Tag Archives: Trump

Democrats crying “affordability” is like an arsonist calling the fire department

Posted on by
2

The party of compassion and intellectualism, according to them, is selling two things this election season. One, they hate Trump, and they want you to.

Forget that Trump stopped illegal immigration and deported millions of Biden’s illegals.

Forget that Trump emasculated Iran and re-masculated America’s would-be trannies.

Forget that Trump called out overpriced woke colleges for their hiring, admissions, grading and testing on the basis of skin color.

Forget all that. Just remember that Trump’s hair, adjectives and vanity make you feel . . . well, deranged. Your derangement is his fault.

Remember only that. And to vote early and often.

The second thing the Democrats are selling is “affordability.” If you vote for them, they tell you, they’ll make stuff more affordable.

The Democrats are light on the details here, for good reason.

For example, the Democrats could, but don’t, say that they’ll lower the price of gasoline.

The Democrats don’t say that because, for two generations now, they’ve argued that the price of gas in the U.S. is already too low (and indeed it’s still lower than anywhere else in the developed world). If gasoline cost more, they argue, we’d use less of it and – voila! – the climate would be Goldilocks. Never too hot, never too cold.

Forget that the Democratic Republic of California enjoys extremely high gasoline prices, and we nonetheless have cold winters and hot summers the way we always have. Maybe the climate Giai hasn’t gotten the memo. And neither have carbon-spewing China or India.

Forget, too, that the average price of gasoline during the Trump administration is less than the average price of gasoline during the Biden administration. As for Jimmy Carter’s administration, let’s not even go there.

In talking about this “affordability” issue, Democrats could also say, but don’t, that they’ll lower the cost of housing.

The Democrats don’t say that because for many years, they’ve enacted rules and regulations to do the opposite. They favor unionized contractors, even – or especially – when the housing is government-subsidized “affordable” housing. They favor burdensome building codes that display omnipotence more than making buildings safe.

The Democrats also don’t say that because they don’t like the outcome of their own experiment. They know that the cost of building a house in their stronghold of California with its crushing land-use regulations and unionized workforce is almost triple the cost of building the same house in free-market – and Republican – Texas.

In California, it seems that a construction worker is required to be either a member of a union or a citizen of somewhere in Latin America.

How about the affordability of college? Under Democrat administrations, the tuition at the nation’s universities has skyrocketed, due largely to the availability of government student loans which the Democrats turn into gifts.

These universities are mostly controlled by a bunch of group-think Democrats who seem to delight in free-speech inquiry if, and only if, they agree with it, and delight in free market economics if, and only if, it benefits them. 

Maybe the Democrats would address the unaffordability of college in the same way they always have. They’d make more student loans-cum-gifts. The outcome of that approach would be the same as always. Their collaborative Democrats at the universities would be grateful, because they could thereby raise tuition some more.

Except they’d still give in-state tuition to illegal immigrants.

Many Democrats think socialism leads to affordability. The elders of Eastern Europe would beg to differ. What socialism leads to is not affordability, but scarcity. Meat in Soviet-occupied Poland cost pennies a pound, but you literally had to wait in line for hours to get it. Talk to a person who lived through socialism in Poland (which, significantly, is now booming under a free market economy).

How about the cost of electricity? Democrats have long proposed to make electricity cheap by simply mandating that.

But price controls don’t work because they destroy incentives for production. What they could do instead is increase the production of electricity by means of nuclear energy. But “nuclear” is still a dirty word in much of Democrat-land. Better to put windmills in the DC mall and solar panels on the Washington Monument.

The only energy source the Democrats like is the scarce kind, which serves their plan to return us to the utopia of the Stone Age.

With no real plan to lower costs in order to increase affordability, Democrats advocate what they’ve always advocated – higher wages. They propose to double the federal minimum wage, for example.

Why not triple it? Why not increase it to $100,000 an hour? If the Democrats seriously think that higher wage costs can be imposed without producing higher prices, then let’s go whole hog!

Why not hand out free money, the way they did in Covid times?

Ah, the organizations that used to be called the “news media” tell us to forget all that and forget the consequences of all that. Let’s not be too specific. Let’s not be specific at all – what is this, a racist merit-based test or something?

Instead, remember only the bad hair, bad adjectives and bad vanity of the guy – that guy! – who is not on the ballot.

Why did Democrats open the border?

Posted on by
5

Until President(ish) Joe Biden assumed office, the Democrat Presidential policy on illegal immigration was the same as the policy of all earlier Presidents of the United States. Their policy as leaders of the Executive Branch was to enforce the law. The law was to prevent people from entering the country illegally.

This non-partisan national policy was founded on the idea that what we have in America is special, and we don’t intend to just give it away to anyone willing to swim illegally across the Rio Grande. Or the Volga, Rhine, Congo or Danube.

Moreover, allowing immigration that was illegal, as opposed to legal, would give us the worst of the pool of immigrants – the ones willing to violate the sanctity of our laws, often because they’d already violated the sanctity of the laws of the place they came from. Lawbreakers break the law.

In other words, illegal immigration by definition is mass immigration by criminals. Despite what the liberal media tells you, it’s a crime to enter the country illegally. (It’s not a crime to overstay a visa but illegal immigrants are not usually mere visa-overstayers.)

We knew that if criminal immigration reached the millions, it would disrupt our social fabric by burdening schools, emergency rooms, highways and welfare systems.

And if the criminal immigration were by criminals unable (or unwilling) to speak our language, we risked becoming a different society altogether. There’s a reason that immigrants who achieve the privileged status of U.S. citizens are required to pass a test – in English. It’s not racist to believe America should be an English-speaking country of non-criminals where everyone can speak with everyone, preferably without pressing “2” for Spanish or talking through the translation app on your phone.

This was the policy of even the most-recent Democrats to precede Biden, namely Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. They stated that people cannot enter the country illegally or stay in the country illegally, and their policies mostly were in accord with those statements.

So, what happened under Biden? Why did he fling the border wide open, even as he denied doing so?

In fairness to Biden, he knew not what he’d done. He was a very old man with very metastasized cancer. Even in his younger days, he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, and in his later days he was nothing but a tooth-capped scalp-plugged cutout taking instructions from others.  

The shots were being called by whoever was the boldest shot-caller. All of them in the Biden White House were very hard-left, including – or perhaps particularly – his wife, “doctor” Jill.

The question remains, why did somebody or somebodies who were calling the shots under the Biden administration open the border, and why did the other Democrats allow it? There must be a strong reason, because it arguably cost them the 2024 election.

This is an interesting question because the answer tells a lot about the modern Democratic Party.

The most generous reason is that they wanted to do the humanitarian thing. People in Haiti and Guatemala and even Mexico have suffered horribly. Enough is enough. I have some sympathy for that sentiment.

But that sympathy goes only so far. Are we supposed to allow all of Haiti and Guatemala and Mexico to immigrate to the United States?

Moreover, such a sentiment disregards our system of government. If we want to allow more immigration from troubled parts of the world, then the way to achieve it is to pass legislation to allow it and regulate it, not to wantonly violate the legislation that is already on the books.

The Biden administration didn’t pass new legislation. They didn’t even try very hard (at that or anything else). Instead, they said in effect, “We don’t like the law, so we’ll simply violate it.”

That’s anarchy. Or, to use the phrase du jour, it’s a threat to democracy. In the context of the Executive Branch collaborating with an illegal invasion of our country by millions of criminals, it’s arguably a high crime or misdemeanor.

The Democrats indeed seem not to like the laws of our country, at least when it comes to immigration, but I’m afraid it goes deeper than that. They don’t like the country itself.

This is factual. Polls consistently show that Democrats are much less likely than Republicans to express a love for America. They’re a bit embarrassed by America. They want a very different America, one that is more socialistic. Merit is bad, because the people who have it tend not to be the “right” people.

“Fundamentally transforming America” is the phrase Obama repeatedly used as a euphemism for correcting this perceived defect. Obama may indeed have enforced the immigration laws, as I mentioned, but he was hell-bent on making the nation different in values and composition. Maybe he didn’t intend to make America into Haiti (and maybe he did) but “fundamentally transforming America” became a cool thing to advocate.

Obama’s followers in the Democratic Party took that phrase and ran with it. And they ran by any means necessary, including willful evasion of the immigration laws.

That leads to yet a deeper question. What’s so bad about America? This country has given the most prosperity to the most people in the history of the world. Our poor people are rich by the standards of nearly all of history. Our foreign aid to other countries far surpasses anyone else in history.

I laugh at youngsters who display their ignorance by complaining that the price of their iPhone is too high. I grew up in a family of six in a 1200-square-foot house. We had no air conditioning, no color TV, no microwave, and no second car until my father bought an old junker for $110. I started working when I was 15, and washed pots and pans through college. And we were considered upper middle class.

I’ll reserve for another column this question as to why young Americans seem not to love this country that loves them. But here’s a hint. It’s not despite America’s prosperity, but because of it. It’s not because things are too hard, but because things are too easy.

The next President will be a white male Democrat

Posted on by
9
This isn’t real

Conventional wisdom is that J.D. Vance will be elected President in 2028. I think not.

Vance has a lot going for him – he’s smart, accomplished, well-educated, in the public eye, and will be heir to MAGA.

That last point, however, is two-edged. Yes, he will be associated with Trump. But yes, he will be associated with Trump. There’s a lot of Trump fatigue out there even among people who voted for him three times, as I did. 

The last time a sitting Vice President was elected to the Presidency was when we elected George H.W. Bush. But that was when Ronald Reagan was a very successful and popular President. When it comes to popularity, Mr. Vance, your boss is no Ronald Reagan.

Vance seems unwilling or unable to apply any balm to soothe this Trump fatigue, much less the strong topical anesthesia that is indicated. He always seems angry and a little xenophobic. I won’t go so far as to say he’s racist – after all, he’s married to an Indian (whom he publicly says he wants to convert to Christianity) – but . . .   

Speaking of xenophobia, what’s with the beard? My phone tells me at a glance which century it is. You’d think Vance could get a Russian oligarch to buy him a phone.

Vance will get some competition from my favorite, Marco Rubio, but Rubio will bow out well before the Republican convention.

The reason Rubio will lose is that he’s Hispanic. On the Republican side, sadly, there are enough voters who simply will not vote for a non-white candidate, even if he’s a dedicated anti-communist, anti-Castro, Republican son of legal Cuban immigrants.

The media won’t help Rubio, even though – or perhaps because – he’s Hispanic. The media will acknowledge that he’s Hispanic, but not a “real” Hispanic since he’s Cuban and since he’s a Republican. They’ll paint him as a betrayer of his race, since in their racist view all minorities are required to be Democrats rather than independent thinkers. They will see him much the way they see Justice Clarence Thomas – as an Uncle Tom.

Ironically, Rubio’s odds would be much better as a Democrat because then he wouldn’t be painted as an Uncle Tom. But then, of course, he’d have to be a Democrat and that’s much worse.

Vance will also get a little competition from Nikki Haley, another candidate I like. But hop in your pickup and drive the backroads of Texas to see how enthusiastic they are about electing a woman as President whose parents are Ajit Singh Randhawa and Raj Kaur Randhaw from Punjab, India.

Or just take it from me: they aren’t.

So, Vance will be the Republican nominee. Who will be the Democrat nominee?

It won’t be Kamala. Even though she seems to be leading in the Democrat polls, a good part of her lead is her name recognition. She did run for President last time and received some 75 million votes. She is also the only credible Black(-ish) candidate, which ensures a few million votes.

But she’s a two-time loser. And both times, she ran a poor campaign. Her support is probably about as high as it will ever be, and that’s not very high.

Moreover, there’s an element of Kamala fatigue – by Kamala. I think she doesn’t want the job badly enough to put in the work that’s necessary to be hired.

That leaves some Democrat white guys. It won’t be Buttigieg. Even the Democrats aren’t ready for a gay man. Besides, being gay is no longer fashionable. To the average American, it’s a little like being trans – it’s sooo 2024.

That leaves the governors. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro is disqualified because he doesn’t hate Jews enough. In fact, he is one!!! (Do the Democrats know?)

The women governors are pretty much all women, and the Democrats have already done that twice. Can they really say with their self-congratulatory zeal, “Third woman Presidential candidate! This is another first – the first time that there’s been a third!”

There’s the governor in Illinois who has lost 80 pounds by taking the new fat pills. That’s nice, but does he still have an appetite for the job?

The only one left is Gavin Newsom, complete with his cursed hair issues and cursed State of California. He’s reasonably bright, good-looking, and well-known.

Newsom says he’s dyslexic, which is a good excuse for any gaffes and might even get him some sympathy votes. It’s only right that we elect a President with disabilities. We already had one who was comatose. (Someday we’ll signal our virtue by electing one who is autistic.)

Think how edgy the Dems will feel in nominating a sentient white guy. They haven’t done that in over 20 years. And Dems are nothing if not edgy.

And so, the race will be Vance vs. Newsom or, if you prefer, J.D. vs. Gavin (sounds like an election for frat president).

I’ll be voting for Vance, but the winner will be Newsom. For Vance, the MAGA baggage is a lift too heavy and a bridge too far. It worked for Trump, but Trump is sui generis. I’m glad. 

Trump offers to pay the taxpayers with money from the taxpayers

Posted on by
3

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.

A tale of two Anthonys; the disgrace of Fauci

Posted on by
1

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.

DSA is the best thing to happen to the GOP since Jimmy Carter

Posted on by
3

Jimmy Carter the peanut farmer was great, OK?

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.

Who needs to moderate when you have Jew-hate?

Posted on by
10

Over the last year and a half, the Democrats have gnashed their teeth about why they lost in 2024 – against Donald Trump, the candidate they hate so much they imagine that everyone else does, too.  

Was it because the Democrats advocated transsexual boys in the girls’ bathrooms? Was it because they favored abandoning the southern border while simultaneously lying to us that it was secure?  Was it because they nominated a nitwit candidate without a nomination convention? Was it because the sitting Democrat President was demonstrably incompetent, and they lied to us about that, too?

The consensus was that they lost for all of those reasons. If they want to turn around their electoral misfortunes, it was said, some moderation was in order on all of those things.

Yet, here we are. Nearly two years later, the Democrats are not busy getting the transsexual boys out of the girls’ bathrooms. They have no time to secure the southern border. They threaten to nominate the same nitwit candidate (presumably via a bona fide nomination convention this time).

The incontinent sitting Democratic President has graduated from sitting to lying. Though he is persona non grata, he’s not entirely out of the limelight and onto the beach; his wife has some books to sell. Perhaps those books will be in the husband’s “library” which will be an added wing to Mordor, the library that Obama built. (Who would have thought that the south side of Chicago could be worse?)

All of this has nothing to do with the Democrats’ 2024 loss. Nope. Instead of moderating their crazy stances, the Democrats are hard at work in perfecting their pitch to be the world’s greatest at something alright – at being socialist antisemites.

They’ve elected an admitted socialist for Mayor of America’s greatest city. They nominated his apostles for the U.S. House of Representatives. Other self-proclaimed socialists have come out of the worm-infested woodwork nationwide and are running for office on the Democrat side. They don’t even hide their socialism anymore; they boast of it.

And they boast of their hatred for the Jews.

One of the nominated socialists brags that the Jews had it coming on Oct 7. She refuses even to condemn the 9/11 attacks on New York City. This is a candidate who will represent, in a manner of speaking, that very same New York City in the halls of Congress.

The Jewish angle is interesting. Antisemitism, socialism and Zionism have a complicated history. Let’s not forget that the architects of the Holocaust went by the name of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Nor that the term “fascism” was from the party of Benito Mussolini, a former labor leader before he brought Italy low. Nor that the Soviet Union blatantly and patently discriminated against the Jews.

And so, the Democrats have re-discovered a winning formula. Don’t side on the 80 side of 80/20 issues like transsexual boys in the girls’ bathrooms and illegal immigration of people who want to make a living by cleaning American’s toilets or putting their drywall up. Too many of those issues involve too few people. And to the extent they involve a lot of people, well, who are you going to get to put up your drywall?

The way to get elected is instead to own two timeless issues that almost everyone likes. One, is that really successful people have too much money compared to . . . um, me for example.

There are lots of reasons for that disparate rate of money-getting, including the fact that people who get money tend to be more adept at getting it. But let’s settle on one fact: luck. The good luck of those successful people and the bad luck of . . .  um, me for example.

Luck is by definition not fair. So, let’s take some of that unfairly-gotten money from the people who unfairly got it, and give it to the people who unfairly didn’t . . . like, um . . . me!

The other timeless issue for getting elected is to rely on people’s prejudices and bigotry. This is tricky, because it’s quite fashionable these days to be a racial minority. A politician cannot rely on people’s inherent bigotry if that bigotry is against what is fashionable.

It would be better to find a bigotry that is not racial per se, and offends only a small minority of the minorities – say about 2% or less. It would be nice if that minority has always been one step from being ostracized, anyway. It would also be helpful if that minority were to have a history, at least recently, of being financially successful. Such a history would dovetail nicely with the socialism.

What better than antisemitism? It might just work. After all, it has before.

Forget about moderation. As the person known for christening New York City “Hymietown,” let’s imagine that the late, great civil rights activist, Jesse Jackson, were still alive. He might say, rhymingly and rhythmically, who needs to moder-ATE if you have Jew-HATE?

Trump got an inartistic deal

Posted on by
11

Donald Trump did the right thing in Iran, for a while. He buried their enriched uranium under hundreds of feet of dirt and rock. He destroyed for years their ability to enrich more of the stuff. He made a lot of headway in crimping their ballistic weapons. He showed others in and around the Persian Gulf that the Iranians are bad guys.

But then he stopped. We’d already lost, um, just about no soldiers, but there was a possibility that we might lose some. He stopped because he believed, correctly, that Americans were tired of the war. Or, more precisely, Americans were tired of paying fully half what they pay in Europe for gasoline to power their monster pickups.

In the meantime, Trump showed the Iranians that they can hold the world hostage at any time by simply threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz.

And so, this artist has sketched us a deal. Details are finally emerging after being hid for days, apparently because they thought we’d forget about it. (Iran who?)

Turns out, this inartful deal was available many months ago, many “we’ve already won” proclamations ago, and many billions of dollars ago.

What has changed now is the U.S. midterm elections. They are fast-approaching, and Trump’s party is in danger of losing.

The gist of Trump’s deal is that the Iranians and the U.S. agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Iran gets buco bucks by exporting oil. Iran can also charge a toll on non-Iranian vessels after 60 days (in time for the midterms), thereby getting more buco bucks.

There’s even more buco bucks. Trump will unfreeze Iranian assets around the world. Iran will also get about 300 billion to rebuild its military arsenal, er, I mean its civilian infrastructure.

For all those buco bucks, the Iranians will talk about discontinuing their nuclear program.

Trump has now announced for anyone who still reads his social media posts that he’s the “greatest President” in American history. Greater than Washington who earned us freedom, greater than Jefferson who negotiated the Louisiana Purchase for less than $0.03 an acre, and greater than Lincoln who saved the Union at the cost of his life.

Uh huh.

Here’s what’s going to happen. The Iranians will embarrass Trump by refusing to give him squat in the continued negotiations. The WH will put the best face it can on such refusal, but the Iranians will not cooperate. Instead, they will close the Strait again, will attack Israel again, will assault shipping again, will demand ransom from ships again, and will demand more buco bucks.

What Trump fails to understand is that the Iranians are principled thieves. Sure, those principles are bad ones – they are right out of the 12th century. They don’t give a whit about commerce or prosperity. They don’t care about their people. They care only about their 47-year-old theocratic revolution.

Trump never encountered such principled people. Many of these people will die. The remainder will have Trump for lunch.

The Art of the Deal? Trump is about to learn that not everyone was born in Queens seeking a piece of the American pie. Midterms or not, you’re a fool to do a deal with madmen.

 Democrats refuse to get on the winning side of 80/20 issues because that side is occupied by America

Posted on by
2
Groucho Marx

Some issues are no-brainers for politicians: Transexuals in women’s sports and girl’s bathrooms. Showing an ID to vote. Securing the border. Enforcing the criminal laws. Judging people by merit. These are 80/20 issues where 80% of the citizens are on one side and only 20% are on the other.

Being on the 20% side of 80/20 issues is not a winning election strategy. We saw that in 2024. Therefore, the big thinkers in the Democratic Party are preaching that Democrats need to shift over to the 80% side on these 80/20 issues.

However, many small thinkers in the Democratic Party are stuck hard in the 20% camp. And the small thinkers in the Democrat Party outnumber the big thinkers by about a zillion to one,

Why do Democrats stubbornly cling to the losing side? Why do Democrats risk losing more elections by siding against 80% of the voters?

I have a theory. I think those hard-left Democrats reflexively side against mainstream Americans – against the 80%.

It’s well-documented that Democrats are less patriotic and hold less love for their country than either Republicans or Independents. In fact, a surprising number of Democrats answer “no” to the question “Do you love America?”

That’s because many of them truly hate America. There are lots of reasons that they hate America – from having been taught to hate America by pea-brained teachers who think America underpays them for their part-time jobs, to simply being of a personality type that would hate anywhere they find themselves including heaven itself.

I’ll look at the reasons in detail some day in another column. For now, accept the fact, and it is a fact, that Democrats love America much less than Republicans do, and that a number of Democrats actively, passionately hate America.

And so, I think they don’t really care where the trannies go to the bathroom; they just want them to go wherever most Americans want them not to. They don’t really care if non-citizens vote in the elections; they just want them to vote because most Americans want them not to. They don’t care whether illegals come across the border; they just want them to because most Americans want them not to. They don’t care whether criminals go free; they just want them to because most American want them not to.

If trannies in the girls’ bathroom, noncitizens voting in elections, illegal aliens, and criminals are America’s enemies, the 20% reason, then those same people are the 20%ers’ friends. It’s the same reasoning that makes them root for Iran.

For this perverse display, these America-haters view themselves as heroic, edgy “resisters.” The fact that they’re resisting not just President Trump but also 2,500 years of Western Civilization makes them, in their vain eyes, all the more heroic, edgy and resistive.  

Here’s a survey I’d like to see. Get two random groups of Democrats. Choose an issue they’re not familiar with. Tell the first group that polls show that Americans are split 50/50 on the issue. Tell the second group that Americans are split 80/20 on the issue, and tell them which side of the issue the 80% are on.

I’m betting that the outcome would be markedly different between the two groups. The second group would side against what they were told was the 80% view.  

Groucho Marx once said “I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me.” Democrats in the 20% cohort know as much about Groucho as Karl, but the saying applies. They don’t want to belong to any country that would have them. Sadly for them and us, they’re here anyway.

Do Blue states produce stupidity, or does stupidity produce Blue states?

Posted on by
5

Blue states have more problems than Red states. On average, the people in Blue states are less law-abiding and less law educated.

The dysfunctional big cities are mostly in Blue states – Chicago, L.A., New York, Baltimore, Seattle, Portland, Detroit, East St Louis, Minneapolis, and – I’ll admit it – my own former city, Denver.

Blue states have the worse budget woes. California, Illinois, Washington, New York and now Colorado are facing severe shortfalls. Their remedy is of course to raise taxes, not to cut spending. You see, the official color of Blue-sters is green.

In Colorado, there’s the TABOR Amendment to the state constitution which requires voter approval for these tax shakedowns. Naturally, the Democrat politicians are scheming to dodge the Amendment, even though the people of the state have already foiled them in their dodges three separate times. Ah, but this time the Democrats have 100% Democrat appointees on the Colorado Supreme Court.

That’s right, even the Blue-ish people of Blue Colorado (isn’t it a cruel irony that “Colorado” means “color red”?) refuse to allow their elected Blue-sters to raise taxes beyond the rate of inflation. But the Blue-ster politicians may still find a way to do it.

In all Blue states, there’s a psychological denial of the fact that if you raise taxes too much, people will move away. In California, they’re proposing a “one-time” 5% tax on the wealth of billionaires, as assessed by government assessors (how convenient that they do the assessing).

Apart from the fact that this tax is almost certainly unconstitutional, and vague to the point of being unenforceable, it ignores the fact that billionaires are typically smart enough to dodge it by . . . [wait for it] . . . moving out.

Duh.

One might think that even a Democrat state legislator in California would know that typical billionaires are smart enough to figure that out. But no, Democrat state legislators in California are not smart enough to figure out that the billionaires will figure that out.

We’re talking world class stupidity here.

This Blue state stupidity has gotten too obvious to ignore. The country used to mock the people of Mississippi. But recent data shows that Mississippi students are now doing better on standardized tests than California students.

People used to mock the kissin’ cousins of Appalachia. But we now have a deep Red Vice President who went to Yale Law School after growing up poor and barefoot in deep Red Appalachia, while the new mayor of deep Blue New York is an unredeemed Marxist with nary a clue about how to balance a budget, manage people, avoid Jew-baiting, or tie his shoes. And he was voted into office by a million deep Blue voters who don’t know Karl Marx from Groucho, and don’t care that they don’t.

So, I have a question along the lines of, “What came first, the chicken or the egg?”

In Blue states, did the stupidity of the people make the states Blue? Or did the Blue states make the people there stupid?

I think it’s mostly the latter. The people who flocked to California a generation or two ago weren’t stupid.  Heck, they launched Hollywood, they invented Silicon Valley, they made surfing cool (and that’s no easy feat). Fifty years ago, I wished everybody could be California girls.

But after the people got there, something weird happened. Maybe it was in the water or the drugs or the collective fashion-consciousness.

Whatever it was, it became cool to be leftish, to be druggy, to be counter to whatever is the culture. The more extreme, the more cool – all the way up to, and stopping just short of, Charles Manson.  

Yep, there was general agreement even in California that Manson was a step beyond cool. You could say that, in California, Charles Manson was literally too cool.

Of course, in the rest of the world, Manson was a murderous psychopath. California probably would not say that; too judgmental.

Once this mass hysteria took root in California, it spread like crabgrass. Fashion is like that. Hula hoops, bell bottoms, long hair and moustaches, streaking, gender mutilation, electric vehicles, dumbing down the school curriculum, you name it.

One day you’ve never heard of it, the next day you can’t live without it, and the following day you wouldn’t be caught dead in it.

And so, Leftism was the fashion of the day. Except it lasted for a generation. A generation lost in space.

In that time, they really messed things up. They tried to abolish merit, and almost succeeded, substituting a hodge-podge of skin color, sex habits, and political leanings. They ridiculed 2,000-year-old religions, and hated 3,000-year-old ones. They canceled and sought to outlaw anyone who disagreed with that agenda.

The fashion-conscious people went along with it for a long time. To be on the wrong side of fashion in a fashion-conscious world (and all worlds are) is to be without a friend. Better blue than uncool.

In short, my conclusion is that the Blue states produced stupidity, not the other way around.

But finally – or maybe this is not final – the tide turned, the fashion changed, the chickens came home to roost, the Kool-Aid ran out, and the people awakened from their wokeness.

They’re discovering, one hopes, that they aren’t actually stupid, but were just mistaken. We will see what comes next.