does that mean the car factories in Italy should be demolished so that they can be made into vineyards and we should all drive a KIA and not a Ferrari?  

An economist would answer “yes.”

But an economist knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Destroying those French vineyards exacts a cultural toll on the French countryside and its people that is impossible to assign a Euro value to. Destroying those Italian car factories that build automotive works of art is almost like destroying Florence.

And what about the personal toll on the workers and their families?

What’s that you say? They should “learn programming?” But AI is putting programmers out of business too.

Economic efficiency is not the highest and best goal of a trade policy, especially in a rich culture. The loadstar of our trade policy – and our foreign policy – should be something more than that.

Trump the Grey has re-arisen as Trump the White

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“Authority had taken up this plan and enlarged it at the moment of its failure. ‘Naked I was sent back . . . until my task is done,’ said Gandalf.”

–Letter 156 of J.R.R. Tolkien about the death of Gandalf the Grey and his return as Gandalf the White

I won’t compare the events of last Saturday afternoon in rural Pennsylvania to the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. I have a weakness for melodrama, but that’s a bridge too far even for me.

But the renewing effect of a near-death experience is old and powerful in literature and life – perhaps especially when the near-death is out of the blue. There’s no anticipation, no nervousness, no preparation.

The entire reaction occurs after the event is already over. Then, safe and sound, the person whose corporeal self was nearly extinguished is completely and intensely alive. The only evidence that he nearly departed is his shaking head and trembling hands.

OK, maybe his ear is bleeding, too, just to remind him how very, very close to his cranium was the Grim Reaper’s scythe.

Since he never saw it coming, he knows that he escaped not by strength, not by work, not by cunning. He escaped by luck.

Some call it Providence.

Gandalf the Grey (spoiler alert!) dies a horrible death in the course of Tolkien’s tale. The Ring-Bearer and his crew are thusly dealt a severe blow in their quest to save Middle Earth. Without a wizard on the team, they’re a rag-tag band of kids, an elf, a dwarf and a mere man.

But – Holy Smokes! – in the nick of time Gandalf reappears to help save the day and Middle Earth. In his reappearance, he is no longer Grey, but White.

Tolkien explains in the books and his letters (this explanation didn’t make it into the movies – they were quite long enough without it) that Gandalf did indeed “die” in the manner that wizards die, but an authority renewed him – stronger and wiser.

It happens.

Donald Trump will give a speech tonight accepting a nomination to save today’s approximation of Middle Earth from goblins, orks, pedophiles, fallen wizards, ballot harvesters, identity politicians, dragons, idiots, malevolence, vagrants, Antifa, dementia, wokesters, BLM, and sundry other Democrats.

On the first three days of the Convention, Trump seemed different. He seemed more calm, more at peace. Fire no longer spews from his mouth. Rather, a radiance shines from his eyes.

He’s becoming a leader. Not the “FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT!” type, although those were his words as his fists pounded the air when he rose from the stage floor last Saturday afternoon.

That was then, when he’d been cowardly ambushed by another messed-up product of our messed-up culture. Trump’s defiance and fight were the natural and right reaction.

But bravado now is unnecessary and unhelpful. Now, he knows he’s been tasked with something big, and so do the people. Now, he and they know that he’s fully capable of performing this task. Now, he and they know his orange head has a purpose more noble than being exploded by a bullet, and more graceful than spouting inflammatory rhetoric.

His old opponents in the Republican Party have gathered round him. He has the endorsement of virtually all of them and many who are new to the Party – from Silicon Valley moguls, to one of the world’s richest men, to each of his vanquished rivals, to an ever-increasing share of Black America, to most Hispanic Americans.

What they see is what I see: A quiet confidence, an unexpected patience, a deep resolve to complete – or at least resume – a task much bigger than he.

The running mate Trump has chosen grew up as a self-described hillbilly in Appalachia, to become a Marine, an Editor of the Yale Law Review, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and a young Senator. This guy is accustomed to being the smartest person in the room, the hardest working, and the one who has come the farthest.

Trump sees him not as a threat, but an asset. A person to whom he might someday pass the torch.

Trump is no longer a man, you see, but a movement. A mission. We’re witnessing something historic.

I hear a train

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President Joe Biden continues to resist calls from Democrats to quit his flagging reelection bid, and continues to accede to prayers from Republicans not to. 

He has set some pre-conditions on quitting that he figures will never be fulfilled. “If the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get out of the race,’ I’d get out of the race,” he said last week.

At his rare press conference a few days later, he said he’d quit if the polls said, “There’s no way [he] could win.” He followed that up with “No poll says that” in that creepy, corny stage whisper he has affected.

Yesterday, he said he would run “unless I get hit by a train.”

It all reminds me of an old religious joke. A believer was caught in a flood. He made his way to the rooftop of his house, confident that God would save him.

As the waters rose, a bystander on higher ground tossed him a rope. “Grab the rope! I’ll pull you over to this high ground!” yelled the bystander.

The man declined the rope. “No, the Lord will save me.” The bystander shrugged his shoulders and walked away. The water continued to rise.

Along came a speedboat with some rescuers. “Hop in the boat!” they instructed the man.

“No, the Lord will save me,” he explained. The boat sped away to rescue others. The water on the roof rose to the man’s waist.

Finally, a helicopter came overhead. They dropped a line. “Tie it around yourself and we’ll fly you away!”

The man refused again. “No, the Lord will save me.”

The water rose over the man’s head and he drowned. When he appeared in Heaven, he immediately found God and confronted him with the tragedy. “I thought you would save me! I told everyone you would! And then I drowned!”

God said, “Huh? I sent you a man with a rope, a speedboat, and a helicopter.”

Pollsters don’t ask “Is there any way that Candidate X cannot win?” What they ask is which candidate the polled person intends to vote for. According to NYT and WSJ polls, Joe Biden is losing by 6 points in the popular vote.

That’s even worse than it sounds, because Democrats have to win the popular vote by about 3 points to offset their disadvantage in the Electoral College. (That’s because they win in landslides in states where they win, such as California, but still get only the electoral votes assigned to those states, while they lose the close states. That happened in George W. Bush’s win in 2000 and again in Trump’s win in 2016.)

So, in reality, Biden is losing by about 9 points in today’s polls. And he’s polling about 15 points behind where he was at this point in the close 2020 election.

In pollster language, that translates to “There’s no way he can win.”

As for the Lord Almighty, I wonder if Joe watches the news. In a small-town event in Pennsylvania last Saturday, a creepy kid seems to have taken to heart Biden’s suggestion the day before that a bullseye be put on Trump.

The kid snuck past the DEI-infused Secret Service to get a shot at Trump from relatively close range with a telescoped high-powered rifle. At the last possible split second, Trump cocked his head to make a point. The bullet grazed his right ear, missing his cranium by a fraction of an inch. (Sadly, a man behind Trump was struck and died instantly.)

In religious language, that translates to “The Almighty Lord came down.”

Now what’s that rumbling I hear?

Trump’s enemies make him stronger

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What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger

— Friedrich Nietzsche, tormented soul

Back in the 2016 election, Donald Trump was a bit of a joke. He was a flamboyant, pussy-grabbing, orange-haired, reality show-hosting, real estate tycoon with improbable aspirations to be President of the United States. Just before the election, the New York Times gave him about a 4% chance of winning.

Assigning those odds was not just the Times’ effort to inform their readers. It was also an effort to crush him. They came not just to condemn Trump, but to bury him.

Imagine their chagrin when Trump proved them wrong. Imagine, too, the chagrin of Hillary Clinton and the rest of the establishment.

In discerning their chagrin, you don’t actually need to use your imagination at all. We saw it. They blocked Trump’s every effort at governance with dishonest smears like the Russian collusion hoax, two impeachments, and the pee-pee dossier. In their effort to prevent Trump from governing the country effectively, they were willing to prevent him from governing the country at all – the country be damned.

But the attacks on Trump in his first term didn’t kill him; they only made his stronger. He found a way to govern the country, and he did it effectively. A good example is his nomination of three conservative Supreme Court Justices, every one of which he successfully got confirmed by the insiders of the world’s most exclusive club – the United States Senate.

Americans today give Trump’s presidency higher marks than they give Joe Biden’s, and in the most important issues like the economy, immigration and foreign affairs, they prefer Trump. That’s why he’s leading in the polls (that, and the fact that his opponent is a senile dolt).

In the 2020 election, the establishment pulled out the stops to prevent Trump’s reelection. With a combination of a little election fraud, a lot of election shortcutting in the form of relaxed vote-by-mail rules enacted under the cover of COVID, the Democrats’ undemocratic kneecapping of Bernie Sanders, and a ton of media bias, they narrowly defeated Trump.

His 2020 loss didn’t kill Trump; it only made him stronger. He didn’t get the memo that he was supposed to retire to Mar-a-Lago and play golf. He instead started campaigning for the 2024 election.

Again chagrined, the Democrats decided to declare “lawfare” against Trump. They filed a series of bogus criminal and civil cases against him. They aimed to discredit him by labeling him a “convicted felon.”

The lawfare didn’t kill Trump; it only made him stronger. He fought and largely won. The Supreme Court has thrown out most of the charges against him. Democrat incompetence has undermined most of the rest. The American people see the lawfare for the corrupt scheme that it is, and Trump’s fight as the righteous one that it is. He’s gone up in the polls.

And this time, he shows a discipline that he’d never shown in 2016. He more often thinks and takes advice before he opens his mouth. He’s stronger.

A good example is his handling of the Democrat civil war over Biden’s candidacy. It must be tempting for Trump to pour gasoline on the self-immolating Democrats, but he’s mostly smart enough to let them do it themselves.

Leftists are by nature authoritarians. See, e.g., Stalin, Joseph; Zedong, Mao; Pot, Pol. That is why they’re so quick to label anyone who disagrees with them a “fascist.” It’s projection in combination with authoritarian shout-down.

And so, the leftists – all of whom are Democrats (though not all Democrats are leftists) – have always alluded to violence against Trump. A two-bit comedienne depicted herself with Trump’s severed head. A theater depicted Trump in the role of assassinated Caesar. Just last week, Joe Biden told donors in a conference call that it was time to “put Trump in the bullseye.”

Yesterday, someone did exactly that.

Fortunately for Trump, his supporters, the country and the world, and unfortunately for Democrats, the someone missed Trump’s head by a half-inch. The high-powered hollow point bullet merely took off the top of Trump’s ear (though sadly it instantly killed the man behind him).

As always, this assassination attempt didn’t kill Trump; it only made him stronger. He fell, but with Secret Service assistance quickly stood back up, blood streaming down his face, fists pumping the air defiantly.

Somewhere in hell, Nietzsche must be smiling.

A respectful response to never-Trump Republicans

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This piece isn’t for confirmed Democrats. They are not persuadable.

They’ll vote against Donald Trump and call him “Hitler” to boot, just as they did with Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney.

Never mind that Hitler’s party was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. In the greatest rebranding coup of history, today it’s not the socialist Democrats but the capitalist Republicans that are deemed just like the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

No, this piece is instead for my Republican friends who still refuse to support the party’s soon-to-be nominee in the presidential race against Joe Biden (or whomever). This piece is for the never-Trumpers.

I understand that Trump is a mixed bag. Aren’t we all? In one side of the bag, he pushed through potent tax cuts that produced the best (or is it the goodest?) economy in three generations. Contrary to the claim of the current White House occupant, inflation was not 9% but less than 2% at the close of Trump’s term and unemployment was at record lows.

He engineered the Abraham Accords in a major step toward peace in the Middle East. He kept Russia and China on the margins cowering in the dark while squeezing more money out of NATO countries for their own defense.

He nominated three solid conservative Supreme Court justices (one or two of whom could become great) and got all three confirmed. He supported the crash development of a COVID vaccine while staying skeptical of calls for shutting down schools and businesses.

In the other side of the bag, Trump had a tendency to talk before thinking. He was deliberately provocative. Perhaps the worst thing he did was something he didn’t do – he didn’t immediately call on the January 6 rioters to go home. He also unsuccessfully pressured Vice President Pence to refuse to certify the Electoral College votes against his reelection.

It’s those two things that Democrats and their never-Trump allies point to as a “threat to democracy.”

Fine; but other Presidents have been mixed bags, as well. John F. Kennedy inspired millions and promised to put a man on the moon, but he also suffered the Bay of Pigs fiasco where he tried but failed to create a counterrevolution in an independent foreign country.

That attempted counterrevolution was not exactly democracy at work.  

Reagan won the Cold War but also tolerated and then covered up the Iran-Contra affair where his administration illegally sold arms to the Ayatollahs in Iran to generate cash for the rebels in Nicaragua.

Not very democratic.

Bill Clinton governed mostly from the center-left, effectively, but he also had Monica Lewinski (and she him).

OK, that one was probably democratic, though Hillary presumably didn’t get a vote.

George W rallied the nation after 9/11, but he also made false claims (though probably unknowingly) of weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion and regime change in Iraq, all while letting the administrative deep state grow unchecked.

That exploding deep state is the most antidemocratic phenomenon in American history.

Nixon masterfully played China off Russia to recalibrate the Cold War in a way that changed history for the better, but, alas, went along with a criminal coverup of a two-bit burglary of the Democrats at the Watergate Hotel.

Covering up a burglary? Not very democratic.

Joe Biden, on the positive side . . . well . . . I’ll get back to you on that. On the negative side, he produced near-runaway inflation with a series of mega-moola payouts to encourage people not to work.

He catastrophically surrendered in Afghanistan, leaving billions of dollars of weapons behind for the Taliban in a show of incompetence and weakness that likely encouraged the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Hamas invasion of Israel – two of the bloodiest wars in those parts of the world since WWII.

He not only ignores Supreme Court rulings, but brags that he does so. He refuses to enforce the immigration laws, to the point that we have tens of millions of unscreened illegal aliens in the country. He vehemently opposes laws to prevent non-citizens from voting.

He, his influence-peddling family, and his White House courtiers have deliberately, fraudulently and venally concealed his mental and physical decline – at the expense of their party, their people, their country, and the world.

Talk about a threat to democracy.

I don’t see myself socializing with Donald Trump. He’s not my type. I don’t play golf. I do drink wine and whiskey. I tend to be respectful of women, and sometimes even men. I like to think my name-calling is more creative than “Little Marco” or “Crazy Bernie.”

But I do see Trump as my President. That vision takes very little imagination. After all, we saw it in real life just four years ago, though it seems longer ago than that.

It was before inflation took a bite out of everyone, before the epidemic of wokeness, before Cabinet members were chosen on the basis of skin color and bedroom habits, before America and her President were a laughing stock around the world.

It was before our democracy became frayed, torn and soiled under a load of incompetence and corruption.

Donald Trump could have taken his marbles and gone home to Mar-a-Lago three years ago to live ever after in his version of happiness. Instead, at age 78 but still going strong, he’s making another run at the office of presidency that he filled well for four years. In doing so, he’s been the target of the opprobrium of effete elites (See? I told you my name-calling was more creative!) and numerous unfair “lawfare” attacks from true threats to democracy.

I don’t believe Trump is doing this because he wants to be a dictator for the limited years left in his life, nor is he doing it to cash in on some small-time influence peddling scheme for himself or his family.

Rather, he’s doing it because he loves America and wants to serve – and to serve well, as he once mostly did. For that, I don’t love him. But I do admire him, I do respect him, and I do intend to vote for him.