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"
The unique “Midterm Convention” by the Republicans in Dallas this week featured the faithful filling an arena (mostly, but there were quite a few empty seats) to hear the faith (mostly, but a Democrat Senator, too, spoke by video).
I’ve voted Republican since Ronald Reagan, including three times for Donald Trump. I didn’t think I would learn anything by watching the spectacle, and I didn’t think it would be amusing entertainment, so I didn’t watch.
But I did hear that President Trump promised to pay each adult citizen $5,000 if the Republicans hold both houses of Congress in November. I have two thoughts on this.
First, the odds that he’ll ever pay the $5,000 are approximately zero. The Republicans are sure to lose the House, and stand a good chance of losing the Senate as well. Even on the slim chance that they hold both, the $5,000 payments would require an act of Congress. The odds that Congress would go along are approximately, well, zero.
The odds that the Republicans will hold both houses of Congress, and Congress will go along with the $5,000 payments, are, if my math still serves, approximately zero times approximately zero, which is well nigh . . . zero.
So, don’t spend the money yet.
My second thought is that this money amounting to something over $1,000,000,000 has to come from somewhere. Oh, you say, it just gets printed.
But didn’t we learn for the umpteenth time during the Biden administration that money that “just gets printed” still comes from somewhere? Didn’t we learn that it comes from us, through inflated prices?
If that were not the case, then why make the payments only $5,000? Couldn’t we all be rich by letting the government simply print and mail to each of us $5,000,000?
Heck, why stop there? Let’s all be as rich as Elon Musk by having the government print and mail to each of us, say, a trillion dollars.
Okay, I said I have two thoughts on the matter, but actually I have three. Trump thinks we’re stupid.
It’s a puzzle. It’s a conundrum. To use Winston Churchill’s quote about the WWII Soviets, it’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
Why do Jews vote for Democrats?
Okay, I can understand why they vote against certain Republicans. For example, notwithstanding his defense of Israel, Donald Trump sometimes comes across as . . . well, let’s just say he does not come across as Albert Einstein.
A culture such as the Jews might find Trump’s social media postings and his in-person “weave” a bit off-putting. This off-putting is apparently not offset in their minds by his support for Israel.
But Trump is not the only Republican rejected by the Jews. The Jews as a group have never voted for any Republican Presidential candidate.
Never.
Was Eisenhower too dumb? This was the general in charge of Allied Forces in Europe, the bold genius who helped mastermind D-Day, and the good soldier who opened the concentration camps.
What about Richard Nixon? A man is not called “tricky” because he’s stupid. Nixon was clearly smarter than LBJ or Harry Truman.
How about Ronald Reagan? All he did was win the Cold War.
Reagan’s vice president who succeeded him, George H.W. Bush, was one of the most accomplished men in DC at that time.
The son of Bush senior, namely George W, was at least as smart as the men he ran against, Al Gore and John Kerry.
Was Mitt Romney who made zillions on Wall Street dumb? I should be so dumb.
Even Donald Trump was clearly smarter than his opponent the last two times.
The Jews voted against all of them, and every other Republican Presidential candidate. Why?
I have a theory.
Jews coming to America were much different than the ones here today. Jewish immigrants were more like the Irish or the Italian immigrants. They suffered discrimination for their ethnicity and religion (Catholicism in the case of the Italians and most of the Irish). All had heavy foreign accents that served to identify them, and the first language of the Italians and Jews was not even English.
They naturally voted for the political party that held itself out as just like them – working-class folk. The Democrats were the party that did not control the country clubs that refused to admit them.
The Irish and Italian immigrants assimilated within two generations, as most immigrants do. For example, I say I’m Scottish but the truth is that I have just one grandparent from Scotland. The rest came from here and there. Likewise, most of the Irish and Italian immigrants married outside their ethnicity and even their faith.
Today, there is no Irish vote or Italian vote, because there’s no longer a discrete Irish culture or Italian culture in America. Getting drunk on St Patrick’s Day doesn’t count, and Columbus Day has been cancelled.
But there’s still a Jewish vote, because there’s still a discrete Jewish culture. That culture is the reason that the Jews survived for thousands of years as a minority ethnic group with a distinctive non-Christian religion despite enormous pressures.
The Jews’ survival skills were forged in the furnace of Europe and, before that, the Middle East. There, they learned not to blend in because they weren’t allowed to. They learned not to marry outside their faith because nobody outside their faith would marry them.
The Jews made a virtue of this terrible discrimination and periodic pogroms. Being ostracized from mainstream culture drove them into an observance and even obsession over their own distinctive culture, religion and traditions.
You have your Christmas, they said, but we have our Hannukah. You have your New Year, but we have our Rosh Hashanah. You have your Easter, but we have our Passover.
And you have your Republicans, but we have our Democrats. In short, Jews vote for Democrats because it’s tradition.
Most traditions are good. There’s a Darwinian aspect to them; bad habits die out and never rise to the level of a tradition. In the context of Jewish culture and religion, tradition has been a very good thing, a sine qua non of these extraordinary and vulnerable people who comprise only 0.2% of the world’s population.
But I submit that the Jewish tradition of voting for Democrats is now unhealthy for them and us.
The Torah is full of traditions that may have been right for their time but are not right for the present. No longer is it appropriate for Jews to push goats off cliffs, decapitate calves, or light bonfires on mountain peaks.
Or vote blindly for barbarians who seek to destroy them. Even Tevye compromised tradition to save his people.
The Ashkenazi Jews are a remnant of the Jewish diaspora. A couple thousand years ago, they fled from Judea to Europe, and then were driven east. They did not assimilate, but deliberately kept to themselves to practice a religion and engage in a culture that was persecuted through the ages.
Just in case they had aspirations for integrating into the local population, the locals ensured that they did not. Marrying a Jew was a good way for a gentile to get disowned and disinherited, and vice versa.
DNA analysis suggests that at one point the Ashkenazim dropped to a population of as few as 350 people spread over the European continent. They were very nearly extinguished.
But in some ways, what didn’t kill them made them stronger. They have an inbred vulnerability to certain diseases but a near immunity to others.
Ashkenazim often score high on standardized IQ tests and they’ve succeeded inordinately in science, law, literature and business. In analyzing the reasons for this success, it’s difficult to tease apart the role of their admirable minds from the role of their admirable culture.
It’s a culture that values education, achievement, wealth, power, and – not least – family.
I’ve wailed at the Western Wall, both literally and metaphorically, though I’m not Jewish. Then again, maybe now we’re all Jewish. In a way, everyone with a claim on Western Civilization is Jewish. I claim a heritage from Moses, Jesus, Paul, Freud, Einstein, Spielberg, Oppenheimer, Kasparov, Ben-Gurion, Kissinger, Bellow, Salk, Kafka, Chagall and Dylan – all Jews.
Thus, I’m saddened to see some of today’s prominent Jews equivocate in their defense of the Jewish state of Israel.
No less that the Senator Charles Schumer – the first Jewish Senate Minority Leader – is willing to throw Israel under the bus if necessary to save his job. No less than Rahm Emmanuel, Chief of Staff in the Obama White House and an advisor to Bill Clinton before that, is willing to put Israel back in the Jewish ghetto if it puts him back in the White House.
The Middle East has always been a complicated place. If only all of it were like Israel – largely an arid land with few natural riches. Instead, vast areas are cursed by black gold. The energy dependency of the world requires us to pay attention to this place. To mollify, cajole, bully and beg the barbarians.
It’s easy and habit-forming to blame things on the Jews and to see their oil-rich adversaries as the victims, notwithstanding the appalling atrocities committed in the name of those “victims.”
But as a matter of history, it was the Jews who were the victims. Their persecution for thousands of years culminated with the systematic murder of a third of their population. After the event that put an upper case “H” on the word Holocaust, the Jews swore that they would be victims never again.
In short, the Jews refuse to be exterminated. Should they be blamed for that?
For those who see the Jews as the source of the problem in the Middle East, I have a question: What would you have them do differently?
Are the Jews supposed to give up their ancient homeland, to give up Israel? Are they supposed to go back to the lands of their persecution and victimhood – to Europe, to America, to Russia? Because that’s what the Palestinians demand.
Look at a map. “From the river to the sea” refers to the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. That’s all of Israel. The slogan chosen by the Palestinians candidly calls for the abolition of Israel.
The Ashkenazim of Europe were persecuted for a thousand years, but against all odds they maintained their identity, their culture and their religion. In their faith and unanimity, they did well and they did good. If only their American successors could be so united and so brave.
The Trump administration has heralded a decline in violent crime in the past few years. America is a safer place.
We’re told that this should be credited to Republican policies for greater law enforcement and more vigorous criminal prosecution. That may be so. I’m certainly in favor of both those policies. But maybe there’s also another factor at work.
The graph* above shows a clear correlation between declining violent crime and declining testosterone levels. To be sure, there’s an exception around the year 2020 where violent crime spiked but testosterone levels did not. It’s safe to say the spike in violent crime at that point was due to something other than a spike in testosterone levels.
Gee, what could be the reason for the spike in violent crime around 2020? Oh yeah. There was a worldwide pandemic where the Biden administration and many Democrat-controlled cities shut down law enforcement.
Apart from this Covid pandemic crime spree, the correlation is clear.
Now, of course, correlation does not equal causation. Just because a decline in violent crime correlates with a decline in testosterone does not mean that the decline in testosterone caused the decline in violent crime. Logically speaking, it could just as well be the reverse – that the violent crime reduction caused the testosterone reduction. (Are they still castrating criminals?) Or it could be that both were caused by some other factor (but I can’t imagine what) or that each was caused by different factors.
But nonetheless, we’re left with the correlation.
In this particular case, there are reasons to think that correlation does equal causation. Testosterone is the male hormone that is responsible for dense muscle mass, risk-taking and road rage.
Testosterone is the main reason that males are far more likely than females to engage in mountaineering, car racing, entrepreneurialism, Seal Team 6-ing, boxing, exploration – and violent crime.
The males most likely to engage in violent crime are the young ones, in whom testosterone levels are the highest. And among young men, young Blacks are far more likely to engage in violent crime than young whites. Is it any surprise that young Black men tend to have higher testosterone levels – and incarceration levels – than young white men?
That said, let me also say that I’m a fan of testosterone, despite (or maybe because of) its mucho-macho side. In fact, the phrase “testosterone poisoning” makes me want to punch someone. But I have to admit, there are benefits to having less of the stuff. And detriments.
*The graph was generated at my request by AI using data from the FBI on violent crime and from the NIH on testosterone levels. I should mention that AI does not buy my theory because . . . sociology. In any event, cursory research finds that no one has noted this correlation. The contrarian in me says that proves it’s right. If you disagree, let’s settle it outside.
By now, you know the story. A man named Jason Arday was hired by Cambridge to be its “youngest Black* professor.”
Cambridge hired Arday in the wake of the George Floyd death, a tragic death that had as much impact on Great Britain as on Minnesota. What we learned from the George Floyd episode was not that we should treat or incarcerate mentally disturbed, substance-abusing criminals. No, that lesson was too much for those Days of Wokeness.
What we learned instead was that anytime a person dies in police custody, the police must have murdered him – if he was Black.
Just as rebels holler “To the barricades,” the DEI advocates hollered, “To the reparations!”
The reparations were not to take the form of putting the likes of George Floyd into in an expensive institution for treatment, rehabilitation and, if necessary, punishment. The reparations were instead to take the form of putting a person who the DEI advocates view as someone just like George Floyd (to the DEI advocates, they all look the same) into a professorship at Cambridge. Call it the George Floyd Chair.
It didn’t matter whether the Black person was ever a victim of slavery or if his ancestors ever were. What mattered was that the person was Black.
And so, it was no problem that the George Floyd Chair was filled with Jason Arday, even though his parents immigrated to London from Ghana and there is no evidence that he or any ancestor suffered slavery (if they did, it was the Black-on-Black kind).
Arday was a piece of work. Outside the classroom, he bragged that he once ran 600 miles in 6 days. As if that was not enough, he once ran 30 marathons – a 26-mile race – in 33 days. In his spare time, he said, he raised $6 million dollars for charity in the span of a few weeks.
He said he barely spoke until he was 11. He suffered two brain tumors.
Inside the classroom, he was touted as brilliant. Any claims to the contrary were dismissed as “racist.”
Yes, there was much ado about the phenom named Jason Arday. It turned out to be much ado about nothing. I was all lies.
There were no brain tumors. He spoke at the usual age. He apparently ran no marathons, much less 30 in 33 days. The $6 million he single-handedly raised for charity in a short time was actually raised over a long period of time by a charity group he was loosely affiliated with.
The thing that did him in, however, was not his superhuman fabulism. It was his academic fraud. It was discovered that his PhD thesis contained over 100 instances of plagiarism. Some of the plagiarism was page upon page of exact copying.
The initial reaction by Cambridge was of course, “More racism! By racist critics!” Arday himself literally called the police when journalists sent him emails asking for his comment. (The police belatedly dismissed his complaint.)
Despite the stonewalling by both Cambridge and Arday, his plagiarism was too stark to be ignored. Whole pages were cut and pasted, including the grammatical errors. Cambridge finally announced that it was undertaking an investigation.
Arday resigned from his prestigious and tenured position later that day. Cambridge must find another Black man for the George Floyd Chair.
Yesterday, this story went from amusing to bemusing. Arday was found dead in London. Police say there is no evidence of foul play. That’s police talk for suicide. Although I condemn Arday’s fraud and his attacks on critics who sought to point it out, part of me feels bad for him and his family.
Here’s who I don’t feel bad for: Cambridge.
It is often observed that affirmative action may feel good to the advocates, but it does no favors to the beneficiaries. The beneficiary is put into a position they’re not ready for, a position where they are bound to fail. Indeed, the failure rate for affirmative action Black students is significantly higher than for ordinary white students.
Lies are compounded by more lies. Soon, a little resume exaggeration balloons into “I ran 30 marathons in 33 days!” Soon, the Black person is no longer a person, he’s just Black.
Cambridge is not full of dummies. The fabulism claimed by Arday was a red flag, and the plagiarism must have been an open secret. Cambridge didn’t care, for they had their Black.
Cambridge’s charges of “racism!” against accomplished academics who raised good faith questions was a coverup, and one that potentially damaged those academics.
All this was for Cambridge to feel good about itself, to fill the George Floyd Chair.
Cambridge, you have blood on your hands.
*Most Black people want an upper case “B” and so that’s what I give them. It costs me nothing. Most white people want a lower case “w” and so that’s what I give them. That, too, costs me nothing. As for the whole ridiculous controversy, I have bigger fish to fry.
The two Anthonys are the former Chief Medical Advisor to the President, namely Anthony Fauci, and the former Justice of the Supreme Court, namely Anthony Kennedy.
The story of Anthony Fauci is well documented. He was a respected scientist who started believing – and relishing – his own press in the course of the worldwide pandemic and national tragedy that we call Covid.
If he’d had the money, Fauci would have set up his own Twitter-like social media outlet. As it was, he didn’t need to, because he effectively owned the real Twitter. Back in the pre-Elon days, Twitter embraced any praise of him and censored any criticism of him.
“Embraced” is a good word to use in connection with Fauci. His dairy released by the Senate this week shows a man engaged in self-embrace and self-pleasure. Tony wrote love letters to Tony. Tony gave big hugs for Tony. Tony all but had a Tony fan club, and he was the biggest fan of all. Tony lamented that he didn’t have time to read all of Tony’s press but, paradoxically, Tony had time to write about all the press that Tony didn’t have time to read about.
That alone is unseemly but it is not a crime. Many people like or even love themselves. Their love letters to themselves are embarrassing but not criminal.
What is criminal are two things. First, Fauci misled the American people about the source of Covid. It was apparently a leak from a Chinese bioweapons lab, after all, not a naturally occurring virus that jumped to humans in the “wet markets” of China. Maybe Covid really should have kept its original name of “Chinese flu.” At the time, however, the media decided that naming it the “Chinese flu” because it indisputably started in China, one way or another, would be racist. (Never mind the precedent of “Spanish flu” for a flu that didn’t even start in Spain.)
Second, Fauci lied to both the American people and the American Congress about the dangers of Covid to otherwise healthy people. The fatality rate actually was on the order of the fatality rate for ordinary flu – well less than 1% and much less than that for people who are young, notwithstanding the masks still being worn by Democrats who are still in solidarity with Fauci. Accordingly, Fauci locked down the country and produced a crisis in education and acculturation that we’re still dealing with six years later.
The lying to Congress is known as the crime of perjury. To avoid yet another count of perjury, Fauci refused to answer over 100 questions posed by the Senate this week. He did get some additional attention in his tiresome invocation of the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, but not the kind he relishes.
Viewed generously, Fauci’s lies for the Chinese were perhaps in the interest of maintaining cordial relations with America’s biggest geopolitical rival. In the course of dealing with a worldwide pandemic, we didn’t want to also deal with WW III.
And Fauci’s lies to Congress and other Americans about the dangers of Covid to healthy people might be seen as an exercise in caution. He figured it was better to be extra careful by exaggerating the dangers of Covid than to be reckless and thereby contribute to the extinction of humanity. (Forget about kids’ education and well-being; his allies in the teachers’ unions want more days off.)
But aren’t both of those justifications for Fauci’s lies beyond his pay grade? Aren’t they matters for a boss to decide – like a President? Or, better yet, aren’t they issues for the American people?
Memo to Fauci: We can handle the truth.
Then there is the other Anthony, the one called Justice Anthony Kennedy. He was Ronald Reagan’s second choice for a vacant Supreme Court seat, after the great jurist Robert Bork had been, well, borked by a Senate Judiciary Committee headed by a man who went on become senile (if he wasn’t born senile) named Joe Biden.
Justice Kennedy, it is rumored (but I have this on good authority), was known to ask his clerks to scour the newspapers each day to retrieve any press clippings that mentioned him. They were to leave the clippings on his desk so that he could read all about himself.
Kennedy, mind you, putatively was not a politician. He was a Supreme Court Justice with life tenure.
Kennedy’s most famous Supreme Court opinion was the 2015 case giving gays the Constitutional right to marry one another. I personally have no quarrel with a gay person marrying whomever or whatever he or she or they or it wants, so long as I’m not required somehow to recognize it as a matter of my religion.
But I think the Court was amiss in this decision. The states and the people were rapidly coming to my point of view. Why not let things play out in the court of public opinion on this matter of cultural norms that has no legitimate legal loadstar, rather than letting lawyers argue it in the highest court?
Why not, you ask? Because that would preclude Kennedy from being the hero, that’s why. There are those press clippings he had to worry about, you know.
I don’t mean to suggest that Justice Kennedy’s self-aggrandizement was equivalent to Fauci’s embarrassing self-pleasuring or criminal deceit. The two are of different orders, and I strongly doubt that Justice Kennedy ever committed a crime.
But I do mean that public servants should serve the public. Their first priority should be the public good, not their so-called legacy.
His 4 years of ineptitude gave us 12 years of Republican rule in the form of Ronald Reagan and his successor, George H. W. Bush. (It would have been at least 16 years, if not for Ross Perot taking many of Bush’s votes to be re-elected in 1992.) And arguably, that 12 years of GOP rule produced another 8 years of GOP rule through the prodigal son, George W. Bush.
I love Jimmy Carter. (I hate Ross Perot.)
There is a chance we’ll see something similar in the midterms this fall. The Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, has been winning Democratic primaries. It turns out that Democrats love socialists.
Or they think they do. Democrats’ support for the idea of socialism is quite different from their support for socialism itself. For example:
One of the DSA policies in its platform is to abolish prisons. That’s right, convicted murderers and rapists would go free. But only 27% of Democrats support that policy. (You have to wonder what those 27% are smoking, but, still, that’s only a little more than one in four.)
Another DSA platform position is to abolish the U.S. military. If China invades, we’ll rely on guys with shotguns. (Oops, we’ll have taken away everyone’s gun, too.) Democrats in general disfavor that policy by about a two to one margin.
Another DSA position is to grant amnesty to all illegal immigrants. Democrats actually favor this policy by a plurality(!) but still only 44% favor it.
Here, it gets interesting. Another DSA platform is to abolish the Presidency and the Supreme Court, replacing both with arms of Congress. Only 30% of Democrats agree with this proposal.
While we’re abolishing sacrosanct branches of government established by the Constitution, DSA would also abolish the Senate. The problem with the Senate, they say, is that it serves as a check on pure democracy. Even the Democrats mostly oppose this abolition.
In short, the DSA would make us a lot like the Soviet Union (which failed, by the way), the Eastern Europe Soviet client states (ditto), Cuba (which will soon fail), and North Korea (ditto). It’s been tried many times, and the absence of checks and balances always results not in democracy, but tyranny. Assigning a word like “fair” to such a system will not make it work. It’s a trap.
DSA should have kept its trap shut about its trap. It should have just said, “We’re socialists, isn’t that wonderful?” Instead, they told us what it means to be a socialist. It’s not wonderful; it’s idiocy.
The media, of course, will try to hide the DSA platform because Orange Man Bad. They will not be successful, however. The DSA is quite proud of it, and intends to promote it.
Between now and the midterms in November, the American people will discover this platform. I anticipate they will soundly reject it.
Of course, the wild President is a wild card. He might find a way to prove me wrong. Or right.
This news item falls into the categories of both funny and weird – categories that are getting a lot of traction these days.
In Denver, the socialists met to party and celebrate, and to party some more, after their chosen socialist candidate beat the Democrat in the Democratic primary last month. It wasn’t even close.
By the way, the Democrats still have primaries for their non-Presidential candidates, apparently, but the winners are generally socialists, not Democrats. (Ah, but maybe I’m splitting hairs.)
The old Democrat who lost this primary has represented Denver in the U.S. House of Representatives for 30 years after succeeding the Democrat who had represented Denver for the preceding 24 years. In fact, the current one was elected before her socialist opponent was born.
I’m no fan of the old Democrat, but does Denver really want to be represented in Congress by a socialist child? Yes, they evidently do.
At the party/celebration/party, a good time was had by all. It was the most people in downtown Denver since the Broncos won the Superbowl, and I’m not excluding the dreadful Rockies games.
Yes, a good time was had by all. Except the 50% of the attendees who wore COVID masks. That’s right, about half of the hundreds of attendees at this socialist party wore COVID masks. A photo posted on X by one of the organizers appears above. The photo-posting organizer bragged;
“Packed house, line out the door, big things are happening!”
Then, he and the attendees were mocked mercilessly on-line for wearing COVID masks to a party – five years after COVID has passed. And so, he deleted the post. Next, we’ll learn that the masks were passed out at the door by the socialist hosts. I’m not sure whether that makes the whole episode better or worse.
COVID aside, this gives some insight into the mentality of the socialists of Denver. They believe the world is a very dangerous place. They’ll invent danger if none is present. And they want to be seen as doing something about this invented danger. Maybe this is unique to Colorado where pot has long been legal, but I think it’s deeper than that.
I suppose they could see danger in Vladimir Putin who invaded a separate nation. Or the Gazans who raped, beheaded and took hostage hundreds of Israelis. Or marijuana, the legalization of which is now recognized as a huge mistake by the medical establishment which treats victims of this mistake. Or the communists who killed 100 million people within the lifetimes of their parents and grandparents.
Well, perhaps the reference to communists hit a little close to home. The reference to pot did, too.
In any event, I’m guessing that the masks did not interfere too much with the socialists drinking the Kool-Aid. These people are funny, weird and high – and dangerous.
The news of the days – or, rather, yesterday – is that the Democratic candidate running for the Senate from Maine named Graham Platner is alleged, again, to be a rapist.
Duty demands that I mention he denies the accusation.
In fact, he denies lots of things. He had a Nazi tattoo on his chest for some 19 years, but denies knowing that it was a Nazi tattoo. Notably, his friends deny his denial.
Before he was alleged to be a rapist, and during the time he sported a Nazi tattoo that he didn’t know was one unless you believe his friends, he pretended to be an oyster farmer. Or oyster fisherman. Or whatever you do to catch an oyster.
One year, he made about $5,000 as an oyster whatever. It was a lousy living but a good campaign story.
Back to the rape allegations, of which there are several, none of which is a good campaign story. This time, there’s a tendency on the left to believe the woman because she’s a Democrat. You should always believe the woman, if she’s a Democrat.
And so, the Democrat establishment have, finally, called on Platner to quit the race.
His Republican opponent, Susan Collins, makes the heads spin of Republicans because she is not in the tank for the President, but she makes the heads spin of Democrats because she allegedly is.
In any event, Senator Collins lacks even a decent taint of corruption over her several millennia in the Senate, unless one of those two head-spinning traits constitutes corruption. She has never been accused of raping anyone.
Platner has been urged to quit by even king-maker socialist Bernie Sanders. When a socialist loses Bernie, he’s lost everyone.
But Platner still won’t quit. Why not?
Here’s my theory. Like all good socialists, he wants some money. Rather, he needs some. So, he’s busy negotiating with the Democratic establishment for a Big Payday. It’ll beat oyster farming/fishing/whatevering for $5,000 a year.
If he stays another couple of weeks, the law of Maine will prevent the Democrats from replacing him with a new candidate.
In other words, he holds all the cards, if not the oysters. He has both the need for money and the ability to get it. It’s a great blend of socialism and capitalism. Tell them you plan to stay, Platner!
There’s an expression that I won’t use in a title to a piece, but I’ll use it in the body. The expression is, “You get a socialist with an election, you get rid of them with a gun.”
Socialists have a pattern. They won’t go away. It’s a one-way ratchet. They get elected, and then they refuse to get un-elected. So, we get more and more of them. They’re like houseflies – just as parasitic, just as bothersome, and just as unhealthy.
Bernie Sanders is a good example. He has been in politics for most of his 84-year life. Since 1981, he has been the mayor of Burlington, then a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and then a U.S. Senator since 2007.
Politics has been very good to Senator Sanders. He now owns multiple houses and has a seven-figure net worth. Not bad money, especially for a public servant who preaches the evil of the stuff.
Bernie reminds me of a bootlegging whiskey runner, which is perhaps appropriate since he represents a state that borders Canada. He opposes the legalization of alcohol because he doesn’t want the competition. (BTW, can we trade Vermont for Alberta?)
Now, we have five more socialists. Three have won their Democratic primaries in New York and are shoo-ins to win the general election since New Yorkers are not allowed to vote for Republicans.
Two won their primaries in Colorado this week – one against a 15-term Congresswoman who herself was hard-left, and one in a contest for the governorship. Both will win their general elections in November because, alas, my formerly great State of Colorado has gone to the dogs (or, more precisely, to the wolves, but that’s a different column).
Of course, socialism will work no better this time than it has worked since Karl Marx dreamed it up a couple of centuries ago. Giving to each according to his needs and taking from each according to his abilities will produce a very needy society with very little ability. When it comes to free stuff, people like to be on the receiving end more than on the giving end.
Who would have thought?
So, we’ll eventually vote the socialists out, as societies always do once they re-learn the fact that the Elon Musks of the world may or may not be likable but they do make the trains run on time, and the spaceships, too.
But what do we do when they don’t go away after we vote them out? When they plead “voter suppression” or some such nonsense? When they pull a Bernie Sanders by hanging around for 45 years? When they pretend to be Nicolus Maduro or Nicolae Ceaușescu or Czar Nicholas?
the Aspen beat 