Glenn K. Beaton is a writer and columnist living in Colorado. He has been a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, RealClearPolitics, Powerline, Instapundit, Citizen Free Press, American Thinker, Fox News, The Federalist, and numerous other print, radio and television outlets. His most recent book is "High Attitude — How Woke Liberals Ruined Aspen"
Hillary Clinton – remember her? – appeared for a friendly interview this week with one of the adoring lefty media people.
Hil lamented the fact that Donald Trump has a constituency that would charge through fire with him. (Whether Trump would lead that charge from the front or from behind is a topic for another column.)
Joe Biden’s constituency, in contrast, is of a different type. They wouldn’t follow him to the ice cream stand, and they certainly wouldn’t let their daughters do so. Most of them don’t even want him to run for re-election.
If you’re a Democrat, this is a problem. Unenthusiastic voters don’t vote.
We were told by illegal immigration activists for years that walls don’t work, Oddly, however, they lobbied vigorously against a wall along our porous border with Mexico. If walls don’t work, I wondered, why are the pro-illegal immigration activists so dead set against them?
And if walls don’t work, I further wondered, why did the Berlin Wall succeed in imprisoning freedom-seekers for decades? Why are there walls around prisons? Why is there a wall around the White House?
But I’m not a wall scientist, so I figured there must be good answers to those questions but the answers were beyond my ken. I did learn from yard signs that it’s important to follow the science and that there is no such thing as an illegal human. So, I figured there must be something I was missing about wall-atology.
Former and future President Donald Trump seemed to miss it too. He built walls on portions of our border with Mexico to reduce illegal border crossings.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is a smart guy and astute politician. Threatening to shut down the government, he put together a spending bill that cut spending dramatically (by DC standards, anyway). He was prepared to pass it in his House, and send it to the Dem-controlled Senate. There, everyone knew it would die, but it would be a starting point for negotiations between the Senate and the House.
But McCarthy never got the chance. Predictably, the House Dems opposed it on the grounds it cut spending too much. Less predictably, half a dozen GOP hard-liners also opposed it – for not cutting spending enough.
To avoid a shutdown, McCarthy watered down the bill. The watered-down bill didn’t cut spending as much, but did garner the votes of most of the Dems and most of the GOP too. The Senate Dems and Joe Biden were delighted with the bill, and promptly passed it and signed it.
Which infuriated the GOP hard-liners. They moved to remove McCarthy from the speakership.
Most Americans say they will vote against Joe Biden next year, even if four-time indictee and twice-impeached Donald Trump is the Republican nominee.
Most Americans say Biden was on the take from foreign governments – they think he accepted bribes directly or through his criminal son. And most Democrats think Biden is too old to be president.
A recent poll by ABC/WaPo (not exactly “far-right-wingers” as the media likes to label dissenters from their narrative) puts Biden’s approval rating at 37% overall, in the low 30s on economics, and in the low 20s on immigration. And it says if the election were held today, he’d lose to Trump by 10 points – a blowout that would surely cost the Democrats the Senate as well.
Republicans would then own the presidency, the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and most state governorships and legislatures. Yikes, that scares even me, but I’ll take it.
I’ve been a moderate conservative for over 40 years. My principal source of news has been the Wall Street Journal. Its investigations, reporting, writing and opinion work have been without parallel. (I’ll admit that my regard for the Journal may have been heightened when they published a piece I wrote on mountaineering.)
But no more. Yes, sometimes they still do very good investigative work. And the opinion pages are still very good and mostly conservative. (And their mountaineering stuff is fabulous, albeit limited.)
I’ll note that those opinion pages often include opinions from the other side. Joe Biden has guest-opined there, as have Elizabeth Warren, Charles Schumer and other leading Democrats. I don’t respect those Dems’ opinions, but I do respect the Journal for publishing them.
If democracy dies in darkness, credit the mainstream media – the so-called fourth estate of our three-branch system – for turning out the lights.
But aside from good investigative work and the opinion page, the Journal has deteriorated. The writing is increasingly hackneyed and littered with millennial colloquialisms. You can almost see the bosses gathered in a conference room scheming to get more silly slang into the writing in order to attract, they think, the next generation of readers.
The Barbary pirates were a ragtag gang of North African pirates who terrorized Europe for centuries. They pirated commercial shipping, raided as far north as Ireland and Iceland to abduct and enslave Europeans –especially women – for the harems of the Middle East, and exacted tribute in exchange for safe ocean passage.
In two wars, the new United States of America put an end to them. The first was in 1801-1805. The second was ten years later and lasted just a few days, permanently putting the barbarian Barbarians out of business. America and Europe finally stopped paying tribute and ransom and enduring slave raids.
Fast forward to the year 2023. Modern-day Barbary pirates in Iran routinely kidnap Americans and Europeans to hold for ransom. Last week, the Biden administration paid an astonishing $6 billion for the release of six of them – a billion dollars each if my math serves.
The University of Colorado football program over the years often contended for the Big 8 title. It was the home of great athletes like Kordell Stewart, Darian Hagan, Eric Bieniemy, Rashaan Salaam, Dave Logan and Cliff Branch.
But it fell on hard times the last few years. Last year, they finished 1-11, lost their last four games by an average of over 30 points, and fired the coach.
Then they did something crazy. They hired a guy whose coaching experience was limited to several high schools, one of which was plagued by scandal, and then a historically Black college that played second division football.
But this new coach had some things going for him. He was a three-sport athletic star in college baseball, track and football. In high school, he was also a basketball star. He became a solid major league baseball player and a star in the NFL – the only player in history to hit a major league home run and score an NFL touchdown in the same week. After retiring, he was promptly inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame.
He goes by several names. His first was Prime Time, which was given to him by teammates on his high school basketball team. Later in college football, they called him “Neon Deion.”
Yeah, it’s Deion Sanders. His players call him “Coach Prime.”
But it’s no yawn to the virtue signalers and the control freaks and the teachers’ unions and the socialist politicians and the “work” from home crowd. They see it as another chance to signal virtue, exercise freakish control, avoid real teaching, redistribute more wealth, and “work” from home forever.
They had a ball last time. Yes, it damaged a generation of children, cost the country trillions of dollars (the repayment of which we’ll bequeath to those damaged children), sparked a lawlessness that still endures, elected a mean, stupid, senile, bribe-taker to the presidency, and spawned inflation that has diminished real earnings and will take years to drain from the system. But who cares about those things?
Well, I do. So do most other Americans.
I care about something else, too. As a matter of principle, I care that these selfish petty tyrants lied and cheated to impose their destructive will on Americans. I care that they owned us and our country for a couple of years and in that time laid great cities to ruins for vagrants, something like the Vandals sacking Rome to inaugurate the Dark Ages.
I care that they humiliated me, my family, and my culture. I care, and I remember.
So . . . we have a score to settle with these little Nazi Nero’s who fiddled, froliced and fornicated while our civilization burned.
Let’s have a rematch. My message to them is: Bring back your totalitarianism, your overreaching diktats, your lockdowns, your vaccine cards and, oh yes, especially your mask mandates.
Just try it. I dare you and I beg you. Make my day.
This Labor Day, the new buzz is about balancing work with life.
It comes at a time when fewer people are employed than before the pandemic, and many of those who are employed are gaming the system by “working” from home in their PJs while surfing the internet and doing house work (oops, no, they pay others to clean their house). Productivity figures still lag pre-pandemic times.
Weirdly, they think even their part-time, disengaged, goal-less so-called work, in the absence of any accountability or supervision, is too much. It interferes with what they call life.
I think they protest too much. They’re not really trying to reduce their work – they’ve already done that. What they’re really doing is trying to justify what they’ve done, or, rather, failed to do.
They do this by glorifying laziness. They deem lazy people like themselves morally superior to hard-working people. The hard-working people just have work, but they – they! – have a . . . drum roll . . . LIFE!
Governor Ron DeSantis is a very good governor. He may or may not out-debate the California pretty boy governor if that debate actually happens, but he sure out-governs him. The guy can run a big state, which historically suggests he could run a big country. See, Reagan, Ronald; but see, Carter, Jimmy.
DeSantis gave a speech the other day about the aftermath of a hurricane that barreled through Florida. Concern had been expressed about looting in the wake of the disaster. DeSantis expressed a similar concern – in the guise of a concern for the looters:
“People have a right to defend their property. This part of Florida, you got a lot of advocates and proponents of the Second Amendment, and I’ve seen signs in different people’s yards in the past after these disasters, and I would say it’s probably here – ‘You loot, we shoot.’”
the Aspen beat 