You're not the caboose, sweetheart, you're the engine

(Nota bene: This post was written well before Election Night 2020, when evidently a switch was thrown at FNC HQ converting Fox News to CNN-3, with the consequent fall of Fox News and corresponding rise of Real America's Voice and One America News among an expanding universe of alternative conservative TV news.) 

  

...Or, an open letter to Fox News. The New York Times is not worthy of the name "newspaper", not in 2020, and The Washington Post is the property and pet of Jeff Bezos who's converted it from Democrat Party news to Democrat Party activism. The papers and ABC and NBC, CBS and PBS, and obviously CNN and MSNBC, not to forget NPR which is that much worse than its PBS companion in taxpayer-subsidized broadcasting, and not to mention the flotilla of second-hand news like "Newsy" that follows in the wake of the big press, are not "biased", not anymore: they're a party press as in a one-party state, propagators of official information and approved ideas as in an authoritarian or totalitarian system. For years by now they've devoted themselves to hoaxes and non-stories and half-stories, they've liberated themselves of their standards including especially on sourcing, and the best that may be had out of them is half the story. 

We are arrived at last at the worst of all worlds. In the 19th Century the press were partisan but they wore their partisanship on their sleeves, and both sides were well represented: Mudville, USA had a Mudville Democrat and a Mudville Republican, and the citizenry of Mudville were at liberty to read one or the other or both papers and judge for themselves. Then early in the 20th Century came the Progressives and their reduction of all pursuits to sciences, including in a new professional, impartial, and clinical press. But ours is not the 19th Century or even the 20th (more's the pity); it is of course that debased age called the 21st Century, and in our time the press combine the worst elements of the 19th Century and the 20th: the monopoly on information of an institutional press as in the 20th Century, with the partisanship of the 19th Century party papers -- and just the one party. 

And then came Big Tech. The internet which within my time online had been an alternative to the establishment press, was captured fully and finally by the establishment, when Google and Twitter and Facebook among others turned their monopolistic powers to partisanship, and partisanship for the party of the elite and the establishment, namely the Democrats. Burying or forbidding alternative sources, wiping posts and videos, suspending and purging accounts. The power of the internet and of monopolistic forces of exponential influence, now is harnessed to the party press and to The Party.

 

But not a perfect monopoly: there is of course Fox News. A relative few websites of relative obscurity produce news and analysis to counter the establishment press, and talk radio carries on in its good work, and more than that Trump himself, alone among Republicans since Reagan, smashes through the press blockade, but in the way of news institutions to speak of which are not captured by The Party, there is only FNC. Television and radio, print and online, the one great counter to the establishment in information today is Fox News Channel, on cable and streaming, on digital radio and online. 

And in the same way that the import of Britain in the Second World War was magnified by its standing alone against fascism, after the Fall of France and before Operation Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor, Fox News in this Cultural Revolution that is 2020 is amplified as the one indispensable force for truth and ideas. And Fox News today may amount to the most influential collection of reporters and analysts since electronic communication: the Republican Party is the winningest party in the greatest nation, and its leader at present is a force-of-nature president with an executive energy like no leader since the last man to get his face onto Mount Rushmore, and yet for news which is not a Democrat campaign to destroy them utterly, Trump and his Republican Party are left with little old Fox News and precious little else, so that Fox News fairly monopolizes the ear of the winningest party and its force-of-nature president. Within these two weeks, Trump ordered an end to the "anti-racism" training of the executive branch into prejudice against whites and whiteness, merest days after the outrage was broadcast on Tucker Carlson Tonight. 

 

The trouble is, Fox News doesn't know its own strength. Some figures at Fox News apprehend the singularity of their placement; the aforesaid Tucker Carlson who leads the Fox News primetime has carried the Right and the republic intellectually for some months since the first of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations and riots in late May and early June, and his issues are just that, the issues he reckons to be worthy of his attention and his viewers'. But too many Fox Newsers seem to imagine it's their place and purpose to reproduce the front page of The New York Times; their issues are whatever it is the Democrats happen to be banging on about at any given moment, through their party press.  

And so it's my plea to Fox News first that they recognize the collapse of the establishment press around them; the establishment led by the Old Gray Lady are decayed and debased, and Fox News is not obliged for its direction to their front pages and needn't necessarily even acknowledge their half-stories and non-stories and hoaxes. And then I say it's past time Fox News felt its oats: FNC is at least as justified in driving the news as any decayed organ of the establishment. China for instance is objectively an issue, in the real world and to the real people in it, not least China's deliberate killing and sickening and terrorizing of the people of the world, and its crushing of the world's economies and bankrupting of the governments, by means of the Chinese invasion that is coronavirus, and yet the press have practically raised a blockade against information unhelpful to the Beijing regime; so smash the blockade, interview the whistleblowers and compile the facts and bang the drum. May it be that what is news, but shut out of the news, is Fox News.   

Get it through your pretty little heads that anymore you're not the caboose, sweetheart, you're the engine, and get to driving.

Urgency and clarity, leftism and totalitarianism

Addendum, September 3: "They don't tell little lies" 

 

What scale of electoral catastrophe must the Democrats be reading in their internal polling, to provoke them to their novel strategy as of this writing, of campaigning as the Republican Party? Evidently the Democratic National Convention was a more comprehensive disaster than even I had reckoned on, and the Republican convention a greater triumph, because in the week after the RNC the Biden campaign has recast itself, as the Trump campaign. 

 

Joe Biden or anyhow his campaign, as of this writing, is campaigning against the Democrat destruction of Democrat cities, and the Democrat lockdowns in Democrat states, and expects us to believe the Democrat rioters are Republican rioters and the Democrat lockdowns are Republican lockdowns. It's as Tucker Carlson observed not long ago, "They don't tell little lies in the Democrat Party." To which I would add only, "...and they think we're stupid."  

The premise of the Biden campaign manifestly is that the people are staggeringly, toweringly, mouth-breathingly dumb: the Biden campaign has quit damning Trump for his championing of the re-opening of America with its schools and its sports, long enough to blame him for the Democrat lockdowns of the schools and of sports. The same Biden campaign which had only just threatened a needless and disastrous new and national lockdown. Lies in election campaigns are ordinary enough, but lies on this order of magnitude are not found in free societies; this is Hitler blaming Churchill for the Holocaust.   

No-one is more surprised than I to say it, but as of the Republican National Convention of August 2020, the Republicans are not the Stupid Party. My unsolicited advice for the GOP posted hereunder went unread so I can take no share in the credit for this reborn Republican Party so smart and so sharp, but I pray God they make a habit of this. The Democrat convention was an unforced disaster, bleak and grim, making out that America is irredeemably wicked and wants tearing down and rebuilding in the profane image of the Left, and forgetting the rules of a national political convention that it must be an event and a show. 

But more than that, the Democrats in four days of primetime never said peep about two of the maybe four great questions of the campaign, namely the destruction of the big Democrat cities, and the menace and evil of China who only months ago sprayed their contagion deliberately to every corner of the planet, to wreck the economies of the world and bankrupt the governments, and to kill and sicken and terrorize the people of the world. The DNC was a fat lob-ball hanging over homeplate, and Trump and the Republicans in their convention smacked the cover off it. 

And don't take my word for it: the next week Joe Biden himself was aping the Republican National Convention. Which brings me to the object of this addendum. Among the reasons for my conservatism is my confidence and even my faith in the people of this greatest nation that ever there was, that they're quite the most extraordinary race, that they know better what's good for them than their elite, and that they most emphatically are not stupid. And consequently it's my conviction that a national political campaign which depends for its premise on the towering stupidity of the people, is bound to lose. But it's up to Trump and his campaign and to Republicans and conservatives more generally to say the words.

The American press in 2020 are functionally a party press as in an authoritarian or totalitarian one-party state; their purpose at present is to drag Joe Biden's carcass over the finish line and to destroy utterly Trump and all his works, so they can scarcely be expected to explain to the people that Biden is lying to them, lies on a scale unknown in American elections. And so I propose, in the spirit of my unsolicited advice just below, a 15-second spot for full saturation at once, bearing in mind that a lie in a campaign is an opportunity, that to demonstrate to the people that the other fellow is lying to them, may be to bury him electorally:

    

"They don't tell little lies in the Democrat Party. 

Joe Biden expects you to believe that the Democrat rioters are Republican rioters, and the Democrat lockdowns are Republican lockdowns.

Joe Biden is lying to you, and he thinks you're stupid.  

I'm Donald Trump and I approved this message."

  

Urgency and clarity

-Support for law enforcement and punishment for law-breaking always and everywhere.
-A Made in America Policy to repatriate American manufacturing from China.
-A moratorium on immigration at least until the United States is returned to full employment.
-Assurance of protections for pre-existing conditions.

Four little lines. Write them up into a joint, national platform for President Trump and Republicans standing for Congress, and the republic is saved. And that's to start; I offer herewith several useful points which it may behoove the winningest party in the greatest nation to commit to memory and to recite with some regularity. 

Biden's official platform may be the first major-party platform for president which itself is the case against its candidate:

-Biden promises to legalize the estimated 22 million illegal aliens and suspend enforcement of immigration law.
-Biden promises to abolish bail nationwide.
-Biden promises to abolish nationwide the single-family-dwelling zoning that preserves suburbs.
-Biden promises to abolish "shareholder capitalism".
-Biden promises to reconsider the wages of whites to adjust for "systemic racism".

That oughtta suffice to drive Biden's share of the vote to 20%, and it's found in black-and-white among the hundred-some-odd pages of Biden's official campaign platform, if only some Republican someplace would utter the words, sometime before election day.

A little take-no-prisoners sloganeering:

-Wherever Democrats can't lose elections, life becomes unlivable.
-Where Democrats have the run of the country, the country looks like the loser in a war.
-Life under Democrats in 2020, in a word: You may not get a haircut but you may smash up and burn down the barbershop.
-The rioters and arsonists and looters and statue-topplers are Democrats to a man, and the politicians who stand down their law enforcement for the mob also are Democrats; to reward the party that smashes up and burns down the country with total power to "reimagine" our country and our lives, would be to hire the pyromaniac as chief of the fire department.   
-Vote Democrat for the race war, violence, destruction, lawlessness, poverty, decay, squalor, and general societal collapse.
-Vote Republican to Make America Great Again; vote Democrat to make of it a Third World squat.

And on foreign policy:

-Biden was Obama's point-man on Iraq; he left us with a third Iraq war.
-Biden was Obama's point-man on Ukraine; on his watch Russia invaded Ukraine.
-Biden was Obama's point-man on China; he gave the country away to China for $1.5 billion to his son's phony firm.

Republicans generally have made a serviceable job of recounting Trump's triumphs, his renaissance in the economy and the national power in the three years before the Chinese invasion that is coronavirus, but they neglect some points that aren't to be neglected, not least:

-After two years of Trump America exported more energy than we import for the first time since the 1950s.
-In three years of Trump America built 12,000 factories with a net of half a million jobs in manufacturing.

-Obama-Biden left America and the world with a third Iraq war; Trump had won that war in his first eleven months, and a year later he had made the difference in Syria, vanquishing ISIS which was born under Obama and thrived so long as Obama was commander-in-chief.  

Urgency and clarity, there's no urgency and clarity. The old hands are slow hands; they speak and think about the election as though 2020 is 2008 and Republicans will roar back soon enough even if they do drop this one, but very plainly the Democrat plan is that if the Rs lose this vote then they'll never win another: the Biden platform promises to pack the electorate with tens of millions of new Democrat voters from the Latin American Third World, and be assured that's one campaign promise they'd get around to in time for the next election. So that if election night is a bad night for Republicans then the country goes the way of Seattle and Portland, Chicago and Baltimore, California and New York, where Democrats can't lose and Republicans need not apply, and wherever Democrats can't lose elections, life becomes unlivable.

The Democrats promise to snatch away the very suburbs and security of white America, so that there'll be noplace but the hills to run from the race war, no remit from the cultural revolution, no refuge from the terror. But those designs of the Democrats are themselves the case against the Democrats. Urgency and clarity: they'd carry a Republican repudiation of the Democrats and the Left on November 3, if only some Republican someplace would utter the words, sometime before election day.

Leftism and totalitarianism

The impulse of leftism always and everywhere is to totalitarianism. Leftism is not an understanding that any ordinary soul arrives at by living and learning, but a construct and a conceit, and a program for the national suicide: "We must fling our borders open wide to the numberless masses who hate us and all we hold dear"; "We must empty the menaces to society from the jails into the society"; "We must stand down our law enforcement for the vicious, violent mobs who smash and burn our cities"; etc., etc. Because leftism is a suicide pact for a nation, no nation can be expected to accept it, and so the nation must be tricked or trained into leftism; leftism must must be taught and it must be enforced. And because leftism must be taught and enforced, to seize a society and to hold it, leftism must necessarily descend into totalitarianism.

Hear the screams and answer them; The lockdown Left; Accessory to the crime of coronavirus; Sucker subscribers; Round is for squares

Hear the screams and answer them 

Two of the three battles in the war for the future, to my way of thinking, and the two that are fought on the field of politics and government, are cutting very emphatically rightward since the bug. USA Today-Ipsos finds the people want a moratorium even on legal immigration and from all countries, 79-11% -- i.e., the people are far to the right of the rightwardmost president on his rightwardmost issue. And it's 90% in the Pew poll who recognize China as a threat. The people are screaming for an assertive conservative ascendancy in the national politics, to slam shut America's door, if not also to starve out the illegals and bolt the door behind them, and to break from China and break Chinese power. I pray God that Trump and his campaign, and every Republican standing for Congress, hear the screams and answer them, and that Trump carries a workable Republican majority in the House as well as the Senate on his coattails come November 3. Sina delenda est.

The lockdown Left  

To every conservative the lockdown was an emergency measure at the height of a crisis, a calculated overreaction, a blunt instrument and a necessary evil, to be enforced by voluntary compliance and never punitive coercion, and above all to be dismantled at the first opportunity. But for the Left the lockdown was a new way of life, an opportunity to reset society and "reimagine" it (in the words of Andrew Cuomo of New York, America's foremost governor-jailer), an excuse to make a welfare case of every able American, a cover for enacting the totality of the leftist program having nothing to do with coronavirus, and a license to indulge every abusive impulse in their petty, vicious leftist souls, to punish conservative America and impoverish business, even to suspend democracy and liberty (the mayor of New York only the other day forbade protests indefinitely).

I can't claim to have familiarized myself with the polling on the question of lockdowns and lifting them, but I know well enough that the lockdowns were blunt-instrument emergency policy, that if we don't get back to business we'll be eating dirt for dinner, and that the people want their lives back and they never elected some governor to "reimagine" their society. The abuse and the malice and the brutal stupidity in the lockdowns by Democrat governors and mayors and lesser enforcers have been an education in 21st Century leftism, and in an election year too.

The accessory to the crime that is coronavirus

One out of three ain't good: the World Health Organization at its top turns out to be unconcerned for "world health", although it is at least an "organization", but then so is the mob. The globalists like the WHO, the Left and the press, even The Great Gates, turn out in the end to be China-ists, frantic to rescue Chinese communism and Chinese power.

In this costliest crime in history that is coronavirus, the "World Health" Organization is an accessory, at every turn promulgating the propaganda of the Beijing regime under their United Nations imprimatur, spreading China's lies and its disease and advancing the Chinese conspiracy: the WHO insisted for a month and a half after China knew better, until it was too late on January 22, that coronavirus was not communicable between humans; they scolded the governments of the world to keep our doors open wide to travel from China and thus to the infection of our societies by a Chinese disease more contagious than flu by 300%; they counseled us counterintuitively that masks were bad, as China hoarded masks; and then once China had sprayed its contagion to every corner of the planet, the WHO screamed "3.4% mortality!" -- the figure claimed in that time by China and catastrophically worse than the true rate which looks to be something nearer to half a percent, as was reckoned by the CDC from the first -- and the world outside China duly collapsed in panic, our economies and governments and societies pulverized like hasn't been seen since the Second World War at least.

"Dr." Tedros is the first director-general of the WHO who's no doctor: he's an Ethiopian Maoist recognized as a fellow-traveler by the Chinese Communist Party and installed at the top of the WHO in '17 in a Chinese power-play; he belongs to a political party recognized by the State Department in his time as a terrorist organization; and Tedros' greatest work in medicine before ascending to director-general of World Health was sheltering his government in Ethiopia from political difficulty by concealing no fewer than three outbreaks of cholera, by conveniently re-classifying the cholera mortality as death by diarrhea.

The very name "COVID-19" was a favor by the WHO to the Beijing regime, to obviate the source of the virus in a word untranslatable into Mandarin. The WHO at its top manifestly cares nothing for the world or for health, and as the criminal in the crime of coronavirus is the Beijing regime, so the WHO is the accessory to that crime, without which China could not have hoped to drag 180 countries down with it into its horror and ruin.

Sucker subscribers 

The third of those three battles in the war for the future is perfectly impervious to elections, namely the battle to break the monopoly of the Left on the institutions. Since the advent of Obama a decade ago leftism as an electoral proposition has turned ever more rarefied and less populist, ever more abhorrent to the masses who are not elites, ever madder, ever more a pact for national suicide; but in that same time leftism as the doctrine and dogma of institutional America, big business included, has gone from prevailing ethos to monopoly of thought. And no institution in America is more driven by leftism and more a driver of leftism than the artless art and unentertaining entertainment that is film and television.

Television and film in America, 2020 is uniformly unworthy and unwatchable, uniformly the doing of mediocrities and poseurs and pygmies, and unremittingly political. It's my fear that the unwatchable in movies and shows is by now effectively subsidized, by the untold millions of subscribers to the big streaming services, who'll pay their monthly or yearly subscriptions without a thought to the unnumbered unwatchable titles produced or purchased on the strength of those subscriptions. You wouldn't watch it but you'll pay for it, because if your subscription doesn't roll over then you're bereft of that one show you care for.

And so the market is abolished, and we forfeit our right to vote with our feet. The audience is the elites who produce and purchase the titles, with their elite preferences and prejudices and preoccupations. If it meets with the approval of the muckety-muck at Netflix then it's a sale, and the sucker subscribers will cover the cost even if they can't stand to look at the first frame.

Round is for squares

The trouble with the fashion elite, excepting that rarefied, Lagerfeldian class of elite fashion, is that they're mad for novelty, and never get around to the question of "But is it good?" In the same way that the Left believe in change for its own sake, the fashion elite are believers in novelty for its own sake. Introduce a square wheel and they'll pronounce that round is for squares, and never mind that a square wheel can't roll.

China and the bug: Not so much theory as conspiracy

So the rightward-most, righter-even-than-Trump-and-Hannity, hard-Right and alt-Right, "fear-mongering" and "warmongering", "xenophobic" and "nativist", "racist" and "white nationalist" and "yellow peril"-ist, anticommunist China-hawk, red-in-tooth-and-claw-red-state-redneck, Peasants Party Freedom Caucus Radical Republican, conservative-to-out-conservative-the-conservatives, all-American rah-rah-siss-boom-bah America Firsters, WERE AGAIN THE ONLY ONES TO GET IT RIGHT, and we had it right from the first, back when "coronavirus" was a punchline of the Left and the elite, who conceived it as a sort of hoax of "racist" Republicans. The bug came from the lab.

Coronavirus is not less than the costliest crime in history.

"If the Chicoms truly believed China's 'wet markets' were the source of this virus which hit China first and hardest, then would it not behoove them to shutter those markets, and inasmuch as the totalitarian dictatorship of China has permitted the reopening of the wet markets nationally, what are we left to infer about Beijing's understanding of the true cause of coronavirus?"

"The government of China damned Trump for slamming America's door on China, and threatened the lesser leaders of the lesser nations against doing as Trump had done, long after China's leadership understood that travel abroad from China would spray their contagion to every corner of the planet, so does it not stand to reason that the communist regime in Beijing calculated that coronavirus had knocked China prostrate and the best they could do was to drag the wide world down with them?" What I didn't appreciate by the time I wrote that latter conjecture was that China had forbidden travel from Wuhan to the rest of China, at the same time they demanded travel from China to the wide world including direct from Wuhan.

In light of that and of the explosive developments of April 15, and considering that China at that same time lied to the WHO and through the WHO to the world to conceal the scale of coronavirus, I'd be a fool if I didn't suspect that China's campaign to keep the borders of the world open wide was a calculation, a policy to infect every country on every continent with the Chinese disease, to play the Maoist and seize the opportunity to do to the world deliberately what China had first done through negligence and incompetence to itself.

Now to the question of coronavirus as good-faith medical research, or research for purposes of biological warfare. In 21st Century China all advanced technology and all advanced knowledge is military advancement. Western businesses with operations in China, businesses even which don't make for a very obvious military application like Google, are subject to China's "forced transfer of technology" policy, whereby any technology or knowledge developed by those businesses and unknown to China, is seized by  Chinese authorities for the People's Liberation Army. Forced technology transfer is no mysterious or obscure feature of business in China; it's been the fraught subject of Sino-American trade negotiations.

So the dear reader will pardon me if I can't accept that the Maoist dictatorship of China who seize even innocuous technologies for their People's Liberation Army, would never dream of a military application for their own research into viruses, viruses including the Wuhan coronavirus which has just now flattened every economy and society and government worth bothering about, and bearing in mind that global dominion is the express object of the government of China, stated in so many words and repeated routinely.

And at all events the question as a practical matter in the here-and-now, is moot: "If coronavirus is not a Chinese biowar program gone awry, how would it be any different if it were?" "If a general marched into a lab and ordered the boys in the lab coats to isolate or manipulate a virus for flattening an enemy society in the space of weeks, how would the virus they worked up look any different from coronavirus?"

As of April 15 in this annus horribilis of 2020 it is established that the worst estimation of China and the bug, was the truest. Then later that same day the news comes over the transom that China is testing The Bomb, notwithstanding the conventions against nuclear tests.

Coronavirus may be our last but best hope to break from China and to break China, to break communist Chinese power. Sina delenda est.

Leftism as luxury in the crisis of coronavirus, and the Chinese infection as invasion

Leftism as luxury in the crisis of coronavirus

I can't know the future but this I know: when the people are reminded that the world is more lions than lambs and more thorns than roses, when they're reminded that our Garden of Eden was built and must be kept up and the wilderness kept out, then they are reminded also that leftism is a luxury, and their impulse is to conservatism. I've studied it as closely as I've studied any mass phenomenon in history, and for one chapter of my life I lived it: when the people are reminded of their fragility they run to the strong, paternal arms of conservatism. "Conservatism" means literally to save and preserve; it's an impulse and a philosophy, and in America it's also the winningest political proposition.

Which brings us to the present crisis. As late as March 11, when America fell fully and finally into the panic of the pandemic, the WHO declared Europe the epicenter of the pandemic, and President Trump moved to slam shut America's door to Europe, the Democrat House of Representatives damned Trump's America First defense of the people against the virus, and moved in their No Ban Act to forbid his exercising that plenary power of the presidency to seal the border for the national defense. When on January 31, just ten days after the first confirmation of coronavirus in the United States, Trump declared a public health emergency, instituted the first system of quarantines in half a century, and slammed the door on China, the now-presumptive Democrat nominee for president Joe Biden damned him as "xenophobic" and "hysterical" and "fear-mongering". As late as that aforesaid March 11 the Democrat mayor of New York urged the people of New York to go out on the town, in keeping with the campaign by New York Democrats since January 31 to defy and damn those measures to save the people from the virus, as "xenophobic" or "racist". New York by now accounts for a third of the U.S. mortality from coronavirus.

By March 22 the Democrat House had been in recess for their spring break for a week, while the Republican Senate and Trump White House had worked day and night for seven days until they concluded a compromise, consensus coronavirus relief and recovery bill, cowritten and approved by Senate Democrats; and then on Sunday night Nancy Pelosi jetted into Washington from San Francisco, and blew it up. The Pelosi Democrat House declined their consent to the relief and recovery, unless and until their demands were met as follows: racial quotas and racial reports and racial enforcement in big businesses accepting federal loans; "carbon reports" on all civilian flights and "carbon offsets" for every breath of fuel in American commercial aviation in just five years; more tax credits for wind and solar; free college for students carrying student loans; the rewriting of election law to benefit Democrat candidates in the 50 states, which presumably is not even within the federal jurisdiction; the rewriting of collective bargaining to benefit Democrat unions; the extension of visas for lawful immigrants and the waiver of immigration law for illegal aliens; bonus funding for cities defying the enforcement of immigration law; free cellphones for Democrat constituencies; free retirements for employees of "community newspapers"; the absorption by the federal taxpayer of the debt accumulated by the post office; and $35 million for the Kennedy Center, among still more demands having not a thing to do with coronavirus or its economic ruin.

The Democrats had miscalculated three ways, at least: the country had no patience now for political games and political blackmail; had the country wished for that wish list then they'd never have made a Senate leader of Mitch McConnell and a president of Donald Trump; and the country couldn't afford that wish list even when we were richer than ever we were, on the day before the bug, so astronomical boondoggles and burdens like that Democrat Wish List look as remote as the stars, now we're spending half again as much as we spend on everything in a year, on a single bill to yank us from the hole China has landed us in.

In the event the bill as passed that Friday was ninety-some-odd-percent as agreed on Sunday; Pelosi had succeeded mostly in delaying the emergency measure by a week, and a week in the coronavirus crisis might as well be a year. Pelosi's Democrat House played the neighbor to a house afire, who saunters over and offers to help pull the family and dog and prized possessions from the burning house, but not before we sign three little papers: we'll carry his mortgage, we'll pay out the lease on his car, and while we're about it we'll put his rotten kid through college too.

Unless the press have managed to conceal all that from the people, the lesson can only be, leftism is a luxury. And just now we're sold out of luxury. 2020 already has been a year of twists and Election Day is seven months off yet, so I can't claim to know the future, but I know Donald J. Trump is the singular president for this crisis and the recovery from it too, and I believe the average American can't fail to notice that despite the best efforts of the press who stand between the people and their president, and I know that to be reminded of our fragility is to be reminded of our conservatism.

The Chinese infection as invasion 

Now that even India, on the point of overtaking China as the world's most populous country, has fallen to the bug, complete with nationwide shuttering, it strikes me that this global pandemic and global depression must be the greatest devastation all told since the Second World War. We're assured that this uncommonly contagious, novel, lethal virus which has devastated the planet like no outbreak in 101 years at least and which by China's own admission first manifest a matter of miles from one of China's virology labs and a matter of yards from another, is not a Chinese biowar program gone awry or in any way deliberate, but how would coronavirus be any different if it were a Chinese biowar program gone awry or if it were the deliberate devastation of the globe by a communist dictatorship open in its ambition for global dominion?

And for our purposes now the question is moot: it is inarguable fact that as late as January 14 China lied and the World Health Organization at the United Nations promulgated the lie as medical science to the world, that coronavirus was not even contagious among humans. As late as middle-January in this year of 2020 China insisted and the WHO accepted that there was "Nothing to see here, folks." It is inarguable fact that well after the Chinese leadership understood the nature and scale of coronavirus, they damned Trump for closing America's border to China and threatened lesser leaders in lesser nations against doing as Trump had done, leaving the world open wide to this Chinese invasion. China sprayed its contagion to every corner of the planet, and wittingly.

And tabulating the dead and wounded, the terror and horror, the strain and dislocation, and the economic ruin, even the military deployments in combating the contagion, how in its effect is coronavirus different from a war waged on every continent at once, by China? How in its effect would coronavirus be any different, if it weren't an infection but an invasion, by hostile forces of the People's Liberation Army, of the wide world? Had the People's Liberation Army invaded every continent in January then surely some agreement and alliance would've formed against China, and some action been taken. And so again I ask, how in its effect is China's coronavirus any different from a Chinese war on the world?  

The "divided country" comes in for a comeuppance; Impeachment impeached; What they don't remember and I can't forget

The "divided country" comes in for a comeuppance

The conventional wisdom has it that ours is a "divided country", and conventional wisdom is only mostly bollocks, so it may be that this is one of those twice-a-day when the stopped clock gets it right, but it's past time the conventional wisdom came in for a comeuppance.

I sometimes wonder whether those people who cry "divided country" are less than proficient in the language, and sometimes whether they were born yesterday: I've heard "divided country" invoked to account for what is plainly "polarization", not division among the people but disparity between the parties, and I've heard "divided country" as though it were some singular feature of our age, that we were skipping along in contented comity until The Advent of The Orange. It was a handful of votes in one state that decided the presidency in 2000, then in '12 the presidency was decided by something like 400,000 votes spread over four states -- I could go on, but that "divided country" business would seem to obtain with some frequency in just these two decades, two presidential elections of four before Trump's.

Then there are the great questions of the age. Securing the border was the principal cause of the Trump campaign, and manifestly that's a question of national consensus: the Democrats won the House in '18 promising "border security", in maybe the boldest fraud and most perfect inversion of the truth I've seen in 14 election cycles. Some part of Trump's presidency has been given over to confronting China, another of those great questions of the age untouched before Trump, and on China the Hate Trump Party take care to pose for the people as standing with Trump, so I can only conclude that Trump's taking the lead pipe to China's kneecaps also is a point of agreement. Trump's disruptive, revisionist policy on trade has passed its Congressional tests with near-unanimity so again I can only conclude that trade is still another question of national consensus. And there is the rebuilding of the forces and of the roads and bridges, Trump's issues and consensus issues.

And as ever, "It's the economy, Stupid," and on that point don't take my word for it: Jim Cramer who's no great friend to Trump concluded late last year that Trump's economy is "the best of our lives." Only lately Gallup found that "personal satisfaction" was never higher, an impossible 90%. So presumably the Trumpian economic program which has wrought what may be the greatest and broadest and deepest prosperity in any society at any age, is another of those questions of national consensus, and not a small one. Anyone might point to questions that split more evenly, but there's more consensus where that came from.

It strikes me that the claim of a "divided country" coincides very neatly with the election of Donald Trump, and that it would make a convenient means for those people who claim it, of denying Trump's triumph and their defeat. If the country is "divided" then there's no winner and no loser, we haven't won and they haven't lost. Maybe they're right, maybe we're split up the middle, but we'll know soon enough, on Election Night in nine months, whether they've not lost and we've not won.

Impeachment impeached

If I were King of America, I'd decree two changes at least to the impeachment of a president. First, no 24 hours unbroken of arguments in the Senate trial, but the morning for the prosecution and the afternoon for the defense, then the defense gets the morning and the prosecution takes the afternoon, and so on. Under the rules as approved by the Senate in 1999 and affirmed in 2020, the defense sits silent for the better part of a week while a mountain of half-truths and untruths out of the other side go unanswered, and without provision for interjecting with objections, then when finally the defense gets its at-bat, there's no provision for the prosecution to answer any points of fact and arguments out of the defense which had been unknown or unanticipated.

But more than that, I'd amend the Constitution to make a partisan impeachment a practical impossibility: removal demands a vote of at least two-thirds in the Senate, so apply that same threshold to the House, raise the bar for impeachment to two-thirds and there'll be no more of this pointless, baseless partisan impeachment paralyzing the national government. Impeachment and removal are reserved for the most extraordinary national emergency and national consensus, and the two-thirds threshold for the Senate reflects that, but then that standard is exploded by the low bar in the House, a simple majority of fifty-plus-one partisan pygmies.

Unless the partisanship and paralysis that was the impeachment of President Trump is punished by the people in November, and brutally, the House Democrats like the teenager whose keys to the family car are snatched away by the grown-ups, we've no right to be surprised if impeachment takes its place as just another tool in the box for hysterical partisans in the House of Representatives, and at all events the threshold is set so low as to invite abuse.

What they don't remember and I can't forget

A vote in my high school history class in Canada a couple years after the Gulf War of 1991 went something like 28-2 against George H. W. Bush's declining to "roll onto Baghdad" and "finish the job"; America was held by the class to have been mistaken in not carrying the Kuwait war over the border into Iraq to tear down the monstrous and menacing Saddam Hussein regime and institute a decent national government in its place -- and those two dissents were the exceptions that proved the rule, namely me and a friend of mine seated next to me and watching my vote. Until '98 it was America's not going to war in Iraq that was Canada's indictment of America. And in America for a decade before the Iraq War of 2003 the consensus had it that we had been mistaken in not "rolling onto Baghdad". I lived it and I can't forget it.

The air strikes and air wars against Iraq carried on through the George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations, including a matter of days before Clinton's inauguration in January of '93, and in December of '98 when Clinton ordered a three-day air war on Iraq a matter of hours before the scheduled vote on his impeachment. And in later years it was practically daily that Hussein's forces fired on allied aircraft patrolling the No-Fly Zone which Hussein had conceded by treaty, with practically daily return fire.

As a young conservative and a contrarian I only ever resisted the consensus that Iraq ought to have been invaded and its regime toppled, for the reasons that it looked to be a bigger and messier business than it was worth, and that there had been cause for hope within Iraq of a coup or revolution. Until in 1998 the accumulation of Hussein's defiance of the United Nations weapons inspections and the routine air strikes and air wars to keep him in his box, with the recognition that Hussein had consolidated his power, tipped the balance of cost and benefit, for me and for the Congress and president. It was 1998 that a Republican Congress and Democrat president committed the United States as national policy to regime change in Iraq, seconded emphatically by Britain's Labour Prime Minister Blair.

And whatever became of those weapons of mass destruction by the time American forces swept over Iraq in '03, it was no fantasy and no lie that Hussein was armed with WMDs because he had put them to use -- ten times. Then there are the resolutions of the UN Security Council which Hussein had defied, or the great majority demanding the Iraq War before the war, including Joe Biden and Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, and the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force which was America's declaration of war on the Hussein regime, passed by a Republican House and Democrat Senate.

And that's off the top of my head, two decades hence. Our effort in Iraq, first tearing down one of the more monstrous and menacing regimes since 1945 and then instituting in its place a living democracy, was not some conspiracy on the people and the world by some cabal of "neocons", but the enactment of the consensus of a decade.

China the pretender, and the manifest superiority of feet and inches

China the pretender

Twice in the 20th Century Germany bid fair to master the world, and no sooner had we put paid to Germany than Russia threatened global dominion through its empire called the Soviet Union, but we faced down communism until that madness too collapsed. It's within my time, the '80s and into the '90s, that the conventional wisdom had it that we were being overtaken by Japan, which by the middle-'90s was an amusing remembrance. And in the '90s too the European Union was thought or hoped to be the future, a United States of Europe to overtake the United States complete with a unitary European armed forces, but Europe is decadent, weak and soft, and it always was a crazy-quilt of tribes, millennia before Brexit was a twinkle in the eye of Nigel Farage. Always the realities are reasserted, always America finds its feet and knocks the other fellow from his, always the challenger to Anglo-American ascendancy is seized by its own demons and cast down again into irrelevance or worse. 

So now that China takes its turn, I can only bet on form. When it'll come, or how, I cannot conceive, but in the end China is a big country with problems to match, a Third World country with 24-karat fillings, and the vote to shake the earth on November 8 of 2016 may turn out to have been the beginning of the end for China's good run, a run on artificial and transient advantage: currency manipulation and books-cooking, patent-thievery and corporate espionage and the outright seizure of Western technology by the People's Liberation Army, administrative convenience for Western supply lines, and above all sweatshop wages that could be had also in India or Indonesia or Vietnam, even. We've let it go too far for too long -- Clinton steered us wrong on China, and Bush and Obama drifted along that wrong turn -- and there may be a price to be paid for that, in troubles I shudder to consider, but in the end we won't be speaking Chinese.

The manifest superiority of feet and inches

Obviously the foot is a practical and human everyday unit of measure, where meters are too big and centimeters and millimeters too small, but more than that, the metric ten divides evenly only into halves and useless fifths; the Anglo-American twelve divides evenly into halves and thirds and quarters. A quarter of ten is 2.5; a third is 3.333333333 to infinity. And then for measures of less than an inch the principle is simple, sensible doubling: half, quarter, eighth, and sixteenth. A little more than a half is three-quarters; a little more than three-quarters is seven-eighths; and a little more than seven-eighths is fifteen-sixteenths. And that's to say nothing of the poetry in "five-foot-two" or "inch by inch".

Some semi-mythical orange giant with a combover, and other visions for 2020 and beyond

Addendum, November 30: Non-evidence of non-criminal non-wrongdoing in a baseless, pointless impeachment

After two months of baseless, pointless impeachment, Trump's worst enemy can't claim that he denied Ukraine its aid or that Ukraine did a thing for him in return, and neither can they claim that Trump ever said or otherwise directed that there should be any such quid pro quo; the case against Trump amounts to one man's baseless presumption and the griping and gossiping of several unelected and unknown, malicious and pretentious bureaucrats on the strength of that baseless presumption; and the only hard evidence in the case is exculpatory, namely Trump's express direction that there was to be no quid pro quo, the innocuous transcripts of every grunt uttered between Trump and the Ukrainian president Zelensky, the testimony of Zelensky and his foreign minister that there was no quid pro quo and more than that, there couldn't have been, inasmuch as no-one let on to them about the imaginary "quid", and the testimony of two U.S. senators who independent of one another spoke to Trump at this time and on this question and swear that Trump's hold on aid to Ukraine of two months had nothing to do with Joe Biden and everything to do with Trump's well-established contempt for the racket whereby America pays the freight and Europe freeloads.


So after two months wherein for the first time an impeachment repudiated the standards of eight centuries of English-speaking justice -- the rights to a public trial, to legal counsel, to confront one's accuser, to cross-examine witnesses and call witnesses, and to present evidence -- the Democrat House advance to their ad-hoc impeachment Phase Three, wherein the Judiciary Committee is meant to put the case that the non-evidence for the non-criminal non-wrongdoing amounts to high crimes demanding the overturning of a national election ten months before the re-election. Then the plan as near as I can tell is to approve articles of impeachment by partisan simple majority over a bipartisan minority before the Christmas recess, and leave the baseless, pointless business to the Republican Senate in the new year. Merry Christmas, America.

Addendum, October 7: The half-assed impeachment

The post below I wrote a day or two before the breaking of the Great Ukraine Nonstory of '19, which a week thereafter would precipitate the Half-Assed Impeachment of '19: for only the fifth time in the history of the Republic, the House of Representatives undertook to overturn a presidential election, and for the first time the House dispensed with its rules on impeachment, the fair hearing and public proceeding wherein the minority and the president may call witnesses and argue the defense, with the object of arriving at something resembling the truth. The premise of my post was that the Democrat House were disposed to impeachment, and thence to disaster; a day or two later they had their pretext, and a week after that they had their impeachment, or rather their semi-quasi-pseudo, half-assed impeachment.

The story these couple weeks has developed practically every few hours so I'll restrict myself here to some bigger and more durable questions, beginning with the beginning. Speaker Pelosi pronounced Trump's guilt and announced his impeachment about 5 PM on September 24, before the transcript of the phonecall at issue was published for the world to judge about 10 AM September 25; i.e., Pelosi consigned her party and House and country to the crisis of impeachment a matter of hours before she and the world saw the evidence for impeachment, and knowing from the lips of the president himself that the transcript was to be published in a matter of hours and that there was nothing impeachable to be found in it. The Mark Levin postulate (modified marginally by me) is that Pelosi had been sold a bill of goods by her Intelligence Committee chairman Schiff, rumors on baseless claims on gossip, and when on the morning after she discovered that the transcript was not as (presumably) Schiff had promised, there was no turning back, and all that was left was to ride the tiger and hope for the best.

And so the Democrat House commenced the search for facts and law to justify their presumption of guilt and declaration of impeachment. But extraordinarily they jettisoned three years of claims against Trump, in favor of their Great Ukrainian Hope, conceding implicitly that those less-novel claims had come to nothing. And assuming as I do that this Ukraine business goes the way of every blessed other Democrat claim against Trump these three years, the Democrats will be hard put to take up again their old hobby-horses: on the morning after, the people will be less than patient for another cry from the Democrats of "What about those tax filings from 1996!"

As to Pelosi's schedule for impeachment-by-Thanksgiving, or two months after the Impeachment Declaration, revised already to impeachment-by-Christmas, I make no claim to see the calendar in my crystal ball but I remember well enough the last big, unwanted thing Pelosi jammed through the House of Representatives: that big, unwanted thing was Obamacare, in 2009-'10, and passage took longer than hoped by maybe half a year; in the event it was enacted only by parliamentary maneuver to circumvent the rules of the Senate, which bears the uncanniest resemblance to impeachment in the House in 2019; and Obamacare was the single-greatest cause for the electoral bloodbath months later in November, wherein Pelosi's supermajority was reduced to powerless minority, the Senate Democrat supermajority was reduced to simple majority, and on the state level Democrats were purged in maybe the greatest partisan turnover in the electoral history of the Republic. And the story is that it was Nancy Pelosi, in that huddle which decided that the polls and elections would be defied and Obamacare would be the law of the land, who made the difference in darning the torpedoes.

I'll supplement this addendum as need be, and meantime the post below from before the Impeachment Declaration stands up well enough.
-----
When in 1998 the Republican House of Representatives approved articles of impeachment against President Clinton, it was on the strength of eleven counts of criminality. The Constitution demands high crimes or high misdemeanors as in treason or bribery, as grounds for impeachment, and the Supreme Court expounded in the 19th Century that a president may not be impeached on charges from that time before he was president. But even the Mueller Report concluded (and I quote from remote memory), "This report does not find that the President committed a crime," even on the nebulous sub-secondary question of "obstructive behavior" short of obstruction of justice, and on the most malicious construction of half the story, the doing of vicious Democrat operators acting in the name of the special counsel Robert Mueller but quite independent of him. So the Democrat House has the will to impeach the president but not the law or the facts.

Then there is the promise implicit in the Democrat campaign of '18 that a Democrat Congress would not pursue impeachment: Democrats standing for Senate as well as House were under orders from the very top that they were not so much as to utter the I-word; when one Democrat Congresswoman did invoke that dread I-word, campaigning in Los Angeles in maybe the safest district for Democrats in these United States, she came in for a spanking by the Democrat leaders of the House and Senate both, rebuked and repudiated for all the world to see, making an example of the Congresswoman and making plain to the country as much as the party that impeachment was not on.

That the Democrats would not chase vendettas into the paralysis and crisis that is impeachment was effectively a condition of their majority in the House, and yet the very month after they claimed that majority they inaugurated their impeachment, scheduled deliberately to dissect Trump's summit with Kim Jong Un for the nuclear pacification of the Korean peninsula; Day 1 of the summit was a great success, then came nine hours of impeachment televised live 'round the world, and on Day 2 Rocket Man let it be known he'd be keeping those rockets of his, and the bomb. And it's worse than a fraudulent campaign and worse even than a House of Representatives burning days and weeks and months on phantoms and fantasies: a House of Congress seized by the impulse to impeachment, chasing a bitter vendetta against a president, can only be disinclined to working constructively with that president, and with three months left of their first year the Democrat House has accomplished a fat lot of nothing. 

But all that is preamble, to the true trouble for Democrats in pursuing impeachment: if Trump is re-elected then it's less than likely that those people voting Trump for president will vote Democrat for House much less Senate, inasmuch as the people are indisposed to vote for Congress as a veto of their vote for president, on the same ballot. If on Election Day 2020 the Democrat House has burned two years in the vain pursuit of an impossible impeachment, then it's something less than likely that any American voting Trump for president will return those same Democrats to a majority in the House much less to reward their party with complete control of Congress, so that Congressional Democrats can occupy themselves for the next two years or four in overturning the presidential election. And the numbers are 18 and 31, 31 Democrat Congressmen defending in districts carried by Trump in '16, in a Democrat majority that stands now at 18. So unless the people vote Democrat for president they'll be less than likely to vote Democrat also for Congress, and to lose the presidency for the Democrats will be to lose the works.

Which brings us to the question of the vote for president. I said in 2016 that if Trump is elected then he's re-elected: the threshold for re-electing a president is considerably lower than for his election, for reasons I'll come to just below, and for Trump's election the threshold was never higher, so if they couldn't keep him out then they'll never kick him out. It's the 22nd Amendment codifying the convention observed by every president but Franklin Roosevelt, in limiting a president of the United States to two terms, that assures an incumbent's re-election as much as anything: because every voter appreciates that good or bad this sitting president will walk out of the White House for the last time in just four years, the commitment, the investment and the risk, are manageable; and unless that incumbent has presided over disasters in the economy or foreign affairs or both, or repudiated the campaign promises that were the terms of his election, the people know from experience that he can manage the job of president and that he'll honor his mandate. Hence that tendency of history whereby a president of the United States wins his re-election.

At home Trump has brought a renaissance in the economy and the national power, maybe the greatest boom in the overall for half a century, complete with the first revival of manufacturing since before free trade and the first independence from foreign energy since the '50s. Then on foreign policy Trump has neutered North Korea, in short order he won the war on ISIS in Iraq and decided the war on ISIS in Syria, he has Iran in a desperate way like hasn't been seen since maybe the Iran-Iraq War of the '80s, and he's brought the second power in the world to its knees, choking China's growth for the first time in better than a quarter-century -- all without the bodybags returned to Andrews. And Trump has been practically tedious in the best way possible, in copying-and-pasting verbatim from his campaign promises over to his executive orders and appointments and legislative initiatives; no-one friend or foe could claim Trump hasn't done all in his power to keep his promises and honor his mandate.

Then any full and fair accounting of Trump's prospects must concede that no winning campaign for president in memory overcame hurdles so towering as Make America Great Again did: Trump became the first candidate since the founding of the republic to win the presidency as his first civil or military office; the totality of the press and popular culture save for Fox News and The Wall Street Journal moved heaven and earth day and night to ruin Trump and crown Clinton; the Never Trump faction in Trump's own party which counts the last Republican president and last Republican nominee for president, sabotaged Trump all the way through election day, with the Republican speaker of the House encouraging the disowning of the man at the top of the ticket just weeks before the vote, and third-party conservative-alternative spoiler candidates draining votes from Trump by the millions; even the pope of Rome ordained that thou shalt not vote Trump. And for all that, Trump won going away: he needed 270 electoral votes and he won 306. Who can say what 2020 will bring, but can it be worse for Trump than 2016 when he scooped electoral votes like a steam-shovel?

So without counting any chickens, I can only conclude that Trump is well-placed for a second term. And don't take my world for it: no less a leftist than Michael Moore has concluded Trump is on course for re-election and the two-dozen would-be Democrat nominees for president are losers to a man.

It's my sense that figures like Donald J. Trump come few and far between -- there are all of two presidents in 44 (not 45: it's a long and pedantic story) who offer parallels to Trump, namely Teddy Roosevelt in the 19-aughts and Andrew Jackson in the 1830s -- and that they're genies out of bottles, not easily re-bottled. When a Trump materializes, and manages the impossible, then again he manages the impossible, and still again until the impossible comes to be blase, he's not likely to be turfed out on his ear. A figure like Trump who joins a vision for national renaissance and national greatness, to a drive like a force of nature, is not likely to shrink away in defeat, not in the face of titans much less the class of pygmies that is the 2020 Democrat presidential field. It's my sense that the Age of Trump has only begun, my guess that Trump's lame-duck chapter will be not so lame as is usual, and my expectation that Trump will move mountains in his second term as in his first. And if I were to venture all the way out onto the limb then I'd guess they'll miss him when he's gone, and that Donald J. Trump will lumber around the American psyche for a good while, and around the psyche of the world to the extent it bears on America, like some semi-mythical orange giant with a combover.

The best of times, where elections determine the times, and what's to be done about the miserable rest

The best of times, the worst of times. A renaissance in the economy and the national power, where a new, reactionary, and militant American conservatism is asserted: after two years of the vigorous Trumpian policy of "energy dominance" America had ascended to world's foremost producer of oil and natural gas, and for the first time since the glorious '50s exports more energy than it imports, to invoke just one measure of the American renaissance that is the Age of Trump.

But in the institutions and the culture whose powers-that-be don't stand for election the New Dark Age turns ever bleaker, as in the unremitting politicization of all things -- banking, professional sports and amateur, the back panels on bags of chips -- as in the infantilization of the society -- "She achieves her dreams, because she can," to cite a current ad for a pharmacy hawking adhesive bandages -- as in the repudiation of nature -- men emasculated and women cast as boxers and bodybuilders and combat forces -- as in the determined inversion of the reality -- black folks who account for a dozen Americans out of a hundred, represented in the national advertising as something closer to half the country. (And before the thought-police are called down on my head for that last illustrative point above, and my life and work and family name ruined, please do read my elaboration as follows: I adore black folks and always have, I was raised by folks who adored black folks, but objectively and statistically black folks are nothing like half the country, and to present them as anything like half the country is madness. No-one and no group is bettered by a turning upside-down of the facts.)

And on that last point of race, race, race: 2008 already is long ago and far away. In that presidential election year we were assured by the Left and the press that if only we'd elect The First Black President, the "racial divide would be bridged" for good and all, that the question of race would be resolved and retired if only America would vote black for president, never mind that this "first black president" was half-white and his ancestral association with slavery was to be found on the side of the slave-master. Even I imagined Rush Limbaugh had gone too far, all those years ago in '08, but Limbaugh alone prophesied and Limbaugh alone was borne out, that a first black president who happened also to be a Democrat president would have the effect of reducing every question in the national politics to race, to where demurring from that first black president on the capital gains tax rate might be damned as "racism".

A decade later half the political class and the whole of the elite, in the least-racist society in history in its least-racist age, are more hysterical than ever they were on the question of race. Only last week a Republican senator addressed a conservative conference with a weighty keynote applying the innocuous term "cosmopolitan" to our globalist elite, for no reason other than that it's apt, and extraordinarily he was damned from the Left for some imaginary "antisemitism" in his choice of words, never mind that it's leftists anymore who are the Jew-haters, and 21st Century American conservatism is if anything philosemitic. Race indisputably is the principal preoccupation of the elite in 2019, but it's one of a clutch of preoccupations which seize the powers-that-be and which they project with the manifold means available to them onto 330 million American consciousnesses, to indict the nation and to divide and debilitate it, and generally to make us miserable. So what's to be done, beyond winning elections which Republicans and conservatives manage miraculously to do more often than not, but which doesn't and can't penetrate the elite and their institutions.

My old joke about America's institutions -- that it's a shorter job to count the institutions in this country that aren't leftist and Democrat, namely the churches and the United States Armed Forces -- never was a knee-slapper and it's less funny with the passing years, but not the less for that it's true enough, and worse than that there's precious little conservatives can do to alter the fact, inasmuch as institutions in America are of course independent of government and invariably they enforce their own prejudices and preoccupations: a leftist dean in a leftist university is most unlikely to hire a class of conservative departmental leadership who offend his impeccable sensibilities, for instance, so an institution once seized by the Left, enforces and reinforces its leftism. In that special case of the universities conservatives may find a tool in the toolbox, inasmuch as a great many universities are subsidized by the state governments, and state governments are of course elected, and it'd be no more than democratic for any Republican state government to insist that any university suckling at the taxpayer's teat abolish any campus prohibition on political expression disagreeable to the Left.

But any great undertaking to yank the culture of this country from the infinitesimal and alien class that is the elite, must necessarily be directed first and most at the press and popular culture, those twin walls which surround us and blare at us daily and nightly, to invoke the imagery of Victor Davis Hanson. Take for a case-study cable news, where the monopoly of the Democrats and the Left and the elite is smashed, with just two news channels of the three in their service: the most-watched show in cable news is not coincidentally the most take-no-prisoners conservative and Republican, namely Hannity on Fox News' primetime, where CNN's most-watched show rates 36th -- not 36th on television or in cable, but 36th in cable news. Or look over the "Popular" titles at a world-beating streaming service which will go unnamed: Old Hollywood and Westerns and war movies, apolitical movies, expressly Christian and expressly conservative movies, not to mention Red Dawn which is maybe the most militant reactionary-rightist feature film of the last four decades -- all represented disproportionately, by my unscientific but sustained survey. So it strikes me that to break the leftist press and popular culture we need only break the monopoly, that if the people of this country are given a choice they'll take it.

Do as Jeff Bezos did, I say, in buying the Washington Post and converting it from Democrat Party news to Democrat Party activism: we needn't conceive a new medium or even to build a new business, only to buy out a newspaper here and a magazine there, a channel here and a studio there. And we needn't necessarily redirect those properties either from Left to Right: it's my sense that the people of this country are starved for a great and grand, neutral, national culture as in the Midcentury or The Last Golden Age, namely the '80s; a culture which doesn't hold its country in contempt, doesn't take sides on partisan questions, doesn't arrogate the function of politics and politicians, and forget and forfeit its art. The object is not to substitute one ideological instruction for another, so much as to liberate the people from the conditioning and hectoring into leftism which is unremitting anymore in the culture of this country.

And it strikes me too that this great undertaking may be a job for President Trump, in his retirement from the presidency which I'm confident will come in 2025 and not '21, an undertaking in its way as grand and as far-reaching as any triumph of Trump's presidency. Trump is placed quite singularly for a job of this sort and scale, with his singular comprehension of the mass media and his demonstrable mastery of it, from the hit reality show to the 160 million pairs of eyeballs on his "tweets", and with his singular capacity as an executive for producing prodigious and prompt results, and it doesn't hurt either that he's a multi-billionaire business emperor and seems to count as acquaintances half the mover-and-shaker class, or that he's inventive and indefatigable as a promoter. I'm a believer in the law of supply-and-demand, and a believer too that the unsupplied demand is there, for a great American culture, and that to smash the cultural monopoly may be to win the culture war.

The last elections and the next, and a word on afros

2016 and 2018

Inasmuch as the Republican president with his Republican Congress by Election 2018 had delivered what may be the greatest prosperity and peace since before Vietnam, and inasmuch as the popular approval for Congress since the Democrat capture of the House of Representatives, the last I looked in on it, was drawing near to single digits, I can't but wonder whether the Democrat majority in the House owes in some part to a critical mass of impressionable voters who after two years of investigations and of hysterical reportage on those investigations imagined that their Republican president had somehow "stolen" his election and was somehow an "agent" of a hostile foreign power, and thus demanded countering by a hostile House. I can't but wonder whether, had the special counsel proclaimed Trump exonerated on the fantastical charge against him of conspiracy with Russia, in time for Election Day, Trump's Republican Party might've held the House. I can't but wonder whether the investigation into interference in the election of 2016 -- which concluded that Russia never flipped a vote and Trump and his campaign never touched Russia with a pole -- might itself have interfered in the election of 2018.

2018 and 2020  

Counting every heartbreaker -- all those narrow margins decided days and weeks after the vote or decided by those "provisional ballots" so conspicuous in their usefulness to Democrats -- the Democrat majority in the House amounts to 18 seats, and no fewer than 31 of that majority represent districts which voted in 2016 to make a president of Donald Trump. Take as a case-study the fifth of Oklahoma's five Congressional districts, the most metropolitan in OK, taking in most of Oklahoma City and a couple outlying counties. OK-5 flipped on November 6 from R to D, but by 50.7 to 49.3%, 3,500 votes of 239,000. The district had voted Republican for better than four decades, and the balance of OK's delegation is Republican, those Republicans having won between 59 and 74% in their districts, in a "bad year" for House Republicans. So surely it's within the realm of possibility that in a presidential cycle, with Donald Trump at the top of the ticket to draw out that Trump voter and in a state that voted Trump in '16 by 66 to 29%, the turnout and the dynamic will suffice to tip OK-5 back to Republican red. And surely there are more OK-5s than one in this republic of 435 Congressional districts.

There are of course items on Trump's agenda which might on paper pass a Republican Senate and Democrat House, particularly the renewal of American infrastructure and the mitigation of prescription costs, but in light of the first hundred days of the Democrat House and Pelosi speakership it would be no more than objective observation to pronounce that the prospect of constructive, compromise legislation proceeding from the House of Representatives in the coming year-and-a-half before Election 2020, is bleak. Only so much of Trump's first-principles, American-renaissance program may be enacted by executive order or Senate confirmation. And owing to the physics of American politics and government, a re-elected President Trump may hold a Republican House in 2022 but could never expect to hold in '22 what he hadn't won in 2020, on his presidential coattails.

And so it's not enough that Trump win his re-election on November 3 of '20: he must carry with him no fewer than 18 Republicans in House districts represented today by Pelosi Democrats. Trump might appeal in so many words that "If you want me for your president then vote Republican for your Congressman, because so long as Nancy Pelosi is speaker of the House there'll be no fixing what's broken," but more substantial would be the joining of Trump's presidential campaign to a nationalized Republican Congressional campaign, along the lines of the Contract with America which delivered both houses to Republicans in 1994 after four decades of frustration.

There is as of today just the one principal vulnerability for Trump and Republicans in 2020, namely healthcare, which is an injustice inasmuch as it's the Democrats alone who decreed the healthcare monstrosity that is Obamacare, but what is not unfair is the expectation of particulars, in a campaign and on healthcare most of all. It's this nobody-with-a-blog's plea that Trump and every Republican standing for Congress, before September of next year, agree to a simplified and nationalized joint platform, covering especially healthcare, as in "President Trump and a Republican Congress will in the next two years enact legislation on healthcare which affirms the guarantees for pre-existing conditions, provides for those truly needy Americans ineligible for Medicare or Medicaid and uncovered by insurance through employers, and for the first time cuts the cost of healthcare in America, by instituting subsidized 'high-risk pools', and by abolishing the prohibition on barebones, emergency-only insurance policies, and by opening insurance to competition from out-of-state." Joining the Trump campaign to a nationalized Republican campaign for Congress, committing president and Congress both to action and to particulars, may well assuage those mostly-female voters swayed in 2018 by the cynical Democrat campaign reduced to "pre-existing conditions", and at the same time make a down-the-line-Republican of the Trump voter, delivering to Trump the presidency and the Congress and the future.

A word on afros

Afros are outlandish and surely they can only be impractical -- 45 minutes every morning in the mirror -- and history teaches us that impractical styles are fleeting, and that outlandish styles look the most dated and comic to posterity.

The King of the Mormons explained

When at their fag-end the Republican presidential primaries of 2012 degenerated to Mitt Romney versus Rick Santorum, who as near as I could tell was running for the United States presidential nomination of the Vatican, I suspended my judgment of Romney. I threw in with Mitt, accepted the assurance of Jim DeMint that he had "learned conservatism as a second language", never wrote peep against him, and on Election Night 2012 when he lost probably the winnable-est challenge to an incumbent president since 1992, I was devastated. But when I last affirmatively hated a human being, in 2011, the human being in question was Willard Mitt Romney. And half a decade later in 2016 that suspended judgment of mine was affirmed: I had it right the first time, I had the measure of the man; Mitt Romney is that vilest of creatures, the cynical politician with boundless ambition for nothing but his power and glory, who believes in nothing but his entitlement to power and glory, and who is perfectly prepared to say and do absolutely anything in the service of that power and glory.

Pardon the brutality of this honesty, brutality to Mormons and the Mormon state, but it must be said. Mormonism is ascriptural heresy and kookery, the indulgent invention of an early-19th Century madman who might conceivably be a distant cousin to me and who in some portraiture bears a resemblance, but I esteem Mormons as Americans and businessmen and genealogists and showmen, and I came by that esteem honestly, my father being an admirer of Mormon businessmen if not of their lunatic theology. And the brutal facts are these: Mitt Romney is a United States senator today for no reason other than that he's King of the Mormons, and among the 50 states is counted a Mormon state.

There was precisely one state of the 50 where Romney might expect not to be received with a hail of putrefied vegetables, so it was that state where Romney ran for Senate. Romney was born in Michigan and he worked and entered politics in Massachusetts, and so long as he had prospects other than Utah, he took 'em. But in 2018 Mitt Romney determined that he must be a United States senator, and he appreciated that if he appealed to the Mormon state for his Senate seat, as King of the Mormons, he could not be denied. In the event he nearly was denied -- Romney narrowly lost the first round of the nomination for U.S. Senate, in the party he had represented at the level of president not six years prior, and in the state which is his fiefdom -- but it's as one of Utah's finer representatives Jason Chaffetz observed on the news of Romney's Senate ambitions, "If Romney runs in Utah, he wins."

And so it was that the King of the Mormons was anointed United States senator from the Mormon state. And Mitt Romney's first effort as junior U.S. senator-elect from maybe the most Republican state in the Union, was not to offer a settlement to the crisis of the shuttered federal agencies and the unsecured southern border, but to submit an op-ed to the Democrat-activist Washington Post and to give a follow-on interview to the Democrat-activist CNN, damning his Republican president Donald Trump, principally on grounds of "character", whatever that may mean in this debased century and whatever it counts for in the existential struggle which is the politics of this age. Not to mention, this country oughtn't abide hectoring on "character" out of a cynical, self-seeking saboteur. I'll hope to be mistaken in this judgment but I find my judgment where Romney is concerned to be depressingly precise and prescient: Mitt Romney doesn't care a tinker's darn for the will and wishes of the people of Utah, or for the United States Senate or the legislation before it, or come to that for the Republic and the state of it; Romney is U.S. senator from Utah for no purpose other than that he has determined the office to be needful to his ambitions for president; and Romney's principle -- not "principles", plural, because he has just the one true principle -- is that Mitt Romney must be and shall be president of the United States, that greatest figure on God's earth.

It was only to be expected that Mitt Romney would be numbered among the Never Trumpers, those elements of the Republican elite who imagine that the enemy is not the America-hating leftism which means to tear it down and watch it burn and which today monopolizes the Democrat Party, but the force-of-nature conservative populist who means to save the Republic and build it up, namely Donald J. Trump. Romney is a cartoon of the Republican elite, and maybe the greatest living exponent of the your-father's-Oldsmobile, go-along-to-get-along Republican, those old hands who lead us to electoral defeat and who mark time in the way of policy when occasionally they do manage not to lose a vote of the people. The trouble with Romney's reaction to the Trump ascendancy was that his declaration of war on Trump in a set-piece speech, much promoted, came the day after Trump had effectively clinched the Republican nomination for president, in a primary campaign wherein Trump won more votes than any Republican for president since the advent of the presidential primary, and wherein more Americans voted on the Republican side than in any primaries since there's been such a thing. But it was so very much worse than even that.

Romney went well past the set-piece speechifying damning his successor as Republican nominee for president: he opened the Romney Rolodex of wealthy benefactors to the third-party, conservative-alternative spoiler candidate for president in Utah, at a time when the consensus was that any Trump triumph in the general election would be a close-run, that Trump couldn't hope to carry anything like the 306 electoral votes that fell to him on election night but might at best scrape over the finish-line with the modicum of 270, and that to yank out from under Trump a gimme-state for any Republican for president, by tipping just enough Republican votes to that conservative spoiler in Utah, would assure Trump's defeat and repudiation. That's to say, Romney quietly and practically sabotaged Trump's campaign in the general election with the purpose of handing the presidency to Hillary Clinton and thus placing himself for a second kick at the presidential can in 2020, as the I-told-you-so candidate. It was the news of that conspiracy that compelled me to conclude at last that I had it right the first time, that Mitt Romney was at least as despicable as my least charitable judgment of the man.

Now to the future, and if these prophesies of mine turn out to be mistaken then I'll duly enter the error in the accounting of my causes for humility. Mitt Romney plainly is delusional, as deluded as a Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton fantasizing of walking again triumphal into the Oval Office, but he's not a perfect fool, and I can only assume he appreciates that no man can win the presidency of the United States as a third-party nominee, not to say there's a statistically-significant contingent of Americans in any event clamoring for Mitt Romney at the top of some novel Romneyan Third Way ticket. Romney may be content to sponsor some loser also-ran candidate to siphon just enough Republican votes in a close contest to deny Trump the presidency, but Romney himself would never play the kamikaze, humiliated in a second presidential election and with three-point-something percent of the vote. And if "independents and moderates" wanted Mitt Romney for their president then surely he'd have been president since January 2013. And much as Democrats and the press adore Romney so long as he's damning Trump, he can't have forgotten already the savaging he took from those self-same individuals and institutions only half a decade past, once he had claimed the Republican nomination for president: any Democrat in America rejoicing today in Romney's every utterance, at the same time hates Romney's ever-living guts.

Obviously the estimation of Romney among Republicans and conservatives is that he's no conservative and no Republican, a liar and a loser, and very possibly the most self-seeking and traitorous figure in America today who's not a Democrat. So Mitt Romney is a man without a constituency; he'd be a man without a state but for the cult-with-a-state he happens to have been born into. But whatever his appreciation of those facts, I can only suppose that Romney imagines the facts to be passing: the great hope of Mitt Romney is the catastrophic collapse of Donald Trump, as in some impeachment proceeding, which in the Romney fantasy will alter the considerations unrecognizably, leaving Republicans to crawl chastened the the feet of the Mormon King, pleading "Wayward wretches were we, scorning your light, o Romney, for our Trumpian darkness! Pity us, o Romney; pity us and pardon us, and lead us to the power and the glory that is yours alone!"

That Mitt Romney means to run again for president is at this point past disputation, but the timing, the presidential cycle, is yet unknown even to Romney, dependent as it is on the demise one way or another of the Trump presidency, which I'm here to say will come only after eight years of American renaissance.

It's no more than is true and fair to pronounce Donald Trump vain and ambitious, like Mitt Romney is vain and ambitious, and there are the superficial parallels -- billionaire businessmen and Republican nominees for president, etc. -- but where Romney is a soulless calculator pristine of principles, Trump is a true-believer; where Romney will stop at nothing in the cause of Mitt Romney, Trump is an irresistible force of nature for the cause of saving the Republic and building it up; where Romney is driven, Trump is driven like no man on earth, easily the most energetic executive since Teddy Roosevelt more than a century ago; and where America is the great love of Trump's life, the great love of Mitt Romney's life is Mitt Romney.

Three paragraphs by way of a Christmas post

I think the world of Gordon Ramsay, really I do, and his unimprovable Ultimate Christmas specials from 2010 would be worthwhile if only for the music soundtrack to the more traditional half of the set, but it must be said, Ramsay's Christmas shows may be the most unwittingly amusing cookery television since Julia Child. Ramsay's thesis in Ultimate Christmas is that these dishes of his are "achievable, affordable, and won't leave you stressed", they don't "cost the earth or take forever", and I suppose that's perfectly and precisely true, for a Michelin-five-star millionaire chef with yes-sir accounts at Fortnum & Mason and Harrods.

Ramsay's dishes are cartoons of overwrought, exotic, Bacchanalian show-food. Never mind the set-piece main course on what is meant to be his more conventional menu (the stuffing incorporates a "merguez" sausage, from North Africa), for breakfast Ramsay fixes pan-seared day-old loaf-sized croissants with shaved smoked salmon and runny, cream-and-chives scrambled eggs. Then for sweets he fixes scratch mint-chocolate truffles, with a small herb-garden's yield of fresh mint, bitter chocolate and half a jar of insect-labor honey to offset the bitter chocolate, and cream and double-cream. It's all in a day's work for Chef Ramsay, but the runny eggs and the ganache for the truffles both demand to-the-degree-and-to-the-second heating which any average or below-average chef could be counted on to botch comprehensively.

Even the cream for Ramsay's Christmas pudding calls for whiskey and Irish cream too: I appreciate that 99% of the British Isles are clinical alcoholics from their teens, but surely it's not an ordinary British household that stocks whiskey and Irish cream both on any given day.