Under-observed observations on the vote to shake the earth

Losing the little guy

It was long ago and far away that Democrats were "the party of the little guy". Until 2016 and Donald Trump, Republicans had not seized that banner for themselves, but on November 8 of '16 the little guy voted "R". That little guy might rightly observe that it was the Democrat Party who left him, and as to how, let me count the ways:

The invasion and colonization of the United States by the Latin American Third World is by now a sacrament of the Democrat Party, and the Democrat purpose in the Latin conquest is to import a new American people, so the consequences to the American people of the here and now are of no account.

Illegal aliens measured in eight digits occupy whole subsectors of the economy, cramming natural-born Americans and lawful immigrants into other, cramped subsectors, and depressing wages and benefits for all but the more untouchable classes. Illegal aliens heap burdens on public services, the public schools and emergency rooms and police departments. Illegal aliens too often import with them lawlessness and violence. And illegal aliens displace American communities with Little Tijuanas, driving natural-born Americans from their neighborhoods and homes, but when an American revisits the neighborhood of his childhood to find the only English left is the "STOP" on the stopsign, a Democrat smiles. 

The minorities who constitute the base of the Democrat Party are the most abused by it. Which is not to say that the minority "little guy" has yet abandoned the Democrat Party in anything like the numbers of the white flight from the Democrats, but Trump drew more votes from blacks and Hispanics than the Republican for president had managed four years before him, by a couple percent each, and given the margins that's more than a Democrat for president can afford to shed. A "chocolate city" like Detroit which was in living memory one of the great cities of the world, resembles something post-Apocalyptic, after a half-century of majority-minority, Republicans-need-not-apply, Democrat-machine politics, where the furthest-leftward candidate wins the Democrat nomination and the Democrat nominee is elected and re-elected and re-re-re-re-re-elected till he expires in office. 

In the twilight of the Age of Obama a Chicagoan is shot every couple hours, Chicago being Obama's hometown, where the old Obama hand Rahm Emanuel is boss at city hall and the Second Amendment is a byword. Majority-minority one-party Democrat jurisdictions anymore are war zones, lawless and lethal, where the schools are jungles, retailers can't open shop for liability of theft and damage and violence, and "opportunity" amounts too much to professional sports or vice rackets. 

In Obamacare the Democrats defied the people, drove up the average health insurance premium by 25% for 2017 alone, dispossessed average Americans of their plans and their doctors, strained Medicare and Medicaid, and restricted untold masses of American workers to 30 hours' work and wages weekly. 

Democrats debase the dollar, by their wanton spending and the wanton printing of dollars to cover their uncoverable debt, which in an economy that imports very much more than it exports impoverishes the people. Obama in his eight years will have doubled the national debt, but he leaves the nation with $9.3 trillion in new debt and nothing to show for it, because anymore spending as directed by Democrats scarcely makes it past the suburbs surrounding Washington. Government spending under Democrats is spending on government, and the average "little guy" doesn't see so much as a T-shirt out of it.

Obama ascended the presidency threatening America's trade arrangements, but in maybe the only transformation of his ideological life he walks out of the White House as the world's foremost exponent of free trade, for the same reason that a good part of the Right have turned skeptic on trade, or worse than skeptic: free trade as practiced in this 21st Century is a transfer of American wealth to the wide world, a racket where America's "trade partners" deliberately debase their currencies to well below whatever impoverished valuation the American dollar has sunk, to hijack American business and profits and jobs. That is free trade as it is in the here and now, not free trade as it was or ought to be, and that is the free trade championed by Obama and his Democrat Party.

Democrats only ever place their mad dogma of "anthropogenic climate change" ahead of jobs and liberties, and let a government scientist claim "endangered species" and a Democrat administration will institute a manmade drought in a farm community. And Democrats outlaw American fossil fuels as far as their writs carry, leaving the economy to cover the shortfall with imports in what amounts to another transfer of wealth from the United States to the wide world.

What the Democrat Party manifestly do not appreciate is that Candidate Trump snatched their proverbial "little guy", and if President Trump and his Republican Congress manage a fraction of what Trump has proposed and promised, they'll have converted that little guy to Republican and appropriated the claim to championing him.

The 1994 Republican Revolution as realignment

Ten election cycles in twelve, since 1994 and at the level of U.S. House of Representatives, have gone Republican. The Republican margin in the House as of the general election just past stands at 47 seats, 241-194. In the 24 years from 1995 to 2019, the Democrat Party will have held the House for all of four years, and those four years may in light of the eight years thereafter be understood as aberrant. When in the midterm elections of '94 Congress went Republican for the first time in four decades, the talk was of a revolution, but as it turns out "realignment" may've been more the mark.

The Obamian "imperator" presidency, and sauce for the gander

Already Obama's expansion of executive power is turned against the Left. Not long before the Democrats were booted from their Senate majority, in 2013, they "went nuclear" and dropped the threshold for ratifying presidential appointments, from a vote to confirm of at least 60%, to fifty-plus-one, surrendering to the executive a good part of the institutional power of the legislature to influence nominations for administrative offices and federal courts.  

To judge by Donald Trump's nominations as of November 18, all of a week and a half after the vote, Trump appreciates that his appointments may be ratified by just fifty-senators-plus-one, and assuredly he knows also that the party he leads holds at least that number, so that effectively Trump is at liberty to stock his administration with whomsoever he darn pleases. The Obama-Reid empowerment of the executive on appointments may produce the most conservative administration since the advent of conservatism as we conceive it. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and that gander is Donald Trump.

Orange jumpsuits vote Democrat  

In time for Election Day, the old Clinton enforcer and now Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe availed himself of the gubernatorial "autopen", to stack the Virginia electorate with something like 60,000 convicts. It says something about the Left and the Democrat Party and the Clinton campaign, not that they'd stack the electorate with criminals who'd forfeited their right to vote, so much as that they stack the electorate with convicts on the understanding that criminal votes are Democrat votes. Republicans demand that the vote of every active-duty serviceman be counted, inasmuch as our fighting forces preserve our rights and liberties and our hearts-beating and breaths-drawing, but with the understanding also that active-duty military and veterans vote Republican overwhelmingly. That might make an evergreen campaign theme if not also campaign ad: "USAF-issue camouflage votes Republican; DOC-issue orange votes Democrat." 

The mother country and the mother's country

Someplace on the long list of those ways in which Donald Trump is unusual among presidents-elect of the United States, is his being bound to Britain. The Founding Fathers and early presidents generally had been bound to the old country in ways great and small, but presidents of the United States since that founding generation have been more remote from the mother country. Barack Obama's paternal forebears in Kenya were British subjects, it must be said, but evidently not the pith-helmet-wearing and Earl-Grey-drinking kind, Obama's grandfather being a Mau-Mau who took up arms against Britain including in the second premiership of Winston Churchill.  

Donald Trump for a start owns properties in Britain where he employs Britons and buys British and pays British taxes. But more than that, Trump's late mother came from Britain; Scotland, to be precise, which accounts surely for the forename of "Donald" and the orange-ish hair. America's mother country is Trump's mother's country. To say nothing of Trump's having been an object of debate in the Mother of Parliaments at Westminster, after a Scotch "journalist" got up a petition that his banishment from the United Kingdom be considered by the House of Commons. (As it turns out, it's handy that Parliament declined to outlaw Donald Trump, inasmuch as he is now president-elect and commander-in-chief-elect of Britain's greatest ally and friend.) 

And more than even that, Donald Trump is very highly unusual in his hip-joining to the British cause which won the Brexit referendum in June of this same year. That campaign and its voters were parallel to Trump's campaign and voters, and Trump appreciated the parallel, landing in Scotland promptly after the earthquake that was Britain's vote to quit Europe for a rarefied appearance outside the United States, and importing to his campaign the principal champion of the Quit Europe cause, UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, who campaigned with Trump, championed Trump on the talking-heads shows, and advised Trump in advance of the second debate, which incidentally Trump won convincingly.

The 8th of November and the eleventh hour

Half of the last four contests for president were decided in their eleventh hours. Twice in four presidential cycles has the vote been decided on the weekend before Election Day, "weekend" there being invoked expansively to refer to the Thursday evening through the Monday evening before the Tuesday vote.

It was the Thursday before the Tuesday in the first week of November 2000, unless I misremember, that Joe Trippi -- now of Fox News but then of the Gore campaign -- let loose the Democrat "oppo research" that Bush had been slapped with a DUI in his dissolute youth of the dissolute 1970s. The DUI had been expunged long since and Bush hadn't volunteered it, but for some part of the Christian conservative core of the Republican base who in that time were unpersuaded of Bush's wholesomeness, the DUI and Bush's not disclosing it were affirmations of their worst estimations of the man, and they were persuaded to sit on their hands come Election Day.

And because the story broke at the eleventh hour, by design, there was not time for its absorption, not to mention this was 2000, i.e., our holiday from history, when too many of us imagined we had the luxury of deciding the presidency of the United States on such trifles as an ancient, expunged DUI. As the Left never tire of observing Bush won the electoral college but lost the popular vote, but the polling and the conventional wisdom had it that if the popular and electoral votes were to split then it'd be Bush claiming the victory and not the presidency, until that fateful final weekend when the popular vote tipped to Gore.

The vote in '04 was decided in those days following September 11 of '01 when the American people saw in President Bush the man for the hour, and that decision was affirmed on whatever day it was in the summer of '04 that the Swift Boat Vets for Truth ran the first of their TV ads and repudiated unanswerably Kerry's principal claim to the presidency, namely his months in Vietnam. Then '08 was decided on September 15 in the Panic of '08, with the graph plotting the polling per the Real Clear Politics average showing a crossover as of September 17, I believe it was: McCain's red line submerged by Obama's blue line, and those lines never again to cross.

And then in 2012 and what was probably the winnable-est challenge to an incumbent president since 1992, Romney led Obama by something like five points deep into October in the gold-standard Gallup Poll, and Gallup found Romney up over Obama as late as election eve, albeit by a solitary point. But in time for the terminal weekend of the campaign came Hurricane Sandy. The press might've reported Sandy as they had done Katrina, for all Obama and his administration managed by way of relief and recovery, but let no man number among Obama's failings as a president that he's a poor hand for a photo-op, and Gov. Christie of New Jersey where Sandy hit hardest swooned like America's cheapest date, "Barry gave me his personal number and told me to call him if I needed him," or words to that effect.

It was the least Obama could've done, and all that he need have done: the press passed over the disaster that was Sandy in favor of Obama's photo-op and Christie's swooning, and carried Obama to Election Day like so many worshipful coolies bearing their master on his rickshaw. And it didn't hurt that Romney -- whose fire-in-the-belly as it turns out is for sabotaging his successor as Republican presidential nominee and not for the fight of his life against Obama -- stood down his campaign and thus conceded to Obama and the Obama-ist press the final furlong of the race.

I write this not in the expectation that it'll make it back somehow to Donald Trump or his campaign, but because in this existential war which is the 2016 presidential election I'm perfectly powerless, except to post to my modest blog. And to pray. So I offer herewith that half of the last four contests for president were decided in their eleventh hours and so it mightn't be ill-advised if Trump and his campaign were to plan for the contingency that November 8 is decided sometime between November 3 and 7, and more than that to force the decision onto those last days, with something big.

And as to that "something big", my proposition for whatever little it's worth would be that Trump smash through the press -- who per WikiLeaks are not prejudiced for Clinton so much as colluding with her campaign -- in a paid, primetime, televised address, Donald Trump in a room with a camera, speaking into the camera and through it to the average American, in a single, unedited take, and explaining plainly, "I'm for this, Clinton's for that; There's what's broken and here's how I propose to fix it; And whatever my faults as a man, if I'm not president of the United States come January 20 then the republic is buried."

One almighty peanut butter cup: A recipe for Peanut Butter Cup Pie

My first and very possibly last recipe post, for my "Peanut Butter Cup Pie", which is to say a peanut butter confection in a crunchy chocolate shortcrust and with a shiny chocolate shell. 

NB: The quantities herein make a pie of about 9" x 1" and maybe 36 oz. The edge of a peanut butter cup may be mimicked by baking the piecrust in a fluted tart pan. Best sliced chilled, and lives long and happy sealed and refrigerated. And be warned, the Peanut Butter Cup Pie is "not a reduced-calorie food", but it's nothing if not rich so that a little goes a long way. The recipe follows, in three parts.  

  

I. PIE FILLING: PEANUT BUTTER CONFECTION 

 

Combine 4 cups powdered sugar, cup peanut butter, 2/3 cup butter, teaspoon vanilla extract

Form and flatten into size and shape approximate to piecrust 

Press into piecrust, before shedding pieplate

    

II. PIECRUST: CHOCOLATE SHORTBREAD 

Mix cup all-purpose flour, 1/2 cup powdered sugar, 1/4 cup cocoa, pinch salt

Add 1/4 cup melted butter, egg yolk, teaspoon vanilla extract

Form into ball, wrap in clingwrap, flatten; chill in refrigerator for half an hour at least

Roll to fit pieplate, press into plate, trim excess

Bake at 360 degrees for 15 minutes, or longer as need be

 

III. PIE TOPPING: TEMPERED CHOCOLATE 

 

In double-boiler or equivalent and consulting a meat- or candy-thermometer, melt 3/4 cup chocolate and heat to 110 degrees 

Remove from heat and add 1/4 cup of that same chocolate

Stir 'til remainder has melted and temperature has fallen, to 90 degrees

Turn out onto pie filling and spread smooth 

Vote of no return; or, Hyperventilation in prose

(Apologia: Lest the dear reader find the entry following to be overwrought, a sort-of hyperventilating in prose, I'll plead preemptively that I know something of what I write, for a change. I've lived for the longest time cheek-by-jowl with the Latin invasion, I know immigration law and am acquainted with demographics, and I'm fairly fixated on how it is that societies and nations and civilizations are made and unmade by numbers and will, as in England and in America and on the tiny island in the Atlantic Ocean which is the place of my birth and my first couple decades.)

A country is the people in it; change the people and the country is changed. Like the losing candidate on election night who wishes to "elect a new people", it has been the project of the Left to import a new American people, legally and otherwise, and anyone alien to Americanism will do.

Never in my lifetime have I known anxiety for anything in the way of politics and government to approach my anxiety for the judgment of November 8, but never in my lifetime and very possibly not since 1864 has this country known a vote for president to decide it all. This campaign of 2016 will decide what is called in this country by the misnomer of "immigration", and immigration will decide the rest: jobs and wages for natural-born Americans, or rather jobs and wages for those natural-born Americans below the untouchable elite; the overburdened government services left over for natural-born Americans; the neighborhoods and communites lost to natural-born Americans, below that untouchable elite; the national culture if not also its undivided language; and the composition of the national government and course of the country.

If the Hillary Clinton program is effected then a good part of Latin America and some part of the Mideast are emptied into the United States, in numbers we can't now fathom, with the border left open wide to the Noah's Flood of humanity which must surely follow any amnesty of a dozen million illegal aliens, and the "chain migration" of resident-but-not-citizen sponsors and "family-based visas" and like provisions of the immigration law since its rewriting by Ted Kennedy.

And the Congress will have nothing to say about it: the Supreme Court has split 4-4 on Obama's arrogation of unilateral authority in immigration law -- the unconstitutional and unconceived-of power of the presidency to determine immigration policy, even unto the point of repudiating the duly-enacted law of the duly-elected Congress -- and the next president will nominate the ninth justice to break that tie.

Late in the evening on the last day of August Donald Trump might've thrown away the election and the nation, in doing as every elite said he must and would, and surrendering on the illegals question. The press in unison with the Clinton campaign had for days delighted in claiming "Trump flip-flops on immigration," but the press are not to be trusted, least of all in reporting what it is Trump is for and what he's against or even what he's said. It's something like that old standard "Do Nothin' 'til You Hear from Me"; unless and until Donald Trump declares a change, there's no change.

And in that earth-shaker of a speech in Arizona on the evening of August 31, Trump's Ten Points on Immigration, Donald Trump made plain that he'll make like Sam Houston and drive Mexico south of the Rio Grande. Criminal illegals are to be jailed, deported forcibly, and banished; the lesser illegals are to be squeezed where possible 'til they're left with no alternative but to quit the country voluntarily; petitioners for entry to and status in the United States from the Muslim world are to be scrutinized pitilessly; and the border with the Latin American Third World is to be sealed, by a "big, beautiful wall".

And so Donald Trump now has ratified his platform as Hillary Clinton has affirmed hers, on "immigration", which is to say the lawless and ruinous invasion and colonization of the United States by the Latin American Third World. To vote for Clinton is to vote for the Latin conquest of America; vote Trump and the nation is saved.

It may be that America's election for president has a very near precedent in Britain's referendum on Europe in June of this same year. Any number of issues figured in that Brexit vote and very few of those issues were inconsequential, but it was immigration which drove Britain's vote to quit the European Union and reassert its sovereign nationhood. The great cousin-nations have been known to be seized more or less in parallel by great shifts, as in Thatcher in Britain prefiguring Reagan in America, or Clinton in America prefiguring Blair in Britain. And never mind Britain's June referendum prefiguring America's November election: some months before the Brexit vote it was immigration which elevated Donald Trump over a field of fifteen to the nomination for president of half of the Big Two national parties, with the most votes and the greatest turnout in a Republican primary since there's been such a thing.

This contest for president, I shudder to say, has a finality about it never intended for a quadrennial election in this limited-government constitutional republic; it is, God help us, the vote-of-no-return. Trump in his Ten Points speech said it, that this election amounts to "our last chance".

I remember Mark Steyn in the '04 campaign writing that George W. Bush would win his reelection and more than that, if Steyn was mistaken on a question like that of the American soul, then ipso facto he'd have ceased to know the nation and would thus cease to write on it, or something very like that. So to modify Steyn, if the next president of these United States is other than Donald Trump then the nation will have voted for its abolition, and to write on the subject will be pointless.

The question is an open one, it must be said, as to whether any candidate for president can win and any candidate lose, with the press and popular culture and institutions doing all in their power daily to see one installed in the White House and the other ruined. The press and popular culture, as of the '08 campaign and in their effect, function something like the state-run media in an authoritarian or totalitarian system, preserving the elite and enforcing their dogmas. And in Donald Trump the elite and their enforcers recognize far and away the greatest menace yet to their project. But Trump makes the first Republican for president since Reagan to beat the press, albeit unevenly. A Trump victory as much as anything would be a victory over the elite and its enforcers in the press and popular culture and institutions. And a victory by Trump also would constitute a new model for Republicans and conservatives, to win the ballgame despite that the umpires which are the press and pop culture will call Democrat balls for strikes, and Republican homeruns for long fouls.

It must be said also that in this contest for president the energy and effort, the new and big ideas, the getting-to-grips with the reality of the real world and the real people in it, the earnestness, and the urgency, are on the side of Donald Trump, who to his everlasting credit says of himself in this campaign that he's "just the messenger, folks".

The polling has shown Clinton up over Trump but also it's shown Trump up over Clinton, and often enough it's been margin-of-error, this-thing-could-go-either-way craps-shooting. So if God has not yet abandoned the Great Republic then may God bless America, and save it, and may the judgment of November 8 be Donald Trump, 45th president of these United States.

Still more miscellany: War will ever be with us; Hostile takeover of a grand old party; Epitaph for a campaign; The woman question; On Coltranian verticularity

War will ever be with us

"Peace" in the English-speaking world amounts to those periods when the wars are smaller and more neglectable by the society at large, left to the professional, standing forces who dirty their hands and risk their limbs and lives so the great majority may pursue our happiness. Leadership inclined to war-making will carry on wars, and leadership inclined against war-making will be compelled to carry on wars despite themselves, by the realities which until they held power they were at liberty to reject, and not infrequently the war-skeptics and pacifists will bring war by their very aversion to it. It is not given to the English-speaking world to know "peace"; that is for lesser and less-honorable nations, nations without the will or the way to fight, which know peace as a gift of the English-speaking world or else as defeat and surrender. Anglo-Saxon Civilization is too great and too honorable to know "peace"; there are wars to be fought, we're the ones to fight them, and 'twas ever thus.

Hostile takeover of a grand old party

It may be that the Trump ascendancy does not rise to the order of the supplanting of one of the Big Two parties by what amounts to a third party, but to my way of thinking for whatever little that's worth, the election of Donald Trump as Republican nominee for president of the United States is at the least the hostile takeover of the old-line Republican Party by an "alt-Right" alternative conservative third-party movement; the triumph, albeit undeclared, of the Tea Party.

The name "Republican" is intact and the personnel are not much changed, and only time will tell if this hostile takeover is thoroughgoing and enduring, but that it is a hostile takeover is I think indisputable: the Republican establishment were about as unanimous as they were strenuous in their contempt for Trump, and Trump won the nomination of the Republican Party by running against the Republican Party about as much as he ran against the other side.

And I'd go one further and venture that this hostile takeover is more likely than not to be thoroughgoing and enduring: even if the most Donald Trump may manage is eight years in the White House, he is today half of the alternatives for next president of the United States because he won more votes than any single candidate in a Republican presidential primary since there's been such a thing, and if Trump were to drop dead of a coronary tomorrow, those masses who voted Trump would be there still, and their principles unaltered.

It was a century and a half ago that a Big Two national political party was last supplanted by a third party, when it was the Republican Party that played third-party usurper. The Whig Party had ceased to represent the people who voted for it, on the question of the abolition of slavery particularly, and by the election of 1860 the erstwhile Whigs had migrated to the novel Republicans and elected a Republican president, a Whig-turned-Republican called Abraham Lincoln. 

1860 is not a very precise parallel to 2016, but the conditions for the partisan reordering are near enough, namely a Big Two party's ceasing to represent the people who vote for it, the Republican Party as constituted before the Trump ascendancy having ceased to represent their people on such questions as the invasion and colonization of the United States by the Latin American Third World and the ancillary question of the immigration to the United States of adherents to a certain world religion who want us all dead and burning in hell.

Now to fill out the parallel will take a Trump presidency, and among the earlier steps to that end Donald Trump and we Trumpians must make nice and make peace with the old-line Republicans and as much of the R establishment as can be brought onside, because they're necessary and because they are after all not on the other side in this war; those people are countrymen of ours, and there's a war to be fought.

Epitaph for a campaign

But before the aforesaid nice-making, a little leftover sport-making. It says something about John "No Hoper" Kasich that on that day in May after Donald Trump had won Indiana in a romp, Kasich didn't quit the race 'til after the first runner-up Ted Cruz had conceded to the Trump ascendancy. Kasich's carrying on in the Republican race so long after he'd been statistically eliminated necessitates that he imagined the party muckety-mucks at the convention might well hand him the nomination that the people in the primaries hadn't voted him. Kasich would point to polling showing him beating Clinton in a general election, but that says more about Hillary Clinton than John Kasich: the average American outside Ohio doesn't know John Kasich from Adam's off-ox, so when they were polled on Hillary Clinton versus John Kasich, they'd hear "Hillary Clinton or John-so-and-so" and shrug and vote John-so-and-so, or so I suppose. But if the voters of the Republican primaries who did know Kasich weren't buying what he was selling, then surely he'd never have sold with the average American once he was known to them.

If some magic wand were waved elevating John Kasich to president of the United States, he wouldn't see what's broken never mind fix it, and as a campaigner he couldn't place second in a three-man race in his own party. Come to that, Kasich placed fourth in the three-man race, after Marco Rubio who had quit the race months before. There's a line Trump ought to have flogged, and an epitaph for the Kasich campaign: In a three-man race, John Kasich placed fourth.

The woman question

From a badly mismatched ad in my e-mail, per my memory of it: "Stand with Hillary and get your official Woman Card." I take it that's meant to be amusing, what the kids call "ironic", and certainly it's a joke, albeit not in the way the Clinton campaign had in mind. Setting aside the inadvisability of official campaign humor, is that not effectively exclusionary, and exclusionary of something over half the population; does it not translate to "Would-be boosters of the Clinton campaign who happen to belong to the larger part of the population which is male need not apply"? The line on Hillary Clinton is that she's not a natural campaigner, but I wonder if whatever professional campaigners she's hired are very much less ham-fisted.

The vote in November and its exit polling will vindicate or repudiate me on this score, but my thinking as of now is that any woman whose vote is decided along the lines of, "I'm a woman and Hillary Clinton is a woman so I must vote Clinton," is not a woman whose vote was Donald Trump's to lose. And I'd go one further and offer that any woman ought to be insulted by the presumption that women will vote Clinton for the reason that Hillary Clinton is biologically female.

Bill Clinton and I both are male WASPs, tribal Baptists and tenor saxophonists, even blue-eyed and pasty-thighed, and yet I have scarcely a good word for the man, precisely because I'm a man and a WASP and all the rest and thus my vote is not decided by the DNAs or denominations etc. of the candidates on offer, but by their ideas and capabilities. And I refuse to believe that the women of America will decide their votes on so base a reasoning as "I'm a woman and Hillary Clinton is a woman so I must vote Clinton," and if Hillary Clinton and her campaign and the Democrat Party and Left and the press and popular culture presume that women voters are so unthinking, then that's still more reason to vote Trump.  

On Coltranian verticularity 

There are in jazz improvisation two principal approaches, called "lyrical" which is to say melodic, and "vertical" which is to say harmonic, "vertical" making an apt description for the ascending and descending of scales or occasionally modes and arpeggios, which is what a more harmonic improvisation very often amounts to. John Coltrane was a vertical sort, but only lately and long since my retirement from saxophony have I got what I suppose to be a handle on Coltranian verticularity.

Coltrane would ascend and descend the scales in keeping with the "changes" or chord progression, which was and is common enough, but beyond his being especially virtuosic and inventive in that way, he added a trick: Coltrane would interrupt his ascending and descending something like the climbing of many flights of stairs will be interrupted by the landings, plateaus among the up and down. He'd linger over those sort-of landings with melodic riffs like a more lyrical soloist, which also is not so uncommon, but what is less common, Coltrane would not infrequently punctuate his ascents and descents with honking assertions, something like a train blasting its horn at a crossing: "Too-toooot! Too-to-toooooot!!" He did after all play a horn, and "trane" was after all half his surname.

Rules are rules, and rotten; Confident as they are clueless; Blessed in his enemies; The race is run; Things to come

Rules are rules, and rotten

Monday the 11th of April was maybe the finest day of Donald Trump's campaign to that date since the new year. That Saturday the Republican Party of Colorado had held something of a coronation for Ted Cruz. The state party having anticipated the ascendancy of Donald Trump and revised the rules to place their presidential nomination in the sure hands of 34 party muckety-mucks, those exalted 34 had voted Cruz to a man, at which point the party took to Twitter to gloat "We beat Trump," as if to dispatch all doubt as to their purpose.

The Republican establishment had by this time lit on Ted Cruz, not out of any affection for Cruz but on the calculation that Cruz was the candidate to deny Trump an outright majority of 1,237 delegates, throwing the nomination to a second ballot where those delegates bound by the votes of the people to nominate Trump would be unbound, and the establishment might bring to bear their inordinate influence and institutional power. And if somehow they could get away with it the establishment would love him and leave him, discarding Cruz on that second ballot and handing the nomination instead to some more reliably pliable establishment man.

On Monday while Cruz ran a victory lap, Trump upturned the campaign. Trump made of the Colorado coronation a kiss of death. Had Cruz seen ahead, seen that to win the delegates was to lose the people, he might've repudiated those 34 delegates from Colorado, or at the very least not gloated in them. Cruz' unlikely alliance with the party establishment puts one in mind of a groupie who spends the night with the lead singer and then the morning after when that singer is onto the next stop and the next groupie, plans her wedding to him and wonders how many children they'll have and what they'll choose for names. 

Trump's charge is not that the rules have been bent or broken but that they needn't be broken or bent, the rules are themselves rotten, written and rewritten to suit the party muckety-mucks. He elevated that by Monday to a theme of his campaign and by Friday to a plank in his platform, proposing that Republican Party presidential nominations be democratized, which is as much shrewd politics as sound principle.

And the racket which Trump proposes to reform, the party presidential nomination, was not conceived by the Founding Fathers or enshrined in the Constitution, is not the law of the land duly enacted by duly elected representatives, and does not derive from founding principles or democratic ideals, so that when the Against-Trump types taunt that Trump is "whining" or wag their fingers that "rules are rules" and any other clueless, cringe-making cliches, they defend only the residue of antidemocratic smoke-filled-rooms-behind-closed-doors party nominations as before the democratization of the process in the last half-century. 

When the rules are not law and not democratic and not unchanging -- having been amended within a matter of months precisely to deny delegates to Donald Trump -- then to answer Trump's "Let the people decide" with "Rules are rules" is to lose the argument.

Confident as they are clueless

The cluelessness -- and I hesitate to invoke so strong a term inasmuch as I esteem some of the parties to the cluelessness -- of the elite and establishment and assorted others who've arrayed against Donald Trump, is something to behold: after misjudging Trump and the primaries practically daily since the summer of '15, their confidence in their judgment is undented.

When Trump observed that "Islam hates us," the question put to the talking heads was, "Can Trump recover from this latest gaffe?" Never mind that Trump's pronouncement was an objective and obvious observation, to real people in the real world; it's precisely that sort of wrecking-ball-to-political-correctness truth-telling and vows to act on it that have elevated Donald Trump from real-estate celebrity and reality-TV showman to one of two candidates for the most exalted office on God's earth.

Or while Trump hung the Colorado coronation around Cruz' neck and sunk him with it, that larger part of the commentariat who disdain Donald Trump, or what I saw of them, sat before the cameras as confident as they were clueless and declared in defense of the coronation, "That's the way the game is played," and "The Cruz campaign has the better ground-game," etc., despite that Cruz could hardly have lost Colorado and Trump could hardly have won it, and "the game" is an antidemocratic vestige. Then toward the end of that week after Colorado, when there was national polling to show Trump lengthening his lead over Cruz to 18 points and Cruz collapsing to two points up from the no-hoper Kasich, the question put to the talking heads was, "Has Trump been drawn off-message by Colorado?" Colorado was the making of Trump, or rather his re-making, and the unmaking of Cruz.

But then, if the many and sundry Against-Trumps had a clue between them then it might be their man standing atop the hill and Trump tumbling down it.

Blessed in his enemies

Donald Trump's 2016 had not been spectacular. He had for too long been seized by a birther mania to disqualify Ted Cruz from the presidency, he skipped the debate in Iowa and placed three points back in second in the first-in-the-nation caucus there, and then came the debate of February 13 and the half-week thereafter, in South Carolina which had been Trump country from the first, when Trump waded well into the swamp of conspiracy-theory kookery, flogging fevered fantasies of events from 2001 and '03. I'd guess that some part of that episode owed to Trump's temperament as well as to his "Art of the Comeback" lesson of answering a punch with a punch: the man lashes out wildly with whatever's to hand, which may be excusable in a private citizen but is not helpful in a candidate for POTUS much less a commander-in-chief. But Trump was a Democrat at the time of the Iraq War, and it shows. And never mind that his conspiracy-theorizing was demonstrably and even self-evidently bunkum; to relitigate Iraq and the 9/11 attacks in the 2016 presidential campaign was nothing to do with the price of tea, something like arguing that Normandy wasn't the optimal site for the D-Day landings, in the campaign of 1960.

Then came February 17, I believe it was, or three days before South Carolina was to vote, when "His Holiness" the "Holy Father" Pope "Francis" of Rome ordained that the people of South Carolina and America were not to vote Trump. Pope Francis is of course a leftist and to be charitable doesn't have the interests of the United States at heart. But more than that, Pope "Francis" of Rome is or rather was Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina, and your average Latin American takes a different view of the Latin American invasion and colonization of the United States than your average American, something like your average German took a different view of the Nazi-Soviet conquest of Poland than your average Pole. So the pope formerly known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio is not high on the Trump proposal of turning back that Latin American conquest of America, and couldn't restrain himself from saying as much, from getting in the middle of an American election, or more precisely from getting in the middle of just one of the two major-party presidential primaries, to damn just one of its half-dozen candidates. And at once the clutter of the campaign cleared, and those folks who had thrown in with Trump saw again why it was that they had thrown in with Trump, and had new cause for demonstrating their throwing-in.

I can only assume the understanding of America in Pope Francis' Vatican is not intimate, because it happens that South Carolina is among the more self-consciously Protestant jurisdictions in Christendom. I.e., in ordaining that they mustn't vote Trump the pope of Rome left the good and great Americans of South Carolina with no self-respecting alternative but to vote Trump and affirm their independence from the Vatican, lest the Reformation be undone and citizens be vassals.

And so it was that Pope Francis blessed Donald Trump by damning him, or anyhow that's the story as it looked to me. Three days after the pope stuck his nose in, Trump won South Carolina with a spread of 10 points. SC GOP to Pope: Drop dead. Then after another three days Trump won Nevada in a rout, taking a greater share of the vote than the first and second runners-up together, etc., etc., and the rest is history.

The race is run

One afternoon sometime in November of 2000, I tuned my radio to a station out of Maine to hear an extraordinary announcement. The disputed vote for president wouldn't be resolved formally 'til December, but on that day in November Rush Limbaugh opened his show with the declaration that he was about to break news, news which wasn't to be found elsewhere, that the recount of the votes for president in Florida was complete and George W. Bush was president-elect. The period for the recount as per Florida election law having passed without an overturning of the result, the state attorney general had certified that result, as of which moment Bush was president-elect. To hear the press tell it, the recount was on and the result was unknown, but Limbaugh understood what the Supreme Court in the end was compelled to ratify, that the voting and the counting and the recounting were through, the result was certified, and the president-elect was Bush.

I'm reminded of that lately in following these Republican presidential primaries. Not to say the decision is anything like as official in these primaries as in that recount, but the facts are these: by the first of April or thereabouts there were nominally three men left standing in the Republican primaries, but to make it to that magic number of 1,237 delegates the first runner-up Ted Cruz would've had to collect something like 86% of the delegates remaining, i.e., a practical impossibility, and for the also-ran John Kasich to make 1,237 would've taken more delegates than there were delegates to be had, i.e., a statistical impossibility. And more than that, by the first of April Donald Trump had been at or occasionally near the top of the Republican primary polling through the summer and fall and winter and into the spring, and had won far-and-away the most votes and states and delegates, and I cannot name a candidate since the democratization of the major-party presidential nominations who managed all that but somehow did not manage to secure his party's nomination.

The conventional wisdom has it that if Donald Trump comes to the end of the voting in June with a plurality but not a majority of delegates, then come the Republican National Convention in July the party muckety-mucks will muck things up and try by hook or by crook to strip Trump of his nomination, handing it instead to a pretender, some candidate who had lost to Trump or not so much as offered for the nomination but who is more amenable and agreeable to the establishment. But if it comes to that then what comes next would be as ruinous as it is predictable: Trump would bolt the Republican Party taking with him not only his plurality but a good part of the rest of the base, outraged as they'd be by the hijacking of the vote by the same elites who had for so long disappointed them and worse than disappointed them, leaving Hillary Clinton a cakewalk to the White House with considerably less than half the popular vote, and Trump would form an "alt-Right" conservative alternative party placing second in the general election, leaving the old-line rump Republican Party as third-party also-ran. Unless I'm mistaken in all that then the party muckety-mucks may be expected in the end to think better of stripping Trump of his rightful nomination, and thus the race is run and Donald Trump has won it.

Things to come

This vision of the future is less statistical than mystical, but for whatever little it's worth it's my sense that any candidate for a major-party presidential nomination who even before he has secured that nomination has driven the news practically daily from summer to spring, has been damned by the lame-duck administration on diplomatic missions, has been the object of debate in the Mother of Parliaments, has been damned by the pope of Rome, and has been protested by the Left as though he's a sitting president already, is not a candidate who'll be swept aside come Election Day, powerless and forgotten. 

To shake the earth

I watched the opening to some documentary on some early English punk bandleader -- another of those Netflix titles one bails on a few minutes in -- and this fellow was on about 1968 and feeling then like a movement was afoot. "Year Zero", again. Well, '68 was not the last word in movements, and movements are not a monopoly of the Left, and witnessing the Donald Trump ascendancy and the Waxahachie bus-blockers and the rest, I'm getting to where I almost believe "There's somethin' happenin' here," a roiling of the resurrected silent majority, reactionary and radicalized, unabashedly rightist and unreconstructed-ly retro.

If it comes to pass that Donald Trump walks out the other end of the primaries with the Republican nomination for president of the United States, then it may be that the nomination and not inconceivably the course of the greatest nation the world has seen were decided over a couple days in December, when Trump uttered some fairly strong words, and every elite and his dog damned him as worse than Hitler, but the American people declared for Trump. No slow-news party primaries in the slow-news month of December, but a December and a GOP nomination to shake the earth.

The story of the 2015-'16 Republican presidential primaries as of this writing is that when in the summer Donald Trump came out against illegal aliens and came down against them harder than was dreamt possible, he was elevated to frontrunner while those candidates who damned him fell away; then when at year's end Trump came out against Muslim immigration and came down against it harder than was dreamt possible, to universal damnation except by the people, he achieved something of a critical mass per the polls while those candidates who damned him were washed away, leaving Ted Cruz as least-distant first-runner-up, Cruz being not coincidentally the most rightward and Trumpian of the dozen other-than-Trumps in the race.

I've lived to cringe at a prophesy or two, and these most unconventional of Republican presidential primaries have defied forecasting, but for whatever little it's worth I'm persuaded and have been since December at least that the base of the Republican party are agreed and thus the Republican primaries are decided. The header on the polls of these R primaries for near enough to half a year might as well read "Trump leads," and the details of those polls have corroborated their headlines: the runners-up to Trump are not so much alternatives to Trump as alternative Trumps, in substance if not in style inasmuch as Donald Trump stands quite alone in that way. And those candidates who go by the wayside, who poll at the margin of error or worse, are very often those same candidates who damn Trump. Plus which 2016 is not 2012: where in the 2011-'12 cycle the conservative base of the Republican Party were forever flitting from one fleeting conservative alternative to the next, never lighting on one man to translate their majority to victory, in the present primaries the base are agreed, consolidating around a "conservative avenger", in Bill O'Reilly's apt coinage.

The news-and-views types are wont to make out that the Republican Party is in civil war, although they've been reporting a "Republican crack-up" for about as long as I've followed American politics and government, but like the stopped clock that's right twice a day they may at last have a point, only not much more than a point. The party has divided, assuredly, but not the base, i.e, the real people of the Republican Party as opposed to their leadership; the divide has opened between those real people on the one side and some of their leadership opposite them. And if the base of a party are agreed, agreed on principles and priorities and agreed also on a nominee, then any intraparty "civil war" must necessarily resolve in their favor. Leadership are disposable, and the base are vast enough to carry the party away with them if they bolt, although it strikes me as of this writing that the establishment of the Republican Party are at least as liable as its base to revolt.

It's been a century and a half since last a third party ascended to the Big Two, in 1854-'60, when it was the Republicans who played third party and in a short span supplanted one of the two great national parties, namely the Whigs. The new Republican Party was very like the old Whig Party, and constituted very largely of erstwhile Whigs, with the principal distinction that these Republicans insisted on the abolition of slavery and polygamy, "those twin relics of barbarism," where the Whig platform and program were for various reasons accommodationist of slavery. The hard-line abolitionist Republican Party was founded in 1854 and by 1860 had won its first election for president, those Americans who had voted Whig or might have voted Whig but demanded a stand against slavery having migrated to the novel Republican Party, and that president being an old Whig called Abraham Lincoln. 

I don't now prophesy the formation of a third party to supplant one of the Big Two, although it has to be said that in my time I've not seen any greater prospect of it. The conditions for it are present today as in the middle-19th Century, i.e., the base of a Big Two national party find themselves unrepresented by that party on the great questions of the age. But if the base are agreed and if they nominate Donald Trump as Republican for president then that nomination in itself may have the effect of supplanting the old-line Republican Party, the base having won their argument with the leadership within the party, and wrestled the old party onto a new course.

There is the question of what it is Donald Trump proposes which has precipitated this division and decision. It is an ancillary to the Trump program of turning back the effective invasion and colonization of the United States by the Latin American Third World, and amounts to a moratorium on immigration to the United States from Islamic societies, although Trump has not always been so artful in his iterations. Some considerable part of the reaction to what is short-handed the "Trump Muslim ban" has run along the lines of "Go to hell," to quote a senior senator and also-ran for Republican presidential nominee, polling by the time of his remarks something like 2% in his home state. (And it's not without significance that the said senator, who damned Trump as shrilly as any Republican and in terms most like any leftist and Democrat, promptly failed out of the race altogether.)

Then there's the superficially more substantial-sounding "no religious test" objection, that the immigration system can't ask a petitioner's religion much less decide yea or nay on the answer, but that's to miss the point, that immigration law may restrict immigration from certain countries, and those countries may happen to be immoderate Islamic societies. Couch the Trump proposal with more precision as something like a "restriction on immigration from certain nations whose societies' beliefs are demonstrably harmful to the United States and its people, laws, and ways," and it's a good deal harder to protest. And then there's the "unconstitutional" objection, which may be dispatched thusly: the United States Constitution is a constitution for the United States, which is why we persist in calling it "the United States Constitution", and some Yemeni who turns up at the American border asking admittance has no Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, say, because the Second Amendment to the Constitution is a protection for Americans, citizens and residents, not for the wide world and anyone in it who knocks at our door.

And has not the question of what a President Trump could and could not do in restricting immigration been mooted by the Obamian precedent of government by executive order and administrative rule-making, which Obama and his administration have applied to immigration policy as much as any? Can the Left and the Democrat Party and the press suppose that this precedent they've championed and cheered, of government-because-I-say-so, will obtain for presidents with that "D" appended to their titles but never to presidents they don't much care for? And how would that be effected, that a President Obama could do as he darn pleased, and if he were succeeded by a President Clinton then she could do the likewise, but if Obama were succeeded by a President Trump then all those Constitutional constraints on a president of the United States dead and buried in the Age of Obama would be resurrected miraculously? How do the Left and Democrats and press propose to enforce this new constitutional order, by which the powers of the presidency vary by the partisan identification of the president? Inasmuch as the Left and Democrat Party and press cannot accept that the rules are the rules, that the Constitution obtains no less for a Democrat presidency than for a Republican one, what a President Obama could get away with could be gotten away with also by a President Trump.

Then there is the question of electability. Like the New York Times wondering in a headline at a drop in crime "despite" a corresponding rise in incarcerations, the news coverage in the wake of Trump's declaring against Muslim immigration and the reaction to it, or what I saw of that coverage, marveled at Trump's holding and indeed lengthening his lead, "despite" his "Muslim ban". When in the hours and days after the Trump declaration he was rewarded in the polling and again a week later when his polling climbed higher still to the highest yet registered in the primaries, doubling the first-runner-up Cruz who's the nearest thing to Trump, the headline-level angle on the coverage ran along the lines of "Trump leads despite..." and "Trump at new heights despite...." I suppose it may be that these newsmen know better but are compelled or cowed by political correctness to play dumb, but very obviously Trump's numbers were up and his denouncers' numbers down precisely because Trump had defied the elite and their dogma of a decade and a half post-9/11 in his novel suggestion that we not import populations from that part of the world which hates our ever-living guts or wants us all dead and burning in hell, not "despite" it.

I would venture that any voter in 2016 whose vote for president is a vote for more Muslims, would on no account vote Republican or conservative, and I'd go one further and venture that a goodly number of Americans who are reliably Democrat in their voting but not so reliably leftist in their thinking would find their teeth gritted when their party and their nominee damned Trump's Muslim moratorium, even if they couldn't depart from their Democrat tribalism or their self-interest in voting themselves Free Stuff. Trump loses not a vote that wasn't lost to him anyhow, and more that that, I fail to see why any Republican should fear the electoral politics of a Candidate Trump's proposing to protect and preserve the nation while a Candidate Clinton insists that all is well and Islam is the "religion of peace" and what America needs now is more Muslims. Oppose the Trump Muslim moratorium if you will, on some principle or imagined principle, but never as an electoral calculation. 

There's a minor cliche on the Right -- "When did we vote for this?" -- invoked on immigration policy as much as any. The question of immigration, its numbers and sources, has in these last decades in this country and the wider Western world been placed well outside the democratic process, to be determined by some nameless elite, impeccable in their multiculturalism and unaccountable to the people, on the understanding that the people are not so impeccable in their multiculturalism, not so post-nationalist.

Which goes some way to dispatching the question of "electability" and brings us to the proposed banishment of Donald Trump from Britain. It seems some "journalist" in Scotland started a petition to the Mother of Parliaments at Westminster, that one Donald J. Trump be banished from the United Kingdom, where Trump owns properties which presumably employ some number of Britons and generally enhance the place, owing to Trump's proposal of the Muslim moratorium and his general offending of elite and leftist sensibilities. (Scotland incidentally is the birthplace of Trump's legal-immigrant mother and the home of his Presbyterian denomination.) The petition was heard and the banishment was debated, notwithstanding that banishment in Britain is a ministerial prerogative outside the powers of Parliament, but Parliament of course declined the measure and the spectacle of course served to "embiggen" Trump -- the Mother of Parliaments is not debating bills to do with even Barack Obama much less Ted Cruz or Carly Fiorina or the rest of the Republican also-rans -- elevating the man to global colossus and his Muslim moratorium to earth-shaker.

The Left are generally very savvy about these things, but when it comes to Donald Trump their savvy fails them and they wind up quite involuntarily promoting Trump and his campaign and causes. The Left are great ones for bans, grand ones and petty ones, on anything they happen not to care for be it firearms or insecticides or perfumes, and they're great ones also for bringing the crushing power of government down onto heads, plus which they're liable to that totalitarian impulse of making an example, ruining the first fellow to stick his neck out and say peep against their dogmas, "pour encourager les autres", so I can only suppose all that had some part in the petition to ban Trump from Britain. 

But I can only suppose too that those leftists who drove the petition are anticipating a British Trump or in any case a British answer to the Trump Muslim moratorium, and anticipating that the people of Britain assuredly would turn back the Muslim tide if only they were offered the opportunity. Why it should matter so desperately to the Left that our countries be flooded by those people most alien and hostile to us and our ways is a question with answers political and indeed electoral, and psychological; the point here is that if Donald Trump wins the nomination and presidency and institutes his moratorium, that example may be taken up in the wider Western world, it may even amount to a hinge in history, and certainly it'll shake the earth.