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Was Michelle Obama a DEI bride?

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I have nothing against Michelle. The media tells us that she’s pretty, she’s smart, she’s accomplished, and I’m sure she’s charming. As her husband said about Hillary Clinton, she’s “likable enough.”

OK, I’ll admit that I didn’t particularly like her comment that the first time she was proud of America was the night Barack was elected. Surely there was a time in her first 45 years before then that she felt some pride in America. How about when the 1980 Olympic Hockey Team beat the Russians? How about when we put a man on the Moon? How about when we passed the Civil Rights Acts? 

In any event, I always thought she could have congratulated her husband for being elected President of the nation without gratuitously insulting that nation. If she truly thought so little of the nation that she’d never before been proud of it, how could she be proud that he’d been elected President of it? 

And how could the incoming First Lady be so rude to the country? A more gracious statement still true to her feelings might have been something like “I was so proud of America that night.”

Also, I think the media fawning over her beauty was a bit overdone, to the point that it seemed racially condescending to me. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but to my eye she is not as beautiful as Jackie Kennedy was. But, for that, blame the media and their eyes for their contrary judgment, not Michelle. 

As for Michelle’s considerable accomplishments, one was indeed comparable to Jackie’s — it was to marry well. Michelle married a bright, rising politician by the name of Barry Soetoro. 

Soetoro had been born to an 18-year-old white woman and an older Kenyan man who abandoned them. He grew up in Hawaii as a mixed-race boy of a white mother. 

Soetoro became interested in politics, particularly the ethnic type. In that, his white mother — his only parent that was present — was a liability. Being half Black was an asset, but only a half-ass-et. 

With a touch of the self-promoting genius he was to display throughout his career, he changed his name to “Barack Obama,” taking his missing father’s Kenyan name. And he decided he “identified” as all Black.

In one of the self-promotion books he later wrote, he even stated in the preface that he had been born in Kenya. When that became problematic — nay, disqualifying — in his campaign for the Presidency, he “explained” that the preface had been written by someone else and he’d never read it. 

Uh huh. It’s surprising that the press let him get away with that explanation, until you realize that this same press later dismissed the Hunter laptop as fake and assured us that Joe Biden was sharp as a tack. 

This guy now going by Barack had a talent for riding the early 2000s wave of liberal white guilt. Chameleon-like, he could be what he really was — a mixed race kid from Hawaii — or, on demand, he could drop his g’s and be shuckin’ and jivin’ with the bros. 

Hillary might have been likable enough, but Barack was Black enough. And in the year 2008, Black was better. 

Barack had foreseen it all, early on. And he had already orchestrated the show.

There was one problem. Barack had several girlfriends before he got married. The thing in common was . . . they were white. 

That presented a problem because this guy had consciously reinvented himself as a Black leader with a white personality, someone who could garner Black votes with his Blackness while garnering white liberal votes with his whiteness.

So Barack let the white chicks go. Bad fit for his career ambitions. He substituted a bright young lawyer, Michelle. She was ambitious, almost as much as he. And very much Black.

He married her. He won the Presidency. He won the adulation of the media. He won that thing he imagined was ever-arcing toward him — history.

Now in his post-history, his post-presidency, his post-Blackness, and perhaps his post-marriage, he might have won Jennifer Aniston. The rumors are thick that the two of them are an item. Liberal “fact-checker” Snopes says there’s “no evidence” of it, even as they reference numerous insiders who swear it’s true. (When Snopes wants something to be false, the evidence of it is always deemed not evidence. What do they want, a stained blue dress?)

Moreover, there’s a dog that didn’t bark. Michelle was mysteriously absent from two big political events — the inauguration of Donald Trump and the funeral of Jimmy Carter, both of which were attended by everyone who’s anyone, but which Barack attended alone. 

The only question now is, will he change his name back to Barry Soetoro? 

Was Michelle Obama a DEI bride?

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I have nothing against Michelle. The media tells us that she’s pretty, she’s smart, she’s accomplished, and I’m sure she’s charming. As her husband said about Hillary Clinton, she’s “likable enough.”

OK, I’ll admit that I didn’t particularly like her comment that the first time she was proud of America was the night Barack was elected. Surely there was a time in her first 45 years before then that she felt some pride in America. How about when the 1980 Olympic Hockey Team beat the Russians? How about when we put a man on the Moon? How about when we passed the Civil Rights Acts? 

In any event, I always thought she could have congratulated her husband for being elected President of the nation without gratuitously insulting that nation. If she truly thought so little of the nation that she’d never before been proud of it, how could she be proud that he’d been elected President of it? 

And how could the incoming First Lady be so rude to the country? A more gracious statement still true to her feelings might have been something like “I was so proud of America that night.”

Also, I think the media fawning over her beauty was a bit overdone, to the point that it seemed racially condescending to me. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but to my eye she is not as beautiful as Jackie Kennedy was. But, for that, blame the media and their eyes for their contrary judgment, not Michelle. 

As for Michelle’s considerable accomplishments, one was indeed comparable to Jackie’s — it was to marry well. Michelle married a bright, rising politician by the name of Barry Soetoro. 

Soetoro had been born to an 18-year-old white woman and an older Kenyan man who abandoned them. He grew up in Hawaii as a mixed-race boy of a white mother. 

Soetoro became interested in politics, particularly the ethnic type. In that, his white mother — his only parent that was present — was a liability. Being half Black was an asset, but only a half-ass-et. 

With a touch of the self-promoting genius he was to display throughout his career, he changed his name to “Barack Obama,” taking his missing father’s Kenyan name. And he decided he “identified” as all Black.

In one of the self-promotion books he later wrote, he even stated in the preface that he had been born in Kenya. When that became problematic — nay, disqualifying — in his campaign for the Presidency, he “explained” that the preface had been written by someone else and he’d never read it. 

Uh huh. It’s surprising that the press let him get away with that explanation, until you realize that this same press later dismissed the Hunter laptop as fake and assured us that Joe Biden was sharp as a tack. 

This guy now going by Barack had a talent for riding the early 2000s wave of liberal white guilt. Chameleon-like, he could be what he really was — a mixed race kid from Hawaii — or, on demand, he could drop his g’s and be shuckin’ and jivin’ with the bros. 

Hillary might have been likable enough, but Barack was Black enough. And in the year 2008, Black was better. 

Barack had foreseen it all, early on. And he had already orchestrated the show.

There was one problem. Barack had several girlfriends before he got married. The thing in common was . . . they were white. 

That presented a problem because this guy had consciously reinvented himself as a Black leader with a white personality, someone who could garner Black votes with his Blackness while garnering white liberal votes with his whiteness.

So Barack let the white chicks go. Bad fit for his career ambitions. He substituted a bright young lawyer, Michelle. She was ambitious, almost as much as he. And very much Black.

He married her. He won the Presidency. He won the adulation of the media. He won that thing he imagined was ever-arcing toward him — history.

Now in his post-history, his post-presidency, his post-Blackness, and perhaps his post-marriage, he might have won Jennifer Aniston. The rumors are thick that the two of them are an item. Liberal “fact-checker” Snopes says there’s “no evidence” of it, even as they reference numerous insiders who swear it’s true. (When Snopes wants something to be false, the evidence of it is always deemed not evidence. What do they want, a stained blue dress?)

Moreover, there’s a dog that didn’t bark. Michelle was mysteriously absent from two big political events — the inauguration of Donald Trump and the funeral of Jimmy Carter, both of which were attended by everyone who’s anyone, but which Barack attended alone. 

The only question now is, will he change his name back to Barry Soetoro? 

Democrats are still owned by their hate

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It was predicted that the changing demographics of America – specifically, more racial minorities – would deliver permanent control of the government to the Democrats by now.

Instead, over the past few years the Democrats have lost the Presidency, the Senate, the House, a majority of governorships, a majority of state legislatures, and the Supreme Court.

This isn’t just about Donald Trump, though his approval ratings are higher than ever while Joe Biden’s (who?) are lower than ever.  It’s broader than that. The approval ratings of Democrats are at historic lows in general, while the approval ratings for Republicans are near all-time highs.

In their rosy predictions of perma-control, here’s what the Democrats got wrong.

Americans don’t vote for their skin color, they don’t vote for their sexuality, they don’t even vote for their financial interests.

What they vote for is America. A Hispanic American does not vote for Hispanic illegals; he votes for America. A gay man does not vote for gays; he votes for America. Black men do not vote for Blacks, or at least less so than before; they vote for America.

Even middle-aged white men don’t vote for middle-aged white men; they, too, vote for America. Democrats used to mock white men in Kansas for being too stupid to “vote their interests.” Which meant that those white men – typically on the low end of the income scale – failed to vote for wealth redistribution that would benefit them personally.

But those men didn’t fail to understand that they personally would benefit from the Democrats’ socialistic wealth redistribution schemes. They understood it perfectly. They simply concluded that it was bad for America even if it might be good for them personally.

Democrats are unable to grasp that. They cannot fathom a person who puts the interests of America above his own personal financial ones – perhaps because those Democrats never would do such a thing themselves.

That’s something unusual and great about America. For all the divisiveness and emotion, we’re still a great melting pot of ethnicities and variations with the common goal of making the country great. People don’t care so much about the color of your skin or where you came from. They care about your ideas, your work, and your love for the country.

Ronald Reagan understood this sentiment, and shared in it. For that matter, so did John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and maybe even Bill Clinton.

Kamala Harris did not. Nor did Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Joe Biden. They thought a presidential campaign was all about assembling and pandering to a hodge podge of people with nothing in common other than grievances against The Man, whom they perceived as their oppressor.

Ironically, the Democrats have continued campaigning against The Man – the establishment – well after they’ve become him. It’s amusing to see leftist professors who comprise 95% of the faculty rebelling against their oppressors – who are presumably the remaining 5% that haven’t yet been purged.

Trump broke the fever. He offered a campaign founded on common sense and plain talk, spiced with an unrelenting calling out of the broke woke.

For that, they hated him. It wasn’t his policies per se, but his independence. He didn’t seek the approval of the establishment powers.

Trump instead spoke truth to that power. I’ll admit that sometimes he exaggerated the truth, to make his point. OK, occasionally he even fibbed.

But the outrage that the powerful expressed at his fibs was faux. They weren’t really outraged that he fibbed to them. He’s a politician, after all. Rather, they were outraged that he refused to bow to them.

Trump not only refused to bow to them; he refused to accept their legitimacy. They had forfeited legitimacy long ago with lies about Russian collusion, burying Hunter’s laptop, hiding Joe’s senility, deleting 30,000 of Hillary’s emails after Congress subpoenaed them, and telling us “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”

It’s one thing to disagree with the establishment. For that, they’ll merely beat you, a la Mitt Romney and John McCain. But if you challenge their legitimacy, they’ll hate and hound you forever because then you threaten their very existence. In Trump’s case, their hatred almost cost him his life.

The Democrats and their establishment cronies are unable to get past this hatred for Trump, and they might never. To use one of their favorite cliches, Trump is an existential threat.

And so, they will double down on mutilating the genitals of boys, trying to promote or pass over people on the basis of their skin color, urging a re-opening of the borders to illegal immigration and lethal drugs, and, as the Democrat leader of the House promised last week “fighting in the streets.”

They long for Antifa and BLM which, to them, were the glory days.

At this point, the Democrats’ policies are not designed to solve problems, but to milk them. They’ve forgotten the substantive bases for their failed policies, if there ever were any. Now, their policies are simply futile, destructive expressions of their raw hate against a person who rejects their mindless dogma, undermines their absolute power, and threatens their establishmentarian existence.

It’s scream therapy.

Expressing one’s anger in a dramatic fashion can be therapeutic, up to a point. But until the Democrats get past their grief, it will continue to cost them elections.

Test scores suggest that 98% of us are becoming expendable

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Democrats in the Federal government the past few years sent a couple hundred billion dollars to the teachers’ unions the schools to help them fund teacher vacations recover from the needless and destructive COVID lockdowns.

I shouldn’t be so cynical about the COVID lockdowns. After all, they did apparently prevent the pandemic from spreading to children, along with preventing asteroid strikes and on-campus bear maulings, all three of which were notably absent in 2020-2021.

Oops, I’m being cynical again.

OK, I’ll admit that, as an educational tool, the lockdowns were not entirely wasted. For example, one education that many of us received through the lockdowns was that we should be wary of our establishment’s susceptibility to mass hysteria and their desire to control society.

Another education we received was that the teachers’ unions, a/k/a, the child indoctrination division of the DNC, will go to any depths for more money and less work, all at the expense of taxpayers and the education of the nation’s children. “It’s for the children” is the most destructive, self-serving lie since “to each according to his needs.”

But here’s the billion-dollar question: We may have learned a few things during the lockdowns, but did the kids learn anything?

This is a multiple-choice question, so you have a chance of getting it right just by guessing. I figure your odds are about 25% (give or take – I’m a product of public schools). Here are your choices:

(A) No, nobody learnt nothin’

(B) Yeah, everybody learnt everythin’

(C) Some learnt stuff, others didn’t no-how-no-way

(D) All of ‘em

The answer is (C). According to recent data, average test scores are way down from pre-lockdown scores, and don’t show signs of recovering. It turns out that most children accomplish about as much with schooling-from-home as their parents accomplish with work-from-home. That’s no surprise.

The interesting thing, however, is that while average test scores are way down, the high scores are not. Good students found a way to be good students during and after the lockdowns. Although most kids didn’t learn stuff, those good students did – and just as much as before.

Those good students who prevailed over the lockdowns while other students succumbed to them, tend to be from wealthier families. The reason could be that wealthier families hired tutors (doubtful) or that wealthier families have parents who got involved in their kids’ education when the lockdowns hit (likely), or that kids from wealthier families are imbued with their wealthy parents’ motivation (probably), or that wealthier families tend to be whiter and white kids do better on standardized tests which are racially discriminatory and became more so during and after the lockdowns (c’mon!).

This data present an interesting philosophical and social question: If our brightest minds continue to burn brightly, does it matter that the rest of the population is fading fast?

The humanistic answer to that question is, yes, it matters a lot. That’s my intuitive answer, as well, as a semi-humanistic full-human.

But does it really matter? It’s a fact that the top 2% of the population are responsible for practically all of human achievement in – you name it – science, math, chess, athletics, art, adventure, innovation, and business. The top 2% would include Edison, Aristotle, Einstein, Musk, Magellan, da Vinci, Fischer, Newton, and all the rest who matter.

“The rest” of the 2% is a big number. It’s estimated that about 100 billion people have lived altogether. So 2% of them amount to some two billion humans and hominids. Even among the living humans, 2% would amount to nearly 200 million people. There would not exactly be a danger of extinction.

The other 98% of us have always lived off these geniuses. Without the top 2%, we’d still be in caves trying to figure out how to make that hot, burny stuff that natural lightning makes with no trouble at all. We’d be unable to even imagine a wheel, much less manufacture or use one.

(That top 2% pay the lion’s share of Federal income tax, too, but that’s a different column.)

So long as we have that top 2%, the rest of us are fine. In fact, if the top 2% gives us just a little bit more innovation in the form of artificial intelligence machines (such as HAL, depicted above, a quarter century past his prime) we won’t need even them.

Right now, the 98% are stupid but not happy – because we’re always jealous of that smart 2%. If we replace the smart 2% with smart machines, we could be both stupid and happy.

On the other hand, consider the possibility that the 2% — being clever creatures – are already fixing to replace the 98% with machines. They wouldn’t even have to be smart machines; stupid ones would do. Hmm.

This just in: Illegals are criminals

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For years, the legacy media (hereinafter the “Leg-Meds”) parroted the Democrats’ line that the population of immigrants can be divided into the “documented” ones and the “undocumented” ones.

The euphemism “undocumented” finally became a joke, and so the Leg-Meds and the other Democrats eventually surrendered to the word “illegal.”

However, within that category of “illegals,” they clung (bitterly) to the notion that about 99.9999999% were “law-abiding” and only the remaining 0.0000001% were criminals.

That lie was called out yesterday by President Trump’s new press secretary. This 27-year-old woman owned the Leg-Meds. Here’s the exchange:

REPORTER: Of the 3,500 arrests ICE has made so far since President Trump came back onto office, can you just tell me the numbers? How many have a criminal record versus those who are in the country illegally?

KAROLINE LEAVITT: All of them [have a criminal record] because they are criminals as far as this administration goes.

She’s right. Here’s the text of 18 U.S.Code Section 1325:

(a)Improper time or place; avoidance of examination or inspection; misrepresentation and concealment of facts

Any alien who (1) enters or attempts to enter the United States at any time or place other than as designated by immigration officers, or (2) eludes examination or inspection by immigration officers, or (3) attempts to enter or obtains entry to the United States by a willfully false or misleading representation or the willful concealment of a material fact, shall, for the first commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than 6 months, or both, and, for a subsequent commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18, or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both.

This quoted section clearly and unambiguously sets out criminal penalties including prison time for illegally entering the country. Imprisonment is only for crimes. You can’t be imprisoned for a mere civil violation of the law.

(If the entry was legal, but the ongoing presence in the country is not, as with a student overstaying his visa, the issue is more complicated. That’s probably why the next subsection sets out civil penalties — rather than criminal penalties — for that circumstance. But the vast majority of illegals are not students overstaying their visas; they are people who snuck across the border.)

Therefore, people who enter this country illegally are illegals – and criminals. It is accurate to refer to them as such. The most precise term for them would be “criminal immigrants.”

Elites rediscover the power of religion – to control you

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Pseudo-intellectual elites like to talk about the “arc of history.” Barack Obama loved that phrase almost as much as he loved the word “existential.” Things in Barack’s rhetorical world didn’t just exist. They were in the state of “existential” and forever bending along the “arc of history.”

The elites assured that this “arc of history” will take us inevitably to a world of equity, inclusion and diversity – a utopian world the elites have always imagined. They even have a theme song for the journey:

“Imagine there’s no heaven, above us only sky,
Blah, blah, blah, blahhhh . . .”

Of course, the people in charge of this utopia of the elites will be the ones with the prescience to anticipate it, the skill to guide us to it, and the power to run it – namely, those elites.

Moses brought his people to the Promised Land but never entered it. Modern elites won’t make his mistake again. They’ll lead us there, herd us in, lock the gates, and run the show.

And in a notable exception to the abolition of merit (it’s sooo dystopian that some people get more just because they merit more!) these meritorious elites will be well compensated. Very well. In the precise amount they deem just.

But detours have recently frustrated the elites in their arc-y journey toward their utopianistic place. Moses detoured 40 years in the desert; today’s elites find themselves detoured four years into a similar wasteland – for the second time in the last decade.

And now their people (note the possessive plural pronoun) in this wasteland are sinning again. Golden calves, bitcoins, ungratefulness, orange hair, cutting taxes. You know – all the usual sins.

With alarm, the elites see that their people are getting beyond their command. What’s needed, they figure, is some of that old time religion.

That’s why a utilitarian epiphany of the elites is in the works.

Let me be clear. Religion is not a bad thing; it’s a good thing. Religion tends to discourage socially destructive behaviors. Nearly all religions have rules against murder and theft, for example.

But those rules are not what the elites like about religion. In fact, they’re a little skittish about those particular rules because the penalties for violating them tend to be imposed disproportionately on people they enjoy viewing as oppressed, blameless, and childlike.

Moreover, the elites historically saw religion as competition for power. The allegiance of the people was divided between the secular elites and the Church elites. The secular elites had the power of money, but the Church elites also had money – and God, too.

Eventually, the secular elites won the competition for power by running the table on money. But they remained at odds with religion until recently. They reasoned that a power like religion that inspires people willingly to burn themselves and others at the stake is one always to be wary of.

But it’s been a long time since religion burned anyone at the stake. Religion has dwindled to the status of a sheep in wolves’ clothing. Elites began to think of religion as a simple superstition that bitter, stupid people cling to – that they depend on – as comfort when things goes bump in the night.

Today, the elites still think that, but now they see religious dependency as a feature, not a flaw. On their road to Damascus, and Davos, they’ve envisioned and embraced Karl Marx’s observation that religion is “the opiate of the masses.”

How convenient. The elites have coincidentally decided that the people inhabiting the land recently laid waste, again, who are rebelling against their authority and inattentively and hyperactively sinning against them, need something opium-ish. And they deserve it, good and hard. For that, the elites have concluded, religion is at least as good as Adderall, and cheaper.

Religion no longer threatens the elites, much. Today, the mild threat that religion poses to secular power is more than offset by its usefulness in securing that power by sedating the masses. In particular, the elites like the rules of religion that call for deference to authority – “authority” being them, of course.

Honor they father, honor thy mother, honor thy priest, honor thy Environmental Protection Agency, honor thy right to choose, honor thy elites, and so on.

Never mind that Scripture doesn’t explicitly spell out every single one of those honor/submission rules. The elites contend that, like abortion, they’re implied in the penumbra.

And so, we have an Episcopal Bishop in gilded robe with bejeweled scepter scolding the man newly elected by the people to lead them, whom she spots worshipping respectfully in her congregation.

She thereupon transfigures the worship service into a public damning of that one man. Complying with his Constitutional duty to enforce the duly enacted Federal immigration laws is sinful, she warns, and honoring the God-created genders is immoral.

She would have the President and us believe that a kid struggling emotionally with sex issues doesn’t need help, he needs surgery. He is the victim of God’s mistake where He accidentally put a female soul into a male body. She proclaims that she’s the one to make that decision, by God, and the President is merely the one to enforce her decision by correcting what she has decided is God’s mistake.

Just don’t get carried away, Mr. President, and start enforcing the immigration laws decided by Congress, too. Who does Congress think they are anyway? Episcopal Bishops?

Elites’ new love for religion has all the passion of an old-style revival meeting. It lacks only one thing: God.

Here’s my advice, for what it’s worth. Don’t believe in religion because it’s a good thing for society – even though it often is, as even the elites are starting to realize.

Rather, believe in it because it’s the truth, and the truth will set you free.

But don’t take my word for it. Really, please don’t. This is a truth that each person must find in, and on, his own way.

God never existed in Barack’s world. But he wants him in yours. He wants you to hallow the elites; he wants you in their kingdom; he wants you to beg forgiveness.

For the Baracks of the world, God is a useful fiction. But they may someday be startled at what they’ve stirred.

Angels at the podium?

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Political candidates aren’t always seen by 19,000 people in big sexy arenas like Madison Square Garden.

They also play the rubber chicken circuit at little outdoor makeshift venues of a few hundred or a thousand people in rural America. These are places you would never visit unless you were looking for votes. Think “County Fair.”

So it was for Donald Trump one ordinary day last summer. He was on an outdoor plywood stage in rural Pennsylvania looking for votes from plain folk.

He was just a few minutes into his stump speech, or his stump speech du jour. Trump is not a polished speaker but he speaks from his heart and with his hands. He often strays from the strictures of his teleprompter, sometimes to the point where you wish he wouldn’t.

What happened next was initially trivialized by Associated Press, apparently to avoid martyring or heroizing the man. They reported:

“Loud noises rang through the crowd.”

One of those loud noises instantly kills a man standing behind Trump. Another loud noise wounds another person. And another wounds another. Altogether, eight loud noises come from the shooter and two from the Secret Service to neutralize him.

One loud noise goes through Trump’s ear, missing his cranium by half an inch. His hand instinctively goes to his shredded ear even before he is conscious of the pain there. He pulls his hand away to look at it, and sees the blood. It was only then that he knew he’d been shot.

Involuntarily, Trump does what anybody – and any body – would do. He falls to the floor behind the podium. The Secret Service keep him there for about two minutes as people around him are screaming and scrambling.

Imagine what goes through Trump’s mind in those chaotic two minutes. He’s not altogether sure what just happened. He doesn’t know if the ear wound is just the ear or the head too. He’s still not sure if he’s been shot anywhere else.

Agents try to assess his condition visually and verbally. They decide to get him to the relative safety of a nearby vehicle.

At the time, there was no way of knowing whether the shooter who’d been neutralized was a loner or one of many. Raising the President from the floor and out from behind the podium could make him a sitting duck. But leaving him there risked another barrage of bullets – and perhaps explosives as well.

Trump was smart enough to know all that.

Most men would have chosen to cower under the podium. It was a lousy shield against explosives and AR-15 bullets but at least it offered a bit of concealment.

But Donald Trump is not like most men.

The Secret Service agents wanted to carry him off in a stretcher, but he refused. Instead, with their help he got to his feet and came out from the podium, ear torn and face bloodied.

Then he did something unforgettable. Let him describe it:

I wanted to do something to let ’em know I was ok. I raised my right arm, looked at the thousands and thousands of people that were breathlessly waiting and started shouting, Fight! Fight! Fight!

Since that day, Trump has said he believes God saved him, that he might save America.

Strong words. Presumptuous even. Some people would say arrogant. But those people have never had rifle bullets from a would-be assassin tear through their ear and kill a man right behind them.

Trump seems different now. Calmer. More thoughtful. Serene. Settled. Dedicated. Workmanlike. Mission-driven.

I don’t pretend to know if God saved Trump so that he could save America. Most of my communications with the Guy Upstairs are from me to Him, not the other way around.

But I know Trump himself believes that. Something happened to him in the eternity of those two bloody minutes as he wondered if they were his last.

Trump brilliantly baited Biden into admitting the guilt of the Biden-ites

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In one of his very final acts as the putative President, literally minutes before Donald Trump was re-inaugurated, the Big Guy issued a pardon to all his siblings and their spouses.

Joe’s five pardons together with his earlier pardon of his son Hunter for tax evasion and gun-running convictions (and all other crimes known and unknown over a period of ten years) bring Joe’s pardons of family members to a total of six. 

In case you’re wondering what crimes these six family members could possibly have committed that required a presidential pardon, let’s just say it was a family business. It was a lucrative one that raked in tens of millions of dollars in exchange for unidentified work. According to emails from Hunter, 10% was earmarked for the guy issuing the pardon – that very same Big Guy.

These Sordid Six thus join the 1,499 rapists, murderers and molesters whose sentences Joe commuted last week. It wouldn’t surprise me if the 1,499 feel insulted to be lumped in with these particular six.

Altogether, Joe issued 8,064 pardons and commutations – far more than any President in history and dwarfing the 237 by President Trump in his first term or even the 1927 by President Obama in two terms.

But I’m OK with the pardoning of the Sordid Six, despite the obvious self-dealing and miscarriage of justice. Here’s why.

Because it labels them guilty.

It’s true that, as a technical legal matter, a pardon does not necessarily mean a person is guilty. (On the other hand, an old Supreme court case suggests that accepting a pardon is, indeed, an admission of guilt.) And it’s true that Joe included some self-serving happy talk about how his fam’ is really, truly not guilty of the crimes for which he pardoned them.

Like Hunter, the other five did “nothing wrong,” Joe tells us.  He’s just concerned that overzealous prosecutors might make their lives hell for political purposes. You see, using the justice system to make a person’s life hell is something Joe is familiar with.

(There is the possibility that the pardons open the door to Congress or enterprising prosecutors calling these people to testify under oath against Joe or others – testimony they would be obligated to give since they won’t be able to invoke the Fifth Amendment privilege against incriminating themselves of crimes for which they’ve been pardoned. On the other hand, they haven’t been pardoned for state crimes, since the presidential pardon power does not go that far. Therefore, there’s the possibility of being prosecuted for, say, criminally evading state income taxes, and so they might still have a Fifth Amendment privilege. I’ll let lawyers better than I sort this out.)

Leave aside the legalisms. At this stage, the court that matters most is the court of public opinion, and a subsidiary court that could be called the court of historians. In those courts, Joe’s pardon of all three of his siblings, their spouses, and his son, will be seen through common sense eyes, especially in view of highly incriminating hard evidence that has already been uncovered (such as the Big Guy emails mentioned above).

And so, common sense and public opinion says the seven Biden family members are guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, and guilty.

In a matter of weeks, Donald Trump and his fusillades were able to get guilty verdicts on Joe Biden’s entire family that Joe and his army of prosecutors were not able to get on Trump, alone, over the course of four years.

Remind me never to play poker – or geopolitics – against President Donald J. Trump.

A modest defense of tariffs

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From publications like The Wall Street Journal, you might conclude that tariffs as an economics practice is in the same category as piracy, slavery and child labor, but worse.

Economists’ main complaint with tariffs is not that they’re destructive and immoral. Economists don’t make moral judgments, after all. There’s a reason they call their profession “the dismal science.”

No, economists’ main complaint about tariffs is that they’re stupid. “Tariffs are stupid” is Economics 101. It’s a given. It’s econo-dogma. The Pope may or may not be Catholic, but popular business publications preach from their printed and pixeled pulpits that tariffs are indisputably, irrevocably, universally, invariably stupid.

In the spirit of Protestantism and economics contrarianism, let me offer a defense of this much-maligned practice. At the outset, I’ll stipulate to some things.

First, it’s true that tariffs are much like a sales tax. Adding a tariff to imported goods tends to raise the price of those goods, just as we saw a few years ago that adding a sales tax on Amazon goods adds to the check-out price of those goods.

If the U.S. government slaps a 10% tariff on, for example, imported steel, it’s logical to expect the price of imported steel to the U.S. consumer to rise about 10%.

But that’s not always the case, because, while tariffs are much like sales taxes, they aren’t exactly the same. A tariff applies not to all goods, but to specific goods – ones that are imported from overseas and specifically designated for the tariff.

Those tariffed goods compete with other goods such as domestic goods that are un-tariffed and other imported goods that are un-tariffed. A steel importer who simply passes his tariff along to the consumer will thereby put his goods at a competitive disadvantage, pricewise.

For that reason, the importers might absorb some of a tariff in their profit margins. Assume the importer has a profit margin of 30%. A 10% tariff could cut that to 20%. The importer might raise prices by the entire 10% in order to maintain his 30% profit margins, and thereby disadvantage his product pricewise, or he might raise prices only 7% and absorb the other 3% in his margins so that he winds up with margins of only 27%.

To the extent the foreign manufacturer absorbs the tariff in his profit structure, it’s he, not the consumer, who is paying the tax.

He would do this not because he’s a good guy, but because he wants to maintain market share vis a vis his un-tariffed competitors. The invisible hand works, even in an artificial market.

To the extent the tariff does get passed onto the America consumer, it’s worth considering what that consumer is currently paying. Apart from certain French wine and Italian sports cars, I’m always amazed how inexpensive foreign-made “stuff” is.

Consumer electronics are a good example. You can get a new, perfectly serviceable smart phone that puts the world at your fingertips – something you couldn’t buy for a billion dollars a generation ago – for $300. That’s about what a house-call by a plumber to fix a toilet cost you last week.

Americans are wealthy enough to pay a few dollars more for foreign-made “stuff.” Especially if that stuff is made under difficult conditions by exploited and sometimes underaged workers who deserve better pay and conditions.

Second, let’s stipulate that trade wars can be bad. If we impose a tariff on wine that Europeans export to us, we should expect the Europeans to impose a retaliatory tariff on something we export to them, such as American whiskey and Harley Davidson motorcycles.

That was exactly what happened in President Trump’s first term. And that was only one salvo in the trade war. It began with a squabble over long-standing European government subsidies to European aerospace companies which put American companies such as Boeing at an unfair disadvantage. Where that trade war will end depends on the mood of the governments and the power of lobbyists – two forces that are often both unpredictable and unconstructive.

The most famous trade war was launched by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. Passed in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash, the 40% American tariffs imposed by Smoot-Hawley and retaliatory tariffs imposed by our trading partners crippled world trade and slashed business profits, leading to bank failures worldwide, the Great Depression and, arguably, World War II.

Let’s not go there again.

That said, there are several legitimate uses of tariffs that even economists would approve of. One is to protect industries that are strategically important. If steel is a strategic industry (and it is) then protecting that industry from being decimated by cheap foreign imports is a legitimate use of tariffs. It’s entirely possible that America will someday need Pittsburg steel again, and I don’t mean the football team.

(This is not to say I approve of President Biden blocking the sale of U.S. Steel to Nippon. That’s a complicated question. After all, Nippon proposed not to end American steel production but to maintain it in America while improving efficiencies – which could lower prices and strengthen the industry here, not weaken it.)

Another legitimate use of tariffs is to protect an industry that is culturally important. In rural France, for example, winemaking is culturally important. The argument can be made that the French winemaking culture ought not be at the mercy of mass-produced wine from, say, Romania.

Or maybe it should be, to produce better wine and lower prices for all. But that’s a judgment for a culture to make. Tariff protections for isolated industries such as winemaking will not to cripple the world economy.

Another legitimate use for tariffs, most economists would agree, is to threaten them without imposing them. Threatening to impose a 25% tariff on French wine if the French don’t quit unfairly subsidizing their aerospace companies that compete unfairly with Boeing, is fine by me.

Of course, such threats are credible, and effective, only if they get carried out once in a while. The next thing you know, we’re punishing American whiskey makers for the French unfairly subsidizing their aerospace companies.

Those are my stipulations on the subject. Now back to tariffs as a sales tax.

In the world of economics, activities are either productive or consumptive. Productive things are good, because they produce resources. They grow the pie. The bigger the pie, the more for everyone at the table.

In fact, productive things are actually double-good because what they produce, in turn, is often productive in its own right. It’s a virtuous circle.

In contrast, consumptive things are viewed as bad in the world of economics. They don’t grow the pie; they eat the pie. They use up resources. It’s fine to eat a little of the pie, but recognize that then there’s a smaller pie. Eat too much of it, and there won’t be any for a hungry day.

Let’s contrast sales taxes in the form of tariffs with other taxes. Income taxes are thought to be bad because they punish people for a productive activity – working. That’s how you obtain income, after all. Punishing people for working is bad economics policy (even if – especially if – it helps certain class warfare politicians get elected).  

Investment taxes like capital gains taxes are even worse. They punish people for making investments. If people don’t make investments, then new businesses are denied the capital they need to grow and innovate.

Apple Computer started in a garage. Without capital investments, it would still be there.

And so, economists generally favor sales taxes which discourage consumption, over both income taxes and investment taxes which discourage production and investment.

Crafting our sales taxes as tariffs might be an especially good approach because we can imbue them with some nuanced policy considerations. Much as liquor and gasoline get taxed extra-high because we want to discourage their consumption, we could extra-tariff such things as, well, Chinese steel if our desire is to avoid over-relying on it.

Ah but, you say, then the Chinese will retaliate by slapping tariffs (notice how tariffs always get “slapped”) on our imports to them, such as . . .

. . . um, I can’t think of any.

OK, but, you say, SMOOT-HAWLEY.

Fine, I agree that we should not slap, or even place, 40% tariffs on all our imports. We don’t want a trade war, global economic disruption, bank failures, a Great Depression, and World War III.

I submit that it’s not one or the other. I submit that we have a lesson to learn from Smoot-Hawley, sure enough, but perhaps we’ve learned it too well.

Joe Biden’s presidency: “Hold my beer and watch this!”

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Question: What do the following have in common?

  • Stupid pet tricks
  • Bungee cord jumping
  • Abolishing the borders that define a country
  • Making oneself a human cannonball
  • Commuting the duly imposed death sentences of convicted murderers and rapists
  • Setting oneself on fire
  • Surrendering Afghanistan to barbarians from the 11th century
  • Jumping Snake River Canyon on a rocket-powered motorcycle
  • Closing all the schools to prevent transmission of a disease that barely affects children.

Answer: What these have in common is that all are stunts. They are designed to attract attention, and they succeed in doing so. But that’s all they do.

If you tell me you’ve taught a poodle to mix a martini and serve it to a parakeet, I’ll probably watch. Then I’ll say, “Wow, that’s something!”

And it is indeed something, in the sense that it’s unusual. It gets attention. But it’s not consequential, other than to make a spectacle of two otherwise dignified animals.

If you tell me you plan to tie a bungee cord to your ankle and jump off a high bridge such that the bungee cord stretches almost to the breaking point as it catches you a few feet above the ground, I’ll probably watch. Then I’ll say, “Huh, that’s something you don’t see every day.”

But, as in stupid pet tricks, it’s inconsequential, other than to demonstrate a certain daredevilry. There are good reasons not to issue dares to the devil for the mere purpose of getting clicks on YouTube.

To understand Joe Biden, you have to understand a few immutable traits about the man. First, he’s not very bright. A person who finishes near the bottom of his class at a fourth-rate law school is not very bright.

Second, he knows it. A person who plagiarizes five full pages of a law review article, “borrows” the family story of another politician, invents fabulations about standing up to a bully named Cornpop, and claims he finished in the top half of that law school class where he actually finished near the bottom, is aware that his real story comes up a bit short.

Third, there’s his relationship with his boss. Barack Obama was widely worshipped by liberals. Although Joe stood next in line for the presidency upon the completion of Barack’s papacy in 2016, Barack spurned him in favor of another candidate, was ambivalent about him running in 2020, and finally pushed him to the curb altogether in 2024 – for being too old and stupid.

Ouch. “Old” doesn’t hurt so much even though this is a guy who went to the trouble of hair plugs and tooth caps, but “stupid” hits close to home.

Joe has gone through life feeling that he had a lot to prove about himself. He was right about that. What he was wrong about was the way he went about that proof.

He decided to prove he was a greater leader than his intellectual superior, Barack. But why stop there? He then set his sights on proving he was the greatest Democrat since FDR, or since, I dunno, maybe Abraham Lincoln. (Half of Democrats think Lincoln was a Democrat. No joke!)

The problem is, Joe has never really thought enough about philosophy, government, religion, or the human condition (I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Joe hasn’t thought about) to have a coherent platform from which to govern.

He had no bold policies; he had only boldness.

Much like Evel Knievel. History has largely forgotten that Evel’s rocket-powered motorcycle jump of the Snake River Canyon landed not on the other side of the canyon, but at the canyon bottom. But they do remember the stunt and the name.

Early in Joe’s term, he decided to pull out of Afghanistan. Never mind that the pullout left a strategic crossroads utterly unguarded. Never mind that we squandered a 20-year investment of time and thousands of American lives. Never mind that we left behind billions in high-tech weaponry for the barbarians. Never mind that we could have instead pulled out in an organized manner, as Joe’s generals urged.

What was important to Joe was that he make a bold statement. And he did. Just like Evel Knievel.

It was a bold “Hold my beer, and watch this!” stunt.

The world did watch Joe’s bold stunt. They were impressed with his boldness. With his common sense, not so much.

But Joe didn’t care if they thought badly of his common sense. In the world of stuntmen and carnival barkers, all publicity is good publicity.

It’s like setting oneself on fire. It might not be productive, but it’ll get you plenty of clicks on YouTube. Probably more clicks than Barack gets, at least on that particular day.

When the conflagration is over, proclaim through charred lips that it was an “extraordinary success.” That’ll get even more clicks.  

That was the pattern of Joe Biden’s presidency. He didn’t so much try to destroy America. He’s too stupid to accomplish that, and too self-centered to try.

Joe’s defiance of the Supreme Court, his commuting of the death sentences of rightly convicted murderers, his transference of college loan debts onto the backs of blue-collar Americans, his takedown of the southern border, his inflation-inducing handouts – they were all designed not so much with policy in mind. Joe’s mind is too small for policy to live there.  

No, Joe’s stunts were designed simply to draw attention to Joe. He succeeded. Joe’s stunts did draw attention to Joe.

But not in the way Joe expected. We’re now seeing his anger in learning that attention does not equal achievement, that infamy does not equal fame, that notoriety does not equal greatness.